298 24 20MB
English Pages 736 Year 1999
Russia Abroad
Writers, History, Politics
for Larisa
Russia Abroad Writers, History, Politics
by John Glad F o re w o rd by V ic to r T erras
a jo in t publication Herm itage & B irchbark Press
1999
John Glad R ussia A b ro a d
W riters, History, Politics Copyright © 1999 by John Glad All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Glad, John. Russia abroad: writers, history, politics / by John Glad : Foreword by Victor Terras p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-55779-115-5 (alk. paper) 1. Russians-Foreign countries. 2. Russia-Emigration and immigration-History. 3. Soviet Union Emigration and immigration-History. 4. Russian literature-Foreign countries-History and criticism. I. Title. DK35.5.G5 1999 325’.247-dc21 98-48570 CIP
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Contents Foreword by Victor Terras Introduction Definitions Tradition The Interaction of Russian Expatriate W riters with the W est
11 14 18 28 30
The Pre-Soviet Period Origins
32 Oleg's shield, Treaties with Byzantium, Anna Yaroslavna
Pilgrims
34 Abbot Daniil, Archbishop Antony of Novgorod, Stefan, Anonymous Travel Guide to Byzantium, Ignaty of Smolensk, Zosim a of the Trinity-Sergiev Monastery, Varsonofy, Vasily Gagara, Arseny Sukhanov, Vasily Polozov, Ioann Luk'yanov, Andrei Ignat'ev, Ippolit Vishensky, Varlaam Lenitsky, Matvei Nechaev Travellers 41 The Deacon Aleksandr, The Merchant Vasily, Afanasy Nikitin, Sergy Cherkashenin, Vasily Trediakovsky, Mikhail Lomonosov, Denis Fonvizin, Nikolai Karamzin, Nikolai Bestuzhev, Fêdor Dostoevsky, Vasily Botkin Diplomats 48 Vasily Poznyakov, Trifon Korobeinikov, Pëtr Tolstoi, Ivan Neplyuev, Antiokh Kantemir, Aleksandr Griboedov, Fêdor Tyutchev, Pêtr Kapnist, Pëtr Vyazemsky, Konstantin Leont'ev Expatriates 54 Zinaida Volkonskaya, Karolina Pavlova, Vasily Zhukovsky, Nikolai Gogol', Ivan Turgenev, Vladim ir Pecherin, Ivan Gagarin, Pavel Annenkov, Pëtr Boborykin, Elena Blavatskaya, Elena Kryzhanovskaya, Leonid Andreev, Maksim Gor'ky, Maksimilian Voloshin The Politicals Exile W ithin the Empire 67 Aw akum , Aleksandr Radishchev, Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, Wilhelm Kuchelbecker (Vil’germ Kyukhelbeker), Pëtr Chaadaev, Mikhail Lunin, Fêdor Dostoevsky (once more)
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Exiles Abroad Pre-Nineteenth Century 76 Andrei Kurbsky, Grigory Kotoshikhin, Nikolai Turgenev, Nikolai Sazonov, Ivan Golovin Nineteenth Century Moderates 79 Pëtr Dolgorukov, Aleksandr Gertsen (Herzen), Nikolai Ogarëv Early Radicals 85 Nikolai Vorms, Sergei Nechaev, Mikhail Bakunin, Pëtr Lavrov, Pëtr Tkachêv, Pëtr Kropotkin, Georgy Plekhanov, Sergei Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, Feliks Volkhovsky, Boris Savinkov Future Soviet Leaders 91 Vladim ir Lenin, Vatslav Vorovsky, A le ksa n d r B o g d a n o v-M a lin o vsky, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Lev Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin Religious Dissenters 94 Vladim ir Chertkov, Vladim ir Bonch-Bruevich America: Economic and Religious Emigration Alaska 95 Demographics 95 Poverty 98 Journalism 99 The Jews 101 W riters 104 A. S. Kurbsky, G. A. Machtet, Vladim ir Stoleshnikov, Osip Dymov
The Soviet Period The First Wave Statistics Politics Rage Political Fragmentation & Hopes for Intervention The Church The Constitutional Democrats(Cadets) The Social Revolutionaries (SRs) The Men'sheviks Monarchism
105 108 112 114 117 119 118 121
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The Changing Landmarks Movement (Sm ena vekh) Eurasianism The Mladoross (Young Russian) League Solidarism The Russian Fascists Postrevolutionary (porevolyutsiomiye) Movements The Trust Émigré Terrorism in Russia Freemasonry and the Jews The Soviet Government and the Émigré Press Repatriation Soviet-Ém igré Relations Geography Gallipoli and Istanbul Berlin Paris Brussels Prague Belgrade W arsaw Sofia Riga Tallinn Finland and Scandinavia Kovno (Kaunas) Zörich-Geneva Kishinêv (Chisinau) Uzhgorod London Rome Harbin Shanghai Buenos Aires Sao Paolo Jerusalem British Columbia San Francisco-Los Angeles New York Athens Tokyo Sydney/Melbourne O ther Locations The Nansen Certificate
7
124 126 129 131 133 135 136 137 138 140 142 148 150 154 164 172 174 180 185 191 195 199 202 206 208 209 210 212 215 216 221 223 224 224 226 226 228 232 232 233 234 234
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The Publishing Marketplace 235 Philosophers and Essayists 240 Nikolai Berdyaev, SergeiBulgakov, Lev Shestov, Dmitry Filosofov, Georgy Fedotov Self-Evaluation: A Mission? Keepers of Culture 244 Literature "Older” and "Younger” Generations 249 Symbolism 256 Lev Kobylinsky (Èllis), Konstantin Bal'mont, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Zinaida Gippius The Parisian Note 260 Georgy Ivanov, Anatoly Shteiger Experimenters 265 M arina Tsvetaeva, Boris Poplavsky, Igor1 Severyanin Independents 270 Vladislav Khodasevich, Dovid Knut, Aleksandr Vertinsky The Realists 273 Ivan Bunin, M aksim G or'ky, Sem ën Yushkevich, Mikhail Artsybashev, Mikhail Osorgin Exaggerated Prose 279 Andrei Bely, Evgeny Zamyatin, Vladim ir Nabokov (Sirin) Historical Novelists 284 Dmitry Merezhkovsky, M ark Aldanov W himsical W riters 286 Viktor Shklovsky, Gaito Gazdanov, Arkady Averchenko, Nadezhda Tèffi,Aleksandr Am fiteatrov Theater 291 Poverty and Isolation 296 Former Tsarist Exiles in Positions of Power 299 The Approaching W ar 305
The Second Wave W orld W ar II The Early Postwar Period Cynicism Further Dispersion The Late 1940s and 1950s Composition of the Émigré Community
312 328 340 341 346 347
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Political Groupings 348 Relations Between "First” and "Second” Waves 351 Geography 353 Periodicals and Radio 357 Shul'gin's Open Letter 362 Prose W riters 363 Sergei Maksimov, Anatoly Darov,Tafyana Fesenko, Nikolai Narokov (Morshen), Irina Saburova Poets 365 Igor' Chinnov, Ivan Elagin,NikolaiMorshen, Dmitry Klenovsky, Oleg ll'insky, Yury Ivask The 2Vz W ave 371 Alla Ktorova, Valery Tarsis, Arkady Belinkov, Anatoly Kuznetsov
The Third Wave Leaving
374 Russian Jews or Jewish Russians? A Crisis of Identity, Background, Self-Image, The Soviet Position on Emigration, Deprivation of Citizenship Émigré Politics 395 Malaise, Ideology, America, Israel, Germany, Stay or Go Home? B elles Lettres 425 The Mission and Role of Russian Émigré Literature, Assim ilation, Attem pts at Soviet-Émigré Literary Detente, The Apolitical Reaction, The W ar of W ords: Publications Prose W riters W riters of High Seriousness 443 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Fridrikh Gorenshtein, Yury Kashkarov, Georgy Vladimov The Aesthetes 450 Boris Khazanov, Andrei Sinyavsky, Sasha Sokolov, Aleksei Kovalêv, Boris Fal'kov Creators of Situations and Ideas 454 Aleksandr Zinov'ev, Vasily Aksênov, Aleksandr Suslov The Natural School Reborn 458 Èduard Limonov, Yuz Aleshkovsky, Vladim ir Voinovich, Vladim ir Maramzin, Zinovy Zinik, Anatoly Gladilin, Arkady Lvov, Mark Girshin, Sergei Dovlatov, Yury Mamleev, Igor' Efimov
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Poets Poets of High Seriousness 465 Joseph Brodsky, Lev Mak, Yury Kublanovsky, Valery Petrochenkov, Vadim Kreid, Naum Korzhavin, Natal'ya Gorbanevskaya, Dmitry Bobyshev, Aleksei Tsvetkov Light-Hearted Poets 474 Mikhail Kreps, Mikhail Vasserman, Igor* Guberman, Bakhyt Kenzheev, the "avantgarde,” Lev Losev, Aleksandr Galich Dissolution of the Empire Reunification at Last! 478 The Near Abroad (blizhnee zarubezh'e) 481 Conclusions 483 Chronology 490 Secondary Sources 616 Annotated Index of Personal Names 640
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Foreword Any history of a national literature is a problem atic undertaking for several reasons, particularly if it is to be in the form of a continuous narrative, rather than of a chronicle or a series of synchronic surveys. There is the question of what it should cover: only "serious" ("art”) literature, or also "slick” and "pulp” genres? And should it concentrate on highlights, seek out the typical, or simply cover as much material as possible? And where is the presumed continuity to be sought? In the nation's history at large, in literature's social and cultural role, or in the developm ent of literature's form al side (genre, style, devices)? Or perhaps in u n iv e rs a l of human existence: creativity, progress, and freedom? Furthermore, should literary history seek to restore its object to the condition in which it appeared to its contemporaries, or should it be dealt with as it appears to us today? Finally, should a national literature be seen as an autonomous entity, or in context with world literature? The fact is that narrative histories of Russian literature are few and that it is widely believed that no single scholar can possibly gather enough knowledge and understanding to write a satisfactory history of any m ajor national literature. As a result, the authoritative histories of Russian literature, East and West, have been collective enterprises. An alternative to a history of a national literature is provided by a body of works which cover a particular part or aspect of literature diachronically. We have for Russian literature creditable diachronic surveys of dram a and theater, of versification, of the short-story, of certain themes, ideas, types, and literary devices. John Glad's undertaking is unique in that he has chosen to present a diachronic survey of a category of literature that is defined by extra-literary circumstances, yet virtually unlimited with regard to literary criteria. It is obvious that Glad's work goes far beyond doing what past studies of Russian literature in exile had done, namely provide some inform ation on a body of works ignored in Russia because of censorship. Rather, his treatm ent of literature abroad raises questions that are relevant to an assessment of the nature and course of Russian literature as a whole, for example: do the advantages of freedom from censorship and the demands of the literary marketplace in Russia outweigh the disadvantage of losing touch with the immediacy of day-to-day life and the living language? Is the possible gain of a new perspective on things at home, or on the world at large, worth the loss of the intimacy of life observed at close range? Is it true that Russian literary exiles, like their political confrères, have in a way conquered their home country, as happened elsewhere, say, in Poland?
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And on a purely literary level, how valuable is direct contact with writers of other nations? Can a literary community survive in exile beyond a single generation, or can it in fact create a bridgehead abroad, securing contact and acceptance for itself and for the whole literature it presents? It appears that these questions may receive different answers in different European literatures. The position of Châteaubriand and Mme de Staël, of Heine and Herwegh, of Mickiewicz and Stowacki was different from that of Gertsen and Ogarêv, and their respective roles in their national literatures are analogous only in the most general way. Russia's peculiar geographic and political position accounts for much of the importance, relative as well as absolute, of Russian literature in exile. Due to the absence, for much of Russia's history, of a free press, of a parliamentary forum, and of free universities, Russian literature represented for long stretches of tim e the only arena of political discussion in Russia. The constraints of censorship which significantly affected not only the content but even the form of literary discourse cause Russian literature in exile to be the living conscience and persistent com m entator of literature at home. But then, Russia was also at all tim es a powerful m ulti-national empire, in which the Russian language drew a variety of ethnic m inorities into its orbit. Thus, while the very existence of Polish or Ukrainian literature at tim es depended on writers and poets living abroad, Russian literature was enriched by works which, under different political conditions, might have been written in a language other than Russian. The question whether Russia, a Christian nation for a thousand years, is a part of the W estern world, albeit marginal and backward, or if it represents an emergent culture of its own, as Oswald Spengler asserted, is answered, at least in part, by the fact that many of the forem ost works of Russian literature were in fact written and/or published in the West, were inspired by or written in response to works of W estern literatures, and have long since joined the canon of W estern literature. All of the above thoughts and questions arise as one follows John Glad's remarkably objective presentation of the facts, literary as well as extra-literary, that make up the vast subject which he has grasped with insightful erudition. I believe that it will not only serve as an indispensable source of information, but also promote the general understanding of the past, the present, and even the future of Russian literature. Victor Terras
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Though sent to this city, I com e in fear, an exile's book. Stretch forth a kindly hand to m e in m y weariness, friendly reader, and fe a r n o t th a t I m ay perchance bring sham e upon you.... If any expressions seem no t Latin, the country wherein he wrote was a barbarian land. Tell me, readers, if it is no t a trouble, w hither I ought to go, what abode I, a book from foreign lands, should seek in the city. Ovid
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Introduction E xile is life . Ovid Exile is death. Hugo This study started out as a history o f Russian authors in exile, but, as the reader w ill see, it ended up being not ju s t that. The m ore I worked on the book, the clearer it became to me that exile is sim ply the la st and m ost extrem e step in a continuum o f foreign experience growing in increm ents. Russia is not, after all, an isolated geographic-cultural entity, and no po litical regim e lasts forever. During the Soviet period, which drew such a sharp line between Russia’s ém igré writers and those who rem ained in Russia, even the ém igrés seem ed not to realize the continuity o f their experience with that o f pre-1917 writers, w ho— to r any num ber o f reasons— found them selves abroad. Inevitably, those who le ft behind the Ksacred, inviolable” Soviet border became fixated on their own banishm ent. It was hard enough fo r non-writers to acclim atize them selves to life abroad, but exile cut the creative writers o ff from the ir audience. Their livelihood, indeed their very way o f life, was threatened. The traditional view o f literature has linked life and art. T. S. Eliot, to r example, concurring with the French novelist and critic Rémy de Gourmont, wrote that nthe great poet, in writing him self, writes his tim e.” In the 1920s, however, the Russian Form alist critics attem pted to establish a school o f literary scholarship which sought to divorce the literary work from the author's personality, experience, and p o litica l views. Since the Soviet governm ent viewed the arts as essential propaganda tools, Formalism was rejected out o f hand. Among the ém igrés, too, this was an approach that was to find few supporters. As the German exile Lion Feuchtwanger convincingly argued, the politicizing o f ém igré literature would seem to be inevitable in any tradition: I have never believed the argum ent that the banning o f Ovid, L i Po, Dante, Heinrich Heine, Victor Hugo influenced only the topics o f these poets. It seemed to me that the innerm ost essence o f the works written by these poets during their period o f banishm ent was conditioned by external circum stances, by their exile. The infernal hatred o f certain o f Dante's terzinas, the b rillia n t sharpness o f Victor Hugo's polem ical writings, L i Po's cheerful-m elancholic, sweet and deep love o f country, the elegant and murderous scorn o f Heine's poem s are a ll unthinkable without the exile o f the authors themselves. It is not the them atics o f these poets which has changed, but the ir essence.
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Literature can exist outside o f politics, but this is the exception rather than the rule, and studies o f exile in literature in particular exist within the juncture o f politics and literature — by definition. Many, though by no means all, expatriate literary works are straight-forw ard artifacts o f this politicized culture. The ém igré historian N ikolai Andreev soundly adum brated som e o f the touchstones which dem onstrate the intertw ined nature o f these two areas: O ur understanding o f m any works would be im poverished if we were unaware o f the “ideological background” o f ém igré life : toe novellas o f M. Osorgin (M ikhail ll'in ), the novels o f G eneral Krasnov, toe officer stories o f General A. I. Denikin, the books o f Roman G ul' o r Black Horse (Kon' voronoi) by V. Ropshin (Boris Savinkov), The Secret and the Blood (Taina i k ro v j by P. Khrushchëv (pseudonym o f P êtr Pil'sky), toe sketches o f G allipoli by I. Savin (Ivan Savolainen), o r the historical— im perial — stylizations o f Ivan Lukash. In an irony o f history Lukash began in 1917 with ecstatic praise o f the Volynsky and Pavlovsky regim ents, which doomed the empire. Then there are the stories o f Sergei Èfron and Vladim ir Sosinsky, the poetry o f Arseny Nesmelov, even The Home in Passy by Boris Zaitsev, and m any others. How can we understand Cavalry (Konnitsa) by A leksei Èisner o r The Poem of Bygone Years (Poèma vremennykh let) by Lebedev if we are unaware o f the nature o f Eurasian constructs and the devastating counterattacks o f the neo-W esternizers? Is a true com prehension o f S irin's (Nabokov's) Glory (Russian title : Podvig) possible without sensing the hero's lack o f confidence in Russian social ideals and, even m ore so, in the bearers o f these ideals? These are the persons he depicts with deadly irony in The Gift (Dar). Even in the classic works o f Bunin and his exquisite Life of Arsen'ev (Zhizn' Arsen'eva) there are pages linked to the name o f the Grand Duke N ikolai Nikolaevich which lose their effect fo r readers who are not aware o f the significance to r ém igrés o f the Grand Duke's name — including the circles in which Bunin him self moved. This lis t could be extended, but suffice it to say that ém igré publicistic writings are an essential p a rt o f the history o f ém igré literature. The exile's sense o f im potence has engendered “ w riter's itch,” which, to r better o r worse, has gone hand in hand with a politicization o f literature, a fact bem oaned by m any observers. The prose w riter A lla Ktorova com m ented to me in 1986 that toe m ain theme o f ém igré literature seem ed to be a tiresom e exposure o f the e vil Soviet governm ent. A grudging adm ission o f this im position o f politics on literature was made by Joseph Brodsky: Viewed less chronologically and m ore exaltedly, history has im posed its reality on art. W hat we im ply when we speak o f
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modem aesthetics is nothing but the noise o f history jam m ing o r subjugating the song o f art. Every ism is both evidence, direct o r indirect, o f a rts deteat and a scar covering up the sham o f this defeat. Though it m ay be crass to say so, existence has proved capable o f defining the a rtists consciousness.... W hatever the faults o r m erits o f this book, I have held to an unabashedly eclectic, holistic approach in assem bling it (not really " w ritten” it, fo r such a topic lite rally writes itself) in large p a rt from the non-literary artifacts o f expatriate existence. To have done otherwise would have been to lose sight o f entire dimensions. In the process, people and politics often ge t m ore attention than the literary artifacts which they create. This was a deliberate attem pt to break down the a rtificia l barriers that s till arbitrarily cage so m any scholars. The tim e period covered here begins with the East-Slav siege o f Byzantium in 906 A.D. and ends with the breakup o f the Soyiet Union a t the end o f 1991, when some 25 m illion ethnic Russians plus m ore than 19 m illion Russophones residing in the various form er republics o f the Soviet Union discovered that they were living in the so-called "near abroad” (blizhnee zarubezh'e). In sheer numbers this immense new diaspora dwarfs the total Russian presence outside Russia during the com bined tsarist and com m unist periods. In fact, this volume could w ell adopt as its subtitle a term from old Russian literature — the "prologue.” The com plex history o f Russian cultured life in the other republics o f the form er Soviet Union deserves special treatm ent, but those parts o f the Russian Em pire which had not enjoyed a t least a tem porary period o f independence p rio r to 1992 do not fa ll within the scope o f this particular study. Few if any books command a universal audience. Inform ation that the professional requires often is viewed by the general reader under the rubric o f "m ore than you ever wanted to know.” To ge t around this dilemma, I have provided inform ation o f interest largely to the specialist on Russian literature and to the well-read Russian in the form o f footnotes. In view o f the broad scope o f the subject m atter covered in this book, it would be unrealistic to expect the general reader to come to the topic with an extensive fam iliarity with it. I have therefore made broad use o f background quotations so as to give a "hands-on” feel fo r the topic as a whole. A ll verse translations, unless otherwise attributed, are m y own. In a ll honesty, I m ust confess that this sort o f study deserves to be done not by a single scholar, but by an entire institute. M y files contain over 3,000 authors over a period o f 11 centuries and cover a veritable avalanche o f historical, political, and dem ographic data. To cope with this vast am ount o f m aterial I have tried to avoid intruding into the course o f events, while attem pting to provide the broad outlines o f
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development. This is a nJust give me the facts. M a'am ” approach, with no apologies intended. Readers interested in learning m ore about the topic are referred to m y collection o f interviews Conversations in Exile, Duke U niversity Press, 1993 (fu lle r version, in Russian, Besedy v izgnanii, Knizhnaya palata, M oscow, 1991). For a discussion o f w orld literature in exile, see m y Literature in Exile, Duke U niversity Press, 1990. I apologize fo r the inevitable errors residing in the text. W riters are often less than honest about th e ir lives, and the m em ory o f w ellintentioned witnesses is fa r from perfect. B ut each yea r carries aw ay persons who m ight have been able to id en tify errors, and so this book is the only way to give those who are s till living a chance to m ake th e ir contribution by pointing them out. I take special pleasure in acknow ledging the contribution m ade to this study by colleagues who generously sacrificed so m uch o f th e ir tim e in carefully com bing through the m anuscript, suggesting changes and catching errors. The geographical and tem poral scope o f the study is such th a t I rea lly could not have com pleted the w ork w ithout them . F irst o f all, I wish to thank D avid Arans o f the Library o f Congress, Laszlo Dienes o f the U niversity o f M assachusetts, D. Barton Johnson o f the U niversity o f C alifornia a t Santa Barbara, and m y erudite publisher Igor* Efim ov fo r having worked through the m anuscript in its e n tirety and supported me in m ore ways than I can acknowledge. V ictor Terras o f Brown University, who has w ritten a foreword, also carefully w ent through the m anuscript, both in an e a rlier version and in this the fin a l one. Jam es W oodbury, who generously em ployed his unique com bination o f exceptional editorial skills, knowledge o f w orld histo ry and culture, and background in Russian literature in preparing the book fo r publication, and w hile I groaned under his kindly tyranny, I accepted it because I needed it. I w ant to especially thank Èngel'sina Pereslegina o f the G or'ky Institute fo r W orld Literature and her dedicated colleagues fo r helping so m uch in working on the annotated Nam es L ist: Tat'yana Bychikhina, Vera Sokolova, Tat'yana Seleznëva, Tat'yana Vladim irovna, G alina M anchkha, Valeriya Kudryavtseva, and Tat'yana Voronina. O ther colleagues read individual portions o f the m anuscript in which they had special expertise: A leksei Alm azov o f Coe College, A rash Borm anshinov o f the U niversity o f M aryland, D m itry Breschinsky o f Purdue University, A leksey Gibson, C hristopher M orris o f Trafika M agazine, D m itry Levitsky, A ndrei Fesenko o f the Library o f Congress, m y w onderful w ife Larisa G lad (Voice o f Am erica), Yuly K agarlitsky o f M oscow's Theatrical Institute, Vadim K reid o f the U niversity o f Iowa, V iktor Petrov, R ostislav Polchaninov, the late N ikolai P oltoratsky o f the U niversity o f Pittsburgh, M arc R aeff o f Colum bia University, ll'y a
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Serm an o f Jerusalem 's Hebrew University, Em anuil Sztein, and Ivan Tolstoi o f Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Larisa Kuznetsova, Vladim ir Butkov, and M urray Feshbach o f G eorgetown U niversity provided im portant consultations, and m y special thanks go to Sarah Form an fo r her keen proofreading skills. Yuliya Vishnevskaya o f Radio Free Europe/Radio Libe rty supplied me with invaluable files on Third-W ave figures. Lastly, I wish to thank the O lin Foundation fo r the financial support it provided to me as S enior Research Fellow a t Radio Free Europe/R adio Liberty in M unich a t the in itia l stages o f work, and also to the N ational Endowm ent fo r the Hum anities whose g ra n t m ade it possible fo r me to com plete the book.
Definitions These days there are a lo t o f things you can becom e besides an exile: you can be an im m igrant, an undesirable alien, a displaced o r stateless person, a dissident, an expatriate, a deportee, a wet-back, a crim inal, a colonist, a tourist, a Flying Dutchman, a Robinson Crusoe, a W andering Jew. W illiam H. Gass Any discussion of Russian literature abroad requires a definition of literature and even of the word "Russian.” These concepts are not at all as clearcut as might appear at first glance. Nowadays we understand literature to constitute aesthetically oriented prose and verse, as distinct from the factual type of writing represented by a newspaper article or a chapter in a history book, but as we examine the earliest works discussed in this book, we will see that this generic estrangement developed only over the course of a very long period of time. Early documentary and factual materials such as diplom atic treaties and pilgrimage accounts served as a bridge to modern secular belles lettres. But if we know, or claim to know, what "literature” is, what then is Russia? As the researcher moves back in tim e to the middle ages, instead of Russia there was R us' and the various principalities of the East Slavs where people spoke, not Russian, but an East Slavic dialect common to today's Russia, Ukraine, and Belorussia. Even today there are Russians who do not recognize either Ukraine or Belorussia as separate nations. And, of course, there are Ukrainians who regard Russia as an upstart colony, in much the same way that
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more than one Briton views the United States. Russian history, they contend, begins only with the subordination of neighboring principalities to Muscovy in the 15th century. According to this view, to claim that Kievan R us' is early Russia is to tumble down the slippery slope of 19th century pan-Slavism and Russian imperialism. So where does such logic lead? And just when and where does Russia begin? This is a crucial point for our purposes, for that will determine where Russian expatriate literature begins. V. M. Piskunov, an otherwise subtle researcher of Russian expatriate thought, has boldly declared that "Russia outside of Russia” begins only as of 1917. This commonly accepted view is unambiguously incorrect, but is routinely taken for granted because of the enormous disparity in the nature of the Russian presence abroad at various periods. Russian refugees fleeing the Soviet Union in 1920 or emigrating in 1980 clearly get lumped together as "Russia Abroad” (Zarubezhnaya Rossiya) or "Russia outside of Russia” (Rossiya vne Rossii), although often with some reluctance on the part of survivors of the earlier group, but it is emotionally difficult for victim s to recognize the continuity of their group with the revolutionaries who returned home to drive them from their country, scattering them across the globe. W hen I first began lecturing in the early 1980s on Turgenev and Gogol' as émigré writers, Russians in the audience expressed surprise. They sim ply were not accustomed to thinking of their classical authors in those terms. Since then, however, this view has come to enjoy greater acceptance. But the further back we move in time, the greater the reluctance to think of Russian writers abroad on the same plane as modern figures, especially since there is very little continuity with these early periods. Nevertheless, that Afanasy Nikitin in India in the 15th century was a Russian creating Russian literature outside the borders of Russia is a simple fact. A history of Russian expatriate literature must, by definition, encompass very heterogeneous traditions, but this is also true of Russian culture in general. Taken as a whole, Russian literature represents a triple tradition: a) Russian folklore, b) the Byzantineoriented tradition of "Old Russian literature,” and c) the secular Russian literary tradition, the font from which Russian expatriate literature derives. But the modern tradition itself has a jerkiness to it, an unflagging rejection of antecedents. The Soviet period represented the most direct challenge to continuity and tradition. Mayakovsky flung Pushkin overboard from the ship of contemporaneity, and the Formalist scholar Yury Tynyanov wrote an apotheosis of literary evolution as revolution. Thus, the discontinuity of Russian expatriate literature is at least partly a reflection of the state of things back home. But that factor alone cannot explain the heterogeneity of the "Russia No. 2”; if
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Russian culture is a disparate mosaic, the composite fragm ents comprising Russian expatriate culture over tim e are them selves the creations of a raucous group of heroes, anti-heroes, and outright villains. Over the Soviet period there did not exist any two-way intercourse between "m étropole” and emigration; instead there was a forced separation, combined with the sporadic injection of totally different generations, who when they left Russia may have been well aware of what was going on culturally back in Russia, but not in the émigré world. Let us assume, however, that we are in agreem ent as to w hat is and is not Russia and what is and is not literature. How do we put the two term s together? Russian literature is defined here as literature written in Russian; this is a linguistic, not an ethnic, geographical, religious, or even necessarily a cultural definition. I have chosen a strictly linguistic definition to avoid the quagmire presented by all other approaches. For centuries the Russian Empire has been home to large populations of persons who are not ethnically Russian, but whose native language and culture is Russian, in every sense of the word. By origin, Blok, Gogol', Derzhavin, Lermontov, and Zhukovsky were, respectively, part German, Ukrainian, Tartar, Scottish, and Turkish. Vladislav Khodasevich possessed not a single drop of Russian blood, while M arina Tsvetaeva was of mixed Russian, Polish, and German origins. "Don't deceive yourself,” she wrote to Yury Ivask, "there is little Russian in me. My blood is too strongly mixed.... I received nothing from Russia on my m other's side, and everything on my father's side. That's the way things are with me — either all or nothing. I'm a halfblood spiritually, as w ell.” Or there is the character in Yuz Aleshkovsky's Flea Tango (Bloshinoe tango) who is half-Polish, halfJewish on his mother's side, and half-Lithuanian, half-Tartar on his father's side, but who feels him self a "pure-blooded Russian.” Sergei Dovlatov, who was half-Jewish and half-Armenian, said that as a Russian w riter he was "Russian by profession” but that he represented no one other than himself. Language is the instrum ent by which a culture is created, developed, and preserved, but a definition of Russian literature as literature created in the Russian language is only one of a number of possibilities. One Third-W ave writer, Èduard Limonov, sees him self as a European w riter and has stated that he no longer wishes to be considered a Russian writer, while Sasha Sokolov and Boris Khazanov take the opposite tack and see their roots, not in Russian culture, but in the Russian language, thus virtually walking away from national culture. A related, but not identical, self-definition was provided by ll'ya
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Suslov, who views him self as "a Jewish writer who writes in Russian.”8 This separation of language and culture was essentially rejected by the ém igré literary historian Gleb Struve when he defined Vladim ir Nabokov as a non-Russian writer after Nabokov switched to English; this was also the point of view of the Slavist Ternira Pachmuss, who writes of Nabokov that he was "formerly” an émigré writer. Certainly, Ayn Rand, who had studied in the same school as one of Nabokov's sisters, but who became a strictly English-language author, could not be classified as a Russian writer. But language defines not only ethnicity; it also is a touchstone for exile status. And even here there is little agreement; Czeslaw Milosz, for example, denies that the writer who has changed languages forfeits the right to consider himself an exile. Since the "rank” of exile can on occasion confer prestige and even money to its possessor, this particular point can be of major import to the writer. Nevertheless, as dem onstrated by the current disinclination of so many Russian "exiles” to return home for more than brief visits, the distinction between exile and expatriate existence is often less significant than is commonly made out. O f course, it also possible to pose the question differently: to define, not the writer, but the work. Invitation to a Beheading was written in Russian, whereas Ada was composed in English. But even here we have an added twist: Lolita was written in English but translated by Nabokov himself into Russian. The significance of language was denigrated by Marina Tsvetaeva: P oetry is translation — from one m other tongue into another, be it French, German, o r any other. P oetry is re creation (Dichten is t nachdichten). That is why I cannot understand how anyone can speak o f a Russian o r French poet. A po e t can w rite French, bu t he cannot be a French poet. That is ludicrous. I am no t a Russian po et and it always am azes me when I am considered to be one. A person becom es a po et (if it is a t a ll possible to becom e a po et if you have not always been one), so as no t to be a Frenchm an, a Russian, etc., so as to be above a ll o f this. (O r: you are a po et because you are n o t a Frenchm an.) Orpheus either destroys nationality o r
■Curiously, this w as essentially the sam e argument advanced by Polish chauvinists who said of Julian Tuwim that he was not a Polish poet, although he wrote in Polish.
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expands it to such dim ensions th a t everyone (form er and present) fits into it Tsvetaeva's words notwithstanding, the linguistic definition of Russian literature is not an artificial construct, a pigeonhole, the invention of a compulsive taxonomist. Language, the very stuff of literature, is acutely sensed by the writer swimming in the sea of a foreign language. Literature as an art form finds its impetus in the verbal; language is not just a mode of expression or an artificial code, it is part of perception itself. Many, perhaps most, exiled writers feel themselves in a constant state of linguistic siege. Inevitably, the experience shapes their thinking along paths different from those they would have followed, had they remained within the sanctuary of their native language. For the majority, the foreign language remains as artificial as a com puter program. Ironically, their children are m ore‘at home in that code than in their parents’ language.3 After a while the expatriate w riter starts wondering if he himself may be forgetting the subtleties of his native tongue. Under conditions of émigré life the writer's healthy linguistic base can be exhausted, forgotten little by little, encroached upon from all sides by Anglicisms and Gallicisms. Of course, there also exists the possibility of a quite different view — that expatriate life can be turned to an advantage in that it perm its the poet to slough off the dross of daily intercourse and local color. But regardless of one's point of view, going abroad is an event in tim e as much as a spatial movement. A great shared language goes hand in hand with a shared historical tradition. The road home runs through the Russian language. And in the process there is a confusion of space in tim e; writers left behind a specific space at a specific time, and these two dimensions become fused for them .b A strictly linguistic definition is at odds with the popular Russian concept of nation as a biological entity — biological in the most literal
aln passing, it should be noted that there are subtle differences between the Russian spoken in contemporary Russia and the Russian spoken by First-W ave ém igrés. Linguistically, the ém igré community can act as a sort of tim e capsule, preserving the norms of a past age, but the Russian ém igré community has replaced itself with sporadic new groups of émigrés, rather than with its own children, w ho— in a long-standing Russian tradition — have usually chosen the path of assimilation. Second-generation Russian émigré writers are virtually nonexistent. This has produced a discontinuity in the linguistic picture atypical, to cite but one exam ple, of English expatriate writings, which have been created by a community enjoying regular and unimpeded access to the mother country. bS ee Brodsky and Khazanov interviews in Conversations in Exile for exam ples.
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sense of the term. In keeping with a long-standing Slavophile tradition, many émigrés have seen Russia as a "living organism .” Marina Tsvetaeva described Russia as "an inevitability of memory and blood, not artificial borders,” while Nikolai Avksent'ev, an editor of the Parisbased journal Sovrem ennye zapiski (Contemporary Annals), placed an equal sign between nation and self. Sergei Chakhotin wrote of the intelligentsia as the "mind of the country” and pleaded that when the nation was "ill” only a "healthy instinct for self-preservation” could induce the "Russian character” to appreciate the seriousness of the "biological moment.” Realists, he proclaimed, could not be "enemies of evolution.” Unquestionably, a genetic definition of Russianness would produce a radically different book from one based on a linguistic definition. Some of the more conservative émigrés in the 1920s were reluctant to recognize even Pushkin as a Russian writer because his great great grandfather was African. There is a political side to the language issue for the Russian writer. The imperial tradition, both in a literary and a political sense, lays a heavy hand on the shoulders of Russia's sons and daughters abroad, and they are constantly aware of its weight. For better or worse, the Russian language has outgrown the boundaries of nation and become an imperial tongue, and the expatriate Russian w riter feels him self to be a part of something that goes beyond his personal experience. Exile is a part, albeit only a part, of the expatriate experience. Exile is when you can't go back. It is the consciousness of this inability that makes one an exile, that violates those collectivist instincts that have been programmed into the majority of humankind by evolution. W hen Gertrude Stein made her permanent home in Europe, she still retained the option of returning home permanently or for a visit. James Baldwin, a black American writer who spent most of his tim e in France, had this in mind when he said he didn't view himself as an exile or expatriate, but rather as more of a commuter. The entire AngloAmerican tradition would be radically altered without its "commuters” — Percy Shelley, Henry James, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Robert Graves, Lawrence Durrell, W. H. Auden, Muriel Spark, Gore Vidal, and many, many others. Up until about 1989 the option of returning was more or less closed to Russia's expatriate writers. As defined by W ebster's Third N ew International Dictionary, Stein was an "expatriate,” i.e. "one who lives in a foreign country,” or an "emigrant" ("a person who leaves a country or region to establish permanent residency elsewhere”), but not an "exile” ("a person expelled from his country by authority”) or an "ém igré” ("a person forced to emigrate ... by political or other reasons beyond his control”).
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The phrase "reasons beyond his control” is far from precise. The case of Solzhenitsyn, who was forcibly placed on an airplane and flown to W est Germany, without even knowing his destination, was atypical. Most of the émigrés left because they "could not stand it any more” or because they were given such unpalatable alternatives to emigration as imprisonment or harassment. Most of them could have stayed, perhaps with disastrous consequences, and this makes their departure semi-voluntary, thus clouding the question of their "exile” status. Some view the writer's country of publication as primary: the Soviet film producer Èl’dar Ryazanov declared that once Vladim ir Voinovich’s Chonkin was published in the Soviet Union, it "ceased to be an artifact of émigré literature and became an artifact of Soviet literature.” The same had been said earlier about Aleksei Tolstoi's Road to C alvary (Khozhdenie po mukam). Both the Soviet and Nazi governments muddied the waters still further by referring to "inner émigrés” — the malcontents who stayed at home while espousing ideas popular abroad but considered unpatriotic by the government. The historical grouping of Russians abroad is in need of reexamination. Émigrés during the Soviet period have traditionally been divided into three broad categories: those who left during or shortly after 1917 (the First Wave), during World W ar II (the Second Wave), and during the 1970s and 1980s (the Third W ave).a Émigrés leaving either after 1985, the introduction of Mikhail Gorbachêv's policy of perestroika, or after the breakup of the Soviet Union are sometimes referred to as the Fourth Wave. On January 1, 1993, a new law entered into effect granting any Russian citizen the right to go abroad for five years for any reason, and concepts such as "exile” and "flight” are not applicable to this group of economic, not political, émigrés. They don’t have to burn any bridges, and they retain the right to return, w ithout having to give up their homes, jobs, friends, and family. Essentially, the notion that Russians abroad before October 1917 were still part of the nation while separation from Russia during the Soviet period meant total alienation was a figm ent of Soviet propaganda, based on the claim that Soviet history was somehow separate from Russian history as a whole. Now that the communist period has come to an end, we can look both forward and backward in tim e and see it within its proper historical framework. It would
•There also exists literature describing the tsarist emigration as the "First W ave," the group that left following the 1917 coup as the "second" and the World W ar II group as the "third," but this terminology never caught on.
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actually be more appropriate to view Russians abroad as consisting of twelve groups: travellers and expatriates; 1) tsarist exiles in Siberia; 2) 19th-century political exiles; 3) Jews fleeing the pogroms of the late tsarist period; 4) 19th-century economic émigrés (the second largest 5) group of all); refugees from the 1905 revolution; 6) refugees from the Russian Civil W ar — the so-called 7) First Wave; W orld W ar II refugees — the Second Wave; 8) the largely Jewish group which left Russia during the 9) 1970s and 1980s, but also including a few individuals who left Russia during the 1960s, such as Valery Tarsis and Arkady Belinkov. Russians in the form er Soviet republics who overnight 10) found themselves living abroad; economic émigrés who left Russia or the form er 11) republics on or after January 1, 1992; and 12) political refugees fleeing violence related to the breakup of the Soviet Union (this group is already turning out to be very large indeed). Many of them, but not all, will be Russians moving in the reverse direction — returning to Russia. This schem atic leaves open the question of what will happen if the Russian Republic breaks up into two or more independent states. Horst Bienek, a German writer who emigrated from the form er East Germany to W est Germany, considered himself a sort of exile from his native land, and Dante thought of himself as having been "exiled” to Ravenna from Florence. If the concept of homeland is narrowed in this fashion, linguistic criteria for determining who is and who is not Russian lose all validity. Lastly, many writers are especially difficult to categorize because of their changing circumstances. The prose writer, memoirist, ethnographer, and political and social commentator Feliks Kon (18641941 ), for example, was born in Poland at a tim e when Poland was part of the Russian Empire. He was arrested and exiled to Siberia, later returned to Poland, emigrated to Switzerland in 1914, and moved to Russia after 1917, and for a tim e was an editor in Kiev. A Jewish Polonophile, he wrote both in Polish and Russian. In such cases, classification can be an exercise in futility.
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The most traditional approach to Russians abroad has been to divide them into two groups — tsarist and Soviet. Somehow tsaristperiod writers in Europe have been viewed as an inalienable part of the general community of Russian writers, while during the Soviet period, writers abroad have been seen as existing in a separate nether world of banishment. W hile this tsarist/Soviet dichotomy is a valid one, it creates an oversimplified, distorted picture when other dim ensions are not taken into account. When all is said and done, Kurbsky and Gertsen lived in the same sort of exile as did Solzhenitsyn; Turgenev and Gogol' were expatriates in much the same sense as Voinovich, Aksênov, or Brodsky after the breakup of the U.S.S.R.; and the 12thcentury abbot and pilgrim Daniil, the 18th-century playwright Denis Fonvizin, the 19th-century memoirist Vasily Botkin, and the 20thcentury novelist Viktor Nekrasov were all authors of travel accounts. To view the Soviet period in isolation is to miss the larger picture. In any case, this book is not a history of any individual group of Russians living abroad, but a portrait of Russian writers and politics abroad as a totality, and as Russia herself changed over the centuries, so have Russians outside her borders. Looking back over a millennium of Russian existence abroad, we can appreciate how Russians in general and writers specifically fit into a multidimensional model of existence abroad. First of all come the causes of emigration. O f course, people rarely em igrate for one reason alone, so that m otivational factors are not mutually exclusive, but among them are criminal, cultural, educational, financial, medical, religious, personal, political, and even sexual considerations. As the readers of this volume can now testify, Russian writers fit into all these categories. People can also be classified according to the circum stances under which they found themselves abroad; this is a som ewhat different breakdown than that given above on the basis of m otivation. Such categories would have to include the "traveller,” whose "trip” was intended from the outset as tem porary; the "expatriate,” who regarded his new address as his "current primary” address, but who returned home from tim e to tim e; the "voluntary émigré,” who selected a new country of residence out of a sense of preference; the "inner ém igré,” who did not emigrate but who would have liked to, or whose sympathies, at the very least, were abroad; the "involuntary ém igré,” who made the decision to leave under coercion; the true "exile,” who was either forced to flee or was transported abroad against his will and was not perm itted to return, even for a visit; and persons whose country of residence changed status. There were also people whose country of residence was incorporated by Mother Russia (the Baltic states after the Second W orld W ar could serve as an example) and
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individuals whose country of residence declared its independence from the country in which the w riter has his ethnic roots (Russians in the form er republics of the Soviet Union after the disintegration of the state). Lastly, there is a tiny group of second-generation writers, but — no third generation. A very significant factor was the difference in the way of life of the host country from that of Russia. In the case of the Soviet Union, it could be roughly comparable (Poland), significantly different Yugoslavia), radically different (U.S.A), or overwhelmingly different (Brazil). Related to this "difference quotient’ was the language of the host country. Unlike the situation enjoyed by writers from some other countries, for Russians it was inevitably a foreign tongue. Ethnicity is defined here on the basis of language, and the unfam iliar linguistic milieu was one of the chief sources of trauma. Nevertheless, very few authors opted to switch languages. The question of repatriation also presents a basis for classification. Theoretically, the option was often open, and the individual could choose to avail himself of the opportunity; some decided to return and bitterly regretted the decision while other returnees claimed never to have repented their return. O r the writer could be forcibly repatriated, as happened to many refugees in Europe at the end of W orld W ar II. At various periods the Soviet authorities were intentionally vague on the question of return. When they barred the door, there were people who either did or did not want to return home, o r — more frequently than n o t— people who were so confused about their own desires that they demanded for decades that they be perm itted to return home and then chose not to do so when the opportunity actually appeared. Naturally, most of the above categories were applicable to anyone abroad, not just writers, but there are other categories which apply exclusively to literature, albeit indirectly. I have in mind classification according to place of publication of the work. Among the possibilities here are the writer's home country. Published in Russia, it was either legal or clandestine {sam izdat); published abroad, it was called tam izdat. The work can also be pigeonholed according to the intended prim ary audience: it can be intended for readers "back home” in a process of legal distribution or to be smuggled into the home country; or the readers may be residents of other countries. Russian writers usually attem pted to serve both markets. During the tsarist and very early Soviet periods the chief audience was back home in Russia; for the greater part of the Soviet era, however, most readers were other émigrés.
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Tradition
... a t th a t tim e I was ju s t beginning to return to life, to recover from an entire series o f tem ble events, m isfortunes, and m istakes. The history o f recent years becam e m ore and m ore clear to me, and I realized with horror tha t no m an knew them aside from m yself, tha t the truth would go w ith me to the grave. So I decided to write. B ut one m em ory awakens another, and a ll th a t which was e ith e r forgotten o r half-forgotten com es alive: the dream s o f childhood, the hopes o f adolescence, the courage o f youth, im prisonm ent and exile. None o f these has le ft any bitterness in m y soul; a ll this has passed like a spring storm whose blow s only freshened and strengthened m y soul. Aleksandr Gertsen How and why d id I and m y w ife end up here? I rea lly d o n t know. O f course, I rem em ber the hustle and bustle o f departure, the steam ship " W indham, ” the skyscrapered shores o f the N ew York p ie r in the lila c tw ilight. I rem em ber a ll this. B ut why am I re a lly here? Who needs m e? A nd why am I destined to die here, in Am erica? I do not understand a ll this very clearly. M ais ne cherchez pas à com prendre. Throughout m y ém igré life, I d rifte d from one chance to another. I never strove fo r much, never p u t o u t m uch e ffo rt o r w orried about "the m orrow .” I accepted w hat sim ply cam e m y way, ju s t as I accepted an Am erica tha t d rifte d past m e. Now I am sitting in a rocking cha ir on a beautiful wide veranda and looking a t the greenery a ll around m e — sm all oaks, apple trees, a garden, birds, bees, patches o f sunlight. I cast back in m y m em ory — fo r w hat? I reca ll the Second W orld War, which I lived through in France. I reca ll it as I experienced it. M y experiences are no t a t a ll the usual ones, and m uch has rem ained in m y m em ory. Roman Gul'
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Here [in G erm any] only the yellow stubble in the harvested fields rem inds you o f Russia. A nd the thought crosses m y m ind: w hat if nothing had ever happened, if there had never been any escape, if I had ju s t been brought here w hile sleeping? I see m yself waking up and standing a t the edge o f a fie ld and w onder if I would realize th a t a ll around me la y a d iffe ren t country? W hat would signal such a change to m e? Really, w hat is different? The grass is the same, and the roadside nettles and w ild flow ers haven't changed. It's like a gam e in which you guess the language o f a text. Some o f the letters are the same, and they form words. B ut the whole thing is void o f m eaning; it's a diffe ren t language. Even the sky, if you look a t it long enough, has a slig h tly d iffe ren t appearance — as if the gases com posing it were d iffe ren t here. An o ld m an strolls in m y direction talking to his dog in so alien a tongue you m ight im agine his vocal cords were constructed diffe ren tly from m ine. The tall-trunked, elegant, sun -lit forest is no t a t a ll like ou r forests; you can ride through it on a bicycle, im agining you rself to be som e sort o f Siegfried. There is nothing le ft o f the forest gam es we played back home, and a new sensation crowds ou t the old, a feeling o f loneliness and freedom . Boris Khazanov These three writers represent very different groups of Russian writers in exile; Gertsen left Russia in 1847, Gul' in 1918, and Khazanov in 1982. In spite of the years which separate them, however, the continuity of their experience is striking. Most of Russia's exiled writers have not attem pted to fit into the traditions of the country which received them, but instead have clung to their native roots, writing chiefly for "the folks back home.” This was understandable in the case of tsarist expatriates and First-W ave émigrés, who left Russia confident, or at least hopeful, that they would eventually return home, but Second- and Third-W ave writers left Russia more or less convinced that they were leaving their native country forever. It might seem logical to assume that, given such a fatalistic view, Russian writers would set their sights on the W estern reader from the very beginning, but such was not the case. The internationalists have clearly been in the minority. The late American Slavist and publisher Carl Proffer at a 1981 University of Southern California conference on émigré literature took
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objection to the term "émigré literature,” saying that the accomplishments of literature written in emigration (not only Russian) were such that they should be recognized as part of the mainstream national tradition. The very term, "émigré literature,” he maintained, is demeaning: It sm acks o f the ghetto. It suggests som ething lim ited, narrow , parochial, perhaps o f interest fo r a tim e, bu t w ith no hope o f entering the perm anent culture o f a language. If w riters are "only ém igré w riters," they w ill probably be forgotten. "Ém igré” literature is by definition a m inority literature, a literature o f special pleading, and like other defensive, m inority types o f literature — wom en's literature, ga y literature, the lite rature o f M ichigan's N orthern Peninsula — the attributive adjective its e lf determ ines its fin a l fate — the com post heap o f culture. Proffer's view was indeed a gloomy one, but to respond to it, we must first work through the history of émigré letters and only then render judgm ent in questions of legitimacy and continuity, and — for that m atter — decide for ourselves whether these two categories are linked.
The Interaction of Russian Expatriate Writers with the West I know how m en in exile feed on dream s o f hope. Aeschylus The 19th century had been a period of rich association between Russian writers and the West. Educated Russians frequently went abroad for medical treatm ent, study, relaxation ... or to lay plans for revolution back home. The opportunities for such travel created a m indset quite different from that of the Soviet period, when foreign travel became virtually impossible and foreign contacts could literally be life-threatening. Paradoxically, even though the roots of modern Russian literature lie in W estern European literature, the interwar period was not one of extensive interaction between Russian émigré literature and the various W estern European literatures surrounding it. In noting this estrangement, Vladim ir Nabokov claimed the Russian ém igré com m unity possessed a higher culture and greater freedom of thought than that of the W estern world in which the exiles found themselves. A s I look back a t those years o f exile, I see m yself, and thousands o f other Russians, leading an odd b u t by no m eans unpleasant existence, in m aterial indigence and inte llectua l luxury, am ong pe rfectly unim portant strangers, spectral
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G erm ans and Frenchm en in whose m ore o r less illu so ry cities we, ém igrés, happened to dw ell. These aborigines were to the m ind's eye as fla t and transparent as figures cut ou t o f cellophane, and although we used th e ir gadgets, applauded th e ir clowns, picked th e ir roadside plum s and apples, no re a l com m unication, o f the rich hum an so rt so widespread in o u r own m idst, existed between us and them . If such a statem ent could be made by Nabokov, a w riter who supposedly read English before he learned to write Russian and whose cosmopolitan credentials were above reproach, how much more was it true for other Russian refugees. After World W ar II this attitude was retained, producing little cross-pollination between Russian ém igré literature in America and the Anglo-American tradition, such stars as Brodsky and Solzhenitsyn notwithstanding.* Russians in Europe both before and after 1917 generally saw themselves as European but often realized that the Europe they loved was an imagined entity. Nabokov’s com m ent in The G ift was quite typical in this respect. W hat has happened to those originals who used to teach natural history to Russian children — green net, tin box on a sling, ha t stuck w ith pinned butterflies, long, learned nose, candid eyes behind spectacles — where are they all, where are th e ir fra il skeletons — o r was this a special breed o f Germans, fo r export to Russia, o r am I no t looking properly? Thus, rather than reaching out to W estern traditions, Russian expatriate writings have displayed a confluence of the traditions of "Russia M inor,” as the émigré community used to refer to itself, with those of the "m étropole.” Russian literature in exile as a whole has been torn by two opposing forces: on the one hand, nostalgia and the desire to retain old traditions, the realism of First-Wave prose writers, the numerous discussions of "bridge building,” and, on the other, political protest and greater experimentation than was possible in Russia proper. Now that Soviet exile has come to an end, this natural attraction and repulsion has resumed, albeit under more normal conditions.
■My view is not shared by ail other scholars. W hen I first m ade this observation in 1976, I w as taken to task by Professor Ternira Pachmuss, who wrote: "Russian ém igré literature w as unquestionably neither static nor irretrievably chained to its 'mother' culture in Russia, as has been incorrectly suggested by some scholars."
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The Pre-Soviet Period Origins 01 a kiss, long as m y exile, sw eet as m y revenge! W illiam Shakespeare O f necessity, this history of Russian literature outside of Russia must begin with the appearance of the first written documents, because we possess no earlier evidence of such a diffusion of Russia's oral tradition. It is entirely likely that the East Slavs travelled to other countries, taking their tradition of folk literature with them, but the Church in its hostility to the Slavs' pagan culture ovqr the course of the centuries strove to wipe out any memory of that tradition. Thus, this book begins, not from the actual beginnings, but from our earliest information. Some of the best sources of knowledge of early East Slavic "statehood” are to be found in the Russian chronicles, the reliability of which, however, becomes increasingly difficult to ascertain the further back they reach in time. We do know that in the ninth century A.D. the northern Russian city of Novgorod was riven by internecine warfare among its rulers. In a not very original justification of the conquering of a foreign state, the chronicles relate that the city supposedly invited three Varangian (Viking) brothers to come and rule it. The eldest, Ryurik, settled in Novgorod, and Igor1, who may have been his son, became the prince of Kiev, the so-called "m other” city of the East Slavs and the capital of a powerful state founded on the intersection of a North-South and an East-W est trade route. After a successful campaign against Byzantium in 906, lgor"s son Oleg hung his shield on the gates of Constantinople as a sign of victory before returning home. The East Slavs still had no alphabet, let alone a written literary tradition, but this prophetically warlike gesture represents Russia's earliest autograph in the West. It was a "sign” eloquent enough to delight the heart of any semiotician, not to mention proponents of later Russian imperialism. In 911 Oleg concluded a treaty with Byzantium, establishing more or less normal diplom atic relations between the two states. In 941, however, Viking traditions were still strong, and Oleg's successor, Igor', evidently decided to demand tribute from his neighbors, supposedly raising an army of 40,000 men in 10,000 boats, but the Byzantines made short shrift of the attackers. Having barely managed to escape, Igor' was forced in 944-45 to reconfirm the earlier treaty, forswear the right to maintain outposts at the mouth of the Dnepr, and
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give up all claims to the Crimea. After his death, his widow Ol'ga was even baptized by the Byzantines. Nevertheless, the Russians’ military fortunes vis-à-vis their Greek neighbors failed to improve: in 971 lgor"s son Svyatoslav was forced to conclude a nonaggression treaty with Byzantiuma, and Svyatoslav's son, Vladimir, ended up converting all of Russia to Christianity. A century later, in 1044, Yaroslav the Wise, Grand Prince of Kiev, intent on forging alliances with the other royal houses of Europe, married off one daughter to the king of Nonway and another in 1046 to the king of Hungary. King Henry i of France, whose first w ife had died w ithout issue, was eager to raise the prestige of the younger French dynasty and ensure himself an heir. Since the Papacy equated marital ties with blood ties and viewed marriages as consanguineous as far as the seventh degree of relation, Henry was forced to look to more distant lands for a spouse. In 1049 he sent a mission to Kiev which returned either that same year or the next with Yaroslav's second daughter Anna, who was forthwith married to Henry at Rheims and sim ultaneously crowned Queen of France. Since Anna claimed descent from Alexander the Great, the match was viewed as advantageous to the French dynasty. During the ceremonies Anna deposited a Slavic Gospel on the high altar of the Cathedral, and it was on this book that subsequent kings of France took their oath of office. Anna bore Henry three sons and possibly one daughter before being abducted in about 1061 by Raoul V, Count of Crépy en Valois, a powerful seigneur who claimed descent from Charlemagne. Anna may or may not have returned to Russia, but in 1063 she wrote out her name and title, Anna regina, in Cyrillic letters in a French document. This is the oldest known signature of any Russian prince or princess and one of the oldest specimens of Russian writing. Some 160 years had passed since Oleg left his shield hanging on the gates of "Tsargrad,” and thus the alternating love-hate pattern which has raged over the centuries between Russia and Western Europe was established early on.
•All three treaties w ere preserved only in Greek, and w ere translated for insertion into the Russian Primary Chronicle only in the early twelfth century.
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Pilgrims B ut one man loved the pilgrim soul in you A nd loved the sorrows o f your changing face. William Butler Yeats Pilgrim accounts represent a genre which had predecessors in Byzantine literature and Western European literature. The East Slavic works were originally dedicated chiefly to descriptions of the sacred shrines of Christianity, and only with tim e began to develop generically. Moving ahead in time, we can also see that these accounts have a later equivalent in the trips of Russians such as Nikolai Karamzin and even ll'ya Èrenburg to the shrines of Western culture. One of the earliest such documents was the early twelfthcentury Life and Pilgrimage o f Daniil, A bbot o f the Russian Land. Preserved in nearly 150 manuscripts representing four different redactions, Daniil's account contains much apocryphal and legendary material. The author created a sort of guidebook, in which he discussed the religious significance of places and relics, providing more and more detail the nearer he reached the Holy Land, which at the tim e was in the hands of the Crusaders. His narration is a personal one, describing places where he spent the night, and placing no little emphasis on the danger of the trip and the return journey via Constantinople. In general, his account is more sophisticated than many written centuries later. Constantinople with its wealth of relics attracted considerable attention on the part of Russian pilgrims from the 13th century until 1453, when the Turks took the city. In this respect the Russians differed from W estern pilgrims, who generally avoided Constantinople after the eighth century out of loyalty to Rome. Altogether six different descriptions of the city have been preserved. These works have a good deal in common, and early manuscripts may have influenced the later ones. The pilgrims were especially drawn by the Hagia Sophia, which supposedly contained the sponge from which Christ drank while on the cross and the lance which pierced his side, Abraham 's table, the doors of Noah's ark, and many precious icons from Jerusalem. In 1200, just four years before the knights of the Fourth Crusade conquered Constantinople and carried off many of the sacred relics, Archbishop Antony of Novgorod travelled to Constantinople to study the liturgy of the Church. W hile Antony failed to include his travel route, his description of the city is quite detailed and the work is not unsophisticated, particularly in its sermonizing (a well-defined genre in old Russian literature):
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N ow has Christ our God visited us thanks to his m ercy and the intercession o f the Holy Sophia, the Wisdom o f God, and through the prayers o f Em peror Constantine and his m other Helene: G od shall grant us life, ju s t as under Constantine, and much more in addition. He will lead the pagan Jews to the baptism al font, and the Christians shall remain within his love and feel no hostility to each other, and do battle only with those who refuse to be baptized, for whether they like it o r not, they shall be forced to approach the font. There w ill be much wealth o f a ll sorts and truth on earth, and men w ill commence to live holy lives, without illnesses, and the Earth shall bring forth the fruits o f the Earth like honey and m ilk for the sake o f C hrist’s good life. Nearly 150 years passed before the next description of "Tsargrad” was written (or, at least, preserved). The lengthy tim e span is perhaps explained by the intervening invasion of southern Russia by the Mongols in 1237-38. This was the beginning of the so-called Tartar Yoke, which laid waste to much of the previously flourishing culture of Kiev, although the Golden Horde was more interested in tribute and empire than in transplanting its own culture and religion. From the fall of Kiev till the disintegration of the Tartar empire in the mid-15th century, the northwestern cities of Novgorod and Pskov served as unique and unspoiled bearers of the religious culture of the East Slavs. Thus, the next Russian visitor to "Konstantingrad” was, like Antony, also from Novgorod; the name of this pilgrim was Stefan, and he had come "to bow to the holy places and kiss the bodies of the saints” (poklonitisya svyatym mestom and tselovati telesa svyatykh). Like Antony, Stefan provides virtually no information on his travel route. The narration is more highly personalized than that of Antony, and the descriptions of the city's holy places are very detailed. In 1389 Metropolitan Pimen of Moscow made his third trip to Constantinople, taking with him an official record keeper, Ignaty, from the city of Smolensk. The see of Moscow was attempting to establish its legitim acy vis-à-vis Kiev, and Pimen wanted the support of the new Patriarch Antonios IV in Constantinople. Evidently Pimen hoped the existence of a written document would help to bolster his position in his quarrel with Kiprian of Kiev. Ignaty describes the route followed by Pimen — down the Oka and Don rivers to the Black Sea. Previous travellers had made the journey by way of western Russia so as to avoid the danger of Tartar attack. Even at that tim e the route was not the safest. Although this route was shorter, it still took the travellers two and a half months to reach Constantinople. Unlike the accounts of previous travellers, Ignaty's was focused around places, rather than dates.
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Three decades later, In 1418-22, a monk of the Trinity-Sergiev Monastery near Moscow, Zosima, made the first comprehensive trip to all the sacred places: Constantinople, Mount Athos, Salonika, the Holy Land. By this tim e there already existed a well-developed genre of pilgrim s’ travel accounts in Europe; moreover, distinct parallels between Zosima's text and Daniil's dem onstrate that Zosima had read Daniil's account. The general convention of canonical literature had been for the author to stress his own "worthlessness,” remaining in the background as much as possible. Zosima makes a gesture at adhering to this tradition but at the same tim e points out his own courage in undertaking the journey. During his trip he was robbed by either Sicilian or Spanish pirates, who fired upon his ship, boarded it, and hacked the captain to pieces. He himself was robbed and was left, quite literally, with nothing but the kaftan on his back. Zosihia also took considerable pride in his presentation of Christendom's holy places: W ithout bragging I can say that no one has seen the sites o f Jerusalem as has this sinner. I spent an entire year in Jerusalem and visited the sacred places outside o f Jerusalem and I, a sinner, have received m any wounds to m y body from the Saracens and endured a ll this in the name o f God. I rem em bered a ll that the Apostles and Martyrs suffered and I counted a ll this as nothing, but rather anguished in gratitude. Two pilgrimages were made to the Holy Land in 1456 and 1461-62 by the monk Varsonofy, who may well have been the sam e Varsonofy who was a candidate for Archbishop of Novgorod in 1471. Both accounts are contained in a single manuscript. Varsonofy, whose journey led him through Kiev, Belgrade, Constantinople, Crete, Rhodes, Cyprus, Tripoli, Beirut, and Damascus to Jerusalem, composed what is basically an inventory of the sites which he visited during his first pilgrimage. The account of his journey is also quite brief. Both are told in the first person. Varsonofy was the first Russian pilgrim recorded as having visited Mount Sinai. Nearly two centuries later, in 1634-37, a merchant from Kazan', Vasily Gagara, travelled down the Volga to visit the Orient. When Gagara's ship, destined for Persia and loaded with goods, sank, he decided to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Despite his professed religious devotion, however, he left Jerusalem after only three days and moved on to Cairo for 14 weeks, his true intentions evidently having been at least as strongly inspired by trade as by religion. Gagara marvelled at the numerous mosques, whose minarets stood like a "dark forest,” at the pyramids, a crocodile, the production of sugar from cane, the Red Sea, and Mount Sinai. He then backtracked to Palestine for two weeks. Forced to return home by a different route
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because of Turkish-Persian hostilities, he chose to travel via Turkey, Moldavia, and Poland. Even so he was imprisoned by the Poles for 14 weeks before getting to Kiev and then to Moscow. Gagara's account contains a short introduction, a description of the trip itself, and a brief afterword. The work differs from accounts of other pilgrims in that the description of holy sites comprises only about ten percent of the text, the rest being devoted to Gagara's experiences and a number of legends. The work is also unusual in that, while written in Church Slavic, it clearly im itates in places the rhythm of the Russian folk epic. During the 17th century the extravagant fantasies of early pilgrim age accounts gave way to more factual presentations. A more levelheaded work was that of the monk Iona Malen'kii (literally: Jonah the Small), who accompanied Patriarch Paisios of Jerusalem on his 1649 trip home from Moscow. Iona broke his narration into four wellbalanced parts: a foreword, the account of the trip itself, a description of the holy sites in Palestine, and the return home in 1652. Not only was Iona factual in his descriptions, but he provided considerable detail. In 1652, Arseny Sukhanov, the head of the Bogoyavlenskii Cloister in the Moscow Kremlin, having returned from a two-year diplom atic pilgrim age to Constantinople, Cairo, and Palestine, wrote what is the largest diplom atic report and pilgrimage account under the title Proskinetareon (Proskinetarii). Some 120 printed pages in length, it provided a detailed account of religious rites in the East. Sukhanov was the first Russian emissary to visit the Holy Land since the tim e of Ivan the Terrible, and he had brought with him 80 sable pelts to present to the Patriarch on behalf of the Tsar, but the ship bringing them to Constantinople was seized by pirates. One of the reasons for Sukhanov's mission was the problem of the legitimacy of the Russian translations of the liturgical texts. Moscow's claim to be the "Third Rome” (after the fall in 1453 of Constantinople to the Turks) could have been undermined by an admission of inaccuracies in the Russian texts. The issue was already a sensitive one but not yet fraught with the tragedy and violence that would later ensue. Sukhanov's account of his mission is factual, with numerous reference to sources, and the tone is relatively scholarly and neutral, much as one might expect from a diplom at. Sukhanov discussed politics, geography, the flora and fauna he observed, and, especially, church ritual. Curiously, the Greeks were alarmed when they perceived him taking down everything he saw in a notebook to report to the Tsar, and they even urged the Patriarch to confiscate his notes and burn them. In 1653 Sukhanov was sent to Mount Athos to collect Greek manuscripts to be used to check the authenticity of the Russian religious writings. He returned in 1655 with 500 texts. In the meantime Patriarch Nikon had gone ahead
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with a 1654-56 church council that led to the schism in the Russian church. From 1660 to 1664 Sukhanov headed the Moscow Pechatnyi dvor, the state printing house, which a century earlier had published the first Russian printed book for which there is a date. Under the influence of the Reformation and humanism the genre of the W estern European pilgrimage account evolved in the direction of a more personal narrative and away from form al catalogues of holy sites, relics, and legends. Much the same trend can be traced in the Russian tradition, albeit with a considerable tim e lag. One of the causes of these changes in Russia is to be found in the appearance of the secular tale. An instance of such a hybrid genre is the colorful 1676 account written by Vasily Polozov of Kostroma, who spent some 25 years outside of Russia. Polozov wrote a petition (chelobitnaya) to Tsar Fëdor Alekseevich requesting a job in recognition of the many trials he had endured. Captured by the Crimean Tartars, Polozov was sold into slavery to the Turkish sultan a year and a half later. After 12 years’ service, he was condemned to death for clinging to his faith, but the sentence was commuted to slavery on a galley, where he was a rower for nine years. When the ship capsized, Polozov managed to survive, chained to his wooden bench which had been tom free from the ship. W ishing to thank God for his preservation, he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, crossing the Black Sea and travelling through Aleppo. He tells of miracles he supposedly witnessed and describes his eventual return to Russia via Astrakhan'. The Tsar was so impressed with Polozov's fortitude that he awarded him 1,000 rubles, plus a position as court investigator and surveyor. Very few later Russian travellers were to meet with such generosity from Moscow. In 1703, in the early Petrine period, the priest Ioann Luk'yanov returned from a two-year pilgrimage to Palestine and composed an extensive account of his journey: 100 printed pages. The work is far more modern and personal than previous such reports, describing how the owner of a menagerie in Constantinople tried to pretend a dead lion was only asleep, how Luk'yanov haggled over customs duties, fell ill with the plague, and warded off the threat of Arab raiders and sea pirates. In some places the actual descriptions of the Holy Land are modelled after earlier pilgrim s’ accounts and are generally more cursory in nature than the description of the journey itself. Just as the church schism in Russia began to place in doubt the legitim acy of the official church, it also began to undermine the inviolability of its written traditions. Luk'yanov was an Old Believer and he perceived great significance in the fact that the right hand of the Kiev relics of the folk hero li'ya Muromets was stretched out with two fingers, not three — a sticking point in the clash between the official Church and the
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schismatics. It is unlikely that the literary freedom he permitted him self in the very personal, even intim ate descriptions of his own experiences would have been as com plete had he not been a religious dissident. Not surprisingly, the manuscript was circulated widely by the Old Believers. Luk'yanov's lively, detailed account was more or less unique up until the end of the 18th century. In 1704, just a year after he returned, the W est Russian monks Makary and Sil'vestr made their own pilgrimage, travelling via Kiev, la§i, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Dam ietta to the Holy Land. The document briefly describes Constantinople, mentions "the Pharaoh's mountains" (the pyramids), and provides an inventory of the sites in Palestine. Part of the text is taken from the pseudo-Korobeinikov account (see below). A relatively unsophisticated pilgrimage account was created by Andrei Ignat'ev, who travelled to Palestine and Mount Sinai in 1707-08 and took vows as a monk. Thanks to the efforts of the Russian diplom at Pëtr Tolstoi, Ignat'ev and his brother received a safe conduct document, a firman, from the Sultan. Unlike Luk'yanov, who not only refrained from calling all Turks "dogs and rascals,” but even had some positive comments to make about them, Ignat'ev was a strong Hellenophile who had no use for the pagan defilers of the city. As for the G reek faith, he wrote that "a light shone in the darkness, and the darkness did not realize it.” The Ignat'ev brothers’ ship capsized on the way home, but they were fortunate: not even their belongings got wet. Another pilgrim to receive a firman through Tolstoi was the Chernigov monk Ippolit Vishensky, who made a pilgrimage to Mount Sinai, Palestine, and Mount Athos in 1707-09. The manuscript, which has been preserved in a single copy, is a diary of his trip. Vishensky naively gave credence to a number of myths, but at the same tim e he devoted a good deal of attention to the trip itself, and not just to the holy places. Among the cities which he visited were la§i, Bucharest, Byzantium, and Cyprus. In Cairo he was concerned with the radical drop in the city's population as a result of the plague and was indignant at the sight of "black arabs” walking around naked. Like Polozov and the Ignat'ev brothers, he also experienced shipwreck during his travels. Just a few years later, in 1712-14, a monk of the Crypt M onastery in Kiev, Varlaam Lenitsky, found himself in Constantinople as chaplain in the service of Field Marshal Boris Sheremet'ev after a truce with the Turks and decided to seize the opportunity to make a pilgrim age to Palestine. Lenitsky's account of his journey is reminiscent, both in manner and in content, of the popular tales (gishtorii) of the Petrine period. Twice his ship barely escaped attacks by pirates, and at one point was severely tested by a storm. No less danger was posed by Arab bandits. Despite all these hazards, Lenitsky
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reached Palestine, where he visited such sites as the Garden of Gethsemane, the Mount of Olives, Bethlehem, and the birthplace of John the Baptist. After spending six weeks in the Holy Land, however, he was unpleasantly surprised to leam that hostilities had again broken out between the Turks and the Russians and that the Russian diplom atic staff in Constantinople had been arrested. A t first he planned to flee with a French monk to Venice but was convinced by the Orthodox Greeks not to travel with a Roman Catholic. He ended up taking passage on a French cargo ship travelling to Accra and Cyprus and was advised by the captain of the vessel to pass him self off as a Bulgarian or Serb. All went well until he reached Cyprus, where he was betrayed by his servant and imprisoned by the Turks for 15 months. Hard as such a lot must have been, his treacherous attendant fared even worse: the man was beheaded by Maltese pirates. Released by the Turks, Lenitsky returned to Kiev via Constantinople and composed an account of his journey consisting of an introduction, his journey to Palestine, a description of the actual holy sites visited, and his eventful return. The account is structured more like a traditional pilgrim age account than a diary. The spirit of adventure came more and more to the forefront in works of the Petrine period. Matvei Nechaev of Yaroslavl' made his pilgrim age in 1721-22. Frightened by the plague in Constantinople, Nechaev delayed his arrival in that city, tarrying in Adrianople, northwest of Constantinople. When he finally arrived in the "new Rome” he spent 32 days sightseeing and created the most detailed description theretofore. Travelling on to Rhodes, he encountered captive Russians from Penza and was fearful of being sold to the Turks himself. When his ship left Cyprus, it was searched by Maltese pirates, among them two Russians, from whom Nechaev hid. Oddly, his account is rooted more in the sentim ental knightly novel of the period than in the tradition of the pilgrimage report. Tears, sighs, com plaints over "bitter fortune,” and rhetorical exclamations over virtuous ladies are a far cry from the accounts of earlier travellers to Palestine. Thus the pilgrimage account evolved away from being a static catalogue of religious sites and myths couched in Church Slavic to a more dynamic mode, and came to be devoted more and more to the personality and experiences of the author, whose language came closer and closer to the vernacular and whose attitude toward myth became ever more critical and objective. Nechaev's work represents a still more radical evolution of the tradition.3
•For more information on Russian pilgrims, see: Seem an, D ie altrussische Wallfahrtsliteratur, 1976.
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Travellers For m y part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The real affair is to move. Robert Louis Stevenson The original motivation for Russians to travel abroad was often commercial as well as religious. Under the year 6903 from the Biblical creation of the world (1395 A.D.) the Novgorodian Fourth Chronicle contains an extremely short description of 21 sites in Constantinople, composed by the deacon Aleksandr, who made the trip partially to view the religious sites and partially to engage in trade, and whose narrative tells of an unsuccessful siege of the city by the Turks. Another traveller who combined business with religion was the merchant Vasily, who travelled to Bursa and Cairo to deal in silks, satins, and damask, then went on by way of Gaza, Hebron, and Bethlehem to Jerusalem in 1465-66, and later wrote a brief description of his visit to Cairo and Jerusalem and environs. W hile the account is relatively brief, the route was a new one for Russians wishing to visit the Holy Land. The merchant Afanasy Nikitin, who visited Persia, Africa, and India in a trip that lasted from 1466 to 1472, left a traveller's memoir based on first-hand observation and reminiscent of Zosima's account. Nikitin suffered shipwreck and was attacked by pirates. The work contains Nikitin's immediate impressions of these exotic lands and is replete with words taken from Turkic, Arabic, and Persian. W hile many of the early travel accounts can readily be seen to have been based on actual experience and provide a wealth of inform ation, others are sheer fantasy. The ancient city of Azov, captured first by the Golden Horde and then by the Turks, was under frequent attack by the Don Cossacks, one of whom, Mikhail Cherkashenin, was called the "Scourge of Azov” (groza Azova). His son, the starets Sergy, is evidently the person depicted in a manuscript as having been kidnapped by the Tartars and sold in Palestine. The often dubious reliability of the text is evident from the mention of camels crossing the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The text is dated April 1,1640, but may have originated in the second half of the 17th century. The growing secularization of Russian society encouraged some Russians to travel for purposes other than religion and/or trade. One of the stronger inducements was the lure of education from the more advanced West. In the 18th century two fortunate young Russians were able to study abroad, and brought a number of W estern
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literary theories home with them. Vasily Trediakovsky (1703-68) travelled to Holland in 1726 and from there to Paris, where he studied mathematics, philosophy, and philology at the University of Paris and theology at the Sorbonne. Five years after returning to Moscow in 1730, he published a tract entitled A N ew and B rief W ay o f Composing Russian Verse with proposals for a German-derived syilabo-tonic system of versification to replace the form er syllabic system imported from Poland but also used in the Romance languages. Syllabo-tonic verse had already been composed in Russian in Moscow by Germans, but it was Trediaikovsky's W estern experience that paved the way for a revolution in Russian poetry. Upon returning from a 1736-41 sojourn in Germany and France Mikhailo Lomonosov (1711-1765) used his W estern training to further develop the ideas of Trediakovsky, proposing that both bisyllabic and trisyllabic meters be accepted. Equally important, he used his own verse to dem onstrate the potential of the iamb for Russian versification. Thus, modern Russian verse is constructed on an imported W estern foundation. Denis Fonvizin (1745-1792) made four trips abroad, and his francophobie letters home go a long way toward explaining his plays. After passing through a Poland "bought up by Jews and priests,” he arrived in Strasbourg, which he found filthy, smelly, and whose streets were so dark that "the sun never shines on these sinners.” From there he went on to Bourg-en-Bresse, where the people were "up to their ears in filth.” French singing reminded him of nothing so much as "goats bleating,” so that his wife was forced to carry ear plugs to avoid the cacophony. In Fonvizin's judgm ent the French were superficial, haughty, materialistic, and dishonest. They seemed to stay young for a long time, but then would abruptly be transformed into old men and women, so that there was no mature citizenry. French writers, he complained, were vain, boastful, envious, wily, and contem ptible in their unceasing efforts to slander each other. French scientists and scholars fared no better in his eyes, being filled with "lies, ambition, and the basest of flattery.” As for French education, Fonvizin described it as limited to rote learning and so compartmentalized as to make a broad education impossible. Dictatorial and exploitative, the governm ent robbed the people at every turn; the courts were corrupt, and the army lacked discipline. Fonvizin's fellow Russians in France came off no better in his eyes; he wrote that they had come alm ost exclusively on a sex tour, while all around the French were either torturing someone on the rack and then beheading the poor wretch or running a raucous carnival. Fonvizin's deepest contem pt was reserved for Paris, which he found "only slightly cleaner than a pigsty” — with widows and orphans begging in the streets and decent people forced
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to live in seventh-floor walkups.a Behind the magnificent facades he found such filth that he could not understand why foreigners would ever want to visit such a "Sodom and Gomorrah.” The chief lesson Fonvizin acquired from France was an appreciation of life in Russia. Only the French theater earned his praise, especially comedy, but tragic stage came off "mediocre.” He found French opera visually magnificent, especially the choreography and the stage decorations, but the singing struck him as nothing less than horrendous. Fonvizin also visited Germany and was favorably impressed by German neatness, but he found the country boring and the weather intolerable. In 1789 the w riter and historian Nikolai Karamzin travelled to W estern Europe and wrote Letters o f a Russian Traveller, in which he described the mixed feelings experienced by many a traveller before and after, albeit in a more sentimental fashion than most. Once on his way, however, he displayed a charming sense of humor: I m ust te ll you o f a m eeting which le ft me with the m ost pleasant memories.... I opened a door and saw a beautiful woman standing before a m irror; wiping the dust from her white face; her companion was seated next to he r in an arm chair yawning. "Excuse m e,” said I, "I le ft a book here.” H er hunchbacked cavalier nodded in the direction o f m y book, which was lying on a table. The beauty turned away from the m irror and peered a t me with such a quick, penetrating gaze that I surely would have blushed, had I anything naughty in m y thoughts. B ut I gazed a t her with calm naïveté, a t her exquisite blue eyes, her perfect Greek nose, her rose lips and cheeks, adm iring her charms the way a young sculptor adm ires a creation by Michelangelo o r a painter prizes a Raphael. The beauty sat down and I rem ained standing before her without picking up m y book. "It's a very hot day,” she said in a pleasant voice, glancing both a t her companion and a t me. He yawned, and I repeated her words: "A very hot day.” A silence ensued. Knowing that in life's decisive moments women never utter the first word, I finally asked: "Is it Dresden you're going to, M adam e?” "N o,” she responded, "we're going to visit our friend in the country. B ut I suppose you really are headed fo r Dresden?” " You're correct, Madame, I hope to be there early tom orrow morning. ” " You m ust be a foreigner, if I m ay make so bold as to ask?” " Quite right, M adam e.” "An Englishman, o f course? Because the English speak excellent G erm an.”
•P ëtr I (P eter the G reat) had m ade a similar observation, remarking that, while it would be worthwhile to copy French art and science, "Paris stinks."
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"Excuse me, Madame, I'm a Muscovite. ” "A Muscovite I M y God, I've never seen a M uscovite.” ” 1 have,” her hunchback gallant inserted and again commenced yawning. "Please tell me how it is you've come to our country.” "It's curiosity, M adam e.” "You m ust be very inquisitive. Surely you've le ft behind much that is dear to you?” "A great deal indeed, Madame, a great deal. I le ft fatherland and friends.” I d o n t know where our conversation would have led, but the postm aster came in with some water and told me that m y carriage was ready. I bowed low to the beauty and she wished me a pleasant journey. "And that was all?,” you ask, dear reader. W hat can I say, I d o n t want to tell a lie. Karamzin's impressions are fresh, insightful, and often tell as much about him as about the countries he visited. In Ba$el he found the women to be "exceptionally ugly” (otmenno dumye), but Switzerland was such a dream that he wanted to kiss the ground. Unfortunately, it was also expensive. Paris too he found exquisite, but attractive women were almost as rare there as in Switzerland. England's womenfolk, on the other hand, were of such beauty as to entrance even the most indifferent male. And Karamzin stressed that he observed them with the greatest attention I London was crowded, but the English never had anything to say; they simply sat around, thinking. As for British theater, it was pitiful compared to the grandeur of Parisian plays. And London was even more decadent than Paris. Karamzin found English descriptive poetry admirable, but "dram atic poetry” was represented by a single author — Shakespeare. The British, in his view, were bombastic and weak, and these frailties showed in their literature. As for contemporary English belles lettres, they were not worthy of attention. And the English language was not only unpleasant, its entire word stock was stolen from the French and the Latin, and it was clearly inferior to the majestically flowing Russian language. The clim ate of the country was cold and damp, like the stingy, calculating British personality. On the whole, the British to him were a gloomy lot, unlike the frivolous French or the wily Italians. But for all these negative assessments, Karamzin confessed that he found it difficult to leave England behind to return to Russia. His letters quickly found an avid reading public, and the epistolary genre became popular in Russia. By the late 18th century educated Russians considered themselves Europeans, and travel to Europe and expatriate living had become common. The simple joys of travel were a new experience for the Russians. In 1824 Nikolai Bestuzhev described his em otions in a letter to a friend:
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How can I explain the charm o f the new, hitherto unknown sensation o f seeing a special land, o f experiencing the inspiration o f an unknown fragrant air, a t seeing unknown grasses, unusual flowers and fruits, their colors unknown to our gaze, their taste inexpressible in words and com parisons? How m any new truths are opened, how m any observations supplem ent our knowledge o f man and nature when we encounter lands and peoples o f a new worldI How lo fty the calling o f the m ariner who brings together the links in the hum an chain! As the Russian navy expanded its operations, a number of its officers gained an opportunity to travel abroad and some took up the pen to describe their experiences. In their ranks was a son of the German novelist and playwright August-Friedrich-Ferdinand von Kotzebue, who had lived for considerable periods in the Russian Empire. W hile still a teenager, Otto Kotzebue (1788-1846) was taken on a world cruise in 1803 by a fam ily friend and upon returning home decided to try his own hand at writing and published his experiences in Vestnik Evropy (The European Herald) in the form of a letter to his father, describing, among other things, folk dram a in Nagasaki and acupuncture. So enchanted was the young Kotzebue by the sea that he became an officer in the Russian Navy and headed up a m ajor world cruise in 1815-18, keeping a diary as he visited such exotic spots as the Canary Islands. In 1823-26 he was off on another world cruise, which he described in Russian and German, providing a colorful description of the natives on the Sandwich Islands and Tahiti, and even Napoleon's grave on the Island of Saint Helena. The descriptions he left behind create the impression of a bold, enlightened explorer. But Russians were motivated to go abroad by any number of reasons and sometimes they stayed abroad for still others. Fêdor Dostoevsky's fear of debtor's prison transformed him into an economic exile from 1867 to 1871. He maintained that his indebtedness stemmed from having taken over his late brother's debts, while his brother's widow insisted that Fêdor was actually the cause of her fam ily's strained material situation. A second factor in Dostoevsky's lengthy stay abroad was his epilepsy and attendant need of medical care. In point of fact, his years abroad were marked by concern over money and homesickness for Russia — hardly a desirable state for an epileptic. Moreover, he was far from convinced of the superiority of W estern physicians. W hile travelling in Western Europe in 1862, 1863, and 1865, Dostoevsky had evidently tried his hand at the casinos of W estern Europe and become obsessed with the thought of quick riches. After only a few weeks in Dresden he left his young wife to travel to the
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gaming tables of Bad Homburg, where he proceeded to lose everything and was even forced to pawn his watch. His short work, The G am bler (Igrok), is testim ony to his passion for the casino, and the figure of Marmeladov in Crime and Punishm ent is probably drawn from Dostoevsky's anguish over his own lack of self control, except that Marmeladov's passion was liquor rather than gambling.3 O riginally intending to spend only the summer in Europe, Dostoevsky took steps not to lose his St. Petersburg apartment. Later he was to claim that he left Russia "with death in his soul,” but in point of fact he had evidently enjoyed his previous trips and was still unaware that actually living abroad without money would be a less pleasant experience than sim ply travelling. W hile in Western Europe, he had frequent occasion to meet with other Russian writers, among them Turgenev and Goncharov, both of whom loaned him money at the gambling tables, and Gertsen, who turned him down. Deeply devoted to Russian culture, Dostoevsky was dismayed to find only Russian liberals travelling in Europe. He saw them as slavishly aping everything European and arrogantly despising all things Russian. Turgenev, he claimed, actually agreed with the words of Potugin— a character in Turgenev's novel Sm oke— that if Russia were to disappear from the face of the earth, it would be no loss to humanity. Supposedly Turgenev told him that he considered him self a German, not a Russian, and was proud of it. For Dostoevsky, this was "crawling” on the part of a writer who had lost his talent while living abroad. The anti-establishm ent critic Vissarion Belinsky was for Dostoevsky a "foul insect” (smradnaya bukashka), not to mention other unprintable epithets. Other liberals fared no better in his correspondence. Dostoevsky was of two minds about Western Europeans, particularly the Germans and the Swiss, between whom he made few distinctions. W hile he was capable of admiring the Germans’ cheerful diligence, in his blacker moments they appeared to him as "base usurers, bastards, and cheaters” (that he wrote after having to pawn his watch), "bestial” in appearance, "stupid,” "self-satisfied,” "unbearable.” Even their theater was "boring.” They were, he wrote, "a dead people, without a future.” If anything, his perception of Switzerland was even less flattering. The Swiss, he wrote, were "foolish, stupid, worthless”; their "base republic” knew nothing but "political squabbling, pauperism, and mediocrity in everything”; and
■Lev Tolstoi was also no stranger to the gambling passion, but he w as so unlucky at the gaming tables in Baden-Baden in 1857 that he w as forced to shorten his stay and return home prematurely.
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they lived in filth and were on "a low stage of developm ent’ — a collection of drunkards, scoundrels, and thieves. In March 1868 he wrote to his friend and physician Stepan Yanovsky from Geneva: I ... w ill probably have to stay a few more m onths in boring, repulsive Geneva. Never in m y life have I seen anything more depressing, more gloomy, more absurd than this morose Protestant city. People d o n t live here, they serve a sentence a t hard labor. The republic (or, a t least, the city) has 50,000 inhabitants, and a ll o f them are divided into political factions. In the newspapers and magazines each tries to bite and chew upon his enemy. Besides that, things are very expensive. B ut you would probably give away everything you possess sim ply not to find yourself here on Sunday. The church bells ring sullenly in the m orning and by afternoon the drunkenness sets in. How depressing the local craftsmen are — glum, filthy, ignorantl A nd there are a lo t o f them. I swear to you that they earn a good salary; they could set p a rt o f it aside, even a lot. B ut a ll these people g e t drunk like swine and drink up their entire wage. A ll night I hear their horrible songs, wails, and shouting under m y windows. It's a real hell. But things were not much rosier elsewhere. Paris was expensive and dusty. From Florence (I) he wrote that living there was worse than his Siberian exile, for at least in Siberia "there were Russians and the homeland, without which I cannot live.” Again and again Dostoevsky's correspondence refers to his fear of debtor's prison; he even weighs in his mind whether imprisonment would not provide him with literary material, and whether his health could withstand the shock. W ithout Russia, he writes over and over, he is depressed, feels isolated, and cannot write. But it is in Western Europe that he conceives the plot of Crime and Punishm ent (after losing at the casino in W iesbaden), and also The Brothers Karamazov — a work which he believes will make all his previous writings seem worthless, but which can be written only in Russia. And it is in Western Europe that he writes The Idiot (1868) and most of The Possessed (1872). Dostoevsky was not the only Russian to live abroad for fear of debtor's prison. Nikita Vsevolozhsky (1799-1862), who founded the first Green Lamp Society in 1819, had done the same, but ended up in a foreign debtor's prison anyway. Another was Nikolai Sazonov (see below). Spanish culture had been a popular exotic topic for Russian writers in the late 1830s and early 1840s, but it was Vasily Botkin (1811-1869) who, after travelling to Spain in 1845, described that country in a vivid, realistic fashion in his Letters On Spain (Pis’ma ob Ispanii), published in the journal Sovrem ennik (The Contemporary). His
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descriptions of the graceful Spanish women and their hospitable, generous, and fiery men, the innate democracy of Spanish society (at least, as perceived by Botkin), the great variety of cultures co-existing in Spain of the day, bullfights, cockfights, and the charm of Andalusian music are all presented with a sense of history and understanding. Virtually the only aspect of Spanish life to find his disfavor was olive oil, the taste of which he carped about repeatedly. Botkin was a moderate liberal at the tim e he composed his sketches, but after the Polish rebellion of 1863, he became a political conservative. Since his views met with hostility from the radical generation of the 1860s, he was so com pletely forgotten that Pavel Annenkov even had to remind readers who Botkin was when writing his obituary.
Diplomats M ay the pens o f the diplom ats no t m in again what the people have attained with such exertions. Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher A fte r the Battle o f Waterloo (1815) Official government agents abroad form a group midway between "travellers” and "expatriates,” and Russian literature has been immeasurably enriched by their contributions. In filing reports (stateinye spiski) of their experiences and observations, Russian diplom ats were haughty and contemptuous of what they saw, and as individuals did not generally create a favorable impression. And their com patriots back in Moscow (the "Third Rome”) were little inclined to travel or even to send their own children abroad for fear of contamination and desertion to the sinful W est. After the fall of Constantinople, the Russian Church in its new role as the protector of Christendom began to assert itself in the Holy Land, among other things by making a donation to restore the Holy Sepulchre. Encouraged by this generosity, Patriarch Joachim of Alexandria and Archbishop Makarios of Sinai sent a mission to Ivan the Terrible which reached Moscow in January 1558. The emissaries told of a miracle experienced by Patriarch Joachim: to prove his faith the Patriarch had to drink a goblet of poison; he did so with no effect to his person except that his teeth and hair fell out. When, however, he filled the goblet with pure water and gave it to the Jews to drink, the sinful Hebrews disintegrated into small fragments. Hoping that they had properly impressed the Tsar with this story, the emissaries then w ent on to request that he make a donation to renovate the Sinai Monastery.
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Ivan responded by sending his own mission to the Holy Land; among the mission members was the Moscow merchant Vasily Poznyakov. The mission lasted from 1558 to 1561, and Poznyakov's report was not preserved. Nevertheless a stateinyi spisok has survived that was in all probability based on Poznyakov's narrative. The delegation was received by Joachim, who intimated to them that he hoped the Russians would liberate the Holy Land from the Turks, referring to a Greek prophecy that Constantinople would be conquered by "an Orthodox Eastern king.” He also told them that St. Nicholas had appeared to the Turkish Sultan in a dream and threatened him with death if he carried out his intention to convert the St. Nicholas Church in Cairo into a bathhouse. Much of the rest of the document is a traditional pilgrim age description, but with mention of Arabs lurking in ambush for the unwary Russian travellers. The Poznyakov-based text was later reworked and passed off as having been written by Deacon Trifon Korobeinikov after his first trip in 1582. This so-called "pseudo-Korobeinikov” text was to become very popular and is found in many manuscripts. During the 18th and 19th centuries it was published over and over. Korobeinikov was a real person who actually was sent by Ivan the Terrible in 1582 to hand out charitable contributions in the Holy Land on the occasion of the birth of Ivan's daughter. Not surprisingly, Joachim himself benefitted handsomely from the Tsar's generosity, which took the form of Hungarian guldens and furs. Mindful that the Tsar was a harsh taskmaster, Korobeinikov was careful to document rigorously the money and pelts that he handed out. Peter the Great's famous journey to the W est in 1697-98, encompassing the Baltic states (which were not yet a part of the Russian Empire), Germany, Holland, and England and was chiefly designed to absorb Western technology. It was a pivotal event for later Russian visits to the West. Fearing a coup d'état in his absence, Pêtr ordered persons of power in the government to make sure that they, too, were out of the country on foreign trips during his absence. One such traveller was that same Pêtr Tolstoi (1645-1729), mentioned above. A courtier with the rank of stol'nik, he understood that great changes were at hand. On the instructions of the Tsar, he visited Poland, Florence, Venice, Milan, Naples, the Vatican, Dubrovnik, Sicily, and Malta. Tolstoi’s notes, devoted largely to Italy, were probably intended to serve as a travel guide for the Tsar. Tolstoi learned Italian and was able to get along without an interpreter. The travel genre was well established by that time, and Tolstoi was personally acquainted with such pilgrim writers as Luk'yanov, Ignat'ev, Vishensky, and Lenitsky. Tolstoi's diary was intended as an objective description of his observations and demonstrates an initially grudging but ever increasing
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admiration for the West. The following passage, describing a scene in Venice, gives an impression of the colorful manner of the work: During the fair the squares contain m any wooden booths set up for trade; they had all m anner o f wonderful and rich goods. A t that time o f year honest people, their wives, and girls in splendid costumes stroll past the booths. A ll sorts o f travellers in fine clothing also wander about, purchasing whatever they need either a t the fa ir o r a t the carnival. On the seaward side o f the same square there are sheds and even great buildings where people dance on ropes — men and wom en! Girls too! It's amazing. I saw one woman so pregnant she was on the verge o f giving birth, and even she did an astonishing dance. In other buildings they p u t on plays with dolls that are ju s t like live people. A nd in still other buildings you see incredible things. I saw a man with two heads, one in its proper place. His name was Jacob. The other head, which was on the side and was called Matthew, had long hair, eyes, a nose, mouth, and teeth. It couldn't talk o r eat, but would ju s t look around from time to time, and they say it could even hiss. B ut he uses his real head to talk, eat, and drink. B ut if anyone truly wants to know about him, he has to see his person, o f which we have not a few in Russia, and take the trouble to visit Italy. There I saw a bull with five legs, a huge turtle, a twoheaded sheep that had six legs and two tails, and m any naturally occurring wonderful things. A nd whoever wants to see a ll that has to pay m oney — four soldi p e r person in Venetian money, which is three M oscow d en 'g a (V A kopeks). From 1702 to 1714 Tolstoi was the first perm anent Russian ambassador to the Ottoman empire. When Pêtr's son Aleksei fled abroad, supposedly in hopes of staging a coup against his father with the aid of foreign troops, it was Tolstoi whom the Tsar charged with returning him and, later, with carrying out the imperial order to torture the young man, who died before he could be executed. After Pêtr's death Tolstoi feared that Aleksei's son would assume the throne and take vengeance on the man whose name was ninth among those who signed Aleksei's death warrant. Together with Aleksandr Men'shikov, a collaborator in the Tsar's reforms, Tolstoi used the palace guards to put Pêtr's widow on the throne. In the subsequent struggle for power, Tolstoi lost out to Men'shikov and was imprisoned in the Solovki Monastery together with his son, where both died. Not surprisingly, Men'shikov himself fell victim to the same complex palace intrigues and was exiled to Siberia. He died the same year as Tolstoi. Even after Tolstoi’s death, however, the genes of this early Russian w riter
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lived on in his relatives, who include Pètr Chaadaev, Konstantin Leont'ev, Vladim ir Odoevsky, Aleksandr Pushkin, Aleksei Konstantinovich Tolstoi, Lev Tolstoi, Fëdor Tyutchev, and Dmitry Venevitinov, among others. The naval officer and diplom at Ivan Neplyuev (1693-1773) was sent to Venice to study sailing and navigation, where he took part in the 1717-18 naval campaigns against Turkey. The years 1721 -35 were spent in Constantinople as the Russian Resident. Suspected of com plicity in a coup, Neplyuev was sent into a sort of internal exile as adm inistrator of the huge Orenburg Territory, east of the Volga, from 1742 to 1758. His eyesight eventually failed, and he retired to write his memoirs. In 1731 the Empress Anna Ivanovna appointed the poet Antiokh Kantemir (1708-1744) ambassador to England. One of the founders of Russian Classicism and satirical poetry, Kantemir used his tim e to write satires influenced by Boileau, and to a lesser degree by Pope and Locke. He became such an Anglophile that, upon his death in France, a French diplom at wrote an epitaph claiming that he was "more English than those born in London." Aleksandr Griboedov (1790-1829) lived the merry life of a young aristocrat, enjoying ballerinas, cards, and liquor until 1817, when he participated as a second in a duel between Count A. P. Zavadovsky and a cavalry officer, V. V. Sheremet'ev, over the ballet dancer Avdot'ya Istomina. Istomina had been living with Sheremet'ev, but had left him following a quarrel. When Griboedov brought her to Zavadovsky's apartm ent after a performance, Sheremet'ev challenged Zavadovsky, while Sheremet'ev's friend, A. I. Yakubovich, challenged Griboedov. Sherem et'ev died from the wound he received, and the Griboedov-Yakubovich duel was postponed when Yakubovich was exiled to army service in the Caucasus. At the tim e Petersburg society was a small club where everyone knew everyone, and Griboedov was blamed for the tragic consequences. Supposedly at the insistence of his mother, Griboedov left for Tiflis (Tbilisi), and the second duel actually took place on October 23 ,18 18 . Yakubovich shot Griboedov in the hand and the affair of honor was considered over. In what may well have been a sort of exile ordered by the Tsar, Griboedov alm ost im m ediately accepted the position of secretary of the diplom atic mission in Persia (he was given the option of going to America). The fruits of his travels were his Travel Notes and the plan for Woe from Wit, a comedy satirizing society and written according to the "rules" of French classicism. Griboedov returned home in 1822 and in 1825 was fortunate to be sent to the Caucasus and thus to be absent during the doomed Decembrist coup. In 1828 Griboedov returned to Teheran as m inister plenipotentiary with his wife, a Georgian princess 17 years his
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junior. But here Griboedov's luck failed him. Somehow the embassy detained two women from the harem of the Shah's son-in-law, and one of the Shah's eunuchs, who had secretly converted to Christianity, asked the Russians for asylum. Relations between Russia and Persia had been strained, and a religious riot broke out, possibly instigated by British diplomats. With the exception of the prose w riter Ivan M al'tsov (1807-1880), who had been living in a separate apartment, the entire Russian mission in Teheran was wiped out, and Griboedov's mangled body could be recognized only by the hand injured in the duel with Yakubovich. His pregnant wife, whom he had left behind in Tabriz, gave birth prematurely, and the baby died. On a narrow mountain pass Pushkin described how he met a cart carrying Griboedov's body to Tbilisi to be buried there rather than in Persia, a country which he had come to despise. A Russian poet who spent some 22 years abroad was Fêdor Tyutchev (1803-1873). A member of the Russian diplom atic mission from 1822 to 1837 in Munich, Tyutchev was transferred to Turin after a scandalous affair with a married woman. After being fired in 1837 from the diplom atic service for leaving his post without permission (again because of a woman), he stayed on in Europe until 1844, but ran out of money. These years spent in Russian embassy circles, following a privileged, idyllic childhood, together with a professed religious mysticism strongly expressed in his verse, form ed political views quite different from those of his contemporaries back home who attem pted the Decembrist uprising of 1825. Having received the personal approval of police chief Aleksandr Benkendorf and Nikolai I for his Slavophile (actually, pro-Russian imperialist) articles, this pillar of the political establishment was reinstated in governm ent service and appointed censor in 1848. In 1858, under Aleksandr II, he was appointed Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Censorship — a post he retained until his death. Tyutchev explicitly rejected the glorification of the W est so popular among his contemporaries. In one unpublished poem he wrote: The more liberal, the more tawdry! Civilization is their fetish, B ut its very idea is beyond them. No m atter how you bow and scrape Before Europe, gentlemen, You'll find no recognition from her. In her eyes you remain not the servants o f enlightenment, B ut its lackeys. Tyutchev, who was acquainted with so many of the luminaries of contem porary Western civilization, was twice married to Bavarian
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noblewomen and wrote polished essays in French. He used Russian to recreate German nocturnal poetry, invoking an image of the chaotic reality of night which is masked over by the false serenity of day. He was later championed by the Symbolists, who used a line from one of his verse as a poetic slogan: "A thought expressed is a lie.” A refined pillar of monarchy and Orthodoxy, Konstantin Leont'ev (1831-1891) began his literary career by writing plays that were rejected by the censor but ultimately himself worked as a censor from 1880 to 1887.a Leont'ev had abandoned his career as a surgeon in 1860 to take up writing for journals and newspapers. In 1864 he went to work for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was sent abroad to serve in Crete and the Balkans, then part of the Turkish empire. For nearly ten years he pursued that career in Greek and Slavic provinces of the Turkish empire, then worked as a foreign correspondent for Mikhail Katkov's Russkii Vestnik (The Russian Herald), taking out a year to spend on Mount Athos during a severe personal crisis. The literary fruits of his years abroad were a three-volume cycle of fiction entitled From the Life o f Christians in Turkey. Leont'ev was also active as a literary critic, anticipating some of the later writings of the Russian Formalists, and opposing the utilitarianism of contemporary critics. In his role of philosopher, he preached a cyclical theory of history that foreshadowed the views of Oswald Spengler, and predicted that the "idle games” (balovstvo) being engaged in by chemists and physicists would destroy the world and that any revolution would rapidly be transform ed into organized torture. Leont'ev was hostile to liberalism, democracy, and bourgeois-egalitarian progress, and saw Byzantinism as the only hope for Russia to ward off the coming Untergang of civilization. Leont'ev is also particularly known for his paradoxical style of thought. In 1891 he took monastic vows. Not all Russian diplomats abroad were enthusiastic supporters of the regime. Prince Pêtr Kozlovsky (1783-1840), who made his debut as a poet but later switched to such topics as steam machines and the
•Tyutchev and Leont'ev w ere not the only expatriate writers to serve as tsarist censors. Another form er ém igré poet to perform that function was Ivan Born (17781851). The poet and critic Prince Pêtr Vyazem sky (1792-1878), who lived almost exclusively abroad for the last fifteen years of his life, even headed up the office of the censor from 1856 to 1858. After returning from his interrupted round-theworld voyage with Admiral Putyatin, the novelist Ivan Goncharov (1812-1891) also worked in this profession. And there w as also Petr Kapnist (1830-1898), a poet and playwright who spent the last three decades of his life in W estern Europe.
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theory of probability, allowed himself to be openly contem ptuous of Russia, at least as quoted by the Marquis de Custine3: The auspicious influence o f the crusaders stopped in Poland, as did Catholicism..... Peter the G reat ... destroyed the patriarchy so as to unite on his head the m onk's hood and the crown.....The Papal m edieval chimera has been realized today in an empire o f 60 m illion persons, the m ajority o f whom are im perturbable Asians not a t a ll troubled by the fact that their Tsar is the G reat Lama. Strangely enough, Nikolai I permitted this convert to Catholicism to spend 36 of the last 37 years abroad as a diplom at. Kozlovsky also maintained a friendship with Fèdor Tyutchev — a circumstance which makes one question the sincerity of Tyutchev's pro-regime views. Kozlovsky was also friendly with Heine, to whom he confessed that he was less than enthusiastic about ever returning to Russia. Regrettably, only fragments of Kozlovsky's memoirs tia v e been preserved.
Expatriates Twas for the good o f m y country that I should be abroad — Anything fo r the good o f one's country — I'm a Roman for that. George Farquhar, 1706 The female woman is one o f the greatest institooshuns o f which this land can boste. Charles Farrar Browne (Artemus Ward) 1834-1867 Prior to the Soviet period many Russian writers travelled freely back and forth, publishing their artistic works in Russia, and any alienation from the Russian tradition experienced by 18th- and 19thcentury Russian expatriate writers was certainly of a far lesser magnitude than that experienced by the three "waves” of Soviet exiles. Now that the Soviet empire and "exile” itself no longer exist, Russia's
“Not only did the Russian censors ban Custine's four-volume description of his 1839 trip through Russia, which described the country as an Asiatic, barbaric, and profoundly vicious society, they made it illegal even to discuss the work. Gertsen, on the other hand, declared that it was the best description of Russia ever penned by a foreigner!
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expatriates find themselves in much the same situation as Turgenev or Gogol' in the 19th century. Curiously, however, the word '’expatriate” is only now being introduced into the Russian language. The number of Russian expatriates was greatly increased by the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Estate owners abruptly lost their slaves, but then discovered themselves burdened with radically fewer oversight obligations. Compensated for the loss of their human property with government-issue five-percent bonds and totally fascinated by French culture (a feeling that appears to have been decidedly less than mutual on the part of the French), as many as 20,000 Russians converted the bonds to cash at ruinous discounts and set off for Paris, creating a lively Russian colony in that city, where they frequented cafés, restaurants, theaters, and balls. The women spent no small amounts of cash on Parisian fashions, while the men favored gam bling and French ladies. So many Russians arrived in Paris that the Russian embassy refused to have virtually anything to do with them. After a tim e their money would run out and these Slavic francophiles discovered they had no credit and could not afford even a ticket home; out of desperation or greed, Russian confidence artists became a veritable scourge of émigré society. This expatriate group was described as totally idle and vacuous in a book which appeared in St. Petersburg in 1881 entitled Russkaya tlya za granitsei, which can be translated as either "The Russian ‘Rot’ or 'Plant Louse’ Abroad.” But it was not only France that drew Russians. Born in Turin, Zinaida Volkonskaya (1789-1862) spent most of her life outside Russia. A member of high society, she wrote romantic tales and verse, and also composed musical plays in which she herself sang. Her romantic, sem i-autobiographical tale "Laura” is written in French, but she also wrote in Italian and Russian, although as an adult she had to work on her Russian, in which she was not entirely at home. Rumored to be Aleksandr I's mistress (with the silent consent of an indifferent husband intent on forging a diplom atic career as a close aide to the Tsar), she would undoubtedly have spent even less tim e in Russia than she eventually did, were it not for Aleksandr's letters to her virtually demanding that she return. Volkonskaya converted to Catholicism and established a literary salon in Rome. It was at her villa that Gogol' wrote much of his Dead Souls, and it was in Rome that she died, reputedly having caught pneumonia after giving her fur coat to a shivering fem ale beggar. One woman writer whose literary career definitely suffered as a result of emigration was the translator, poet, and novelist Karolina Pavlova (maiden name: Jänisch, 1807-1893). When she was only 20, she met the fam ous Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz in Volkonskaya's salon. Mickiewicz was asked to tutor Pavlova in Polish, and the
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lessons led to what was evidently a rather tepid proposal of marriage. Pavlova's rich uncle, however, who eventually left her his fortune, was opposed to the union, and the indifferent Mickiewicz departed from Russia, leaving his would-be fiancée behind. Pavlova first left Russia (but not the Russian Empire) in 1853, when her father died of cholera in St. Petersburg. She was so terrified that she left for Dorpat (Derpt) in Livonia without waiting for the burial. There, at the age of 46, she fell in love with a 21-year-old student and future writer, Nikolai Pavlov, and followed him when he returned to Russia. After her uncle's death, she married Pavlov, who later confessed he had agreed to the union only because of her money, which he then proceeded to squander on gambling. Once the doomed relationship fell apart, she left Russia in 1856 to live nearly another 40 years in Dresden, bereft of her inherited fortune. In Dresden she met the poet and playwright Aleksei Konstantinovich Tolstoi, who secured a pension for her from the Russian government. Pavlova's literary production abroad ïs relatively modest. Her only novel, A Double Life (Dvoinaya zhizn'), written while still in Russia, tells of a woman locked into a meaningless life and marriage. She also composed verse in German and French with mixed results. With the advent of fem inist studies her person has begun to attract the attention of several scholars.3
•Russian literature in Russia and even more so Russian literature abroad represent a largely m ale tradition. The overwhelming number of writers in the glossary to this volume are men. One thinks of Lev Tolstoi's w ife raising a large fam ily, managing a huge estate, and copying out W ar and P eace over and over again. There was precious little opportunity for writing in such a schedule. Moreover, Russia's talented wom en have displayed an incredible willingness to sacrifice for the sake of their husbands. W hen the Decembrists w ere packed off to Siberia, their wives followed them . For better or worse, many Russian wom en have seen them selves more as their husband's mates and helpers rather than as creative individuals in their own right. V era Bunina wrote in a letter to the ém igré critic Aleksandr Bakhrakh: ...it is now almost thirty-three years since I rejected the life I would have liked to lead and linked my life with that of Ivan Alekseevich [Bunin], who is a very original person. For twelve years [underlined by Bunina] I lived together with him in great spiritual nearness, attempting to fuse our desires and aspirations into one, but when I understood that this w as impossible I began to search out other paths. W hy is this impossible? If you have read Lika, you will find an answer there. O f course, I am not Lika, and he is not totally Arsen'ev, but if a wom an does not live through the ambition and other pleasant creative sides of the creative person, but wants a response to her own inner life, longs for attention to her own personality, she will not receive it from the creative person. For such a person is greedy, he never gets enough, he likes only to take from others, and gives of himself only in his art, and not in life.
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Vasily Zhukovsky (1783-1852), who began his writing career with a free rendering of Thomas Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” was one of Russia's most distinguished translators. He did a number of im itations of the ballads of German poets, including Goethe and Schiller, and translated Byron's "The Prisoner of Chillon.” His m ajor effort, however, was his translation of The Odyssey, done in Germany, where he spent the last 13 years of his life. There he had earlier met with Goethe on more or less equal terms and was a friend and patron of the romantic painter C. D. Friedrich. Actually his German connection went back to earlier roots, in Dorpat, where the university was German. In Russia he was even criticized for being "too German.” W hile he played a major role in introducing Russia to Western literature and was, of course, a m ajor poet in his own right, he himself once stated: "Everything I have ever written is either taken from others or based on their work.” In the long run, Zhukovsky's greatest influence was outside the area of poetry — in the liberal upbringing of future Tsar Aleksandr II, to whom he was tutor. Nikolai Gogol' (1809-1852) was also an expatriate, but one who not only was not disgruntled with the tsarist regime, but even supported it enthusiastically. Gogol' left for Europe in 1836 and made only three trips home before finally returning in 1848. His immediate stim ulus for leaving Russia was the negative reception of his play The Inspector General. This comic play, which depicts a small town with a corrupt adm inistration, was pronounced a "stupid farce” by Prince Chernyshëv, the Minister of W ar; Count Fëdor Tolstoi declared the author to be an "enemy of Russia”; and the novelist Ivan Lazhechnikov (1790-1869) told Belinsky he would not give a kopeck to have written it. Equally unpleasant to the young author was the ecstatic praise heaped upon him by those attacking the government. GogoC’s response was to burn his bridges behind him: I am going abroad to slough o ff the anguish heaped upon me daily by m y contemporaries. A contem porary writer, a com ic writer, a w riter who wishes to describe the mores o f his society, m ust live as far as possible from his native land. From Hamburg he wrote to Zhukovsky: Providence, which has sent me everything from above for m y education, has rem oved me from m y fatherland. This is a great breaking point, an epochal event in m y life. I know that I will encounter much that is unpleasant, that I will suffer poverty and need, but nothing in the world can make me return soon. I shall rem ain on alien s o il— as long as possible. A nd although m y name, m y efforts will belong to Russia, I and m y m ortal flesh w ill rem ain rem oved from her.
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It was a promise he was to keep. Gogol' remained largely indifferent to the literary life of Western Europe and was often contem ptuous of W estern civilization. Still, he felt he could w rite best about Russia from a distance. W ithin a month he wrote another letter to Zhukovsky: God has taken me under his wing and worked a m iracle in giving me a warm, sunny apartm ent; I am in bliss. Dead Souls is m oving along much better than in Vevey, and I am overwhelm ed by the feeling o f still being in Russia. I see before me our landowners, our officials, our officers, ou r peasants, our huts — in a word, the whole o f Orthodox Russia. I c a n t help but laugh when I think I am writing Dead Souls in Paris. It was not long, however, before he became more than a little jaundiced about Paris. As for Germany, it was "nothing more than the foul-sm elling belch of the most revolting tobacco and the most disgusting beer." Italy, however, struck him quite differently. The longer he lived there, the more enchanted he became with the country and the more disenchanted with Russia; in a letter to the historian and journalist Nikolai Pogodin he wrote that there was "no life in Russia for gentle people. Only pigs live there.” Paradoxically, however, the same Gogol' who so often reviled Russia and was loath even to visit the country wrote entirely about that country, showing little evidence that his stay abroad essentially influenced his writing. When in September 1839 his mother and sisters found themselves in serious financial straits, Gogol' was depressed over being compelled to return home for even a few months to make arrangements for their future. He wrote to literary historian and poet Stepan Shevyrêv: Can it really be that I am going to Russia? I find it hard to believe. I fear fo r m y health. I've become unaccustom ed to the cold; w ill I be able to endure it? ... B ut much as I dislike it, I have to go. GogoC’s attitude did not change after spending a few months in Russia; he wrote once more to Pogodin: Oh, fo r the sake o f God and everything that is sacred, g e t me out o f here to Rome, that m y soul m ay be able to relax. I shall perish here. The popularity among liberals and radicals of Gogol' the expatriate immediately collapsed when his Selected Passages from a Correspondence with Friends appeared. In these letters, which he later
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regretted having published, he proposed a spiritual transformation of Russia through strict observance of morality, religion, and obedience to the State. Belinsky's famous rejoinder to Gogol' is actually an expatriate document, having been composed in Salzbrunn and sent to Gogol' in Frankfurt: Preacher o f the knut, apostle o f ignorance, champion o f obscurantism, a panegyrist o f barbarism, what are you doing? Look a t your feet. You are standing a t the edge o f an abyss. How could you, the author o f The Inspector General and Dead Souls, begin singing hymns to the glory o f the disgusting Russian clergy, setting it even higher than the Catholic priesthood? I rem em ber even now how you present the idea that education is not necessary for the people, is actually harm ful to it, as some great and unarguable truth. M ay your Byzantine God forgive you that Byzantine thoughtl ... The public looks to Russian authors as its sole guides, defenders, saviors from Russian Autocracy and Orthodoxy. That is why it is always ready to forgive an author for writing a bad book; but it w ill never forgive him for writing a pernicious one. If you love Russia, you ought to jo in me in rejoicing a t the failure o f your book.... It is not the truth o f Christian doctrine that can be found in your book, but rather a m orbid fear o f death, the devil, and hell.... One enthusiastic adm irer and close personal friend of Belinsky's was Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883), who adopted Belinsky's letter as his "religion.” Born into a wealthy land-owning family, Turgenev was accustomed to travel in Western Europe from early childhood. His life almost ended at the age of four in Berne, when he nearly fell into the fam ous bear pit but was saved by his father, who caught hold of him just in the nick of time. W hile still a student at Moscow University, he was nicknamed "the American" for his democratic, W estern sympathies and especially his enthusiasm for the United States of America. His other main student enthusiasm was for an idealism modelled on that of Schelling. Turgenev's political views were formed in large part as a reaction against the cruel manner in which his mother treated her serfs. On one occasion, for example, she had a gardener flogged for failing to prevent the plucking of a tulip. Turgenev wrote in the introduction to his reminiscences that not only was there nothing to keep him in Russia, but, on the contrary, almost everything he saw aroused in him a feeling of embarrassment, indignation, and disgust: I hated the very a ir I breathed, I could not live side by side with what I abom inated; I daresay I did not possess sufficient strength o f character for that. I had to p u t a certain distance
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between m yself and m y enem y so as to be able to attack him more effectively. In m y eyes this enem y had a clearly defined form and bore a fam iliar nam e: serfdom. In this nam e was concentrated everything I had made up m y m ind to fight — everything with which I swore never to become reconciled. That was m y Hannibal's oath; and I was not the only one to take it a t the time. I went to Western Europe so as to be able to carry it out. Turgenev was later to maintain that he never would have written Diary o f a Sportsman if he had remained in Russia, just as Gogol' said he never would have written Dead Souls if he had not left Russia. As soon as he learned of revolutionary disturbances in France in 1848, he immediately hurried from Brussels to Paris to observe the events. When his mother demanded that he return home, he refused and was cut off without funds for two years. Finally back in Russia in 1852, he was arrested for having circumvented censorship rules and, unofficially, for his friendship with the émigrés Gertsen and Bakunin. Ordered by Tsar Nikolai I to live on his estate, he was not perm itted to travel abroad again for four years. Turgenev purchased a house in Baden-Baden, and it was there that he wrote the novel Smoke (Dym) in 1867, having selected the title to symbolize the futility of human effort in Russia, which disappears w ithout a trace — like a puff of smoke. In it both Russian revolutionary students and conservatives were subjected to merciless satire. The novel was seen as so unpatriotic that the English Club in Petersburg even wanted to exclude Turgenev from membership. Turgenev maintained friendships with many of the luminaries of the W estern world, including Flaubert, George Sand, Zola, and Henry James, but his impression of the French literary scene was a gloom y one. He described French literary life as petty, prosaic, hollow, void of talent, impotent, lacking any conviction, artistic or otherwise, and in a state of moral decay. But even though he disliked Paris, he lived for long periods in the city. And while he romanticized his estate of Spasskoe, he ultim ately chose to lodge in a few small rooms in the house of his friends, Pauline Viardot and her husband, rather than in his ancestral home. On June 17, 1870, he wrote that "it is alm ost impossible to write Russian stories while living abroad — die Fühlung (the feeling) is lost.” But in January 1873 he wrote that he did not live in Russia because it was "the fatal thing (in the sense of fatum and not of fatality).” Another close friend of the Viardots was Elena Apreleva, who wrote under the pen name "Ardov.” She studied in Geneva in the early 1870s and later wrote one of her first stories while a guest in the Viardot home. A sort of George Sand of Russian literature, she wrote
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about passion and tragic love. Turgenev assisted her in getting one of her novels published — G uilty W ithout G uilt (Bez viny vinovatye). She died in Belgrade in 1923. In 1833 the 26-year-old idealist Vladim ir Pecherin (1807-1885) was sent to Europe to continue his education, chiefly at German universities, as a future professor of classical philology. W hat he saw in the W est only strengthened his form er rejection of his homeland, which he believed could be reborn only by first being destroyed. Mixed feelings of love and hate for Russia are nothing new, and for Pecherin this was a destruction which he found "sweet” to observe. In 1835 he went back to Russia, only to leave within a year, never to return. He had wanted to live in Paris, which he saw as the "new Jerusalem,” but the French authorities granted him only a transit visa. In Belgium Pecherin converted to Catholicism and in 1840 became a monk in the Redem ptorist Order, which is dedicated to serving the poorest of the poor. As a young man he had written verse, but later he was to tell Aleksandr Gertsen that he viewed his own poems the way a recovered patient would look upon his form er illness. Stationed in Rome in 1858, he was repelled by the luxury of the Vatican, and in 1861 left the monastery (although he remained a Catholic priest), feeling that he had wasted the best 20 years of his life. Pecherin considered returning to Russia after Aleksandr II assumed the throne in 1855, and the possibility of his return was even debated in the Russian press by the journalist Mikhail Katkov and the historian Mikhail Pogodin. Katkov, who later was to become a political conservative, favored Pecherin's coming home, while the nationalist Pogodin feared his proselytizing skills. Hoping to influence events in Russia, Pecherin wrote an autobiography: Notes from Beyond the Grave (Zamogil'nye zapiski). Russian censors refused to perm it its publication and it finally appeared only in 1932 in Moscow. The last 23 years of his life were spent as a Catholic priest in a Dublin hospital. Just before his death Pecherin wrote that he believed God's invisible hand had guided him throughout his life and asked that the words of Pope Gregory VII (Hildebrand) be inscribed on his tom bstone: "Dilexi justitiam et odivi iniquitatem et propter ea morior in exilio” (I have loved justice and abominated lawlessness, and thus I die in exile). Despite his request, Pecherin's tombstone is inscribed only with his name. Among the 35,000 persons discussed in the Soviet literary encyclopedia he is not mentioned. Another expatriate to become a Catholic priest was the diarist and theologian Ivan Gagarin (1814-1882), who had lived three years abroad with his fam ily as a child and spent most of 1833-1842 as a Russian diplom at. Having resigned from the Diplomatic Corps, he expatriated in 1843 and entered the Society of Jesus as a novice.
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Gagarin had gone through several ideological metamorphoses as a young man. Although he belonged to a wealthy fam ily that may have owned thousands of serfs, he was vehem ently opposed to that institution. For a tim e he espoused views strikingly sim ilar to those of Chaadaev and sympathized with revolutionary thinking, but he became frightened by the prospect of violence in Russia and concluded that the Eastern Church should be reunited with Rome under the leadership of the Pope so as to guarantee the Russian Church's independence and make revolution impossible. One of his books, all of which remained largely unnoticed in Russia, was entitled: La Russie sera-t-elle catholique? The tsarist governm ent took a decidedly dim view of his activities and in 1853 he was tried and convicted in absentia for having converted to Catholicism and for being abroad without permission. After his m other's death he applied for permission to visit his father, but the old man evidently presented his own counter-petition, asking that the son's request be denied. Gagarin was a good friend of Tyutchev, and he was the source of a selection of the latter's verse published in Sovrem ennik (The Contemporary). Russian criticism was well represented in W estern Europe. Pavel Annenkov (1812 or 1813-1887) lived abroad during much of the 1830s and 1840s, and settled there permanently in the mid-1860s. An early adm irer of GogoC's, he actually rented a room next to GogoC's in Rome in 1841 and served as his scribe for the first volum e of Dead Souls. Subsequently, he described his impressions in Letters from Abroad and Travel Notes. Still later, in his Parisian Letters, he was to recreate the atmosphere of French literary life as represented by Dumas, Sand, and Balzac. A close friend of Belinsky and a proW esternizer, Annenkov was nevertheless more sym pathetic to the artfor-art's sake position than to the Belinsky-ChernyshevskyDobrolyubov-Pisarev ''utilitarian” group. But he was at Belinsky's side when the latter wrote his fam ous denunciatory letter to Gogol'. Annenkov devoted his later years to literary and political memoirs of Belinsky, Stankevich, Bakunin, Gogol', and Turgenev, among others. He died in Dresden. One of the most productive, although later largely forgotten, Russian 19th-century expatriate authors was Pêtr Boborykin (18361921). Boborykin travelled in W estern Europe from 1865 to 1871 and after 1914 again lived chiefly abroad. He is the author of nearly two dozen novels and an enormous quantity of short stories, plays, memoirs, and literary criticism. Proficient in a number of languages, he was also active as a translator and scholar. Boborykin wrote chiefly about contem porary life, following the practice of his French model, Émile Zola (although he disagreed with Zola's biological determ inism ). This once well-known writer, who introduced the word "intelligentsia”
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in Russian, died in Lugano, Switzerland, and was not republished in Russia until the mid-1960s. His wife S ofya (1845-1925) abandoned her stage career for him and herself became a writer of prose and plays. Elena Blavatskaya (1831 -1891 ) was certainly an independent and fascinating woman. A t the age of 16 she married a 42-year old man (who she later claimed was 70 at the time) and then left him to travel about Africa, North and South America, Egypt, India, and China. During stays at home she founded an ink factory and opened an artificial flower store. In 1872 she unsuccessfully proffered her services to the tsarist police (the so-called Third Section [Trete Otdelenie]) as a polyglot international agent. In 1873 she travelled to the United States, where she obtained American citizenship and founded a theosophical society with the goal of discovering the lost forces of nature and developing a universal religion. In 1879 she established a theosophical society in Bombay and until 1884 stayed in India, which she viewed as the cradle of civilization. In the meantime her form er colleagues accused her of practicing fraud in her seances. Blavatskaya wrote verse and published in English a collection of stories entitled The Nightm are Tales. B lavatskaya influenced the o ccu lt no velist V era Kryzhanovskaya (1857-1924), who had been fascinated with ancient history and mysticism ever since childhood and as an adult participated in seances as a medium. Kryzhanovskaya lived in W estern Europe in the 1880s and 1890s, supposedly writing only in French in a coma-like state and later translating her creations into Russian. Her readers were chiefly women interested in spiritism and magic. The background of her novels was usually that of an exotic antiquity, with an adventureoriented plot intended to catch the attention of the mass reader. Politically a conservative, Kryzhanovskaya wanted to save the world from an atheism created by Masons, liberals, and humanists. The Jews, she wrote, had corrupted the people and achieved power by accum ulating money. The destruction of world civilization would commence when the Chinese destroyed them, triggering the end of everything living on the planet, and a resurrection would be achieved only through the efforts of a group of immortal magicians. Such books were hardly consistent with the ideology of Bol'shevism, and Kryzhanovskaya emigrated to Estonia after the October coup. Penniless, she died in Tallinn after working in a tim ber mill for two years.
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Another woman w riter fascinated by the occult was Aleksandra Moiseeva, who took the pseudonym Miré» (1874-1913). As a young woman Moiseeva had joined a troupe of wandering actors travelling the Volga River circuit. In frequent contact with revolutionaries, she was arrested several tim es and then placed under police surveillance. Finally perm itted to leave Russia in 1897, she left for Europe but suffered from alcoholism and was afflicted by hallucinations. In Paris she continued to lead the bohemian life, posing for artists, and at one point was even sold by a lover. Colorful as her life was, she created quite the opposite impression on contemporaries — that of a reticent, even shy person. Her two major works, Life (Zhizn') and The Black Panther (Chërnaya pantera), were published after her return to Russia. Part of Life may have been written in Paris.b One of the most popular Russian writers of the early 20th century, Leonid Andreev (1871-1919) was a devotee of melancholy sensationalism. His intense, surrealistic presentation of sex, insanity, death, and the sinister lurking in everyday life — all couched in hyperbole and the grotesque — partly fit the mood of a country on the verge of calamitous events, partly expressed a general trend in W estern literature at the time, and partly reflected the personal life of an alcoholic author known to have attempted suicide on at least three occasions. Lev Tolstoi quipped about Andreev: "he tries to frighten you, but I'm not afraid.” In 1905 Andreev was arrested for perm itting the Central Committee of the Russian Social Democrat W orkers’ Party to meet in his apartment, but was released after two weeks. In 1906, fearing that he m ight be attacked by right-wing organizations, he left for Finland. Since that country was still part of the Russian Empire, he ended up having to flee to Berlin that same year. Subsequently he moved to Capri, where he joined Gor'ky, who tried with mixed success to wean him away from his experiments in symbolism and the surreal, and also to provide him some emotional support after the death of his wife. Resisting Gor'ky's personal and artistic influence, Andreev returned to Finland in 1907, and in 1908 built him self a large gloom y house in Finland where he could spend his nights writing, surrounded by copies of paintings by Goya that he had created himself. In 1909 he protested the governm ent's use of violent methods in its struggle with the revolutionaries by publishing his famous Story o f the Seven Who Were Hanged (Rasskaz o semi poveshennykh), based on the
«Evidently from the French; prendre sa m ire means to take aim. bThe occult topic, which w as suppressed in the Soviet Union, w as later to be resurrected abroad in the collection OkkulVzm iio g a (Belgrade, 1933) and by two Riga publishing houses, Mir and N. Gudkov.
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execution of conspirators plotting the assassination of the tsarist M inister of Justice Ivan Shcheglovitov. In the chaotic war years Andreev was forced to abandon his "castle of death,” as the newspapers referred to his home, and became more and more conservative in his views. In 1916, offered the enormous salary of 50,000 rubles a year, he became the literary editor of the very conservative newspaper Russkaya volya (Russian Freedom or Volya), to which his form er ally Gor'ky refused to contribute. Having become fam ous for his anti-war story Red Laughter; which was inspired by the Russo-Japanese war, he ultim ately supported the tsarist governm ent's efforts to prosecute W orld W ar I and during the Civil W ar was even offered the post of Propaganda Minister in the governm ent of the W hite General Yudenich. He refused the offer, but that same year published an "S.O .S.” to the Allies — America, Britain, and France — calling on them to save Russia from Bolshevism . His literary production during his brief post-1917 émigré period is not significant — an inevitability considering his declining health, material circumstances, and the political turm oil of the period. His 1905-07 expatriate period, however, was a prolific one. In 1947 Andreev's son Daniil, also a writer, was arrested in Moscow and imprisoned for ten years, but in 1956 the Soviet governm ent more or less forgave the elder Andreev his views, when his body was moved from Finland to Leningrad for reburial. Maksim Gor'ky (pseudonym of Aleksei Peshkov, 1868-1936) was a triple émigré, having experienced both tsarist internal and foreign exile, and then having spent ten years abroad during the Soviet period (albeit partly for health reasons). Before taking up writing, Gor'ky had a jack-of-all-trades background — something like that of Jack London. Also like London, he became a champion of socialism. His 1901 sentence to internal exile was the result of his having penned a proclam ation calling for the end of autocracy. Briefly imprisoned in the Fortress of Peter and Paul for participating in the revolution of 1905, he left the country illegally in 1906 and visited America, where he became the target of attacks in the press for his common-law marriage and was even evicted from his hotel room. His negative impressions of the trip are recorded in M y Interviews and In America. It was in the United States that he also wrote the novel Mother, a naive and sentim ental work which was eventually proclaimed a model of Socialist Realism. The novel initially appeared in English in 1906, and in Russian only the following year. In 1906 the Russian government sought a loan to recover from the w ar with Japan, but Gor'ky opposed the extension of credit. When the French banks nevertheless acceded to the request, he responded angrily:
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Fair France ... Your best children no longer know you ... a woman kept by bankers.... You, the M other o f Liberty, you, Joan o f Arc, have allowed beasts to try to crush men once again. O great France, once the guide o f civilization, do you realize the vileness o f your act? Your m oney-grubbing hand has tried to stop a whole country from taking the road to freedom and culture.... O m y beloved, I spit blood and g a ll into your eyes. Gor'ky settled on the island of Capri, where he remained until a general amnesty in late 1913 permitted him to return home. It was on Capri that he wrote The Last Ones (Poslednie), Sum m er (Leto), and The Life o f M atvei Kozhemyakin (Zhizn' Matveya Kozhemyakina). It was in the name of this self-educated, sincere émigré that Russian literature was throttled for over a half century. Maksimilian Voloshin (1877-1932), who had first travelled abroad in 1899, fell so much in love with Paris he returned to that city for most of the years 1901 to 1917. The beauty of Paris, he wrote, left a "light aftertaste of decay, as in well-prepared wild fow l.” Poet and artist, the young man roamed through Italy and Spain, soaking up impressions "like a sponge.” His fascination with Catholicism, Buddhism, Freemasonry, the occult, and Rudolph Steiner's Anthroposophism was to be reflected in his debut as a Sym bolist poet and in his later mystical, prophetic verse, intense, palpable, in which he spoke to "Holy Russia”: The enem y whispered: yield Your treasure to the rich, your pow er To slaves, your m ight to foes, your honor To serfs, give traitors your keys ... You burned your cities and fields; Your ancient home was devastated, You le ft as a beggar, humiliated, Slave to the lowest slave. Dare I stone you o r condemn Your urgent flam e? Shall I not press m y face in the m ud Before you and bless the print o f your Bare foot, you homeless, drunk, impure Russia, Christ's holy foolI Voloshin had received a small inheritance in 1903, which he used to build a house in the Crimea. For him it was an anchor to
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Russia, and he periodically returned there before 1917. After the Bol'shevik coup that year he returned to that home, and was never again to see his beloved Paris. Instead, he opened his home to a bohemian crowd of artists and writers. During the civil war the revolutionaries Bela Kun and Rozaliya Zalkind were guests in his home, and Kun, who had taken a liking to Voloshin, permitted him to cross out one name in ten in the lists of those marked for death. The gentle poet thus was forced to become a party to mass murder, "praying for the murdered and the murderers.” His own life was miraculously spared. Had he lived longer, there is little doubt that he would have perished in the purges, as did Kun himself in 1937.
The Politicals Exile Within the Empire Russia's speciality ... internal exile, which gives the worst o f both worlds: emigration ... plus repression Leszek Kotakowski Praise everywhere as freedom Exile from your native land. Mikhail Lermontov Both the tsarist and the Soviet governments made liberal use of "internal exile,” in which the offender was relocated beyond the bounds of Russia proper but remained within the empire, under some form of custody. In the 17th century, exile to the Mongolian border or to the W hite Sea was true exile in every sense. Such was the lot of Archpriest A w akum (1620 or 1621 -1682), who was a leader of the Old Believer movement opposing the liturgical reforms of Patriarch Nikon. Church Slavic translations of the Bible and liturgy were found to contain errors and Nikon wanted to bring the rituals of the Russian church into conform ity with those of the Greek Orthodox church. The Old Believers refused to give up traditions which had been observed for centuries, and in 1653 Aw akum wrote a letter to Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich protesting the Nikonian reforms. During this period, the association between Church and State was closer than ever before or since, and Nikon, like many a bureaucrat before and after him, did not hesitate to avail himself of the power he enjoyed through the State to have Aw akum exiled to Tobol'sk, in Siberia, and later still further — to the Mongolian frontier. Two of A w akum 's children died before he was brought back to Moscow in 1664. Unrepentant, Aw akum refused to support Nikon's
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reforms at the Church Council of 1666-67 and was defrocked and exiled to Pustozersk, not far from the Arctic Ocean. There he spent the last 15 years of his life, largely confined to the log hut in which he was eventually burned to death as a heretic. It was during this period that he produced the bulk of his writings: theological treatises, historical sketches, petitions to the Tsar, and his celebrated autobiography, describing his torm ents at the hands of Afanasy Pashkov, commander of the local army regiment: Pashkov drove me out into the m ountains to wander am ong the beasts, snakes, and birds. A nd I sent him a little message which began: "M anl Have a fear o f G od who sits am ong his cherubs and sees into the deepest abyss. A ll the powers o f heaven and a ll creatures, including man, trem ble before Him, but you alone deny Him and show your stubbornness. ” A nd so did I write this and m any other things to him. Then I saw about 50 men running tow ard'm e.... They brought me to him, and he was standing there with a sword and trem bling with rage. "Are you a priest o r have you been defrocked?” (Pop li ty Hi rospop?), he said. I answered: "I am Archpriest A w akum ; what do you want from m e?” He bellowed like a wild beast and struck me on one cheek, then on the other, and then on the head. He knocked me o ff m y feet and seized an axe with which he struck m y prone body three times. Then he had me stripped and given 72 blows o f the knut. But I said: "M y Lord Jesus Christ, Son o f God, help m e!” I kept saying this over and over, and he became angry that I did not say: "Spare m e!” I prayed with every blow, but in the middle o f the beating I cried: "Enoughl” A nd he gave the order to stop. A nd I said to him : "W hy do you beat m e? Do you know?” A nd again he had me beaten on the sides before stopping. I began to tremble and fell to the ground. He had me dragged and flung into a flat-bottom ed boat, where I was shackled hand and foot to a supporting brace. It was fall, and it rained heavily on me a ll night.... I wanted to call ou t to Pashkov: "Forgive m e!” but God's strength restrained me — it was m y lo t to endure. Previously, hagiographie works had been written exclusively in Old Church Slavonic, and Aw akum 's lively, vernacular style was a radical departure from the accepted Church canon for this genre. Ironically, Nikon himself was deposed in 1666 and likewise sent into internal exile. Aleksandr Radishchev (1749-1802) was one o fte n young men sent by the Russian governm ent to study law, literature, the natural
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sciences, medicine, and foreign languages at Leipzig University from 1767 to 1771, where his "democratic” convictions were only strengthened. In 1790 Radishchev, who by that tim e had become a civil servant, used his own printing press to publish an unflattering description of life in Russia entitled A Trip from Petersburg to Moscow (Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu) in an edition of 650 copies. When Radishchev's authorship was revealed, he was arrested and was personally interrogated by Catherine the Great, who had him condemned to death but then commuted the sentence to ten years’ exile in Siberia. When Catherine died in 1796, her son Pavel, reversing as many of his mother's decisions as he could, permitted Radishchev to return from exile in 1797; Radishchev was even permitted to move to Moscow in 1801 under Aleksandr I. The following year he committed suicide in an extremely painful fashion: in the presence of his sons he drank a glass of sulfuric acid intended for cleaning his uniform. Radishchev's works could not be published again in Russia until after the revolution of 1905. Q uite a different situation was enjoyed by Aleksandr Pushkin (1799-1837), whose upbringing was, in many ways, nearly as French as Russian — his tutors, his father's library, even his fencing teacher were all French. Supposedly he still could not write good Russian upon entering the lycée. Even as an adult he wrote to his countryman Chaadaev: "I will speak with you in the language of Europe, with which I feel most com fortable.” All his life he longed to go abroad, but was not permitted to do so, first by the liberal Tsar Aleksandr I in 1817, and then by Nikolai I. O f the 20 members of the St. Petersburg literary circle to which he belonged, he alone never travelled beyond the bounds of the empire. One of his chief offenses was his "Ode to Liberty,” in which he referred to the assassination of Aleksandr's father Pavel I and seemed to repeat the rum or that Aleksandr had been implicated in the act. Pushkin's case provides convincing testim ony that "internal exile” under the Tsars was not always a hardship. His banishment from Petersburg to the south in 1820 was more like a vacation, and even though Aleksandr I had originally intended to send him to Siberia, his many friends, including Glinka, Zhukovsky, and Karamzin, successfully interceded with the Emperor to get him permission to leave for the Caucasus and Moldavia. In the south he lived the life of the sophisticate visiting the provinces, enjoying official dinners with the local officials, travel, and women friends, one of whom described a m eeting with him:
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I rem em ber how during this journey no t fa r from Taganrog I was driving in a carriage with m y sister Sophia, ou r English governess, our Russian nurse, and ou r lady companion. A t the sight o f the sea, we told our driver to stop and our whole crowd le ft the carnage and ran tow ard the sea.... N ot suspecting that the poet was walking behind us, I began to amuse m yself by running after the waves and then running away from them as soon as they were about to reach m e; in the end m y feet g o t wet but, o f course, I did not te ll anyone about that when I returned to our carriage. Pushkin found this scene so beautiful that he described it in his charm ing verses, poeticising m y childish prank. I was only 15 a t the tim e:
How I envy the waves — running in stormy succession To lie down lovingly at her feet! How much I wished then with the waves To touch her dear feet with my lips. So lacking was this life in serious moments that in 1822 Pushkin actually fought a duel over whether the band at the city park would play a mazurka or a French quadrille. All this was a far cry from A w akum 's experience. Nevertheless the bored Pushkin could not resist comparing his lot with that of the Roman poet Ovid, who had also been banished to the Black Sea by his emperor. After Pushkin was killed in a duel, Mikhail Lermontov (18141841), only 23 years old and still unknown as a poet, captured the attention of the reading public with his poem on Pushkin's death. He was placed under house arrest and sentenced only five days later. Retaining his rank of cornet, he was transferred to the Nizhegorodsky Dragoon Regiment in the Caucasus, and later portrayed him self as the bored and jaded officer Pechorin in the novel Hero o f O ur Times. W hile not quite as relaxed as Pushkin's exile (he was, after all, an army officer on active duty), Lermontov's sojourn in the southern reaches of the empire was hardly an arduous one. He made stopovers in Stavropol', Pyatigorsk, Kislovodsk, and Tiflis, was soon perm itted to transfer to Novgorod, and even spent a month in Petersburg, where he frequented the theater. In 1838 he was transferred back to his original regiment. In 1841 he was sent back to the Caucasus. Along the way he wrote a poem which contained the line: "Farewell, unwashed Russia, land of slaves, land of lords.” Upon arriving in Pyatigorsk, Lermontov called a fellow officer, N. S. Martynov, a ferocious "highlander with a big dagger” (montagnard au grand poignard) in the presence of a lady. It was common at the tim e for Russian officers to
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dress up as Circassian warriors, and Martynov, who considered himself offended by Lermontov's jibe, challenged him to a duel. Lermontov was shot through the heart, whereupon he collapsed and died on the spot, w ithout even clutching at the place where he was hit. Like the death of Pushkin, his was a tragedy couched in trivia. One of the landmarks of Russian history was the so-called "Decem brist” uprising of 1825. Some of the rebels were prose writers and poets, and their ideals were reflected in their literary works in the form of "civic poetry” and revolutionary songs. One of them was a co editor of Polyarnaya zvezda (Polar Star), Aleksandr BestuzhevMarlinsky (1797-1837), a romantic prose w riter influenced by Byron and Hugo and a translator of English and French literary criticism. Like many writers of his generation, Bestuzhev was engrossed with Russian/W estern literary relations: We have criticism, but no literature.... Raised by foreign tutors, we have im bibed with our m others’ m ilk cosmopolitanism and adm iration only for things foreign. When we measure our literary works against the brilliance o f other literatures, we deprecate our own m odest accom plishm ents still further.... To make things worse, we have been raised exclusively on French literature, which has little in common with the tem peram ent o f the Russian people and the spirit o f the Russian language. After the quashing of the Decembrist Rebellion, Bestuzhev turned him self in and confessed to have volunteered to murder the Tsar's fam ily. His original death sentence was reduced to im prisonment, and he was sent into internal exile in Yakutia. In 1829 he was transferred as a private to the Caucasus, where his interest in ethnography and languages led him to establish close contacts with the local tribesm en and to become fascinated with the exotic milieu of the area. His essays supported the transition from Neoclassicism to Romanticism, which was taking place at the tim e on the Russian literary scene. W ilhelm Küchelbecker (1797-1846) was a poet, playwright, and critic whose parents had emigrated from Germany to Russia in the 1770s. He acquired first-hand European experience during a year-long trip undertaken in 1820-21, when he met Novalis and Goethe. A critic, journalist, dram atist, prose writer, and poet, he came to the conclusion that Russia lacked an original national literature, which he saw as a necessary precondition for the formation of a true national character. During the Decembrist uprising Küchelbecker, armed with a pistol and broadsword, actually fired shots at Grand Prince Mikhail and General Voinov, but missed both. After the suppression of the uprising he attem pted to flee to W estern Europe but was arrested in W arsaw
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and brought back to Moscow in chains, where he was sentenced to be beheaded. Tsar Nikolai I commuted his sentence, but Küchelbecker remained in solitary confinem ent until 1835, when he was exiled to Eastern Siberia and married the young, illiterate daughter of the local postmaster. There he fell ill with tuberculosis and went blind. Nevertheless he wrote a good deal during those last nine years of his life — prose, poetry, translations, articles. Pushkin was able to assist him in getting a small portion published, but only anonymously. It was not an easy life for a man who had had money problems even before his arrest. In one of his poems he borrows a line from Dante: Hard and bitter the stale bread o f exile, Anguished the flow o f an alien country's river, Its shore morose, its water no t sweet. The exile's silence is g rie f unshared; His heart is le ft behind, in a different land, Where every flow er is alive and blossoms for him. B ut here his roo f is a shroud, and everything around him withers, dies. Hard and bitter the stale bread o f exile, Heavy the exile's yoke. The Polish police were able to recognize Kuchelbecker, having been provided a good description of him by the Pole Faddei Bulgarin (Tadeusz Butharyn, 1789-1859), a prose writer, critic, journalist, and publisher. Bulgarin had been close to Pushkin's liberal group before the Decembrist coup attempt, but afterwards judged it wisest to side with the governm ent — a circumstance which caused many to view him as an unprincipled opportunist. W arning of the dangers of "socialism, communism, and pantheism,” he proposed to Nikolai that censorship not be limited to passively cutting out objectionable passages, but should also involve actively coopting loyal writers. Bulgarin was a fascinating figure. Having received a dishonorable discharge from the Russian army in 1811, he had made his way to Paris, where he joined Polish units of the French Foreign Legion and fought in their ranks in Italy and Spain and later published Memoirs o f Spain. In the last stages of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, he actually fought against his form er comrades in arms. Pardoned as a Pole under the general amnesty, he went to Russia to establish a literary career as a proseiytizer of Polish culture, but after the uprising of 1830 actually came out strongly against his form er countrymen. Having switched to writing in Russian in 1820, he became a widely read novelist in that language, claiming that he had forgotten his Polish and playing down his form er journalistic career in that language in Poland. When he
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became known as the "Russian W alter Scott,” Pushkin quipped that only skot was apposite, alluding to the Russian word "skot,” meaning "livestock.” Bulgarin's newspaper Severnaya pchela (The Northern Bee) had the largest circulation of any Russian newspaper at the time — up to 10,000 copies. Vilified by Russian critics to this very day, Bulgarin was significant in that he transformed publishing into a commercial enterprise. Before his time, literature had been the pastime of the wealthy nobility. A secret agent of Benkendorfs Third Section, he was rumored to have been responsible for inciting Pushkin to participate in the fatal duel. Bulgarin the expatriate Pole writing in Russian and deeply involved in Russian culture and politics presents a stark contrast to Russian expatriates, who for the most part have been largely uninterested in assimilation. Like Küchelbecker, Pëtr Chaadaev (1794-1856) complained that Russia lacked a genuine national character. Chaadaev had fought in the Napoleonic war and had first seen Western Europe as an officer in the Russian army of occupation. From 1823 to 1826 he travelled throughout Europe and was fortunate to have been absent from Russia during the Decembrist revolt. Chaadaev was a Hegelian who assumed that humanity was one and that Western civilization was its vanguard. In this he differed from the Slavophiles, who took a more pluralistic view. From 1829 to 1831 this Catholic philosopher in an Orthodox land composed (in French) his "Philosophical Letters,” in which he took a harshly negative view of Russian history and claimed that Russia was "une nation bâtarde” and that Russians had made no contribution to world culture, having been cut off from Western civilization by the Tartar yoke (1240-1480): For us historical experience does not exist.... We have not been affected by the universal education o f mankind. A ll that we have received from the progress o f the human spirit we have disfigured.... We have come into the world like illegitim ate children, without a heritage.... We have given nothing to the world, taken nothing from the world, we have added not a single idea to the totality o f human ideas: we have contributed nothing to the human spirit.... We are one o f those nations which does not seem to form an integral part o f humanity, but which exists only to provide some great lesson fo r the world.... Situated between East and West, supporting ourselves with one elbow on China and another on Germany, we ought to have united within us imagination and reason.... [Instead], we live only in the m ost narrow kind o f present, without a past and without a future. Chaadaev often argued heatedly with Tyutchev, the two of them representing opposing world views. It must have been particularly
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onerous for Chaadaev to encounter in the almost totally Europeanized, sophisticated Tyutchev a staunch proponent of Russia's political establishment. W hile Chaadaev himself was not exiled, but merely declared insane and placed under house arrest, his publisher Nikolai Nadezhdin (1804-1856) was sent into Siberian exile. As happened later with Dostoevsky, imprisonment and exile turned Nadezhdin into a loyal servant of Church and State. In 1838, just before being allowed to return from exile, he wrote: The catastrophe which befell me has given m y life an entirely new direction. Now I live exclusively in the past.... I am studying the thought and faith o f form er years — especially faith! For me the highest point in human history is concentrated in the history o f religion, in the history o f the church. A ll ou r tragedies, personal and social, occur from a lack o f religious enthusiasm, from crawling over the earth ‘in crim inal forgetfulness o f the fact that our lives are a preparation fo r heaven. Mikhail Lunin (1787-1845) was also arrested after the failed Decembrist coup, and accusations came to light that he had conspired to assassinate the Tsar some ten years earlier, in 1816, when he had belonged to a secret society modelled on the German Tugendbund. Even though no seditious acts or conspiracies could be established after 1822, he was sentenced to hard labor and then exiled to Siberia for 20 years. His Letters from Siberia (1836-1840), in which he presented a political and philosophical analysis of Russia's history, role and prospects, demonstrated that he had become more, not less radical during his imprisonment and led to a new arrest in 1841, when he was moved from a village near Irkutsk to the even more remote Akatui, an area heavily polluted by the Nerchinsk silver mines. Lunin's Letters correspond to the date of Chaadaev's philosophical letter of 1836. The epistolary genre was popular in Russia at the time, having been imported from W estern Europe. The Letters were first published in Gertsen's Polar S tar in 1859 and 1861, but could not appear in Russia until the revolution of 1905 changed the political climate. Minutes of the interrogation of the Decembrists were taken by the prose writer, memoirist, and poet Andrei Ivanovsky, who was later to serve as the secretary of police chief Aleksandr Benkendorf, founder of the Third Section. Ivanovsky, who died in Belgium, seems to have been equally enamored of the political establishm ent on the one hand and of Russian literature on the other. It was to him that Benkendorf entrusted the task of explaining to Aleksandr Pushkin why Pushkin was denied his request to go to the Caucasus as part of the active army.
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As a young writer, Dostoevsky began to attend semi-secret m eetings of the Petrashevsky Circle in Petersburg in 1847. By today's standards, the group's interests and intentions appear to have been far from radical: improvement of ship building, emancipation of the serfs, governm ent reform. All these issues were discussed at gourm et Friday suppers at Petrashevsky's home. There were other members of the group, however, whose interests were far more radical and who wanted to establish an underground printing press and work for the overthrow of the government. The revolutionary events in France in 1848 alarmed the tsarist government, and the Petrashevsky group was infiltrated by a governm ent informer. In 1849 Dostoevsky was arrested together with the rest of the group and after an eight-month imprisonment was subjected to a mock execution before the eyes of a silent and watchful crowd of some 3,000 persons. Only four years later was he permitted to write his first letter, addressed to his brother, maintaining that a sentence at hard labor in military service was worse than a civilian sentence. Permitted to leave the prison only for work, he spent the entire four years behind prison walls. On one occasion he worked four hours overtim e when even the mercury in the thermom eter froze: We lived together in one large heap, in a single barracks. Im agine an old, dilapidated wooden building which should have been torn down long since. In the sum m er the heat was unbearable, and in the winter the cold was unendurable. A ll the floors were rotten and covered with an inch o f dirt, so that you could easily slip and fall. The tiny windows were covered with an inch o f ice, and it was impossible to read even during daylight. W ater dripped everywhere from the ceiling. We were kept like sardines in a barrel. Even with six logs in the stove there was no warmth (ice barely thawed in the room), and the fumes from the fire were intolerable. A nd it was like that a ll winter. Convicts would wash their clothes right in the barracks, so that the entire room was wet. There was not enough space even to turn around, and it was not possible to go outdoors to take care o f one's bodily functions, since the barracks were locked. A bucket was placed in the entrance hall, and the stench was unbearable. A ll the convicts stank like pigs and claim ed that they couldn't help acting like pigs since they were only “human, " so to speak. We slept on bare bunks and were allowed only one pillow. We covered ourselves with short pea jackets, and our feet were always bare, so we shivered a ll night. Fleas, lice, and roaches were everywhere. O ur coats, which were shabby in the extreme, retained alm ost no warmth, and ou r short boots were totally inadequate for the weather.
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The literary result of the experience was Notes from the House o f the Dead. After being released from prison, Dostoevsky had to spend four more years in the army. The basic political controversy between left and right has not changed essentially since those days, centering ultim ately on human nature. Dostoevsky, like Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov after him, came away from prison and exile deeply conservative and disillusioned in his fellow creatures and convinced that a better world would not achieve the beauty and harmony predicted by Rousseau and Marx. "It is the sim ple man,” he wrote, "whom I have come to fear.” But his despair was not total, and as soon as he was again perm itted to write, he wrote letters asking for books: a German dictionary, the Koran, Tacitus, Plutarch, etc. And soon the born w riter in him began seeing imprisonment and exile as a creative experience: / need to live, brother. A nd these years w ill\ not pass in vain [underlined by Dostoevsky].... How m any are the characters and types I have come to know! I have lived with them, and I think I know them well. How m any stories [I have heard] o f tram ps and bandits, and in general o f an entire m iserable way o f life ! It's enough to fill volumes. W hat an odd people. In general this time has not been lost for me. I have come to know — not Russia — but the Russian people as have only a few before m e *
Exiles Abroad Pre-Nineteenth Century A sort o f craving came over me to travel abroad. Apollon G rigor'ev One of Russia's first prom inent men of letters was Prince Andrei Kurbsky (1528-1583), who had been commandant in the city of Yur'ev (Tartu, Estonia) under Ivan the Terrible and had the misfortune to suffer a m ilitary defeat in 1564. Already disgruntled by Ivan's policies and probably worried that he would be treated in a less than kindly fashion by his sovereign lord, he defected to the camp of Sigismund,
‘ Curiously, this is almost the sam e remark m ade by the imprisoned Andrei Sinyavsky to his w ife M aria Rozanova and quoted in my interview with them (Conversations in Exile, 1990; Besedy vizgnanii, 1991.)
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King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania. Once out of Ivan's reach, he initiated an angry correspondence with him: I w ill order that this letter; soaked in tears, be p u t in m y grave with me fo r that m om ent when I shall appear together with you before the judgm ent o f m y Lord, Jesus Christ.... You are an enem y o f Christianity, conceived in lust, an Antichrist struggling against the Lord Himself. You have spilled Christian blood as if it were water and have doom ed the strong men o f Israel ... N either you nor your children for ten generations shall enter the Church o f God. Amen. Upon receiving the letter from Kurbsky's servant, Ivan had the man tortured and put to death before responding to his nemesis: On account o f a single angry word o f mine, you have lost not only your own soul, but the souls o f a ll your ancestors: for, by God's will, they had been given as servants to our grandfather, the great Tsar, and they gave their souls to him up to their death, and ordered you, their children, to serve the children and grandchildren o f our grandfather. B ut you have forgotten everything and traitorously, like a dog, have you transgressed the oath and gone over to the enemies o f Christianity. In your wrath you utter stupid words, hurling, as it were, stones a t the sky ...a Ivan's death in 1584 and that of his son Fêdor in 1598 created a crisis of authority in Russia known as the smutnoe vremya or smuta (the Time of Troubles), which lasted until the Romanov dynasty was installed on the throne in 1613. This period marked the appearance of the first "false Dmitry,” a pretender to the Russian throne who was, at least according to one version, a form er deacon from the Chudov M onastery in the Moscow Kremlin. Supported by the Polish-Lithuanian gentry and the Catholic clergy, Dmitry secretly converted to Catholicism and promised to hand over large territories to Poland and support Sigismund III in his struggle with Sweden, to convert Russia to Catholicism, and marry Marina Mniszech, the daughter of a Polish governor. When Tsar Boris Godunov died, his army switched loyalties to Dmitry, who occupied the throne in 1605. During the wedding ceremony, however, Dmitry was assassinated in a conspiracy organized by Prince Vasily Shuisky. Dmitry appears to have had a homosexual liaison with Ivan Khvorostinin (7-1625), who likewise flirted with the "Latin heresy” and was exiled by Shuisky, who had been
•The authenticity of this first correspondence between a Russian exile and the Russian head of state has been called into question (see: Edward L. Kennan, The Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha, 1971).
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crowned Tsar, to the Volokolamsk Monastery. Marina was perm itted to return to Poland in 1608, where she recognized a second "false Dmitry” as her husband, who had been miraculously saved from death, but they both met the same fate as the first Dmitry. Khvorostinin, in the meantime, was forgiven his past errors and promoted to the rank of stol'nik. Nevertheless, he continued to read Latin books covertly, carouse, eat meat on fast days, and conspire to flee, "for in Moscow the people are stupid, and it is impossible to live with them ,” he complained. Searches of his home revealed "verses” ridiculing Moscow customs, and his attempted escape ended in confinem ent in the Saint Cyrill Monastery of Beloozero, where he "recanted” his heretical views. Under the monastic name "Joseph” this would-be émigré composed a number of anti-Catholic tracts and a chronicle of the Time of Troubles: Words o f Days and Tsars and M oscow Prelates. Like Awakum , Grigory Kotoshikhin (16307-1667) was a subject of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich. Kotoshikhin was a scribe who took part in negotiations with Sweden at the end of the Russian-Swedish war of 1656-58. He was unfortunate enough to have om itted the Tsar's title of "Lord” or "Sovereign” (Gosudar') in a document he sent home, for which offense Aleksei Mikhailovich ordered him beaten with rods. The incident did not interfere with Kotoshikhin's career but must have jaundiced him somewhat against his employer, for he began to sell confidential information to the Swedes. In 1664 he fled to Poland, and from there to Sweden the following year, by way of Silesia and Prussia. In Sweden he was promptly put on the governm ent payroll and wrote a sort of sociological treatise entitled About Russia in the Reign o f Aleksei Mikhailovich. Kotoshikhin's tenure in the Swedish service came to an early close when he became involved in a drunken brawl with his landlord, who was also his translator, over Kotoshikhin's apparently rom antic relationship with the man's wife and also over unpaid rent. He stabbed the landlord to death and even wounded the man's sister-in-law, who tried to intervene. Submitting to arrest, Kotoshikhin offered no resistance and stated he would have committed suicide otherwise. Under Swedish law he could have attempted to overturn the sentence by appealing to the wife, who seems to have had mixed feelings on the subject, but he did not. W hether it was his sense of guilt that restrained him or whether he was simply aware that a lifting of the sentence would lead to his being handed over to the Russian authorities, who were actively seeking his extradition, is a question which will never be resolved. Kotoshikhin was permitted to convert and was then executed. His body, dissected and made available for anatomical research, thus
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served as a testim ony of relations between Russian émigré writers and their translators, but his manuscript, written in the exquisite script of a professional scribe, was not discovered until nearly two centuries later, in 1837. The discovery of the manuscript was a major political event; it gave W esternizers a stick with which they could beat the Slavophiles and attack their claim that Russian culture was inherently humane and virtuous. In the early 19th century Kotoshikhin's skull disappeared — perhaps collected by some ardent fan of Russian literature in exile.
The Nineteenth Century The Moderates There is moderation even in excess. Benjamin Disraeli Although a rail link with Western Europe was established only in 1848 (via Warsaw), roads were sufficiently well developed that even in the 18th century the difficulties inherent in travel by carriage were not sufficient to put off Russians intent on travel. Even such Slavophiles as the Kireevsky brothers, Konstantin Aksakov, and Aleksei Khomyakov travelled to Western Europe, where German romanticism and idealist philosophy strongly influenced their own view of Russia's unique role in the world. One of the first Russian émigrés of the 19th century was Nikolai Turgenev (1789-1871), who was a member of two secret societies — The W elfare League and the Northern Society. He had also joined the Arzamas literary association, but left it after losing hope of inducing Russian writers to become interested in social reform. Fortunate in having gone abroad in April 1824, he escaped the vengeance of Nikolai I. Turgenev was no stranger to Europe, having studied at the University of Göttingen in 1808-11 and returned for another two years to work on the staff of Baron vom Stein in the allied forces pursuing Napoleon. The tsarist governm ent demanded that Turgenev return home to be tried, and when he refused, attempted — unsuccessfully — to extradite him. The court sentenced him to death in absentia, but Nikolai commuted the sentence to life at hard labor in Siberia. Turgenev wrote to the Tsar, and the poet Vasily Zhukovsky even interceded on his behalf, but to no avail. Fearful of arrest on the continent, Turgenev was unable to travel outside England until 1830. Turgenev's interests were more social and economic than literary, and he was what nowadays might be termed a liberal on the political spectrum — a circumstance that did not prevent him from
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selling his serfs to support himself abroad. A specialist in the area of taxation, he also authored a work in 1847 expressing his own view of Russia in a three-volume opus entitled La Russie e t les russes. Fearful of recriminations against his brother, he had waited for the latter's death to publish the manuscript. Aleksandr II restored his rank, and he made three trips to Russia before his death — in 1857,1859, and 1864. As the oppressive thirty-year reign of Nikolai I dragged on (1825-55) a number of Russians began to lose hope for reform and went abroad. To do so they needed to receive permission from their government. The two most acceptable reasons were medical treatm ent and/or business. Once in the W est they, like Nikolai Turgenev, used their newfound freedom to "tell the truth” about the Russia they had left behind. The group was largely aristocratic and not organized into anything like a coherent revolutionary movement. Nikolai Sazonov (1815-1862) left Russia in 1840, having already been abroad in 1835-36. Because of his extravagànt lifestyle, he found himself so deep in debt by 1845 that he would have been clapped in debtor's prison, had he returned to Russia. In 1854 he published a small book entitled La vérité sur l'em pereur Nicholas. It was a frontal attack on Nikolai personally, whom he described as an imperial Khlestakov — an impostor official from GogoF’s play The Inspector General. Sazonov wrote that, not only was the Tsar system atically destroying authentic literary culture by imprisoning and exiling such writers as Bestuzhev, Dostoevsky, Küchelbecker, Lermontov, and Pushkin, but he was even creating a surrogate literature to take its place, supported by a plethora of stultifying governm ent journals. When Nikolai died and was replaced by the more liberal Aleksandr II, Sazonov submitted a petition to the Grand Duke Konstantin during the latter's visit to Europe, "acknowledging his faults” and meekly asking permission to return to Russia. Aleksandr granted his request, but somehow Sazonov died in 1862 without making use of the imperial consent. Claiming he needed medical treatment, the prose w riter Ivan Golovin (1816-1890) left Russia in 1842, having already visited Sweden in 1838. Displeased by his writings, Nikolai ordered him to return home in 1844 and, when Golovin refused, confiscated his estate, stripped him of rights of inheritance, and sentenced him in absentia to hard labor. In response Golovin obtained a certificate of naturalized British citizenship in 1846 and in 1847 published Types et caractères russes, which appeared in English under the title A Russian Sketch-Book. Using fictionalized stories, Golovin told a depressing tale of the lot of Russians in their native land. In 1849 he followed up with Catechism o f the Russian People. Although printed in Paris (anonymously), the place of publication was shown as St. Petersburg.
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Created in the form of dialogues, the work is just as pessimistic as the Russian Sketch-Book. There was also La Russie sous Nicolas l-er, which must have pleased the Tsar even less. Poverty forced Golovin to regret his own audaciousness and, like Sazonov, he repeatedly petitioned the Russian government for a pardon. Nikolai would not hear of leniency, but when Aleksandr II took the throne in 1855 Golovin radically changed the tone of his writings and attem pted to assume the role of advisor to the Tsar. Secretly, in 1872, he even proposed to the Third Section that he become an inform er for them. The application for a staff position was rejected, but an offer was extended to pay for individual useful pieces of information. Among Golovin's works is a novel written in German, D er Flüchtling (The Refugee). In 1843 "Pierre Dolgoroukow” (Prince Pëtr Dolgorukov), who was living in Paris, published a four-volume study of Russian aristocratic genealogy under the pseudonym "Count d'Am agro.” Displeased over the unsavory details contained in the book, Nikolai im m ediately ordered Dologrukov to return home. When he arrived in Kronstadt on May 2, 1843, he was arrested and exiled to Vyatka. A year later his sentence was commuted, but without the right to live in St. Petersburg, where it was feared he might use his tim e to gather new material. He managed to leave Russia again only in 1859 and was horrified to read a book by C. Châtelet, a Frenchmen in Lyons, entitled La vérité sur la Russie (The Truth About Russia). France, Châtelet wrote, had the advantage of three more centuries of civilization than had Russia — a situation that he felt explained a great deal. In Russia, Châtelet maintained, commerce, communications and the arts were blossoming under the wise oversight of the government; serfdom entailed responsibility on the part of the serf owners, not just exploitation; the Russians preferred the knut to prison "and who is to say that they are wrong?”; lastly, Châtelet wrote, the Tsars should not abdicate a right granted them by Providence. And, if Russia was guilty of dismembering Poland and acting aggressively toward Turkey, one could point out equally reprehensible behavior on the part of England with regard to Ireland. Châtelet thus admonished his French readers to remember that France was "strong enough to respect her enemy and be fair to him.” Russian émigrés seem to have always been berating W esterners for their tolerance of Russian ways, and Dolgorukov was no exception. In 1860 (with a second edition in 1861) he composed his own La vérité sur la Russie, informing the reader that he had em igrated with the specific purpose of telling the Russian governm ent what he thought of it. Russia, in his view, was a land inhabited exclusively by slaves, some of whom were more privileged and others less. And the privileged slaves were busy junketing around
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W estern Europe with no concern for the condition of their native land. W hen his cousin Vasily Dolgorukov, the tsarist chief of police, demanded that "Pierre” withdraw the book from the book stores and return home immediately, Dolgorukov sent him his portrait instead, pointing out that it was an excellent likeness and could be exiled to Siberia in his place. As for the late Nikolai I, Dolgorukov wrote that Russia was fortunate to be rid of such a Tsar, but that it was a shame that the late monarch had not taken poison him self earlier. The Russian Senate responded by stripping Dolgorukov of all titles and rights of inheritance, and condemning him to eternal exile.a W hile still a boy, Aleksandr Gertsen (1812-1870) had become a staunch adm irer of Schiller. Together with his lifelong friend Nikolai Ogarêv, he swore a boyhood oath on Moscow's Sparrow Hills in 1827 to sacrifice his life for the liberation of the Russian people. Later the two friends enrolled in Moscow University and became involved in a circle for the study of the socialist ideas of Saint-Simon. M ost of the group's members were arrested, and Gertsen spent nearly a year in prison before being sent into internal exile in Vyatka from 1835 to 1837 and then in Vladim ir from 1838 to 1840. In 1839 he received a personal pardon from Nikolai I. But in 1840 the Tsar again lost patience with him when Gertsen wrote a letter to his father criticizing the local police. He was, however, able to plead his wife's ill health, so that he got permission merely to move to Novgorod. Gertsen took a keen interest in the ideas of Hegel, Leroux, Feuerbach, Fourier, and Proudhon, and eventually became deeply enamored of socialism. When his father died, leaving him a fortune of 500,000 rubles, he lost no tim e in applying for a passport and emigrated from Russia in 1847. Once abroad, he quickly became disenchanted with the Western world, particularly with Paris, where he witnessed the suppression of the June Days uprising in 1848. Curiously enough, it was as an expatriate that this W esternizer began to gravitate somewhat toward the Slavophile camp. The Russian
»Actually Dolgorukov's problems w ere not limited to the above. H e had been accused of being the author of a lampoon on Pushkin which caused Pushkin to challenge his wife's purported lover to a duel. Dolgorukov denied the allegation, but many granted it credence. Since Pushkin w as viewed with great piety as Russia's national poet, the accusation was very difficult to live with. Another ém igré suspected of being the author of this lampoon w as Prince Ivan Gagarin (1814-1882), who left Russia in 1843 and becam e a Jesuit priest. The unproven accusation was a burden on Gagarin for the rest of his life. In Paris Gagarin founded a Russian library called M usée Slave and published a theological journal.
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peasantry, he believed, was destined to play a unique role in history. In 1861 he wrote in Kolokol (The Bell): Listen, for darkness does not prevent listening: from all regions o f our vast, vast country, from the Don and the Urals, from the Volga and the Dnepr the sigh grows, the protest rises; it is the first roar o f the tidal wave which rises, big with storms, after an om inously long silence. Go to the people! To the people I — there is your place, exiles o f science, show that they w ill not make church servants out o f you, but fighters o f the Russian people, and not hirelings without a country! H ail to you ! You are starting a new epoch, you have understood that the tim e o f whispering, o f distant allusions, o f forbidden books is com ing to an end. You still write in secret a t home, but openly you protest. H ail to you, younger brothers, and our blessing for the future! Oh, if you only knew how our hearts beat, how the tears sprang into our eyes when we read o f the student disorders in St. Petersburg! Gertsen considered it his mission in life to acquaint Western Europe with Russia and to forward the revolutionary cause. To this end he moved to London, where he founded the Free Russian Press in 1853. There he was joined by Ogarëv, who helped him found the newspaper Kolokol and an almanac The Polar Star, both dedicated to the emancipation of the serfs, freedom from censorship, the abolition of corporal punishment, and the establishment of open courts. Banned in Russia, the two publications were regularly smuggled into the country. Gertsen's purely fictional work was created largely before he em igrated and was intended as a vehicle for his social and political views. His 1845-46 novel Who Is to Blam e? centers around a lovetriangle and deals with the topic of female emancipation and the role of the "superfluous man” in Russian society. "Doctor Krupov” (1847) is devoted to his hopes for the creation of a new, communal society, and "The Thieving Magpie” is an indictment of serfdom. Gertsen's major achievement, however, is his memoir M y Past and Thoughts, which he wrote between 1852 and 1868. His life story was also a history of the intellectual life of the period, and his sensitive reminiscences are remarkable documents. Here Gertsen summed up his life experience in a passage addressed to Ogarëv: When I think o f how we two men, who are now nearly 50 years old, now stand before the first free Russian press, it seem s to me that our childish enthusiasm on Sparrow Hills is not 30 years behind us, but no more than three. Peoples, revolutions, the m ost beloved minds appeared, were replaced by others and disappeared somewhere between Sparrow Hills and Primrose H ill [in
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London]. Their traces have been alm ost lost in the m erciless w hirlw ind o f events. E verything around us has changed: instead o f the M oscow River the Thames flows past me, and the speech o f a foreign people sounds in m y ears.... For us there remains no way back to the fields o f our native la n d ... and only the dream o f two boys — one 13 and the other 11 — still livesI Nikolai Ogarêv (1813-1877) was also arrested in 1834. A fter a nine-month period of imprisonment he was sent under police escort to Penza. His continuing interest in the ideas of Hegel and Feuerbach was rewarded by the government with a second arrest and imprisonment. After he emigrated and joined Gertsen in London he m anaged— unlike the la tte r— to lose the entire fortune he had inherited and depended on Gertsen for a stipend in his later years. The relationship of the two men has an unusual personal twist to it. True to the liberated world view of their circle, Gertsen and Ogàrêv's wife informed Ogarêv that they intended to have an affair. Ogarêv acquiesced and his wife became Gertsen's mistress, bearing him three children, all of whom were legitimized as Ogàrêv's. (Madame Gertsen in turn had an affair with the German poet Georg Herwegh.) Ogàrêv's literary vocation was to poetry — love lyrics and sociopolitical verse. After emigrating, he continued to write poetry, but more and more of his efforts were devoted to political activities. After the December 1825 uprising it became increasingly difficult to receive permission to travel abroad; often such authorization depended on the Tsar's personal approval. After Nikolai's death, however, Aleksandr II relaxed these limitations. In the late 1860s and early 1870s Russian émigré political activity was more intense in Switzerland than in England. A Russian colony of some 300 persons was grouped around the University of Zürich. Many of these émigrés were women, who — for the most part — were not perm itted to obtain university degrees in Russia. In May 1873 the tsarist governm ent became alarmed at the new "populists” (narodniki) and issued a decree declaring all degrees obtained in Zurich after January 1,1874, to be invalid in Russia. As a result the colony's popularity with the Russians fell drastically. Up until roughly 1861 the general inclination of Russian intellectuals had been to cooperate with the governm ent of Aleksandr II. Reform-minded Russians felt they could collaborate with the bureaucracy on a friendly basis, and the period has been called "the honeymoon of freedom .” Since there was no bourgeoisie of any magnitude in Russia to bear the banner of liberalism (as had been the case in the West), the hope was for reform from above.
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Early Radicals Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm ; tell him to m oderately rescue his wife from the hands o f the ravisher; tell the m other to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation. William Lloyd Garrison, 1831 By and large, 19th-century Russian political émigrés were men of the pen. In the late 1850s and early 1860s a number of periodicals were published in England, but by the late 1860s the center of Russian ém igré publications had begun to shift to Switzerland. Ogarêv moved to Zürich in 1865, where he established ties with Bakunin and Nechaev and attem pted to help the latter revive Kolokol. A significant radicalization occurred in the period 1859 to 1861, producing the so-called "young em igration.” As this group of Russian ém igrés began to arrive in Europe, Gertsen came to be regarded by many as too conservative, and outright hostility became evident between him and such more radical thinkers as Aleksandr SernoSolov'evich, Nikolai Utin, Varfolomei Zaitsev, and Nikolai Zhukovsky.3 W hile there was also a sm aller Russian colony in Heidelberg, Switzerland was a safer abode for the émigrés than was Germany, which m aintained close diplom atic relations with Russia. By the mid1910s France came to be more and more important. Often the titles of such publications clearly illustrated their ideological thrust. For example, one 1904-05 publication was entitled Power and Law: The People's Self-Defense Arm Against the Benefactors and Parasites Who Have Stolen Its Education and Bread. The romantic poet Nikolai Vorms (1845-1870) felt increasingly uncom fortable under police scrutiny in Russia. After emigrating in 1866 he received financial assistance from Gertsen. Nevertheless, Vorms attacked Gertsen for not being sufficiently circumspect in conspiratorial matters, and Gertsen broke off relations with him in 1868. The affair contributed to Gertsen's worsening relations with the "younger generation."
•For a discussion of ém igré politics of the period see Martin Miller's The Russian Revolutionary Ém igrés: 1825-1870 (Baltimore/London, 1986).
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The mild-mannered Ogarëv made a strange pair with Sergei Nechaev (1847-1882). In his Catechism o f a Revolutionary (Katekhizis revolyutsionera) Nechaev proposed that the revolutionaries declare them selves to be above the law, emotion, and conventional morality. W hen his suspicions were aroused that a member of his organization might betray them to the authorities, he arranged the man's murder "to bind the organization together with blood.” In 1872 the Swiss authorities handed Nechaev over to the Russian government, and he died ten years later in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Nechaev mirrored the extreme shift in attitudes which had occurred between the generation of the forties and the generation of the sixties. The older generation, represented by such figures as Ivan Turgenev, Timofei Granovsky (1813-1855), and Vissarion Belinsky, had favored gradual change, while the generation of the sixties — Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-1889), Dmitry Pisarev (1840-1868), and others — were in favor of far more radical solutions. The revolutionary movement abroad, not needing to fear the long arm of the tsarist police, was far more open and radical in expressing such views. Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) was a revolutionary and one of the founders of the international anarchist movement. Like many of the radicals of both the 19th and the 20th century, he was the son of a well-to-do family. A member of the Stankevich Circle in Moscow in the 1830s, he acquainted Belinsky with the theories of Fichte and Hegel and thus exercised a considerable, albeit indirect, influence on the developm ent of Russian literary thought and practice. Bakunin left Russia in 1840 and lived in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, and France. Declaring that "the urge for destruction is also a creative urge,” he became involved in uprisings in Paris, Prague, and Dresden. In 1844 the Russian authorities confiscated his funds and sentenced him in absentia to hard labor, but that did not hinder this tireless revolutionary from scheming to raise a Polish insurrection to invade Russia. In 1850 he was jailed in Saxony and Austria and handed over to the Russian authorities, who imprisoned him in the Peter and Paul Fortress for six years and then exiled him to Siberia in 1857 after he wrote a confession to the Tsar. In 1861 he reached London after escaping to San Francisco via Japan. There he feuded with Marx (although at one point he began to translate Das Kapital into Russian) and was expelled from the First International in 1869. He also collaborated with Nechaev, although he eventually broke with him. A major figure in the anarchist movement, he may well have served as a prototype for Stavrogin, the hero of Dostoevsky's novel The Possessed Bakunin and Ivan Turgenev became inseparable friends in Berlin and shared housing for a year. After Bakunin's escape from
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Siberia, Turgenev offered to contribute 1,500 francs a year to a fund which he hoped to raise for him. In an added twist to their close relationship, Turgenev even became infatuated with Bakunin's sister, Tat'yana. Nevertheless, Turgenev ultimately came to disagree with Bakunin, Gertsen, and Ogarêv over their idea for a pan-Slavic Federation of States with Russia at its head. Bakunin died in Berne. Pêtr Lavrov (1823-1900), philosopher and ideologue of the Populist movement, boasted some 56 pseudonyms. A member of the secret revolutionary society Zemlya i volya (Land and Freedom or Will, he was arrested and sent into internal exile in 1867, accused of "pernicious thinking.” In 1870 he fled Russia, joined the First International, and took part in the Paris Commune. In his influential "Historical Letters” (1870) he identified the intelligentsia as the key force in enlightening the masses, but was opposed to much of the violence and anarchy preached by some of his fellow revolutionaries. Lavrov was active as a literary critic and aesthetician, preaching a sort of revolutionary classicism. As he grew older his purely artistic view of literature weakened, and he came to stress more and more its ideological content and accurate reflection of reality. His best known poetic accomplishment was a song first published in 1875 which was sung as a Russian version of the Marseillaise (the so-called "W orkers’ Marseillaise”). Lavrov is now remembered as a moderate who served as a sort of bridge between Gertsen's generation and the more radical youth who came later. His disagreements with Plekhanov over populism versus Marxism in many ways proved so prophetic of future quarrels among the revolutionaries that the Soviets refused to republish any of his works from 1930 until the late 1950s. Lavrov's personal secretary from 1894 up till his death was the Russian and Yiddish prose writer and dram atist Shloime Rapoport (1863-1920). Rapoport, who did not learn Russian until he was 17, was a populist who had taught literacy to Russian peasant children almost as soon as he himself learned to read Russian. From 1891 to 1905 he lived in Switzerland and Paris, playing an active role in the AgrarianSocialist League and the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. Rapoport studied the life of Russia's Jews as an ethnographer and wrote several plays about them. He also translated Russian poetry into Yiddish. He died in Warsaw. Pêtr Tkachëv (1844-1885) left Russia in 1873 and collaborated with Lavrov in the latter's journal Vperëd (Forward) in Geneva. His earlier association with Nechaev had left its mark upon him so that he soon broke with Lavrov, whom he considered too moderate. In 1875 he and other like-minded radical revolutionaries began to publish Nabat (The Alarm). Tkachêv saw the Russian peasant commune as an institution which would perm it Russia to skip capitalism and move
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directly into socialism. This expectation did not stop him, however, from proposing the establishm ent of the "KOB” — the acronym of Kom itet O bshchestverwoi Bezopasnosti or "Committee for Public Security,” an absolutely uncanny anticipation of the Soviet KGB. In the last years of his life he suffered from severe mental disorder. Another prominent anarchist and émigré was Prince Pêtr Kropotkin (1842-1921), who as a 12-year-old first tried his hand at literary composition and as a 17-year-old cadet in the Imperial Corps of Pages attem pted to produce a revolutionary magazine. Kropotkin was a governm ent adm inistrator and explorer in Siberia who had undertaken major expeditions along the mighty Am ur and Lena Rivers and discovered several dorm ant volcanoes. After returning from a geological expedition to Finland and Sweden in 1871, he came more and more to favor his revolutionary activities over his scientific career. A confirmed anarchist by 1872, he was arrested in 1874 but escaped from the prison infirm ary two years later and made his way to London. In Europe he frequently moved back and forth between England, Switzerland, and France, sometimes deported and on other occasions fleeing from fear of arrest. After the assassination of Aleksandr II in 1881 he learned that back home a conservative organization called the "Sacred Fellowship” (Svyashchennaya druzhina) considered him to have been a major participant in the act and had condemned him to death. In 1883 he was arrested in France and sentenced to five years imprisonment. In prison he taught his fellow inmates astronomy, geometry, and physics, but fell ill with scurvy and malaria. Released thanks to public pressure after having served three years of his sentence, he lectured on anarchism in Europe and the United States, publishing his memoirs in the Atlantic Monthly. In 1908 he was one of three members of the revolutionary jury of honor which investigated Evno A zefs record and found him guilty of having been a double agent for both the tsarist secret police and the revolutionaries, and of betraying agents from both sides.3
•Rom an G uf's novel A ze f gives a fascinating account of the activities of this incredible terrorist. For an equally talented documentary presentation of the Azef case see Nikolaevsky's Story of a Traitor (Istoriya odnogo predatelya). Gor'ky at one tim e also gathered material for a book on Azef. Azef w as exposed by a man who w as his moral antipode — Vladim ir Burtsev (1862-1942), who w as imprisoned by Tsarist authorities, the British government (for inciting the murder of the Tsar), the Provisional Government, and the Soviet government. Burtsev died in abject poverty in Paris. Azef was not unique. Dmitry Bogrov, assassin of Pêtr Stolypin, Russian head of state, was also a double agent and evidently assassinated Stolypin to allay suspicions of the revolutionaries of his complicity in earlier arrests in their ranks.
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In 1897 Lev Tolstoi wrote to Kropotkin asking his advice on the resettlem ent of some 8,000 members of the Dukhobor religious sect to Canada, a cause Kropotkin was more than happy to take up. During his second lecture tour to North America in 1901 he visited the Dukhobors in their new home. Kropotkin had a number of personal ties with Russian writers and in 1905 he published his Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature, in which he claimed that Russian Populist writings and Russian realism were more profound than French naturalism, criticized tsarist censorship, and was generally so utilitarian in his approach to belles lettres that he included in that category even political writings and quasi-dem ographic studies. Kropotkin's Notes o f a Revolutionary, written partly in Russian and partly in English, was translated into some 15 languages, bringing him international fame and honor. He returned to Russia in 1917 and was invited by Kerensky to join the Provisional Government. Although he refused the offer, he supported the prosecution of the war by the Provisional Government. Kropotkin soon began to experience misgivings as to the course being taken by the Soviet government. On November 30,1920, the Soviet governm ent issued a statem ent claiming that W hite organizations were planning terrorist activities against "the leaders of the worker-peasant revolution” and that an "Institute of Hostages” was being established. In December Kropotkin wrote a letter of protest to Lenin, in which he described such a practice as a return to the worst period of the Middle Ages and religious wars, an act unworthy of the new com m unist state, and an indication that the new leaders were sim ply protecting themselves rather than the cause. That same month he also wrote an open letter to the Eighth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, defending the right of independent publishing houses to exist. A few weeks later he fell ill with angina and pneumonia and died in the small town of Dmitrov. Georgy Plekhanov (1856-1918), who had been a member of Zem lya i volya, left Russia in 1880 and spent the next 37 years abroad. Plekhanov did much to develop a Marxist aesthetics and establish the view of art as a superstructure dependent on an economic base. He viewed the fin de siècle art-for-art's-sake movem ent as a form of escapism, but also disagreed with the m echanistic utilitarian model which eventually became so influential during the Stalinist period. Plekhanov returned to Russia after the revolution, but died soon after, unloved by Soviet critics for his criticism of the proto-utilitarian critics Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky, and Pisarev, whom he faulted, among other reasons, for their ahistorical approach. Sergei Stepnyak-Kravchinsky (1851 -1895) was a co-worker of Plekhanov's and one of the most colorful figures among the Russian
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revolutionaries in Europe. As a 22-year old Populist, he abandoned his studies and travelled about the countryside, preaching socialism to the peasants, was arrested, and escaped. Shortly thereafter he began publishing utopian tales of a communal Russia; the stories were printed in London and Geneva and smuggled into Russia. In 1874 he fled abroad and took part in an unsuccessful uprising in Herzegovina against the Turks, and later illegally returned home. In 1877 he was arrested in Italy for taking part in an armed insurrection and held in prison for nine months. After being released under a general amnesty he went to Switzerland — on foot for lack of funds — and together with a group of other Russian émigrés founded a revolutionary magazine entitled Obshchina (Commune). Having returned home in 1878, he became a member of Zemlya i volya and that same year stabbed to death the Chief of Police in Petersburg. In 1879 he again fled abroad, never to return — this tim e with an ominous task: to kstudy the manufacture of dynamite. After the assassination of Aleksandr II in 1881, the tsarist governm ent requested his extradition from Switzerland, forcing him to flee to Italy, and in 1884 from Italy to London. In London Kravchinsky continued to compose political tracts, and in 1889 published in English a novel about the Russian populist m ovem ent— The Career o f a Nihilist, continuing that topic in Russian in 1894 in an unfinished novel, Pavel Rudenko, M em ber o f the Stunde. In 1889 he founded "The Society of Friends of Russian Freedom” in England, and the following year a monthly English-language magazine, A Free Russia. The London home of the untiring Kravchinsky became a gathering place for like-minded writers. W alking down the street two days before Christmas 1895, too busy to look up from the m aterials he was examining for the first issue of a newspaper he was preparing, Kravchinsky was struck by a train. In 1896 his novelette A Little House on the Volga (Domik na Volge) was published posthumously. Living together with Kravchinsky in his London home was the revolutionary poet and prose writer Feliks Volkhovsky (1846-1914). In 1869 Volkhovsky was arrested for purported participation in the Nechaev group and then released, in 1874 he was again arrested for revolutionary activities and, after an unsuccessful escape attem pt, imprisoned for four years in the Fortress of Peter and Paul. During his trial in 1877 he refused to testify and was sent into internal exile in the Tobol'sk guberniya. In 1899 he fled to Canada by way of Vladivostok. Boris Savinkov (1879-1925) was described by Zinaida Gippius as having an "interesting, asymmetrical face and light hair” and suffering from guilt over the people he had killed in the revolutionary cause. He had escaped to Geneva from tsarist internal exile in Vologda and joined the Socialist Revolutionary Battle Organization
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(Boevaya Organizatsiya) under A zefs leadership. In 1904 Savlnkov and two other terrorists, Ivan Kalyaev and Egor Sozonov, had travelled to Russia to assassinate Vyacheslav Pleve, Minister of Foreign Affairs. Sozonov, who threw the bomb, was seriously wounded. Sentenced to hard labor, he later took poison to protest the beatings of political prisoners. Savinkov and Kalyaev managed to flee abroad. The next year they returned to Russia and killed the Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, uncle of the Tsar, in the Kremlin. Kalyaev was unable to escape after this second attem pt and was hanged after refusing to plead for mercy. Savinkov again managed to flee and this tim e devoted him self to literature under the pseudonym "Ropshin,” composing two novels, Black Stallion (Kon' voronoi) and W hat Never Happened (To, chego ne bylo). We will hear more of Savinkov later on in this book.
Future Soviet Leaders 'Tis Apollo come leading His choir, the Nine. — The leader is fairest, But a ll are divine. Matthew Arnold The 1917 October coup probably would never have taken place if the ideology and strategy had not been worked out in Western Europe. Anyone who harbors any doubts in that regard need only peruse a list of the hundreds of revolutionary Russian-language periodicals published in Europe. The early Soviet government was literally a governm ent of émigrés come to power. Vladim ir Lenin (pseudonym of Vladim ir Ul'yanov, 1870-1924) had been sent into "internal exile” and been abroad twice — from 1900 until 1905 and from 1907 until 1917. His elder brother Aleksandr, who had participated in preparations to assassinate Aleksandr III and later refused to ask for clemency, had been hanged in 1887. The decision proved to be a fateful one for the Romanov dynasty; it was Vladim ir who gave the order to murder not only the Tsar, but his entire fam ily as well. From 1907 to 1917 Lenin, who was of a very practical, nonliterary bent, form ulated the official Party position for literature in what was to become the Soviet Union. Upon returning to St. Petersburg from his first stint abroad in 1905, Lenin published "Party Organization and Partisan Literature” (Partiinaya organizatsiya i partiinaya literatura) in Russia's first legal Bol'shevik newspaper Novaya zhizn' (The New Life): Literature m ust become Party-oriented ... a pa rt o f the proletarian cause, a "screw and gear” in the great social-
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dem ocratic cause p u t into m otion by the conscious avant-garde o f the entire working class. Literature m ust becom e a com ponent o f organized, planned, united social-dem ocratic Party work.... The newspapers m ust become arm s o f the various Party organizations. Writers m ust jo in Party organizations. Publishing houses and warehouses, bookstores and reading rooms, libraries, and the book trade m ust a ll become Party-oriented and be held responsible fo r this obligation. A nd a ll this work m ust be controlled b y an organized socialistic proletariat, without exceptions.... W hile at the tim e Lenin advocated this program only for Party organizations during the period of the revolutionary struggle, it was later forced upon all Soviet writers. Literature was to be treated as an instrum ent of political propaganda. The Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky later compared the policy to using a samovar to drive nails; it could be done, but the sam ovar would inevitably be the worse for wear. After imprisonment and internal exile for revolutionary propaganda the critic Vatslav Vorovsky (Wactaw Worowski, 1871 -1923) emigrated to W estern Europe in 1902, and returned to Russia in 1905 after the general amnesty. As a Marxist critic, Vorovsky engaged in regular sallies against the decadents, who placed greater emphasis on their own experience of reality than reality itself. Vorovsky stressed that he was a m aterialist and a proponent of the view that literature reflected both the real world and the underlying cultural-political forces directing it. The crucial role played by Vorovsky in early Soviet literary policies and his own violent end are discussed later in this book. A member of the radical group "The People's Freedom,” Aleksandr Bogdanov (pseudonym of Aleksandr Malinovsky, 1873-1928) had been arrested in 1899 and sent into internal exile in Kaluga and then Vologda. When his sentence ended, he left for Switzerland to join Lenin. There he served on the editorial boards of Proletarii (The Proletarian), Vperëd (Forward), and Novaya zhizn' (The New Life). At the 1907 London Congress of the Russian Socialist Party Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875-1933, married to Bogdanov's sister) found themselves opposed to Lenin over the question of whether to boycott the Duma and were expelled from the Bol'shevik faction. In 1909 Bogdanov and Lunacharsky joined Gor'ky on Capri and established a school to educate the proletariat. They were to follow up on this idea after 1917, when they established P ro le tku lt Following Plekhanov's lead, they held the view that literature necessarily reflects class prejudice and interests. But they believed that even though modernism and decadence were fundam entally flawed in a social sense, they nevertheless enlightened and uplifted the reader. When
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Bogdanov and Lunacharsky argued that literature should be independent of Party control, they were opposed by Lenin. By 1920 the Party had taken a firm stand against the Proletkul't movement. Nevertheless the core concepts of the movement eventually formed the basis of Socialist Realism, as expounded in officially approved Soviet textbooks. W hile still an émigré, Bogdanov wrote two science fiction novels: Red S tar (Krasnaya zvezda) and Engineer M anny (Inzhener Mènni). Red S tar evidently influenced Aèlita, the popular science fiction novel of Aleksei Tolstoi. In both these works the Russian revolutionary goes to Mars, has a love affair with a Martian woman, interacts with Martian society on several levels, and eventually returns to Earth. Engineer M anny is a utopian fiction tale about the building of the Martian canals. Bogdanov's attem pt in both novels to develop an adventure plot within a utopian fram ework served as a bridge between pre-Soviet and Soviet science fiction. As soon as Lunacharsky graduated from high school in Kiev he enrolled in the University of Zurich to study philosophy and the natural sciences under the philosopher Richard Avenarius. In 1897 he returned to Russia but emigrated in 1906 and did not return until 1917, when he was appointed "Commissar of Education” of the Russian Republic. In an attem pt to reconcile Marxism with religion, Lunacharsky launched the Bogostroitel'stvo (God-Building) movement. In 1904-06 he authored a three-volum e work entitled Empiriomonism, which was an adaptation of the epistemological ideas of Avenarius and Emst Mach. He followed it in 1908-11 with a two-volume Reiigion and Socialism. His "genuine, unvulgarized, un-Plekhanovized Marxism” was vigorously supported by Bogdanov despite the latter's rejection of Lunacharsky's religious term inology. The most ferocious opponent of Lunacharsky's religious ideas was Lenin, who attacked him in his 1908 Materialism and Em piriocriticism . Lunacharsky wrote a half dozen plays and 20 "dram alettes” (one-act plays) of a melodramatic nature. He favored active dram atis personae and was opposed to Meierkhol'd's passive creations. Lunacharsky was also active as a translator from the German. His chief activity, however, was in the area of criticism — nearly 2,000 articles, book reviews, and lectures. Lev Trotsky (assumed name of Lev Bronshtein, 1879-1940) was subjected to both foreign and internal exile under the Tsars, and repeated both experiences under Stalin. In 1898 he was exiled to Siberia, where he lived in a squalid village and "studied Marx while chasing the cockroaches from his pages.” In 1902 he fled to London, w ent straight to Lenin, and could hardly wait for him to get out of bed to discuss his revolutionary plans. In London, where he was so engrossed by his revolutionary work that he hardly noticed the city's
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architecture, Trotsky wrote for Iskra (The Spark) and eventually broke with the Men'sheviks. In 1905 he returned to Russia, where he was a leading participant in the Revolution of 1905. In 1907 he and 14 other members of the Petersburg Soviet were exiled to Siberia. Later that year he again left Russia, in London first meeting the man who was eventually to order his murder, Iosif Stalin, and settled in Vienna for seven years. In 1916 he spent six months in the United States, where he was editor of N ovyi m ir (The New W orld). In America, he wrote, the profession of revolutionary was considered no more crim inal than that of bootlegger. A member of the Moscow City Committee of the Bol'shevik Party, Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938) was arrested in 1910, spent six months in Moscow jails, and was exiled to Onega in 1911. He escaped within a few months and fled to Europe, where he took part in socialist anti-war agitation. After the revolution, as we shall see below, Bukharin was to play an im portant role in the young Soviet state.
Religious Dissenters Zion, will you not ask after your captive sons? Political protestors were not the only writers to go abroad to pursue their goals in greater freedom; religious dissenters also chose this route. W hile Lev Tolstoi himself remained in Russia, his most loyal follower, Vladim ir Chertkov (1854-1936), was deported for his work in assisting the Dukhobor sect to em igrate to Canada. From 1897 to 1908 Chertkov remained abroad, publishing in English the newspaper The Free Word, which was devoted to the student movement and Russian sectarianism. In 1908 he returned to Russia, settled down on Tolstoi's estate Yasnaya Polyana, and led the "Tolstoians” in opposing the more traditional views of Tolstoi's wife, whose pressure on her husband had caused the w riter to undertake his final journey, leaving Yasnaya Polyana surreptitiously on foot and dying in a small railroad station. Another w riter who took an interest in the Dukhobors was Vladim ir Bonch-Bruevich (1873-1955), who had been an émigré from 1896 to 1905. In 1899 he even accompanied the Dukhobors in their resettlem ent to Canada.
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America: Economic and Religious Emigration Alaska The first Russians to appear in North America arrived on the W est rather than the East Coast — a circumstance that sets them off from other European immigrant groups. As might be expected, the Alaska chapter of Russian emigration to the United States has very little literary significance. On instructions received from the dying Peter the Great, Captain Vitus Bering, a Danish sea officer, led an expedition across the North Pacific in 1728 and discovered the straits that still bear his name. In 1741 he undertook a second expedition. Although Bering died during the expedition, his crew returned home with pelts worth $30,000 — a sum large enough in those days to give birth to a vigorous Russian trapping industry. In 1783 the Irkutsk merchant and explorer Grigory Shelikhov led a Russian expedition to Alaska and built a fort at Three Saints Harbor. Catherine the Great was reluctant to support Shelikhov's plans, but her son Pavel, who continued to take great joy in reversing his m other's decisions after her death, granted Shelikhov monopolistic rights to develop Alaska in 1799. In 1805 Nikolai Rezanov, head of the Russian-American company, built a school and library in Sitka. By 1833 over 600 Russians resided in Alaska, and by 1850 the territory boasted 9 churches and 37 chapels. The Russian population after that grew largely as a result of intermarriage of Russian men with Aleutian women, but in 1867 Russia sold Alaska to the United States for seven million dollars, thus converting Alaska's Russian citizens into American "citizens by purchase.” According to the census there were nearly 800 Russians in the territory, men outnumbering women by three to one. Many of the Russians moved on to California, but a considerable cultural-religious heritage was left behind among the native Alaskans, despite the often cruel treatm ent they sometimes received at the hands of the Russian settlers.
Demographics The collective m em ory is ultim ately the motherland. Leszek Kotakowski Combined American, Canadian, and Argentine immigration figures alone show 4,509,495 individuals as having arrived between 1828 and 1915 from the Russian Empire. The actual emigration from
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Russia was preceded by a shift of population within the empire. Beginning in the middle of the 19th century there was a considerable internal migration to Russia's southern and south-eastern territories. With the coming of the railroad there was also migration to the Far East, with over IV 2 million settlers looking for land there. The governm ent encouraged this resettlement, but by the last quarter of the 19th century agricultural laborers began travelling westward instead, to Prussia and Austria, and especially to America. Using "foreign statistics,” the Brokgauz and Efron encyclopedia, published in the late 19th century, indicates that the chief destination of the émigrés during the period 1886 to 1902 was the United States. Some also left for South America. Many of the em igrants were not Russian, but shtetl Jews, with a considerable contingent of Belorussian and Ukrainian peasants, who are described with revolutionary pathos in Korolenko's 1895 novella W ithout a Language (Bez yazyka). O f the 1.5 million immigrants registered by the U.S. Census Bureau as having arrived from the Russian Empire in 1910-30 the vast m ajority were Jews (58%), Poles (11%), or Germans (8%). "Russians” comprised only 15-17% of the group, and many of these were actually either Belorussian, Carpatho-Russian®, or Ukrainian. In general the tsarist governm ent attempted to discourage this out-m igration. W ork abroad was supposed to be limited to a period of five years, and persons who took foreign citizenship and later returned home could be sent into internal exile. For whatever reason, the percentage of ethnic Russians declined even further after the turn of the century. Most immigrants in the United States from the Russian Empire on the eve of W orld W ar I were farmers and working class people. Just as significant as the relatively small percentage of ethnic Russians in this group was the fact that many of the ethnic Russians were single males who had come to earn money and then return home. In 1909, for example, 42% went back to Russia, but by 1913 that figure had dropped to a little over 16%. Only 15% of ethnic Russian émigrés to Am erica were women, as opposed to 43.4% among the Jews, causing one American researcher to comment that "The paucity of Russian women results, to some extent, in a suppression of normal sex responses.” Children below the age of 14 comprised only 3.4% in the Russian group, and persons older than 44 constituted even less — 1.6%. Such figures are evidence of an emigration that was intended by most of the ethnic Russians to be temporary. A census of one of the districts in the
•400,000 Carpatho-Russians emigrated to the United States from 1880 to 1914, most of them settling in Pennsylvania mining districts.
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Chernigov guberniya showed that 62% of the peasants who had travelled to America remained there from one to two years, 35% stayed two to five years, and only 3% spent more than five years. In contrast, the overwhelming majority of Jews remained, with only 4.7% to 10% returning. It should be noted that Russian emigration also increased significantly in the period immediately preceding World W ar I. If, according to one tsarist source, only 21,000 ethnic Russians arrived in the U.S.A in the eight years preceding 1907, the figure for the next seven years was 144,000. By the end of the reign of Nikolai II the population outflow was so massive that the governm ent was forced to accept it as a reality; for a tim e the tsarist officials even nurtured a vague hope that Russians abroad would be so horrified by Western democracy that they would be cured of the disease. From 1820 to the 1917 October coup some three and a quarter million persons are recorded as having entered the United States from Russia. The figures for emigration to the United States provided by the Brokgauz and Efron and the official U.S. statistics differ considerably. For example, the Brokgauz and Efron figure for 1886 is 32,143, as opposed to only 17,800 according to U.S. statistics. For 1902, on the other hand, the Brokgauz and Efron provides only 55,368, as opposed to 107,347, according to U.S. statistics. For the period 1886-1902 the Brokgauz and Efron indicates a total of 703,088 as having emigrated to the United States, as opposed to 849,461, according to U.S. statistics. The official U.S. statistics are probably more accurate for the United States. Just how reliable the Brokgauz and Efron statistics are for other countries is difficult to surmise. In many cases, however, it seems obvious that the Brokgauz and Efron must be widely off the mark. In general pre-1917 Russian statistics could not be particularly reliable in view of the fact that many of the emigrants left Russia secretly and thus were not registered anywhere in tsarist records. In the United States the areas of settlem ent chosen by the new em igrants were widely scattered: Massachusetts — 41,669 (1915), Ohio — 48,756 (1915), New York — 60,000 (1917), Pennsylvania — 35,000 (1917), Illin o is— 50,000(1917), M ichigan— 30,000(1917), New Jersey — 25,000 (1917), Connecticut — 20,000 (1917). The breakdown by cities is estim ated as: New York — 40,000, Detroit — 17,000, Chicago — 16,000, San Francisco — 15,000, the greater Pittsburgh area— 14,000, Philadelphia— 12,000, Newark— 10,000, Jersey C ity— 8,000, Cleveland — 5,000, Saint Louis — 5,000. The massive exodus from Russia was brought to a halt by W orld W ar I, when steamship travel became dangerous, and then by Soviet "locked borders” after 1917.
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Poverty W hether ethnically Russian or Jewish, the new im migrants in Am erica were, for the most part, among the poorest of the poor. In the period 1899-1910 they arrived in the United States with savings averaging between 11 and 19 dollars. By 1910-14 the émigrés were still more impoverished, and only 5.3% had more than 50 dollars upon arrival. Salaries of W h cents an hour at the Pittsburgh steel mills were sufficient to attract a number of the new arrivals; low as such pay may have been even then, a significant portion of these wages was nevertheless sent home to Russia to fam ily members in still greater need. A letter published in the New York Russian-language paper Russkaya zemlya (The Russian Soil) in 1914 described their lives: Peer into the subterranean kingdom o f the mines, into those places where God's light does not penetrate and where there reign eternal darkness and the dankness o f the grave. W hat figures w ill you see there, often knee-deep in cold water, bent over o r prone, in narrow passages, covered with mud, choking from dust and harm ful gases, threatened every m inute by a thousand dangers? In the dim light o f the flickering lamps, people look more like ghosts than living, m oving human beings. M any o f them have worked for years in this hopeless kingdom o f darkness. Some o f them have becom e so accustom ed to their situation that they can no longer tolerate daylight, and take no pleasure in the jo ys o f the world.... Go to the factories that m anufacture pig iron. There you w ill see a sea o f smoke and flame.... The infernal heat is everywhere, and the bright gleam o f m olten m etal blinds the men who work there. Lumps o f m olten iron fly in a ll directions from the furnaces, and woe to him who is struck b y them. Alm ost naked, barely human, these people m ove about, sometimes in semidarkness, sometimes in the light o f red-hot blobs o f metal. To the observer they appear like m onsters from another planet.... If we were to list a ll the different types o f labor in America, we would see that the Russian worker's lo t was to be given the m ost difficult and exhausting work. Alm ost without exaggeration we can say that where there is d irt and where there is suffering, you will be sure to find a Russian worker. Another article in Russkaya zem lya (1916) described the ruinous effect of this poverty on the immigrants’ self-esteem: Recently a friend and I went into an enorm ous departm ent store on Broadway. M y companion had to buy some sm all thing, but we were unable to explain to the
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saleswoman precisely what it was that we needed. The woman wanted to be helpful and asked m y companion what his nationality was so as to find someone to interpret fo r us. M y friend responded without a second thought that he was French. They brought a salesman who could barely speak the language, and we m anaged to make the purchase, albeit with no sm all difficulty. When we le ft the store, I asked m y companion, who was from Moscow, what made him claim to be French when there were undoubtedly m any Russian Jews among the salesmen in the store. "I'm asham ed to adm it it, " he answered, "but I never say I'm Russian. Surely you can understand me. Russians abroad are viewed with either curiosity o r contempt, so I pass m yself o ff as French." From his point o f view, m y friend was undoubtedly right. We Russians really had not created a positive reputation fo r ourselves. One of the problems afflicting America's Russian communities was alcoholism. In 1915 the newspaper Russkoe slovo (Russian Word) conducted a mock trial of liquor in "The W orkers’ Cathedral” on 14th street. The "prosecutor” gave an impassioned speech, but was countered by the defense ... in verse. Nevertheless, the jury banished the defendant to Mars.
Journalism Anaxagoras, when asked if he did not care about his motherland, replied that he did care very much indeed and pointed a t the sky. Reported by Diogenes Laertius In the 1860s a modest number of Russian intellectuals came to the United States to promote the revolutionary cause, among them the priest Agapy Goncharenko, who had worked with Gertsen in London in his "Free Russian Press.” When, in 1867, Russia sold Alaska to the United States, Goncharenko was awarded a subsidy of $50 an issue from the U.S. State Department to publish a RussianAmerican newspaper for America's new citizens. For $1,700 he bought Russian type and established in 1868 (in San Francisco) the Alaska Herald, which contained eight pages and appeared twice monthly. Half the m aterials were in Russian and the other half in English. True to his form er ideals, Goncharenko used the paper to publish Russian revolutionary literature, which he sent to Siberia. Unhappy over
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Goncharenko's editorial policies, Russian diplomats in America, and evidently some émigrés as well, made their feelings known to the U.S. government, and Goncharenko eventually lost his subsidy. Despite the early appearance of the Alaska Herald, the Russian press in Am erica did not really get off the ground until the 1880s. The center of Russian publishing was New York. At first the new arrivals leaned toward a generally Russian orientation, but the preponderance of Russian Jews in this group was especially evident in the press, and Jewish materials became particularly common. From 1889 to 1892 the "workers’ newspaper" Znamya (Banner) appeared weekly in New York, publishing pieces by such revolutionary Populists as Pêtr Lavrov, Vera Zasulich, and Georgy Plekhanov. One of its contributors was the journalist Sergei Shevich, who in 1886 ran for mayor of New York; although Shevich was unsuccessful, his campaign attracted a good deal of attention in the press. Two weeklies that appeared in 1892 were Russkii listok (The Russian Page) and Russkie novosti (Russian News); the latter had a circulation of 2,000 copies. Both papers were aimed at the newly arrived audience of Russian Jews. Russkie novosti was edited by Yakov Gordin, who later became a popular author of m elodramatic plays. In 1893-94 the weekly Progress appeared, first in New York and then in Chicago. The weeklies Spravochnyi listok (Questions and Answers) and Russko-amerikanskii vestnik (The Russian-American Herald) provided useful information on the day-to-day activities of Russians in New York. Nevertheless, by 1894, the revolutionaries decided to concentrate their activities in Europe and for a while virtually stopped coming to America. By 1910 the U.S. Census showed 95,137 persons indicating their native language was Russian; of these 57,926 were foreign-born. By the turn of the century this population base was large enough to support a number of Russian publications.8
“Among the new periodicals w ere Velikii okean (The G reat O cean, Los Angeles, 1912-1917, appeared three tim es a w eek), Russkaya zhizn' (Russian Life, Detroit, 1915-1918, weekly), the Social-Revolutionaries' Volya (Freedom , N Y , 1915, w eekly), Trud (Labor, Pittsburgh, 1914-1916), and Am erikanskii pravoslavnyi vestnik (The American Orthodox Herald, NY, 1899-1915). Most of these proved to be quite ephem eral publications, but by 1918 Mark Vil'chur, a form er editor of Russkoe slovo, w as able to list som e 21 Russian periodicals appearing in the United States and Canada. They included Novyi m ir (The New W orld, NY, founded in 1911 by the M en’sheviks), the humorous Zhizn' ism ekh (Life and Laughter, N Y, founded in 1914, w eekly), the Carpatho-Russian Golos naroda (Voice of The People, 1917), and Russkii golos (The Russian Voice, NY, 1917). O ne of them still exists and even prospers, today: Russkoe slovo (The Russian W ord, N Y , 1910; later renamed Novoe russkoe slovo [The New Russian W ord]).
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One journalist was Vladim ir Geins, who arrived in America in 1868 and wrote articles about American life under the pseudonym W illiam Frey for magazines back home: Otechestvennye zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland), Delo (The Cause), Nedelya (The Week), and Vestnik Evropy (The Herald of Europe). In Am erica Geins established a Russian-Jewish commune in Oregon called The N ew Odessa, where he preached vegetarianism and religious positivism. Later Geins lectured in New York State and acquired a considerable number of adherents. Humanity, he taught, was a living organism in which individual people were only temporary atoms. Religion and science had to be unified to create a great human brotherhood without private property.
The Jews ... the m ost experienced exiles, exiles p a r excellence, the Jews. Leszek Kotakowski Russian estimates of pre-1917 emigration from the Russian Empire in the period 1899-1909 show only 4.4% of the émigrés as Russian, the rest being Jews (43.8%), Poles (27%), Lithuanians (9.6%), Finns (8.5%), and Germans (5.8%). According to another estimate, based on the native language indicated for the 1910 U.S. census, ethnic Russians comprised only 2.4% of arrivals from the Russian Empire. No understanding of the huge Jewish exodus from the Russian Empire is possible w ithout taking into consideration the historical circum stances that gave rise to it. At first excluded from Russian territories, the Jews found themselves incorporated on a massive scale into the Russian Empire after the first partition of Poland in 1772. Under the influence of liberal Western ideas, Catherine the Great originally called for their integration into the empire but changed her mind by 1791, when she first established the "Pale of Jewish Settlem ent” (Cherta osedlosti). The Pale extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea, expanding and shrinking alternately over the years, and eventually came to include 15 gubem iyas .a Fertility patterns were, of course, very different back then than now: from one and one-half
•The Bessarabia, Chernigov, Ekaterinoslav, Grodno, Kherson, Kiev (excepting Kiev itself), Kovno, Minsk, Mogilev, Podol'sk, Poltava, Tavriya, Vilno, Vitebsk, and Volyniya gubem iyas.
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million in 1825 the Jewish population grew to nearly five million by 1897. During the reign of Aleksandr II, Jews were perm itted to settle in other areas — "where they would comprise an insignificant minority and thus partially soften their national characteristics; but for the sake of caution and gradualism, and also with the goal of preventing a rapid influx of an alien elem ent into the inner guberniyas” These groups were limited to merchants of the First Guild, persons possessing a higher education, artisans, veterans, and Jews living in Turkestan or Siberia. According to the census data of 1897 only 0.9% (44,328) of the Jews considered their native language to be Russian, and 96.9% were Yiddish speakers; that figure reached 99% in rural areas of the Pale of Settlem ent. In cities outside the Pale, however, only 80.5% indicated Yiddish as their native tongue. In spite of these census results, however, a quarter of the Jewish population was literate in Russian; Jewish males had a one-third literacy rate, higher than that of Russians and lagging behind only that of the Russian Germans. Despite the lim itations placed upon the Jews, the Jewish bourgeoisie appears to have been remarkably sym pathetic to the monarchy and viewed russification of the shtetls as a positive influence. In 1920 the Paris-based Evreiskaya trib u n a {Jewish Tribune) editorialized that the Jews were linked intim ately with Russia: These bonds consist o f the deep influence o f Russian culture on the Jews. Russia is for [Jews in ] the western provinces their country and above a ll their spiritual home. Who are the readers o f the Russian newspapers o f Wilno, Minsk, Grodno and Warsaw? Nine-tenths o f them are Jews. The Grodno paper Nashe utro (O ur Morning) is printed ha lf in Russian and h a lf in Yiddish. When one o f these Russian papers passed into Polish hands and began to support the Polish point o f view in the question o f the kresses (The Russian-Polish borderlands), a ll the Jewish contributors abandoned the paper. The Jews represent the sole conquest made in the western provinces, not by Russian arms, but b y Russian culture. The assimilation of Jewish intellectuals into Russian culture was particularly evident. For example, Trotsky in his autobiography consistently speaks of himself as a Russian, not a Jew. Some Jews were even openly hostile to their own Jewish heritage. Sheer Èfron (1849-1926) was a Lithuanian Jew who composed prose works and plays in Russian under the penname Savely Litvin (meaning "Lithuanian”). Èfron-Litvin had studied in a cheder and then graduated from a rabbinical school in Vilnius, but nevertheless had no compunctions about expressing his disdain for Jewish life in his prose
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works and plays. In 1900 the St. Petersburg Malyi Theater put on a play written jointly with Viktor Kryiov under the title The Contrabandists, with one of the main roles performed by the Jewish actor Yakov Tinsky. The prem iere of the work, which described the Jewish population in a small border town as consisting of bandits and murderers ready to commit any crime for the sake of money, engendered such riots that the actors fled the stage and the alarmed censor forbade any mention of the play in the press and even shut down the newspaper Severnyi Kur'er (Northern Messenger), which organized a counter-campaign. Èfron himself was widely attacked as a turncoat and slanderer. After the 1917 October coup he escaped first to Feodosiya, in the Crimea, and then to Serbia, where he took vows as an Orthodox monk.3 The first pogroms occurred in 1859, and again in 1871. When Aleksandr II was assassinated in 1881, the fact that one of the conspirators was a Jewish woman received wide publicity. Over 100 pogroms occurred that year alone. They continued until 1884. A second onslaught took place in the wake of the October Manifesto of 1905, which was regarded as a humiliation of the Tsar, forced upon him by Jewish revolutionaries. 1915-21 were years of particularly violent pogroms, the Jews having been accused of aiding and abetting the enemy during the war. Altogether the historian S. M. Dubnov counted 887 m ajor pogroms and 349 minor ones; an estimated 60,000 persons lost their lives and 200,000 were injured. These events, together with the russification policies of Aleksandr III and the introduction of universal conscription into the army in 1874, which included Jews, engendered a massive exodus. Most of the émigrés left for North America. In the period 1881-1908,1,250,000 Jews emigrated from Russia to the United States, while Canada attracted 30,000 and Argentina 20,000. England drew 150,000, but France, Germany, and Belgium only 30,000, 20,000, and 5,000, respectively. South Africa accepted 15,000 and Egypt 10,000, while 20,000 (about 1.3%) relocated to Palestine.
•Èfron must have spent some tim e abroad in the 1880s, having criticized the ém igrés as immoral and satirized them in 1889 in Ta/es From the Life o f the G eneva Rebels (Rasskazy iz byta zhenevskikh buntarei).
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Writers An exile's life is no life. B ut the M uses love me. For m y suffering they gave me a honeyed g ift: M y name survives me. Leonidas of Tarentum (c. 290 - c. 220 B.C.)
Neither the background of the new arrivals to the United States nor their material situation was such as to be conducive to the composition of poetry and fiction. Indeed, 92% of them belonged to the peasant laboring class. These were uneducated people who had to earn a living by the sweat of their brow. Nevertheless, there was a modest amount of literary activity. In the late 1860s the Russian w riter A. S. Kurbsky settled in the United States, travelled all over the country, and published a series of essays back home in the Vestnik Evropy (The Herald of Europe). One writer, Grigory Machtet, arrived in the United States in 1871 and helped establish a Russian commune in Kansas which quickly folded. In San Francisco he met Goncharenko, who published some of his verse in Svoboda (Freedom — the Alaska Herald renamed). M achtet is the author of a collection Travelling Around the W orld with one story entitled The Pull of America. Vladim ir Stoleshnikov (7-1907) had been a close friend of Tkachêv and Nechaev and had helped publish Nabat in Switzerland from 1875 to 1876. He arrived in Am erica in the late 1870s. There he published his verse and political parodies in Znamya. A lawyer and architect, he helped design Carnegie Hall. Osip Dymov (pseudonym of Iosif Perel'man, 1878-1959) had been a professional prose writer and journalist since the turn of the century. He emigrated to the United States in 1913, having published half a dozen books in Russia. In the United States he continued to publish in Russian and Yiddish, particularly plays. An eclectic writer, he began his career as a sentim entalist, but wrote many humorous works and tried his hand at psychological prose.
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The Soviet Period The First W ave Statistics Unless statistics lie he was more brave than m e: more blond than you. E. E. Cummings If, in Pushkin's phrase, Peter the Great "hewed a window through to Europe” and later tsars attempted to board over that opening so as to keep unwelcome prodigal sons from returning home, it was the Soviets who went even further and applied what had been known in 17th-century Prague as "defenestration.” As it became increasingly evident that the W hites were losing the civil war, no active process of ejection was required on the authorities’ part. Educated society in particular was only too eager to flee the dictates of a leftwing group of intellectuals freshly arrived from Parisian "exile” to instruct the working class in what was referred to as "recognized necessity.” Although individual Russians made their way abroad as early as 1918, the mass exodus began only in 1920, when General Denikin's army was defeated and a massive evacuation was undertaken from the Black Sea port of Novorossiisk. Admiral Kolchak's forces were crushed in the Far East, and many Russians fled to Harbin and Shanghai, which already had large Russian populations to maintain the rail link to China. Also that year VrangeC’s army was evacuated to Istanbul from the Crimea, and later was dispersed throughout France, the Balkans, and Czechoslovakia. Historically, radical political upheaval has been accompanied by correspondingly massive emigration, and while the institution of M arxist governm ents proved no exception, Russia was the first in that series of events. On the whole, it is quite difficult to assess the accuracy of estimates of Russia's population losses in the period im m ediately following the civil war. The émigré historian Pêtr Kovalevsky estimated an expatriate population of somewhere between nine and ten million people: to the 1,160,000 who were estimated by the League of Nations to have left Russia after the 1917 October coup are added Russians residing in areas split off from the Russian empire:
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Poland— 5,250,000a; Bessarabia— 742,000; Slovakia-Eastern Ukraine (Carpatho-Ruthenia) — 550,000; Latvia — 231,000; Estonia — 91,000; Lithuania — 55,000; Finland — 15,000. But there were also those who returned to M other Russia — over 180,000 between 1921 and 1931. The enormous wave of Russian refugees outside of Russia was not a unique phenomenon; there were another 1.4 million Russian prisoners of war, of whom 1.2 million were still in Germany as late as October 1918. Large, additional numbers were interned in 70 camps, with 230,000 working in agriculture and another 650,000 in industry. When the war came to a close the majority of these men wanted to return to Russia and in their restlessness posed a real threat to German law and order — especially under the influence of the revolutionary events in Russia. The Germans exercised only nominal supervision over the camps, and on a number of occasions the prisoners were released by sym pathetic German "comrades” to make their way to Berlin in hopes of getting home from there. For their part, the Germans wanted to be rid of the Russians as quickly as possible — both because of the practical difficulties involved in maintaining them and also in view of the successful communist propaganda campaign being conducted in their ranks. Huge columns of ragged, hungry men began the trek eastward in the bitter cold. On January 16, 1919, however, Supreme Allied Commander Marshal Foch decided to stop the repatriations in the hope of recruiting these men to fight on the side of the W hite armies or, at the very least, of preventing them from filling the ranks of the Red army. Given until February 2 to stop the repatriations, German officials hurriedly sent 400,000 Russians home — by ship and train. Nevertheless, it soon became rapidly evident that the W hites had lost the civil war, and the repatriations continued. In December 1920, the Germany Ministry of Internal Affairs declared that the bulk of Russian prisoners of war had been repatriated. This may have been som ewhat premature, since only three months later there were still some 30,000 Russian prisoners of war registered in Germany and another 40,000 to 50,000 were "at large” (flüchtig). The Russians in the German POW camps lived under very difficult conditions. 50,000 actually died in captivity. There were attem pts to fight the prevailing boredom by organizing choirs and staging theatrical performances; the camp at Altengrabow even had two resident am ateur theater companies. Camp newspapers were published, among them Daite zh it' (Let Me Live), evidently published
“Ukrainians and Belorussians w ere probably included in the figure, classified as "Russians."
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in Altengrabow, and a Soviet publication — Izvestiya Russkogo Byuro Voennoplennykh (News of the Russian Prisoner of W ar Bureau). Some of the Russians, particularly the officers, resisted repatriation, and the German government eventually decided not to forcibly deport such persons. By February 1922 between 12,000 and 20,000 form er Russian prisoners of war were permitted to remain, and the prisoner-of-war camps in Altenau, Altengrabow, Celle, Quedlinburg, Lichtenhorst, W ildemann, and W ünsdorf began to close. Under these circum stances the distinction between a "refugee” and a "prisoner of war” or, for that matter, between an émigré and a Soviet citizen residing in Germany, became very vague indeed. The composition of the First Wave had a high percentage of m ilitary men. This was hardly surprising in view of the fact that an estim ated 71/2 million men were serving in the Russian armies on the Austro-German front in 1917, not to speak of veterans of the various W hite armies. But while this imparted a definite military bent to émigré culture, it would be a mistake to view the First Wave exclusively in this light. The first edition of the G reat Soviet Encyclopedia thus describes the inverted social pyramid of the W hite emigration: Although there are no precise data on the social com position o f the White emigration, the shattered remains o f the Russian bourgeoisie, the landed gentry and (tsarist) officials undoubtedly predom inate in it. Within the White émigré com m unity there are a t least 1,000,000 participants in the White arm ies — m ost o f them officers, volunteers, and cadets, drawn prim arily from the nobility o r products o f the upper o r middle bourgeoisie, and ... the kulak stratum.... The bulk o f the rem aining White em igration is made up o f form er members o f the landed gentry, capitalists, tsarist officials, priests, etc. Within the ranks o f the White em igration the intelligentsia is represented b y its upper la y e rs ... chiefly lawyers, journalists, professors, adm inistrativetechnical personnel, and so forth. How is it that an official Soviet government publication could so frankly adm it that the cream of society had fled the country en masse? Such admissions were still possible in the early Soviet period, when total censorship had not yet been imposed. Nevertheless, this "brain drain” was regarded by an egaiitarian world view as a temporary loss — not, in the words of the non-émigré writer Lidiya Chukovskaya, a genetic "bloodletting” of society. The relentless war waged against its own intellectuals was to become a topic of concern for a number of Russian scholars. The émigré writer and historian Nina Berberova wrote that the Russian tragedy resulted from a split between the intelligentsia and the people and worried that the consequences of the
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destruction of the intelligentsia would not be overcome even in two hundred years. A later emigrant, Aleksandr Zinov'ev, wrote: W hat will the Russian people contribute to the world com m unity once it has disappeared from the face o f the Earth as an ethnic unit? In point o f fact, Russia is disappearing as a nation. The revolution, civil war, collectivization, endless repressions, and the Second W orld W ar have a ll crushed Russia as a national entity. For a long time now Russia has ceased to exist. A nd she will never be again. O nly the Russian population remains — as m aterial for som ething else, perhaps, but not for a nation. The philosopher Georgy Fedotov in an article entitled "Tragedy of the Intelligentsia” described the massive murder and exile of Soviet Russia's intellectuals as a national "loss of memory” (poterya pamyati). This was indeed the case, although the magnitude of change was not really comparable to that brought about by the introduction of the East Slavs to Christianity. Communism lasted seven decades, not seven centuries— the amount of tim e that lapsed between the Christianization of Rus' and the Petrine reforms — and the cultural gap that lay between the tsarist exiles who pulled off the coup of 1917 and the intellectuals who took their seats in Parisian cafés was in no way comparable to that which existed between East Slavic pagan tribes and Byzantine monks in the tenth century. This realization may be poor consolation for the tragic course of the 20th century, but it does help to maintain a proper historical perspective. On the other hand, this is adm ittedly a comparison in magnitude between a positive historical phenomenon and a national disaster; Christianity was, after all, a civilizing influence, while Soviet communism introduced an era of devastating violence.
Politics Rage3 Assassination is the extreme form o f censorship. George Bernard Shaw On the whole, Russian literature had been highly politicized under the tsars, and the Soviet period only served to strengthen this
•I had already chosen the heading for this subchapter when I cam e across the identical expression — rage — used in connection with Germ an exile literature — "Literatur des Zornes" — in an article by the Germ an critic Hans M ayer.
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tendency. One must imagine Mark Vishnyak, editor of Sovremennye zapiski (Contemporary Annals), being introduced in Paris to Pêtr Shuvalov, whose father had been governor of Moscow and was assassinated by terrorists. Vishnyak took Shuvalov aside to assure him that he had not been a party to the assassination. Another instance (one of thousands) of the intensity of political passions occurred at the funeral of Cavalry General Vladim ir Sukhomlinov, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment by the Provisional Government for his failures in leadership during the war. When the Bol'sheviks took power, instead of shooting Sukhomlinov, as they did so many other highranking tsarist officers and officials, they handed him over to the Germans under what many regarded as suspicious circumstances. He ended up in Berlin in 1918, where he wrote two books: The Grand Duke N ikolai Nikolaevich the Younger and Memoirs. One of the gravediggers at Sukhomlinov's funeral was a form er W hite officer who muttered as he was digging: "All right, German spy, return to your German earth.” And there was W hite General Denikin, who had to be evacuated from Turkey to Malta for fear of assassination by his own men, who blamed him for the defeat. Even so, such precautions failed to save his second-in-command, General Ivan Romanovsky, who was shot by a man wearing the uniform of a Russian officer. Such emotions did not fade with the years. Aleksandr Kerensky, the unsuccessful head of the Provisional Government, played an active and prominent role in ém igré life. One day, while walking down a street in Paris, he passed a Russian woman with a little girl. The woman pointed at Kerensky and said loudly: "Look Tanya. That's the man who ruined Russia.” Kerensky fell into a deep depression that lasted for days. Even four decades later the émigré newspaper Rossiya (Russia) claimed that to compare him to Judas Iscariot was an insult to Judas, who had, at least, had the courage to kill himself when he realized the treason he had wrought. Passions ran so high that a spelling reform put into effect by the Soviets was rejected by the émigrés for decades, even though it had been conceived and planned during the tsarist period. When Ivan Bunin was asked to examine a copy of the Prague magazine Studencheskie gody (Student Years) he replied: "You can send me a copy of the magazine for examination, but only if it's in the old orthography. Otherwise don't bother.” In Belgrade Professor Evgeny Spektorsky declared that: "in the Russia of the future people will be hanged for [using] the new orthography.” At a meeting of the Parisian society "The Green Lamp,” Dmitry Merezhkovsky raised the question of a "disconvergence between the intelligentsia and the Russian spirit, the soul of Russia.” He concluded that the intelligentsia itself had produced the Bol'sheviks as "typical
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Russian intellectuals” who created a philosophy "unheard of in history, unique, an unbounded evil — Satanism.” This hard-line view was institutionalized in the establishment of a "Day of Implacability” (den' neprimirimosti), observed annually on November 7, the date the W inter Palace was taken. In the U.S.S.R. the date was celebrated as the "Day of the Great October Revolution.” Such heated emotions inevitably found expression in the violence which became a regular companion of Russian émigré life. One particular act that might well have had disastrous consequences for the Russian émigré community in Paris was the assassination of French President Paul Doumer by the Russian émigré Pavel Gorgulov on May 6 ,1 9 3 2 . Ironically, Doumer had been a true friend of Russian émigrés, having organized an aid society for Russian soldiers who found themselves in France after 1920. Lev Lyubimov, ‘a Russian émigré for almost 30 years who was deported to the Soviet Union in 1948, was a correspondent for the newspaper Vozrozhdenie (Renaissance) at the time. He described how he learned of the event and immediately rushed to the scene, still unaware that the assassin was Russian. A t the entrance I m et the editor o f a m ajor French newspaper. ”So a ll our presidents are to be m urdered now, ” he said as he greeted me. I stared a t him in incomprehension, but he said nothing m ore and rushed o ff to his car.... I followed the other reporters and entered a room packed full with people. As I pushed forward, I saw a face which im m ediately im pressed itself into m y m em ory fo re ve r— round, puffy, flushed. Something in the face seem ed both fam iliar and strange to me. I had never seen that particular face before, but I knew such faces. M y sensations were still unclear, but then I heard the m an's voice. As he groped for French words, I understood him immediately. And I shuddered a t the thought that I was probably the only one there to understand him so easily, in that mass o f French reporters and police he was m y only countryman — a Russian émigré ju s t like m eI The distorted face, the Russian accent.... His bloodshot eyes seem ed to flash with a dumb, insane pride. Gorgulov, who had been beaten during the arrest, screamed out the motive for his a c t— to protest France's relations with the Soviet Union. When attacking Doumer he screamed: "The violet will defeat the machine!” In his book The Secret o f the Lives o f the Scythians (Taina zhizni skifov) he explained that the violet symbolized a tender,
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sensitive Russia, as opposed to the intellectual West. A brochure was found with the political platform of his party, the "Greens”: Russia was to be ruled by a trium virate of dictators. Its senior member was the Green dictator, the peasant leader Pavel Gorgulov. Its second and third members had not yet been selected, but the trium virate's titles had already been established: "Citizen Dictator” for Gorgulov himself, and "Citizen Vice-Dictators” for the other two. The uniforms for the various ranks were precisely described — who would wear high boots with spurs, who would wear a boyar hat, who would have striped trousers, who would have shoulder braids, etc. A notebook was found with the inscription: "Doctor Pavel Gorgulov, Head of the Russian Fascists, M urderer of the President of the French Republic.” At his trial, Gorgulov declared, however, that he was not a fascist, but a loyal adherent o f ... Kerensky! Before he was guillotined publicly, Gorgulov screamed (to the dismay of the émigré community) that he had com m itted the murder in the name of Russia and out of hatred for the Bol'sheviks. Gorgulov, whose nom de plum e was "Pavel Bred” (In Russian, bred means "ravings” or "delirium ”) — was a prose w riter and a poet: Forests! Grow treesI BeastsI Be bestiall M enl Subm it! Georgy Fedotov, criticizing fellow émigrés for their insistence on violent overthrow of the Soviet government, coined the term gorgulovshchina to indicate such doomed efforts. The reaction in the Kremlin to all this rage and violence was one of unconcealed gloating. In a 1922 article in Pravda Aleksandr Voronsky, editor of the Moscow journal Krasnaya nov\ mocked the ém igrés as "impotents” who were already beginning to sense that they were at a dead end.a Pravda itself went even further, calling the émigrés "corpses brandishing cardboard swords.” Curiously, this was virtually the same phraseology to be used by Goebbels in mocking exiled German writers in 1933: "The thread of your lives is broken; you're cadavers on leave,” he jeered. But the defeated foes — both those actually slaughtered and those merely wished dead — remained a source of morbid fascination. Stalin, who had current issues of the Paris émigré newspaper Poslednie novosti (The Latest News)
ideologically neutral literature, he pronounced, would not be tolerated: "À la guerre, com m e à la guerre." By 1927 Voronsky himself was arrested as a "Trotskyite" and exiled to Siberia. Although this form er tsarist exile recanted his sins and w as permitted to return to Moscow, he was rearrested in 1935 and shot two years later as an "enemy of the people."
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delivered to his desk, attended Bulgakov's play about the fleeing W hites, Days o f the Turbins (Dni Turbinykh), fifteen times! Nor was he the only person in Moscow to be enthralled with the lives of the foe: from 1926 to 1941 the Moscow Art Theater presented 987 performances of this stage adaptation of the novel White Guard (Belaya gvardiya).
Political Fragmentation and Hopes for Intervention Liebchen, with whom should I quarrel except in the hiss o f love, that harsh, irregular flam e? Stanley Kunitz Once the original shock of defeat and exile had receded som ewhat and it gradually became evident that a victorious return home was not imminent, the émigrés had to decide how to get along with each other.3 Even though the number of émigrés was not sufficient to support the estimated 150 Russian political parties which had existed before the revolution, the number was, nevertheless, still quite large. Compared to the ideological views of tsarist exiles, the spectrum of émigré political credos had been broadened considerably; not only did the émigrés not form anything like a unified community, they seemed to live in different worlds, shaped by their divergent political views. On the right were the monarchists, the Mladoross (Young Russia) party, the "post-revolutionary" (porevolyutsionnye) movements, the Solidarists, and the Russian Fascists. In the center were the Constitutional Democrats (The Cadets), and on the left the Social Revolutionaries, the Men'sheviks, the Eurasians, and the "Changing Landmarks” (Smena vekh) group.6 Despite their manifold political disagreements, the émigrés recognized the need to unite in the struggle against the victorious Bol'sheviks. Lenin anguished over the fact that the émigrés were
■For a discussion of the topic see Mityukov's 1926 Com m unity a t a Crossroads (Èm igratsiya na pereput'e).
book
The Ém igré
bThis heterogeneity is not an unusual phenomenon in the world context of emigration. The Germ an émigré writer Lion Feuchtwanger in his 1940 novel Exile noted the infighting in the Germ an émigré community during the Nazi period, but with an ethnic self-centeredness typical of ém igré existence, saw such divisions as something uniquely Germ an.
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willing to pay any price to overthrow the revolution, and the émigré economist, historian, and politician Pêtr Struve (1870-1944) seemed to confirm the fears of the first head of the Soviet state when he commented that he didn't care who overthrew the Bol’sheviks — the liberal Kerensky or the arch-conservative Markov II. But how was this to be accomplished? Nikolai Astrov, the form er mayor of Moscow residing in Prague, advised Russians abroad to refrain from accepting citizenship in their new countries of residence so as to avoid denationalization. He was opposed by Struve, who believed that if they were to be effective in their struggle against the new government of Russia, the émigrés had to be financially secure and integrated into their new lives. The chief issue of émigré debates at the tim e was the nature of the "W hite Idea” — the unification of the various groups to achieve the overthrow of the Soviet government. Many hoped for foreign m ilitary intervention, a contingency which Markov II declared could be rejected only by fools hoping for a miracle. On the other hand, when Struve led a delegation of émigrés to visit the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, who had just been deported, Berdyaev went into near hysterics over any talk of intervention by the Western powers. The Prague newspaper Volya Rossii went even further, favoring international recognition of the Soviet state and condemning military intervention as hopeless. Faced with such a broad range of political views, many adopted the position that the achievement of a united front required renouncing any specific political platform for Russia until after the communists were overthrown. This view was referred to as nepredreshenchestvo (non-predeterm ination). As the interwar period progressed, rightist movements generally gained strength, but liberals and leftist organizations were financially better off and, according to the contem porary German historian Hans von Rimscha, controlled 80 percent of the émigré press. And the literary and journalistic establishm ent of the new host countries was even further to the left. Russian writers — both outside and within the Soviet Union — had expected their foreign colleagues to support them in their hour of need, but instead they found themselves running up against a wall of indifference. In 1927 Russian émigré papers published a letter, supposedly received from Moscow, attacking Western writers for their silence at a tim e when Russian literature was being strangled in its native country: W riters — ear, eye, and conscience o f the world — answ er u si It does not behoove you to maintain that na ll authority comes from G od.” You will not say to us the cruel words: "each people desen/es the governm ent which rules i t ”
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O ur only weapon— the p e n — has been snatched from our hands. We are deprived o f the a ir we need to breathe — literature.... We send you this letter as from an underground dungeon. We write it a t great risk, and those who forward it abroad will also be in m ortal danger. We do not know if it w ill reach the pages o f the free press. But if it does, if our voice from the grave sounds among you, we bid you — listen, read, think o f its message. The standard o f conduct o f our late great man — Lev Tolstoi — will then become your own standard: 1 cannot remain silent.” — A group of Russian writers* Despite its eloquence, the appeal was ignored by W estern writers; in 1928, however, Konstantin Bal'mont and Ivan Bunin did manage to publish an appeal protesting this lack of attention in L ’A venir. A few days later Romain Rolland asked Gor'ky, then still residing in the West, if all this was true. In the March issue of L'Europe Gor'ky responded that it was a lie.
The Church Let there be no violence in religion. Koran, Surah 2 It was only natural that in their new circumstances the refugees would cling with special tenacity to their traditional faith. Faced with open war declared in the Soviet Union upon religion and themselves refugees fleeing a "godless” government, Church figures them selves became intim ately involved with politics, thus complicating the situation even further. The Crimean evacuation brought with it a number of bishops, who on November 1, 1919, with the blessing of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, formed the Russian Church Administration Abroad. Patriarch Tikhon in Moscow, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, desiring to confirm the legitimacy of this decision, issued decree (ukaz) No. 362 on November 20,1920. This document, which is regarded as
•O f course, Russians w ere only one of many émigré groups to encounter disbelief from W estern writers over the horror stories they brought from home. In 1934 the Germ an League of Proletarian-Revolutionary W riters sent a strikingly sim ilar and equally anguished appeal for support from writers in other countries.
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the canonical foundation of what is known today as "The Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia,” states that if the Supreme Church Administration should for any reason cease its activity, then any diocesan bishop would immediately be authorized to enter into relations with the bishops of neighboring dioceses with the aim of organizing a body to serve as a supreme authority or even to take such authority upon himself. From November 21 to December 3,1921, the Supreme Church Administration Abroad convened a council (soboi) of 13 bishops, 23 priests, and 67 laymen in Sremski Karlovci, Serbia, which declared loyalty and submission to the Patriarch of Moscow but called for foreign m ilitary intervention to overthrow the Soviet government and restore the Romanov dynasty. Monarchist sympathies were so deeply ingrained in the Church Abroad that as late as the 1938 Episcopal Council, held in Yugoslavia, Archbishop Ioann (Maksimovich) accused the entire Russian nation of complicity in regicide. Patriarch Tikhon himself anathematized the Bol'sheviks in 1918, but in March of that same year he was placed under house arrest, and on May 5 he issued a new ukaz, suspending the Supreme Church Administration Abroad for engaging in politics and appointing Metropolitan Evlogy of Paris as the new head of the Church Abroad. Supposedly, Tikhon issued the declaration under threat of execution of the entire Moscow clergy. Evlogy himself originally refused to accept the order. O ut of obedience to the Patriarch, but aware of the pressure placed upon him, the Supreme Church Administration Abroad grudgingly accepted the latest decree but shortly thereafter created the Tem porary Holy Episcopal Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad as its own replacement. On March 25,1925, Tikhon died under suspicious circumstances, and most of his staff was arrested and exiled to Siberia. Meanwhile, Evlogy had reexamined his position with regard to Ukaz No. 362 and now maintained that he was head of the Russian Church abroad, having been appointed by Tikhon. In JuneJuly 1926 Evlogy left the Synod, creating the Russian Orthodox Church in W estern Europe and taking with him 10 bishops and 62 parishes. But 18 bishops declared themselves loyal to the Synod. Both groups appealed to the new Metropolitan in Moscow, Sergy, who at first declined to intervene on the grounds that he was poorly informed about the nature of their quarrel. In December 1926 Sergy was imprisoned for refusing to excommunicate all bishops in exile, but he was released in July 1927 after agreeing to issue a "declaration” demanding that the clergy abroad sign a written promise of com plete loyalty to the Soviet government, which had threatened to arrest the entire clergy if he refused to do so. Evlogy signed the oath
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so as not to endanger the Church in Russia, maintaining that he understood "loyalty” as abstention from political activities. The Synod, however, rejected the loyalty oath as "an unheard-of and unnatural union between the godless authorities and the Holy Orthodox Church,” forbade Evlogy to perform religious functions, and demanded that his fellow believers refuse to pray with him. Meanwhile, the Russian Orthodox Greek-Catholic Church in America, whose roots went back to the 1790s, when the first Russian clergy arrived via Alaska and which had 100,000 members in 169 parishes on the eve of the Russian revolution, had substantial differences with Evlogy but eventually supported him in denying the authority of the Synod. The American Church also appears to have supported the loyalty oath, at least somewhat. In 1930 Evlogy travelled to England, where he took part in a prayer service for the "suffering Russian Church,” but was reprimanded by Sergy and ogee again began to rely on Tikhon's 1920 ukaz rather than the 1921 appointm ent. Thus, separate Russian Orthodox churches abroad came into existence: a) the (Synodal) Russian Church Abroad (also known as The Russian Church Outside of Russia), b) Evlogy's Russian Orthodox Church in W estern Europe, which recognized the authority of the Moscow Patriarch, and c) the Russian Orthodox Church in America. The Church in America eventually sought to resolve its vague ecclesiastical status by seeking "autocephaly” (independence) from the Church in Moscow, while Evlogy preferred to enter the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople. Since the Russian Orthodox Church had for centuries taught that Moscow was the "Third Rome” after the Greeks had been punished for their sinful ways, this recognition of the authority of the Constantinople Patriarchate definitely represented a radical change in policy. Inevitably, the Synod accused Evlogy of "selling out” to Constantinople. Synodal archbishop Serafim even declared that Evlogy had abandoned the Mother Church, and declared him to be, not a Russian, but a Greek bishop. In June 1928 the Moscow Patriarchate declared the Synod to be guilty of disobedience and schism, and form ally condemned and expelled the entire Church Abroad. The following year saw the passage of the Soviet Law on Religious Associations. Church buildings were converted into clubs and dance halls, and religious education was prohibited even more strictly than before. Priests and bishops continued to be arrested and to perish in Soviet forced-labor camps. W hen Metropolitan Sergy declared to foreign journalists that the Church in Russia was not being persecuted, Evlogy's ideological stance was subjected to devastating criticism within the exile community. That same year Sergy appealed to other local Patriarchs of the Orthodox Church to forbid activities of the Russian Church
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Abroad, but the appeal remained unheeded. In the confusing religious politics of the 1930s the American Church tem porarily reunited with the Church Abroad, and in 1934-35 Evlogy came to a provisional understanding with the Synod. By 1937 the Great Purges were in full swing throughout the Soviet Union, and in 1938 the Second Sobor of the Russian Church Abroad reconfirmed its unwillingness to rejoin the Moscow Patriarchate. The ém igrés’ conservative political outlook found expression in religious affairs, and a resolution of the 1926 Synod recommended that the Paris Theological Institute, a creation of the Evlogian church, reject "Judeo-Masonic” financial support. In 1936 Father Sergei Bulgakov, an em inent theologian and member of the Institute, was declared a heretic by both the Synod and the Moscow Patriarchate. Later, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, they supported the Synod over the Evlogian Church, which recognized Moscow's ecclesiastical authority. W hen an Orthodox cathedral was built in Germany in 1938, the German governm ent made a sizeable donation and Metropolitan Anastasy even wrote a letter to Hitler thanking him for the donation and calling him "a leader in the struggle for peace and truth ... for whom the Russian people should constantly send their prayers to God.” That same year the German government handed over all Evlogian parishes and property to the Synod.
The Constitutional Democrats (Cadets) The fly-blown phylacteries o f the Liberal Party Archibald Philip Primrose, Earl of Rosebery Established in 1905, the Constitutional Democratic Party called for a constitutional and parliamentary monarchy in the English mold which would strictly observe such fundamental human rights as freedom of speech and movement and the right of workers to form unions and strike. This was a liberal party which called for gradual reform rather than radical revolution. Upon coming to power, the Bol'sheviks immediately declared the Cadets to be "enemies of the people.” During the civil war a number of Cadets fought in the W hite armies, and when the new government had defeated its opponents on the battlefield, the Cadets were forced to flee the country. Once abroad, they split into the liberal Republican-Democratic group, headed by Pavel Milyukov, a centrist group led by Nikolai Astrov, and a conservative under Vladim ir Nabokov the elder and Anton Kartashev. The conservatives remained in Berlin, while the liberals moved on to
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Paris. Obshchee delo (Common Cause), edited by Vladim ir Burtsev, was a Cadet publication, as was the newspaper R ul' (The Helm), in Berlin. On December 21,1921, Milyukov issued a statem ent entitled "W hat to Do After the Crimean Catastrophe?", in which he proposed that the Cadets renounce their form er reliance on military defeat of the Bol'sheviks and, rather, attem pt to undermine them from within. Instead of achieving its stated cause, the "new tactic” served only to create intra- and inter-party factionalism. On December 14,1922, the leaders of the tiny Cadet faction in Berlin form ally voted to disband,3 and the effectiveness of other groups in Paris, Warsaw, Belgrade, Prague, Vyborg, Harbin, and Vladivostok was dissipated.
The Social Revolutionaries (SRs) 4
O but we dream ed to m end W hatever m ischief seem ed To afflict mankind, bu t now That winds o f winter blow Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed. W illiam Butler Yeats The political platforms of the the liberal Cadets, the conservative Social Revolutionaries, and even the Men’sheviks’s conservative wing were really quite close. The Social Revolutionaries, who saw themselves as continuing the traditions of 19th-century revolutionary populism, had existed illegally from 1902 until 1917. In contrast to the Social Democrats with their dedication to the proletariat, the SRs saw themselves as the defenders of the peasantry, the largest class in Russia at the tim e of the revolution. Their platform called for political freedoms, the socialization of land, and the establishm ent of a dem ocratic republic. Even before 1917 they were divided between the "m inim alists,” who favored participatory democracy, and the "m axim alists,” who advocated terror and assassination. A number of other individuals and groups claimed to represent or at least to defend the interests of the peasantry — Boris Savinkov, for example, or the National Socialists (the NSs) and Kresfyanskaya Rossiya (Peasant Russia), although it would be difficult to imagine a
•Among its more prominent members w ere Iosif Gessen, Avgust Kaminka, Aleksandr Izgoev (pseudonym of Aleksandr Lande), and Aleksandr Kizevetter.
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broader cultural gap than that which existed between this émigré cultural elite in Paris and the illiterate peasantry back in Russia.“ Aleksandr Kerensky, the head of the Provisional Government, was a prom inent member of the Social Revolutionary Party, but he — like Milyukov — was forced to live in constant fear for his life since many Russians blamed him for losing Russia to the Bol'sheviks. While still head of state, Kerensky had transferred funds abroad, which he used to publish the newspaper D ni (Days), distributing it free of charge to subscribers. The general editorial line was one of moderate socialism, favoring the type of reforms attempted during the February Revolution, not those of the October coup. One group of Social Revolutionaries in Prague published the magazine Revolyutsionnaya Rossiya (Revolutionary Russia). Later, when members of this group moved from Prague to Paris, some of them began publishing Sovremennye zapiski (Contemporary Annals). Although the Cadets received funding from the Czechoslovak Russian Iniative, popularly referred to as the Action russe (see below), they hoped to receive considerably more from Western states, but to do that they had to ally them selves with the Social Revolutionaries. In August 1922 a public trial was held in Moscow of 47 Revolutionaries. In Baku the terrifying public prosecutor Nikolai Krylenko called for the complete destruction of the party. On March 18, 1923, the Soviet authorities forced those party members who had not yet been arrested to hold an "All-Russian Conference,” at which they confessed the error of their ways and voted to disband. For some tim e after this, the SRs abroad tried to remain active, but it proved im possible to revive the party, divided as it was into four major factions, and lacking a sister organization in Russia.
The Men'sheviks Democracy is, by the nature o f it, a self-canceling business; and gives in the long run a net result o f zero. Thomas Carlyle The Social Democrats were known as the Men'sheviks, since they were the minority faction in the Social Democratic Party in 1903, when they split off to form their own party (Men'shevik means minority,
•K ie s f yanskaya Rossiya w as headed by the form er Socialist Revolutionaries A.
A. Artunov and Sergei Maslov.
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while Bol'shevik signifies majority). The crux of their disagreem ent with their previous allies was their insistence that a dem ocratic regime was necessary to prepare the Russians for the overthrow of capitalism . This led to an irreconcilable split with the Bol'sheviks. After the October 1917 coup, most members of this almost exclusively Jewish group emigrated to Germany, where they had established close ties before the W orld W ar.a Since they had brought considerable sums of money and valuables from Georgia with them, having been in power there nearly five years, they were able to stay in Germany until Hitler came to power, when they shifted their declining base of operations to Paris. The Men'sheviks had a leftist faction, led by Yuly Tsederbaum (pseudonym: Martov) and Fêdor Gurvich (pseudonym: Theodor Dan), and a conservative one, led by Aleksandr Potresov; the attitude of the party's left wing toward the U.S.S.R. was one of partial approbation in some aspects. For example, they viewed separatist tendencies in Georgia as a threat to the new Socialist state, and they were often happy to publish materials which threw a positive light on events in Moscow. The economic reforms of the NEP period only encouraged them in their belief that revolution in Russia could be restrained and channeled into something much more humane and even desirable. David Dalin, for example, believed that "our revolution is bloody and horrible, but it is our own Russian revolution and we should not damn it, but fix it.” Naturally, this party of Jewish socialists was extremely unpopular in the very conservative ranks of the émigré community, and even in its strongest émigré period it was, in the words of the rightist M en'shevik Pètr Garvi, "an emigration within an em igration.” So hostile were their fellow émigrés that the Men'sheviks voluntarily chose not to proselytize, and while this policy was ultim ately disastrous to their cause, it did save them from infiltration by agents of Moscow. Created in 1921 by Yuly Martov and Rafail Reinb, the Men'shevik journal, Sotsialisticheskii vestnik (Socialist Herald), specialized in publishing materials smuggled out of the Soviet Union. It was so well informed that there were 700 subscriptions from Soviet officials, which represented a major source of funding for the publication. The chief literary critic of the journal was Vera Aleksandrova, who favored a political and sociological approach to literary scholarship.
•M any party members used pseudonyms, among them: Rafail Abramovich (Rein), Pavel Aksel'rod (Paul’), David Levin (Dalin), Sem en Monoszon (Shvarts), Sem ën Portugais (Stepan Ivanovich), V era Shvarts (Aleksandrova), Yury Tsederbaum (M artov). bLater editors were: Theodor Dan, David Dalin, and Sem ên Shvarts.
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Most of the Men'sheviks had left Russia in the early 1920s with valid Soviet passports, which they regularly renewed, and at first they preserved warm relations with their form er colleagues in tsarist exile, now reincarnated as high-ranking Soviet officials. In 1923, for example, Aleksei Rykov attended Martov's funeral and Anatoly Lunacharsky composed a magnanimous obituary. The Bol'sheviks accused their form er allies of exploiting talk of democracy as a cynical political ploy to mask their real desire to reestablish capitalism. Lenin demanded that the party be totally wiped out, and Stalin followed up on that particular piece of advice in 1931, when leading Men'sheviks in Moscow were put on trial for sabotaging the economy. In 1932 the ém igré Men'sheviks, along with Trotsky, were stripped of Soviet citizenship. After the Nazis came to power, most of the party members in Germany fled to Paris, some of them abandoning even their personal possessions and archives. After the war what was left of the party relocated to New York, but by 1965 Sotsialisticheskii vestnik was finally forced to close.
Monarchism A m erry monarch, scandalous and poor John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-1680) The Supreme M onarchist Council, headed by Markov II, the form er leader of the right wing in the Russian Duma, was located in Berlin. The m onarchist idea remained strong in the émigré community. According to Pêtr Struve, 85 percent of all the émigrés were monarchists — an assessment confirmed by Milyukov. There was even talk of the spirit of Rasputin having reappeared to save Russia from the darkness which had descended upon her. Nevertheless, the very intensity of feeling split the movement into numerous factions. The first Assembly of monarchists was held in Bad Reichenhall, Bavaria, on June 2, 1921, attended by representatives of 75 monarchist groups. According to the Council's weekly bulletin, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, uncle of Tsar Nikolai II, was to be elected "émigré dictator” in order to overthrow the Soviet government with the assistance of foreign governments, whereupon he was to be elected "All-Russian Dictator.” Those monarchists who wished to proclaim an ém igré tsar, particularly the supporters of Grand Duke Kirill Vladim irovich, referred to themselves as "legitim ists.” There was even a movement to create a sort of Soviet monarchy, preserving the Tsar but m aintaining the structure of the Soviets. By November 1922, when the second Assembly was held in Paris, the number of m onarchist groups attending had risen to 120. In
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1922 Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich declared him self "Protector” (Blyustitel' ) of the Russian throne and in 1924, when little doubt remained as to the fate of the imperial family, he assumed the title of Tsar and named his son Vladim ir heir to the throne. Supporters of the two contending claim ants to the throne were referred to as Nikolaevtsy and Kirillovtsy. Kirill's rights to the throne aroused especially heated debate. According to Imperial law, if the tsar's future wife was not a member of the Orthdox Church, she had to convert before the wedding ceremony; Kirill's mother was a Mecklenburg princess who had converted to Orthodoxy only after he was born, and his wife and German cousin Viktoria was a staunch Lutheran and a divorcée to boot, thus form ally rendering Kirill ineligible to participate in the chain of Imperial generations. And there was a second, even more serious objection to Kirill as future tsar. The October coup which brought the Bol'sheviks to power had been preceded by the February revolution, which had installed the so-called Provisional Government and limited the Tsar's authority. During the February revolution, Kirill had appeared at the Duma in the uniform of a Russian sailor and wearing a red ribbon, bringing his entire regiment with him to swear loyalty to the Provisional Government. Markov II must have found this event particularly difficult to pass over. There were also ideological differences between the two claimants. Nikolai Nikolaevich called for the Soviet governm ent to be overthrown with the aid of foreign troops, after which the Russian people would themselves decide what sort of governm ent they preferred (nepredreshenchestvo), while Kirill Vladimirovich supported a reestablishment of the monarchy but opposed intervention.3 Nevertheless Nikolai Nikolaevich was already 70 years old, and the rivalry became a moot point when he died in January 1929. Kirill's official representative was the W hite General Vasily Biskupsky, who together with the Riga German Max Scheubner-Richter had organized the first Monarchist convention in Bad Reichenhall. Biskupsky claimed he had concealed Hitler in his apartm ent after the failed Munich putsch in November 1923 and that his w ife had sold her jewelry to finance Hitler's attempted escape. Supposedly Biskupsky even supported financially the Nazi Völkischer Beobachter. If this was true, Hitler was singularly ungrateful, perm itting him to be arrested in 1933 and personally ordering that no compensation be paid him upon his release. Biskupsky was said to have received money from W olfgang Kapp, who had attempted an unsuccessful coup in 1920. But
■When approached by Kirill Vladimirovich, supported Nikolai Nikolaevich.
Vrangel'
responded
that he
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all of this is in the realm of rumor and conjecture; we do know that Biskupsky him self was chronically short of funds and was particularly interested in transferring funds deposited in the name of Nikolai II to Kirill Vladimirovich, having been promised a 15% fee if the case proved successful (it did not, and what actually happened to this money is unknown). A t the same tim e he was an informant for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (das Außenpolitische Amt). When he died, there was even a rum or that he had been killed by the Gestapo. The monarchists enjoyed considerable financial backing, for example, from fem ale members of the royal family, who even auctioned off their jewels to support them, and supposedly from German industrialists such as Gustav Krupp, and even from Henry Ford. The monarchists maintained vigorous ties with the National Socialist Party in Germany, and are thought to have exercised no small influence in shaping Hitler's anti-Jewish views. Reportedly, they even helped to finance his ascent to power. They regarded the October 1917 coup as a Jewish conspiracy and looked to the new German governm ent as a source of support. The alliance ended, however, when it became obvious that the Nazis were not about to leave Ukraine under Russian domination. Popular as monarchism was among the émigrés, however, there were also many fervent anti-royalists in their ranks. Thus, when some of the audience stood up while the tsarist anthem was played during a scene in Bulgakov's play Days o f the Turbins, others dem onstratively remained seated or even walked out. Needless to say, relations between the monarchists and the left wing of the émigré political spectrum were hostile; Markov II, for example, referred to the left as "liberal trash” (liberaTnaya skvema). Russian Jewish emigrants especially were horrified at the thought of restoration of the monarchy. At the same time, insofar as the m ajority of world Jewry had resided for centuries within the Russian Empire, Jewish exiles very much wanted to see themselves as Russian citizens who would survive in a new and reformed Russia, and for them those reforms had to preclude any return to the old order. Among the monarchist publications were the newspapers Novoe vremya (New Time), Prizyv (Call to Battle), Vozrozhdenie (The Renaissance), and Gryadushchaya Rossiya (The Future Russia), and the magazines Derzhavnaya Rus' (Great-Power Russia), Dvuglavyi orël (Double-Headed Eagle), and Vysshii monarkhicheskii sovet (The Suprem e M onarchist Council). In 1926 a Russian monarchist youth league was created to engage in terrorist activities in Russia. However, the organization was soon infiltrated by Soviet intelligence, and most of the would-be terrorists were arrested and executed after crossing the Soviet border.
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The Changing Landmarks Movement (Smena vekh) When two people are under the influence o f the m ost violent, m ost insane, m ost delusive, and m ost transient o f passions, they are required to swear that they w ill rem ain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part. George Bernard Shaw In effect from 1921 to 1928, Lenin's "New Economic Policy” (NEP) allowed a good deal of freedom in the area of trade and small commercial ventures. Soviet publishers even commissioned émigrés to write books for publication in the U.S.S.R. During the early years of the NEP Soviet writers travelled to the West, and émigrés served as correspondents for Soviet newspapers. Lenin openly conceded that this had been only a tactical move, but at the tim e many believed it represented a genuine return to a more conventional form of government. One of the movements that grew out of this wishful thinking was the Changing Landmarks Movement. The name came from a collection of essays with that title which was published in Prague in 1921. Contributors were Aleksandr Bobrishchev-Pushkin, Sergei Chakhotin, Yury Klyuchnikov, Sergei Luk'yanov, Yury Potekhin, and Nikolai Ustryalov. The movement's name was selected to dem onstrate a new set of values, distinct from those laid out in the 1909 collection Vekhi (Landmarks), authored by a group of thinkers — Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Semên Frank, Mikhail Gershenzon, Aleksandr Lande (Izgoev), Bogdan Kistyakovsky, and Pètr Struve — most of whom were later to find themselves outside Russia's borders. The 1909 collection, which was a reaction to the revolution of 1905, had rejected utilitarianism and positivism, atheism, radicalism, and revolutionism in favor of a spiritual world view. The Changing Landmarks movement view of the 1917 October coup as a purgative storm that had mercifully separated Russia from the corrupting W est (an image of long standing in Russia) represented an early attem pt to find a modus vivendi with the new Soviet government. Chakhotin's essay "To Canossa!”, for example, called upon the émigrés to do penance before the Soviet governm ent and return home. Intellectuals were called upon to renounce their misconceived hostility to the regime:
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The civil war has been irretrievably lost. Russia is proceeding along its own path, notours.... Either recognize this Russia that you hate o r remain without her, but there w ill be no "third Russia, ” concocted according to your recipes. A prom inent figure in the movement, Professor Nikolai Ustryalov (1890-1937), steadfastly proclaimed the indigenous nature of the Russian revolution: No, neither we nor the "people” can totally deny our responsibility for today's crisis — neither for its dark, nor its bright visage. It is our [crisis], truly Russian, entirely embedded in our psychology, in our past, and nothing rem otely sim ilar could possibly occur in the West. A nd even if it is m athem atically proven, as is sometimes now unsuccessfully attempted, that 90 percent o f the Russian revolutionaries are foreigners, chiefly Jews, that in no way cancels out its purely Russian nature. For better o r worse, if "alien” hands have played a role, its soul, its "inner s e lf’ is authentically Russian, intellectual, bent by the prism o f the people's psyche. Curiously, another prominent member of the group, Yury Klyuchnikov, was a form er Cadet, but nationalist feelings overwhelmed his form er convictions, much as was to happen later with Pavel Milyukov during the Second W orld War. Berlin became a center of the Changing Landmarks movement in the early 1920s. Evidently with Soviet funding, the group founded the newspapers Novaya m ysl' (New Thought) and Nakanune (On the Eve), whose literary supplement was edited by the novelist Aleksei Tolstoi and counted among its contributors Mikhail Bulgakov as its Moscow correspondent. The magazine Russkaya kniga (Russian Book), later renamed Novaya russkaya kniga (The New Russian Book), edited by Aleksandr Yashchenko with the assistance of the young Roman Gul’a, promoted the theory that the Soviet government would inevitably be forced to return to a more traditional form of rule and that the émigré community should renounce the extreme animosity it had heretofore displayed.0 Most émigrés were openly hostile to the Changing Landmarks movement — especially after learning of Ustryalov's more extreme statements about "national Bol'shevism.” A
•Gul' w as later to reject the movement vehemently, as did Yashchenko. O th e r publications which supported the movement w ere Novaya Rossiya (The New Russia, Sofia), Novosti zhizni (Life's News, Harbin), Put' (The Path, Helsinki), and Novyi put' (The New Path, Riga).
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number of writers* withdrew from the literary society Vereteno (Spindle) to protest the sympathy shown by its leaders for the Changing Landmarks movement, and in 1922 the Union of Russian W riters and Journalists voted to expel all members of Nakanune (Berlin). Attacked vituperatively byZinov'ev and Bukharin, Ustryalov, the "bard of dictatorship” (a phrase coined by Sergei Mel'gunov), taught at Harbin University and managed a branch library of the trans-Siberian railroad before he finally returned to the Soviet Union, where he perished in the purges. Sergei Luk'yanov, one of Ustryalov's collaborators in the Changing Landmarks collection, was beaten to death during his interrogation in a Soviet forced-labor camp. Aleksandr Bobrishchev-Pushkin was first sentenced to ten years im prisonm ent for "terrorist expressions” (vyskazyvanie), but then ordered executed by a revolutionary panel of three judges, known as a "troika.” Yury Klyuchnikov was executed as a spy.
Eurasianism But, softI what light through yonder window breaks! It is the east, and Juliet is the sunl W illiam Shakespeare Another m ovem ent— with religious overtones— that professed to find positive elements in the Soviet state was Eurasianism. The movement was founded by Nikolai Trubetskoi, Georgy Florovsky, Pêtr Savitsky, and Pêtr Suvchinsky, who regarded Gogol', Dostoevsky, Khomyakov, and Leont'ev as their spiritual teachers. It was launched with a collection of essays entitled Exodus to the East (Iskhod k vostoku) in Sofia in 1921.b Believing in the need for an authoritarian social structure based on religion, the Eurasians combined Slavophile ideals with a belief in a new culture which would unify both Europe and Asia. Their view was a traditional Russian concept which w ent back centuries to the idea that Russia was the "Third Rome,” and that the selfish, individualist W est had much to learn from the ideal of Russian communality. Peter the Great with all his forced W esternization was
•Among them w ere Ivan Bunin, Ivan Lukash, Vladim ir Nabokov, and Aleksandr Otsup [Sergei Gorny]. bThey w ere supported by some very prominent thinkers, such as Pêtr Bitsilli, Dmitry Svyatopolk-Mirsky, Georgy Vernadsky, Lev Karsavin, and Anton Kartashev. They published Evraziiskii vremennik (Eurasian Herald) and Evraziiskaya khronika (Eurasian Chronicle), and a newspaper, Evraziya (Eurasia).
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viewed as having gotten Russia off her special, unique path.3 W hile the Eurasians did not reject W estern civilization altogether, they had little use for the "fetish of technical ‘progress.’” A relatively young group, the Eurasians were influenced by Nikolai Berdyaev, who, although he was later to view their movement as a form of cultural isolationism, felt that contemporary democracies were in such a degenerate state that they could not serve as a source of inspiration for anyone: Liberalism, parliamentarianism, constitutionalism, democracy, juridical formalism, hum anist morality, rationalistic and em pirical philosophy are a ll creatures o f the spirit o f individualism and hum anist self assertion. A ll o f these are now living out their lives and are losing their form er significance. This is the yesterday o f our history. S trictly speaking, this dying out o f dem ocracy should be a source o f joy, since dem ocracy leads to non-being and is based not on truth, but on the formal right to choose any truth o r lie whatsoever. Moreover, in Russian conditions, dem ocracy is utopia. Should we not recognize as utopian and senseless the dream s o f abruptly transform ing Russia into a legalistic dem ocratic state, o f forcing the Russian people through humane speeches to recognize the rights and freedoms o f man and citizen, o f using liberal methods to exterminate violent instincts both am ong rulers and the ruled? Prince Svyatopolk-Mirsky, who had left Russia in 1920, was remembered by Vladim ir Nabokov as an almost perfect physical double of Lenin. A literary scholar who wrote what is still used as a popular textbook on Russian literature in English-speaking countries, he was also a representative of the left wing of Eurasianism (indeed, he considered rightist Eurasianism to be a form of mental imbalance). Mirsky found him self "in total sympathy” with communist policy and
aThis Spenglerian view of cultures in decline w as soon to become quite fashionable. By 1925 the Germ an sociologist Alfred W eber spoke of a ”reasiatization" of Russia; the poet Aleksandr Blok in a famous 1918 poem "Scythians" described an alien, slant-eyed Russian tribe peering hostilely at W estern Europe; Herm ann Hesse’s popular novel D er Steppenwolf was based on the idea of a new Karam azov-like civilization engulfing the bourgeois W est; André G ide w as captivated by this idea; and in his notes to The W aste L a n d T . S. Eliot referred to a hostile army coming over the plain. The more immediate Russian roots of the movement reach back to an essay by Vladim ir Solov’ev — "Three Conversations on W ar, Progress and the End of World History" (1899-1900) — describing an invasion of Europe under the banner of "Pan-Mongolism."
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was openly contemptuous of the views of his fellow émigrés: "Like the Bourbons,” he wrote, "the Russian émigrés have shown them selves to be among those who forget nothing and learn nothing.... [Their] intellectual sterility has been com plete.” Like the Changing Landmarks group, the Eurasians encountered considerable hostility. One of their chief opponents was the liberal Pavel Milyukov, a form er member of the Duma and editor of the influential newspaper Poslednie novosti> The impractical Eurasians perceived a certain affinity between them selves and the Soviet state, where they naively hoped to seize power. Their émigré opponents faulted them for passivity and called them "[Religiously] Orthodox Bol'sheviks.” For their part, the Soviets attem pted to use the group for their own ends and claimed that Eurasian groups existed in the U.S.S.R., urging émigrés "to liberate Russia-Europe from the oppression of European culture.” One branch of Eurasianism eventually became more and more pro-Soviet, and in 1929 the movement split. The pro-Soviet‘ faction was headed by Mirsky and Marina Tsvetaeva's husband, Sergei Èfron, while Trubetskoi and Florovsky ultim ately disassociated them selves from the movement. Mirsky returned to Russia in 1932, only to find that his political beliefs offered little protection at that particular point in Soviet history; he was arrested and sent to a Siberian forced-labor camp, where he worked in a boiler room while writing a book on the theory of verse and giving lectures on the theory of Russian literature.0 Lev Karsavin was in Lithuania in 1940 when it was occupied by Soviet troops. He remained there even after the Germans were driven out, was arrested in 1948, and died in the hospital of a Soviet forced-labor camp. Èfron was executed in 1941 as a foreign spy after returning to Russia. Like the Changing Landmarks movement, Eurasianism proved too intellectual to have any mass appeal. More m ilitant movements were to take their place among the disaffected and impoverished "younger generation” of Russian émigrés.
•Milyukov
himself w as criticized from the right, which viewed him as a
twentieth-century Stepan Verkhovensky — the well-intentioned but bumbling old man in Dostoevsky's Devils. bUntil recently he was thought to have died in Kolyma in 1941, but he may actually have survived until 1951.
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The Mladoross (Young Russian) League Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by, That here, obedient to their laws, we lie. Simonides (c. 556-468 B.C.) The "Young Russia” League was founded in Munich in 1923 and renamed the "Mladoross League”a in 1925 and published more than twenty publications, among them Mladoross (1928-1932), M ladorosskaya iskra (The Mladoross Spark, 1931-1940), and Bodrost' (Boldness, 1934-1939). Later it moved to Paris. The movement's goals as presented by its chairman Aleksandr Kazem-Bek were clearly influenced by the impending Zeitgeist of the Nazi period, albeit within the fram ework of a monarchy (a position that Soviet counterintelligence was quick to exploit, claiming that the Soviet people longed for a new tsar!): The Russian future lies in the new Russia, which we call the "young Russia“.... We do not amuse ourselves with the fiction o f a Russia abroad. We know that there is no Russia outside o f Russia. N or are there two Russias. There is one living Russia. That Russia, the only Russia, now being reborn in torturous spasms, is the young Russia. The so-called "Catastrophe,” that is, the October 1917 coup, was seen by the M ladorossy as the creation of a rootless intelligentsia, and in fact the sense of guilt among all intellectuals — regardless of political leanings — was real and palpable. W hat was supposedly needed was a return to the less effete ideals of the common man. The M ladoross League was the first major ideological and political movement created totally by the "younger generation” of émigrés. In 19th-century Russia intergenerational conflict had taken the form of a clash of views between conservative fathers and liberal sons. Now, in exile, the sons were the conservatives, and radical conservatives at that. These young people wanted to reach out to their own age group in Russia over the heads of the fathers and create a new Russia which would preserve some of the achievements of the revolution. To understand the impetus behind such a movement, one must be aware of the spirit in which émigré children were raised in those years. R. Termen, director of the Rodnoi Korpus school in Sofia, laid out the
aSoyuz molodoi Rossii; also Soyuz mladorossov.
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ideals set before émigré children as “Life for Faith, Tsar, and Fatherland”: Elections, the hollow ring o f pariiam entarianism and party spirit, along with their accompanying struggle, are considered by us to be incom patible with order and unity. The history o f our revolution and the fall o f Russia totally ju s tify ou r view.... Within the Russian intelligentsia we witnessed sharp criticism o f the measures taken by the authorities and the actions o f superiors, criticism which even included attacks upon the Tsar, condemnation o f everything Russian, lack o f faith, decline o f religiosity, smirks directed a t the clergy, a desire on the p a rt o f everyone (either personally o r through "delegates”) to interfere in the governing procedure and to control it, a broad wave o f wilfulness, a thirst fo r "liberties. ” In a programmatic article published in the Mladoross magazine Bodrost', Boris Kadomtsev set out the goal of the party as4a seizure of power from the communists while retaining governmental control over the economy. A "new totalitarian corporate state” was to be created for the "narod-bogonosets” (the God-bearing people). Bodrost' called for a "synthesis of the ontological internal searching of October with the national ideal of Russian Truth.” The group supported Kirill Vladim irovich's claim to the throne. There seems to have been little disagreem ent as to the fascist nature of the Mladoross party. Even its meetings emulated those of the Fascists, including shouts of "Glava! G laval” ("Führer” or "Duce”) when Kazem-Bek appeared on stage. Kazem-Bek was particularly taken with the Italian head of state, about whom he wrote: The spiritual life o f fascism hearkens back to Rome — Im perial Rom e— and is totally em bodied in the person o f Mussolini. His genius is the genius o f Rome. His sense o f measure is the heritage o f an ancient culture. As the years pass his very appearance becomes more and more that o f a Roman Caesar. Kazem-Bek's stressed "total unity” with Mussolini's views extended into the broadest philosophical realms: Russia is the first great white state on the path o f the rising yellow wave.... Solidarity o f the white people should be recreated, since a ll peoples o f the white race, whose growth has been stabilized, are threatened in the next century with being crushed by the colored races, who have m aintained their elem ental fertility and acquired the technology and m aterial civilization created by whites, but reject our spiritual culture. O nly white racism makes sense for peoples o f the white race. Despite all the above, when W orld W ar II broke out, the pro fascist leanings of the Mladorossy were swept away by a surge of
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Russian patriotism , and Kazem-Bek sent a telegram to the French governm ent placing all the resources of his party at its disposal. Kazem-Bek him self quietly left for the Soviet Union from the United States in 1958.
Solidarism Tous pour un, un pour tous. Alexandre Dumas In 1924 the secret society Duty to the Homeland (Dolg rodine) was created with the goal of overthrowing communism in Europe. In 1927 it was replaced by The Internal Line (Vnutrennyaya liniya). Membership was voluntary, but any attem pt to withdraw from the organization was punishable by death. The organization called itself an "order” — in the traditions of knighthood. Eventually, many émigrés reached the conclusion that the organization was a Soviet-sponsored plot to control the émigré community in general, and specifically both the Solidarist movement and The Russian All-W arrior League (ROVS), led by generals Pêtr Vrangel', Aleksandr Kutepov, and Evgeny Miller®. Formed in July 1930, The National League of Russian Youth (Natsional'nyi Soyuz Russkoi Molodêzhi) became the political party of the Solidarist movement. In 1931 it was renamed the National W orking People's League of the New Generation and in 1936 the National Labor League of the New Generation (the NTS). W hile quite sim ilar in orientation to the Mladoross movement, Solidarism was even more closely modelled on fascism, and favored the establishment of a transitional dictatorship. In the words of one natsmal'chik, it was more a social and economic doctrine than a world view. In 1940, when Marshal Pétain became head of the Vichy governm ent in France, the Solidarist K. Vergun claimed that dem ocracy and "prettified liberalism" were gradually fading from the scene of history. Members of the movement were called upon to endure any sacrifice in the name of the nation. Such slogans as "Forget yourself in serving Russia” and "Let our names perish as
•Russkii Obshche-Voinskii Soyuz (R O V S ). According to the captain of Vrangel”s ship, Vrangel' ordered his own vessel sunk in the Bosphorus in the sum m er of 1921 so that he could collect the insurance on his fam ily jewels after first removing the ship’s safe. If this is true, this act may have provided some of the financing for R O VS.
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Russia rises up in glory”3 demonstrated not only a strong idealism, but also a negation of the individual in favor of the collective. In this respect the movement was entirely in line with the spirit of the age. Russia's models for developm ent were Italy ("a first-class power of which every Italian could be justifiably proud”) and Germany ("young and powerful”). The Solidarist publication Za novuyu Rossiyu (For a New Russia) left no doubt as to where its sympathies lay: Within the process o f this world revolution a new social order w ill be born, not in Moscow, but in a ll those places where there are dedicated and noble reform ers who recognize the decay o f liberal capitalism and the lie o f inhuman communism. A t the head o f those struggling for a new social order and firm social peace are Hitler, Mussolini, and Salazar, but they w ill be followed by others inspired by those same ideas. The Solidarist M. Georgievsky was equally straightforward in identifying National-Socialism and fascism as models for the movement. In discussing the New Order being developed in Italy, Portugal, and Germany, he dismissed all criticism of party dictatorship and any mention of persecution of dissidents and even of terror and concentration camps: People forget first o f a ll that a difference in degree and quantity has a prim ary — not a secondary — m eaning in ou r days, that an intense heat destroys young shoots but that warmth is good for them. They forget the m illions o f victim s o f the Bol'shevik terror. They forget that the mockery, torture, and bleak horror o f the Soviet concentration camps cannot be in any way com pared to the exceptional m easures taken to presen/e order which are generally directed against those who [previously] dug a p it for dissidents and an execution wall to go along with it.... It is difficult to see a hidden reactionary in Mussolini, who barked a t the capitalists: *D o n t think we're going to serve as a lightning rod for you.” The same is true o f Hitler, who instructed his people: ” Honor work and the working m an.” The experience o f both o f them is only the beginning o f a strengthening in minds and social order o f a new doctrine — the doctrine o f Solidarist cooperation. To Georgievsky's chagrin, his admiration for Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany was not reciprocated by either regime. Only later,
•Sluzhit' Rossii - zabyt' sebya; D a vosvelichitsya Rossiya, da gibnut nashi imena.
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when Germany found itself in desperate straits, was the decision made to use the émigrés. By March 1939 Georgievsky had begun to distance himself from his form er admiration for Hitler and Mussolini, describing the oncoming war as a struggle between two world views — that of "Jewry and ‘dem ocracy,’” on the one hand, and "fascism,” on the other. After the M olotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed on August 23 of that year he became disenchanted with fascism and pronounced it to be a sort of "anti-Com intern,” now allied with the Comintern. The NTS actively pursued a program to infiltrate the U.S.S.R., but half these agents perished in attem pting to cross the Soviet border. Even when war broke out, it was still unclear what course of action the Solidarists would take. On March 1,1940, their newspaper Za Rodinu (For the Homeland), newly transferred from Sofia to Belgrade under its original title, Za Rossiyu (For Russia), came out with a special page showing previous titles of the publication and a prom inent article by Dmitry Zavzhalov, Chairman of the Bulgarian branch of the Solidarist movement, calling upon members to be ready to fight, but when Germany attacked the U.S.S.R., the Solidarists declared total neutrality.
The Russian Fascists Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears. Shakespeare, Julius Casear By the early 1930s the totalitarian spirit of the period led some converts in the Russian émigré community to create organizations which their organizers openly called "fascist.” One émigré group chose to celebrate the Day of Russian Culture on the birthday of St. Vladim ir (July 15) rather than on Pushkin's birthday because of Pushkin’s "nonAryan” descent. After Vladim ir Nabokov's father was assassinated, rumors circulated that he was a Jew and the Russian Church in Karlovac, Yugoslavia, refused to perm it a memorial service to be perform ed in his honor. His novel-writing son himself was married to a Jewish woman, and precisely for this reason some émigrés did not wish him to give a speech on the occasion of Bunin's receiving of the Nobel Prize. Once the Nazis actually came to power in Germany, some 23 Russian émigré associations sent their greetings to Hitler.
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One figure who was difficult to take seriously was "Count” Anastasy Vonsyatsky, a dancer married to a wealthy American heiress whose money opened many doors. During a visit to Paris Vonsyatsky visited a Russian m ilitary museum run by a form er tsarist general, who escorted Vonsyatsky to his car while encouraging him to make a donation to the museum. Suddenly the general abandoned Vonsyatsky and rushed up to the young man seated at the wheel; it was Grand Duke Fêdor Aleksandrovich, a nephew of the late Tsar ... and Vonsyatsky's chauffeur. From his wife's Connecticut estate Vonsyatsky played at soldiering and issued instructions to his (largely) fictitious minions, calling upon his purported supporters within the U.S.S.R. to assassinate governm ent officials, engage in all-out sabotage, and poison the country's foodstuffs. Although he explicitly rejected antiJewish views, Vonsyatsky employed the Swastika, titles such as "Death Storm Trooper” (Shturmovik smerti), and the Nazi salute, accompanied by the shout "Glory to Russia!” (Slava Rossiil). The fascist movement found considerable support among the Russian émigré community in Yugoslavia. One book published in 1937 in Belgrade by "Orthodox Russian fascists” defined the movement's ideals: 1) This is a traditional religious-national working m ovem ent o f the Russian people. It is both political and social in nature and has as its goal the establishm ent o f the type o f governm ental structure which has achieved brilliant results in Germany, Italy, and Portugal. The m ovem ent is called fascism, because this word is the accepted term used to define the spiritual structure o f the "new m an,” as distinguished from the "o ld" type, who was raised in the ideals o f liberalism, democracy, socialism, and communism. 2) The basic goals o f Orthodox Russian Fascism are: a) active arm ed struggle with communism and Godlessness, b) the installation o f Russian Orthodoxy in a ll its purity and sacredness, and c) the establishm ent on Russian soil o f the reign o f social justice — o f the Working Russian Empire. 3) O rthodox Russian Fascism considers that such goals can be accom plished only if an arm ed uprising o f the Red Arm y and the people can be organized out o f the reach o f the Soviet government, and under the slogan "God, Nation, L a b o r...” Konstantin Rodzaevsky, the pale, nervous Führer of the Manchurian-based Russian Fascist Party, did not confine him self to the type of fantasies indulged in by Vonsyatsky, but became actively involved in a number of very serious operations, including the
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infiltration of Soviet territory. Rodzaevsky evidently participated in several crim inal operations, one of which involved kidnapping the son of a wealthy Jewish businessman. When the father refused to pay, the son's ears were cut off; still later, the young man was murdered, but the Japanese court refused to convict the kidnappers. Arrested by the Soviets at the end of the war, Rodzaevsky wrote letters to Stalin, praising him as a leader of the Russian fascist movement. Nevertheless, after being flown to Moscow from Peking, Rodzaevsky was executed in the Lubyanka prison.3
Postrevolutionary {porevolyutsionnye) Movements The Philistines have invaded the land. Old Testam ent The term "postrevolutionary” (porevolyutsionnyi) was used to cover such groups as the Utverzhdentsy (literally, "those who affirm ”), the Novogradtsy,b and the National-Maximalists, all of whom denied the possibility of a restoration of the ancien régime and who called for a religious transform ation of the Soviet state from within. For example, Yu. Shirinsky-Shakhmatov, an ideologue of National-Maximalism, rejected calls for foreign intervention in Soviet Russia, believing this would lead to a "replacem ent of red internationalism with an international cabal of gold and stock markets ..., create a bourgeois Jewish-A/epman republic ... and at the price of thousands of victim s purchase a philistine governm ent with two chambers and ministerial crises.” In 1933 at his initiative "The Congress of United Postrevolutionary Movements” was convened, which called for a society based on nationalism and religion. Thus, there were a number of elem ents common to Postrevolutionary movements, the Changing Landmarks Movement, and the various Fascist groups.
•O ne of Rodzaevsky's followers was A. N. Pokrovsky, who was married to the poet Rim m a Pokrovskaya (pseudonym: M arianna Kolosova). She wrote poetry dedicated to Pokrovsky under the title "To a Russian Fascist" (Russkomu fashistu). After the Germ ans w ere defeated, Pokrovskaya-Kolosova took up Soviet citizenship but later renounced it following the attacks by Andrei Zhdanov on Anna Akhm atova. She and her husband ended up in Santiago, Chile, w here the Russian colony in the 1950s numbered no more than 300. bAfter the journal Novyi grad (The New City), founded by ll'ya BunakovFondaminsky, Fëdor Stepun, and Georgy Fedotov.
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The Trust
If a ll good people were clever, A nd a ll clever people were good, The world would be nicer than ever We thought that it possibly could. Elizabeth W ordsworth (1840-?) Faced with such intense political activity by an ém igré com m unity consisting to a large degree of form er m ilitary men, the Soviet governm ent launched a campaign of counterintelligence and subversion. In 1922, or possibly 1923, evidently on the initiative of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, head of the CHEKA, the so-called ."T ru s t’ was created — a fictitious monarchist organization which claimed a wide base of support in the Soviet Union. W hite general Pëtr Vrangel’ suspected that the "T rust’ was actually a Soviet front organization, but General Aleksandr Kutepov was more inclined to lend it credence. There was considerable hostility between Vrangel' and Kutepov, who held Vrangel' responsible for the failure of the W hite armies to defend Russia against the communists. In October 1923 the Poles recognized the "T rust’ as the only legitim ate governm ent of Russia and, in exchange for the promise of the supposed future m onarchist governm ent of Russia to recognize Poland's independence, agreed not to support either the Ukrainian nationalist Simon Petlyura or the Russian émigrés, nor to perm it any émigré infiltration back into Russia through Poland. The 1925 death in Russia of Sidney Reilly, a British agent and probably a Russian-Jewish émigré, raised a number of suspicions about the Trust, but Vasily Shul'gin, who together with Aleksandr Guchkov had persuaded Nikolai II to renounce the throne, travelled to Russia that same year and returned in February of 1926, claim ing that the Trust was a reliable ally. After five years of more or less successfully duping the émigrés, the Soviets announced that the Trust had been a sham all along, created to provide European intelligence services with false information. An enormous amount of hope and effort had been invested in cooperating with the Trust, and the news not only represented a vast setback for the émigrés, but also sowed even more distrust in their midst than had existed before.
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Émigré Terrorism in Russia There w ill be tim e to m urder and create. T. S. Eliot In the early 1920s a number of organizations existed which aimed at armed insurrection in Russia, among them Savinkov's Popular League for the Defense of the Homeland and Freedom (Narodnyi Soyuz Zashchity Rodiny i Svobody), Sergei Mel'gunov's and Mikhail Fëdorov's The Struggle for Russia (Bor1>a za Rossiyu), Peasant Russia (Krestyanskaya Rossiya), and The Brotherhood of Russian Truth (Bratstvo russkoi pravdy). Discouraged, Kutepov even considered abandoning the struggle and going to work as a carpenter's helper. In late 1929, however, rumors circulated in Paris that he had received 10 million francs that had been deposited in Japan in 1919 by the governm ent of Admiral Kolchak. Even before receiving this purported windfall, Kutepov resolved to respond to the exposure of the "T rust’ by appointing Mariya Zakharchenko-Shul'ts head of the League of National Terrorists. Zakharchenko called for open terrorism, utilizing explosives, contagious diseases (cholera, typhus, plague, etc.), and the poisoning of grain supplies. All agents were to be provided with cyanide capsules so they could forestall capture by committing suicide. In June 1927 Zakharchenko and Èduard Opperput, a form er OGPU agent who had defected to the Whites, blew up part of a dorm itory of Opperput's form er employers on Moscow's Malaya Lubyanka Street. The explosive device was not entirely successful, however, and Opperput and his accomplices were pursued and killed. According to one version, when Zakharchenko realized she could not escape, she shouted "For Russia!” and shot herself in the temple. Opperput supposedly shot him self through the mouth. This, at least, is one version. But there are also claims as to the existence of a certain Aleksandr Opperput, one of whose aliases included the name “Èduard.” This Opperput infiltrated Kutepov’s organization as a sort of “Soviet A z e f and was then sent by Kutepov to the USSR. This O pperput had the misfortune to be in Kiev when the Germans occupied the city and was executed. Which version is to be believed? The dilem m a is a typical one in emigre studies. In any case, another attack was carried out near the Moika Canal in Leningrad, when a bomb was hurled during a university lecture on "American Neorealism,” wounding 26 persons. In September of that same year a number of captured terrorists were put on trial. Kutepov refused to give up his tactics and in the summer of 1928 resumed smuggling agents into Russia. Two of the chief targets were the form er tsarist émigrés Nikolai Bukharin and Anatoly Lunacharsky.
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By 1930 Soviet counterintelligence resolved to pursue its émigré enemies even more directly. On January 26 Kutepov was dragged into a gray-green Alfa-Romeo which sped through Paris to the Pont de l'Alma. When the car was caught in a traffic jam, one of the kidnappers, posing as a gendarme, explained to a passerby that he was administering ether to the victim of a traffic accident whose legs had been crushed. On the coast near Coburg a "longish package rolled up in sacking” was transferred to the Soviet cargo ship Spartak, which after a stop in Antwerp continued on to Leningrad. Kutepov was executed. No specific information on this event was received from Russia until 1965, when the newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda noted that Sergei Puzitsky, a commissar in the secret police, had participated in both the arrest of Savinkov and the kidnapping of Kutepov.
Freemasonry and the Jews ... beyond the obvious facts that you are a bachelor, a solicitor, a Freemason, and an asthmatic, I know nothing about you. Sherlock Holmes, The Norwood Builder Freemasonry, a mystical, egalitarian movement of universal brotherhood, had arrived in Russia in the early 1730s, a tim e when the movement was achieving unheard-of success in its proselytizing efforts throughout the Western world. Due to the movement's anti-clerical nature, it was periodically suppressed by the Russian government, while its secretive rituals lent it a sort of catacomb status. After the civil war, masonry exercised considerable influence among Russian émigrés. Hitler's Germany outlawed the movement, but by then most of the Russians had moved on to France. A number of writers were masons.3 In the minds of its Russian critics, Freemasonry was part and parcel of a Jewish conspiracy, referred to as zhidomasonstvo (JudeoMasonry). A popular quip had it that the 1917 October coup had been created by "Jewish heads, Latvian sharpshooters, and Russian fools.” Valery Bryusov complained that not more than five percent of Lenin's governm ent consisted of Russians; Metropolitan Antony (1863-1936) published a book entitled Christ the Savior and the Jewish Revolution; and another émigré, V. Vladimirov, inveighed:
•M ark Aldanov, Georgy Adamovich, Aleksandr Amfiteatrov, Gaito G azdanov, Roman Gul', Vasily Nemirovich-Danchenko, Mikhail Osorgin, Nikolai Otsup, Andrei Sedykh, Mark Slonim, and Yury Terapiano, to nam e but a few .
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Now Russia is Judea, in the full and literal meaning o f the word. The socialist republic o f peasants and workers is only a screen to conceal Judaism, which has trium phed over the Russian people. Now generally assumed to be a forgery, The Protocols o f the Learned Elders o f Zion was first published in Russia in 1905, and reissued in 1919 by the Berlin magazine Luch sveta (Ray of Light), edited by Pëtr Shabel'sky-Bork, Sergei Taboritsky, and Fedor Vinberg. The basic thrust of the Protocols is that Jews, themselves few in number, were using the secretive Society of Freemasons to undermine Christianity in order to achieve world domination. Thus, the 1917 October coup and, hence, the exile of so many Russians were blamed on zhidomasonstvo. A 1923 Russian-language Berlin publication prophesied retribution upon the "Bol'shevik Jews” for their "sinful” participation in the oppression and destruction of Russia. One of the most active Judophobes was Grigory ShvartsBostunich, a journalist, playwright, and poet whose library had been confiscated by Red troops in Kiev at the end of the civil war. In his writings this so-called 'C hristian occultist” railed against "Jewish Soviet gorillas” who with the assistance of "mongoloids and other sem ihum ans” had drowned Russia in a 'S ea of Blood” (the title of one of his pamphlets). He was naturalized as a German citizen and even promoted to the rank of SS-StandartenfQhrer, but so extreme was his conduct that Himmler was forced to forbid him for a time to wear the SS uniform for fear that he would "compromise” the organization. Many prom inent representatives of the Orthodox Church were far from reticent in denouncing the Jews. In 1926 the Archbishop of Harbin Mefody warned ominously of zhidomasonstvo. At a 1932 council of the Russian Church Abroad, Metropolitan Antony was equally blunt: M asonry is a secret international world revolutionary organization for the struggle against God, against Christianity, against the Church, against the national state, and particularly against state Christianity. Within this international organization, influence and significance belongs first and foremost to the Jewish nation, which has been engaged in a struggle against God from the day that Christ the Savior was crucified. Historically, Judaism enjoys the m ost intim ate ties with M asonry in its fierce struggle against Christianity and in its messianic strivings for world dominance. The great secret of the revolution, according to the writergeneral Pëtr Krasnov in his popular novel From the Double-Headed Eagle to the Red Banner (Ot dvuglavogo orla k krasnomu znameni)
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was that "Zion was consuming the best of the goyim .” One sarcastic, and grossly exaggerated, definition of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow was "Lenin and 33 Jews.” But if strong Jewish participation in the workings of the young Soviet state is a fact of history, it is equally true that Jews made up an im portant part of the opposite camp and thus also found themselves exiled. An estim ated 20 percent of immigrants from Russia in Germany were Jews, and among the stateless the figure rose to nearly 40 percent. Jewish refugees such as Iosif Bikerman, G. Landau, and D. S. Pasmanik felt compelled to distance themselves from the events in Russia. In 1923 the National League of Russian Jews Abroad published a book in Berlin entitled Russia and the Jews: The transform ation o f legend into truth was partially prom oted by those Jews who loudly declared the genetic link between Bolshevism and Hebraism and who boasted q f the broad sym pathies o f the Jewish masses for rule by commissar. The psychological truth o f our responsibility compels us to accept a portion o f the responsibility for the overthrow o f Bolshevism .... O nly through this struggle can we save Jewry.
The Soviet Government and the Émigré Press After their trium phant return to Russia, the Bol'sheviks m aintained a keen interest in émigré affairs. Lenin ordered that all W hite Guard newspapers be collected for system atic examination, and in early 1922 Trotsky had the Politbyuro charge the Comintern with keeping an eye on the émigrés. Their literature, art, journalistic forays, and philosophy were the bailiwick of Kamenev and Zinov'ev. Soon a special Soviet commission consisting of Yakov Agranov, Andrei Bubnov, and Nikolai Meshcheryakov was established to m onitor ém igré publications. Agranov, who had been a Social Revolutionary before going over to the Bol'sheviks, became a prom inent member of the CHEKA and personally interrogated the historian and future émigré Sergei M el'gunov and the poet Nikolai Gumilêv, who was executed. It was Agranov who prepared the list of intellectuals deported in 1922 (much to the displeasure of the German Chancellor, who grumbled that "Germany is not Siberia”), but at the same tim e he m aintained close relations with members of such leftist literary groups as RAPP and LEF, not to mention Osip Mandel'shtam and Boris Pil'nyak. Thus, he became the chief resident literary henchman of the GPU, serving first as Yagoda's right-hand man and then as Ezhov's deputy. He oversaw the interrogations of Kamenev, Zinov'ev, Bukharin, and Rykov, among others, and conducted the fraudulent investigation of Kirov's m urder in
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1934. Obviously, Agranov knew more than Stalin would have liked, and he was shot in 1939. The form er Trotskyite Bubnov switched his allegiance to Stalin and headed Agitprop, the Central Committee's propaganda arm. Later, after first conducting a purge in the army, he replaced Lunacharsky as M inister of Education. Subsequently he was arrested, sent to the Gulag, and shot in 1940. Even his daughter was put in a labor camp. But Stalin's scythe could not mow down every blade of grass. Nikolai Meshcheryakov had been a writer and publisher before 1917 and had lived in Belgium, graduating from the University of Liège. During the Soviet period he headed Gosizdat (the state publishing house), was on the editorial board of Pravda, and was assistant editor of the first edition of the G reat Soviet Encyclopedia. He actually appears to have died under non-violent circumstances in 1942. The Bol'sheviks’ plans for literature included far more than sim ple oversight, however, and on May 29, 1922, on Dzerzhinsky’s initiative, a censorship body was created which just a few days later was christened G iavlit — Central Management of Literature and Publishing3. It was headed by the literary critic and editor Pavel Lebedev-Polyansky, who had lived abroad from 1908 to 1917, mainly in Geneva. Just three months later, on September 1, 1922, Iosif Unshlikht, acting chief of the GPU (executed in 1938), proposed to Stalin that G iavlit be put in charge of foreign publications, as well as dom estic. After that G iavlit was responsible for receiving and distributing émigré publications. In October 1922, G iavlit established its own special bulletin, which was intended to provide an objective overview of émigré activities and was sent to a very select group of high Soviet officials. Lenin wanted to remain a force in émigré publications, and the Soviet governm ent subsidized such publications as Novyi m ir (The New World, Berlin), P ut' (The Path, Helsinki), and Sovetskaya Rossiya (Soviet Russia, U.S.A.), but the expenses proved too high, and all these publications were shut down in spring 1922. The chaos of the civil war had wreaked havoc on Russian publishers, and the decision was made to import émigré editions selectively. This function fell largely to Gosizdat, which spent millions of rubles in 1922-23 to import books from abroad, many of them émigré publications. Readers found these books were expensive because of im port duties and licensing requirements, which doubled the cost, and Soviet censorship over them was fairly rigid, albeit often arbitrary.
•Glavnoe upravlenie po deiam literatury i izdatel'stv.
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Repatriation No foreign sky protected me, no stranger's wing shielded m y face. Anna Akhmatova
in the early years of exile the émigrés hoped to return home victorious, and W estern bankers were so confident of this prospect that they even granted discounted mortgages to people who owned property back in Russia. Home was, after all, so very close. The émigré editor Iosif Gessena stood on the Finnish shore, peering at St. Petersburg through binoculars, while the poet and popular singer Aleksandr Vertinsky hearkened to the peal of a church bell wafting across to him on the Romanian shore of the Dnestr River. Such prom inent émigrés as Pavel Milyukov, Pêtr Struve, and Pêtr Vrangel', among others, frequently proclaimed the Bol'shevik regime to be on the verge of collapse. With time, the theme of return was sounded more and more insistently, but the logic of that return came to be based on acceptance of the new regime. This mood was promoted by various Soviet front organizations, for example, "The Society for Cultural and Political Links with the U.S.S.R.,” which was created in 1925 and later replaced by the "League of Friends of the U.S.S.R.” The heated emotions surrounding the topic abate as the years passed. In 1934 Dmitry Filosofov wrote in the W arsaw-based Mech (The Sword) that Russians who consciously abandoned the ideological front were the same as dead to the émigré community. In the opposing camp was Aleksandr Peshekhonov, an impassioned proponent of return. Peshekhonov wrote that he had left Russia against his will and remained abroad only because the Soviet governm ent would not issue him a reentry permit. In a series of articles published in Volya Rossii (Russia’s W ill), he denied that the ém igré community had any cultural mission to perform and accused the émigrés of violating principles of honor, of being ignorant of the new Russia, and of exaggerating their own importance.
•Iosif Gessen, an brothers): Vladim ir (a Sergei's son Evgeny Vladimirovich Gessen,
editor of the Berlin newspaper Rul', had two sons (halfjournalist and prose writer) and Sergei (a philosopher). was a poet. There was also an ém igré poet, Aleksei possibly the son of Vladimir.
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Overwhelmed by the difficulties of émigré life, impoverished, hopeful of a "normalization" of the political situation in the Soviet Union, nostalgic for friends, family, and country, and afraid of being forgotten professionally, a number of writers returned to the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Among them were the Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky, the future "father of Socialist Realism” Maksim Gor'ky, the prose w riter Aleksandr Drozdov, and the poet Aleksei Èisner. Vsevolod Nikanorovich Ivanov® did not return until 1945, Nikolai Fedorov (pseudonym: Nikolai Roshchin) in 1946, and Natal'ya il'ina in 1947. The poet Antonin Ladinsky went back only in 1955, while Irina Odoevtseva waited until 1987. One returnee was the talented but opportunistic novelist Aleksei Tolstoi, who managed to make a brilliant and remunerative literary career for himself in the U.S.S.R. Before returning to Russia, Tolstoi published an open letter, stating that he was "cutting himself off from the émigrés.” In 1923 he published the science fiction novel Aèlita, in which the protagonist emigrates in allegorical fashion, escaping from Earth (the dynamic Soviet Russia) to Mars (the decadent West) in an effort to at least give this degenerate world a chance to "perish calm ly and m ajestically.” W riting in the Berlin newspaper R ul' (The Helm) in 1921, the prose w riter and member of the Changing Landmarks movement Ivan Sokolov-M ikitov had accused the Soviets of poisoning Russian minds with hatred and then expecting the W est to come to their assistance. Nevertheless, he himself returned home only a year later. There he was fortunate to have preferred country life and thus escaped the purges. He took part in an expedition of the icebreaker Malygin and was even received by Stalin. The poet Mariya Vega, who likewise returned to the U.S.S.R., but only in 1975, gave eloquent expression to the longing to go home: Take m y talent, m y hands, ready to work, M y experience, memory, the honed sword o f m y anger, M y loyal heart, which has m atured in this long parting, M y stem lyre and soft feminine speech. Take the sta ff which tapped
•Not to be confused with the Soviet writer Vsevolod Vyacheslavovich Ivanov.
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the cold paving stones O f alien cities. Take the treasure which I have hoarded. Take the colors o f m y palette, faded with poverty, and the wanderer's shaggy sail, decorated with patches. Stack a ll this up in the square, in your snowy Leningrad. Kindle the bonfire, and le t the high flame leap upward. Let m y notebooks soar skywards In light flocks — Like yellow leaves, when granite freezes. O nly from flames is bom the word. If you believe m y living verse and ask: "Are you prepared to burn twice?” I w ill answer: " Yesl” A nd the Russian muse will stretch out her hands to me through the smoke. The talented poet, novelist, and critic Andrei Bely had arrived in the W est declaring that the émigrés were as alien to him as the Soviets and that he would be alone in Berlin. In the words of Fêdor Stepun, he returned to Russia in 1923 in a "fever.” Nina Berberova recalled a dinner she attended on September 8: Bely arrived in a state o f rage and spoke to virtually no one. Squeezing his enormous wrists between his knees ... he sat looking o ff into space. A t the end o f the dinner he stood up, glass in hand and staring with hatred a t the more than 20 people who were sitting a t the table, to announce that he wished to make a speech. It was a toast to himself. A t that m om ent the image o f Christ seem ed to come alive in this brilliant fool: he dem anded that they drink to him, because he was leaving to be crucified. For whom? For a ll o f us sitting there in the restaurant on Hentinerstraße — fo r Khodasevich, Muratov, Zaitsev, Remizov, Berdyaev, Vysheslavtsev.... He was going to Russia to spill his blood and be crucified for a ll o f Russian literature.
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"B ut not for m e,” Khodasevich said quietly without standing up. "Boris Nikolaevich, I d o n t want you to be crucified fo r me. There is no way I can give you that sort o f mission.* B ely p u t his glass down and, staring ahead, his eyes filled with hate, he declared that Khodasevich had always been filled with the poison o f his own skepticism and that he, Bely, was breaking a ll ties with him. Khodasevich grew pale. Even after such a speech, actually going home was no easy decision to take, and Bely asked Marina Tsvetaeva, who had moved from Berlin to Prague, to obtain a grant to allow him to continue his literary work there. Tsvetaeva, who was almost as impractical as Bely, som ehow managed to get him not only a grant but an apartm ent as well. In an irony of fate, however, her telegram arrived only hours after Bely had boarded the train for Moscow.3 Before returning to Russia herself much later, Tsvetaeva summed up her dilem ma in a letter to her friend, the Czech w riter Anna Teskovâ: Do you happen to know a good soothsayer in Prague, m y dear Anna Antonovna? I d o n t know what to do without a soothsayer. Everything revolves around the question: to go o r not to go. (And if I go, then forever.) To sum things up, S. Ya., and also Alya and M ur [Tsvetaeva's husband and childrenJ definitely want to go. A ll around us we see the danger o f war, revolutions, and generally catastrophic events. I c a n t stay here alone. The émigrés d o n t like me, Poslednie novosti has driven me out, and I c a n t get published. O f course, writers were not the only émigrés to go home. The painter Ivan Bilibin, rejected in the world of Parisian art, returned to Russia to find an audience. The composer Sergei Prokofev, evidently to his own regret, also went back and found himself living under enormous pressure for the rest of his life. (He died the same day as Stalin, and his funeral was ignored in the Soviet press.) Many others, including the writers Aleksei Remizov and Roman G ul\ toyed with the idea of returning to Russia but never went through with it. An amnesty was declared for soldiers of the W hite armies. Altogether, 181,432 persons returned to Russia during the decade 1921 -31 ; the majority of them — 120,000 — in 1921. And these figures do not include the period 1917-20. Returnees from the United States were commonly referred to as "Am ericans.” Repatriation was again to come to the fore against the
•According to one version, Bely was induced to return to Russia by his future w ife, Klavdiya Vasil'eva, who was supposedly sent to bring him home by fellow anthroposophists in Moscow, concerned about his well-being.
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background of Russian patriotism evoked by the oncoming Second W orld War. According to one Soviet source, by the end of the 1930s as many as 400 émigrés in Paris wished to be repatriated, and over 1,000 in the whole of France. W hile the Soviet government regarded expatriates as "renegades” and "enemies,” many writers who had either voluntarily or involuntarily remained in Russia were wracked by conflicting emotions. It was not a new situation for Russian writers, as Pushkin could have testified. The life of the poet Anna Akhmatova, who returned over and over again in her verse to the them e of emigration, is illustrative. Akhmatova was rom antically involved with the painter Boris Anrep, who had lived mainly in Western Europe since 1908 and evidently was not as keen on marriage with her as she was with him: Heretic, fo r an em erald island You have bartered away your native land, O ur songs, our icons, The quiet pine above the lake. Bold man o f Yaroslav, If insanity has not usurped your mind, Why does your eye fall upon red-headed beauties A nd their opulent villas? Blasphemer, wallow in your bluster, Doom your Orthodox soul, S it tight in the king’s capital Savor your precious freedom. In the difficult war year of 1940 she returned to a poem she had written in 1917: I heard a pleasing voice, It called to m e: " Come here, Leave your distant, sinful land, Abandon Russia, never to return. I will scrub the gore from your hands, Pluck the sliver o f black shame from your heart, A nd cover the anguish o f defeats and hum iliations With a new nam e.” B ut calmly, indifferently, I covered m y ears so as not to corrupt the m elancholy spirit With this impious speech.
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And there is, of course, the famous verse which was so often quoted by official Soviet critics to show that Akhmatova cursed and anathematized the émigrés: I am not with those who abandoned the land To be ravaged by its enemies. I give no ear to their flattery A nd lend no song to their impiety. To you, castaway, I grant eternal p ity — A s to a convict o r a man diseased. D ark is your path, wanderer, A nd your alien bread reeks o f wormwood. O f course, the number of writers who would have left Russia, given the opportunity, must have been very large, indeed. One of the most tragically eloquent instances was the suicide of the playwright, critic, and editor Anastas'ya Chebotarevskaya, wife of the "decadent" sym bolist w riter Fedor Sologub. Chebotarevskaya jumped off a bridge in Petrograd in 1921 when she and Sologub were denied permission to emigrate. Another prom inent non-émigré was Isaak Babel', who visited W estern Europe three times, living for a while with his wife and daughter in Paris, but who chose to remain in Russia even though his fam ily remained in the West. Life abroad was amusing, he maintained, but only in Russia could he write. Besides, like Aleksei Tolstoi, he lived a privileged life in Russia; a large dacha was built for him in the writers' settlem ent of Peredelkino, not far from Moscow, where he enjoyed such luxuries as servants and a new eight-cylinder Ford, imported from Am erica. In May 1939, however, he was arrested and all his m anuscripts were confiscated. Despite the imminent threat of war, Soviet prosecutors found tim e (20 minutes) in January 1940 to try him and have him shot. And there were many, many other writers who would have left Russia, had they been given the opportunity, for example, Aleksandr Blok, who died while waiting for permission to go to Finland for medical treatm ent, and Mikhail Bulgakov, for whom permission never came. This sad list could grow to be very long, but it is really the topic of a different book.
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Soviet-Émigré Relations Pontifical Death, that doth the crevasse bridge To the steep and trifid God. Francis Thompson (1859-1907) Until the advent of giasnost\ the official Soviet approach to émigré literature, not surprisingly, was to ignore it completely. For example, the index to the nine-volume B rief Soviet Literary Encyclopedia (1962-78) contains roughly 35,000 names; Solzhenitsyn's is not among them. Nevertheless, relations between émigré and Soviet Russian literature were relatively cordial in the liberal atm osphere of the early 1920s. This is not to say that Soviet-émigré relations were idyllic even then. To cite just one example of countless others, the émigré critic Yuly AlkhenvaPd (1872-1928) was convinced that Valery Bryusov had played a role in having him deported from the U.S.S.R. as revenge for a negative review he had written about Bryusov's poetry.® By the mid-1920s Soviet writers were largely forbidden to have any contact with émigré colleagues, and when the great purges were launched in the late 1930s, even ordinary working people in the Soviet Union stopped corresponding with their relatives abroad and on occasion went so far as to burn their pictures. On the whole, ém igré writers kept abreast of Soviet Russian literature rather well, but Soviet writers before the late 1980s — through no fault of their own — often remained largely ignorant of émigré literature. Soviet law forbade the importation of any Russian-language materials published abroad, and it was a crime to own, to conspire to acquire, or to import them. One émigré reaction to such draconian measures was to deny that anything of literary value was being produced in Russia and to claim that the center of Russian literature had moved from Moscow to Paris. Bunin wrote that Esenin's poems were sentim ental trash, that Babel’ was "nothing special,” and that Pasternak was "boring.”
‘ Trotsky, too, may well have had a hand in his deportation. Just six months earlier, on June 2, 1922, Trotsky had published an article, under the pseudonym "O ,” entitled "Literature, where is your whip?" (Literatura, gde tvoi khlyst?), in which he called Aikhenval'd a "snake-in-the-grass aesthete" (podkolodnyi èstet) and accused him of championing the sam e sort of "pure art as had been popular in the sewers of Generals Denikin and Vrangel'." Trotsky proposed that Aikhenval'd be driven out of the Soviet Union by the "whip of dictatorship" to that cam p to which he w as accustomed to "pander." All his life Aikhenval'd had suffered from a superstitious fear of trolley cars and he w as actually killed by a tram in Berlin in 1928. The literary circle which he had founded in Berlin continued functioning until 1934.
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Merezhkovsky and Gippius saw their salon as a refuge for the Russian literary tradition being destroyed in the Soviet Union. W riters who were unpublished at home took pride in the fact that they had never "collaborated” with the Soviet literary establishment. But this view was not universally shared. The argument that émigré literature would eventually reunite with Soviet literature was first advanced by figures who were politically left of center. In 1922 Aleksandr Yashchenko wrote that a "bridge” was needed between émigré and Soviet literature, while Ekaterina Kuskova spoke of filling in a trench between the refugees and Russia. Voicing the opposite view, Vadim Rudnev, the former mayor of Moscow and an editor of Sovremennye zapiski, sarcastically commented that such "illusions” as "bridge building” were like jumping from the fifth floor of Moscow’s Lubyanka prison. But the "bridge builders” were not about to be silenced, and the critic Mark Slonim m aintained that émigré books did not constitute a distinct literary tradition, thus supporting the need for émigré letters to make peace with Russian literature back home. The idea persisted throughout the Soviet period. In 1956 Gleb Struve wrote in his history of Russian émigré literature that it was a tem porarily diverted stream which would eventually flow back into the river of all-Russian literature. Later the émigré writer-scholar Nina Berberova even went so far as to claim that this reunification had already taken place in the period 1972-83. Of course, her statem ent was premature, but the very appearance of such a claim dem onstrates that Russian émigré literature no longer made a claim to an existence independent of Soviet literature. At a conference on ém igré literature held in Los Angeles in 1981 the primary topic of discussion was the eventual reunification of Soviet and émigré literature. But reunification was only the far end of the bridge, the beginning of which reached back to a cultural heritage so threatened in the U.S.S.R. that Osip Mandel'shtam in his poem Vek (The Age) wrote of using his own blood to paste together the snapped spine of his age. Thus, it was up to the émigrés to recognize the mission thrust upon them by fate. Berberova felt herself to be a seam holding together the new Soviet age with that of the past. Roman Gul' and Vladislav Khodasevich spoke for the émigré community in saying they had "carried their Russia away with them .” At a meeting of the Green Lamp Society, Zinaida Gippius asked if it was not tim e simply to forget about Russia? In response to the view that the capital of Russian literature was not Moscow, but Paris, and that Pushkin's best work had been on foreign topics, supposedly demonstrating the Russian language could be used to write on topics other than Russia, the critic and poet Georgy Adamovich responded that such views were almost as frivolous as they were affirm ative:
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We need a different tone, different words, a sense o f tragedy. It is said that we brought the Russian language with us, and our Russian streams and birch trees are supposed to stay back in Russia. Fine, gentlemen, but Russia is not a concept that can be exported piece by piece. A language is inseparable [from its country o f origin] and cannot be carried away. Language is a form o f the people's spiritual life; it exists only for its people, and not for anyone else. Otherwise you should be consistent and take up Esperanto. Language takes shape together with the life o f the people and corresponds to it. Russian literature can only be about Russian people. A nd despite some exceptions in certain literary masterpieces, it is absurd to elevate these exceptions to the status o f a rule.
Geography Gallipoli and Istanbul I would send them to the Turk, to make eunuchs of. Shakespeare, A ll's W ell That Ends W ell The original evacuation from Black Sea ports to Constantinople and the Caucasus was conducted by the French in April 1919, when Odessa first fell to the communists, but most of the evacuees returned after that city was retaken by the Whites. The second evacuation took place on January 20,1920, after the defeat of General Denikin's army, and was conducted by the British. The evacuation of Novorossiisk, ten days after the Bol'sheviks retook Odessa, was only partially successful. Both in Novorossiisk and Odessa conditions attending the evacuation were chaotic and desperate, with a number of people literally thrown overboard. The third and main evacuation — that of Vrangel”s army — proceeded in an orderly fashion from Novorossiisk, Yevpatoria, Yalta, Kerch, Odessa, and Sevastopol' in mid-November 1920.a Among those left behind was the son of the w riter and future émigré Ivan Shmelêv, who was taken prisoner and shot by soldiers commanded by the Hungarian Communist Béla Kun and his associate Rozaliya Zalkind (Zemlyachka). It was ironic that the same Russian armies that had threatened the Ottoman empire for centuries had arrived at those very shores in
•There w as also a northern evacuation from Arkhangelsk in February, 1920, and a Far-East evacuation from Vladivostok in October, 1922.
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search of refuge. The Atatürk government, which was asked to host these uninvited guests, was sympathetic to the new Soviet regime and hardly eager to harbor this potentially dangerous refugee army of an empire that as recently as 1915 had concluded a secret pact with the Allies to gain control of Istanbul and the Dardanelles. Nevertheless, Istanbul was occupied by the Allied armies and in a state of chaos, so the Turks had little choice in the matter. The last, and largest, group of evacuees numbered some 150,000, of whom 100,000 were soldiers and 50,000 were civilians, including 30,000 women and 7,000 children. A veritable armada of between 126 and 166 ships participated in the evacuation (accounts vary).3 The British government quickly adopted the position that a continuation of the Russian civil war was no longer feasible, but the French for a tim e supported the Russian troops in exchange for the Russian fleet which had delivered that army. Even so, the French governm ent itself began to exert pressure on the army to either return home or move on. Offers to take in the refugees were extended by Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, Canada, and even Brazil. As of this moment the émigrés were transformed from assets to expensive liabilities in the eyes of W estern governments. Before this admission of the nonviability of the W hite movement, Russians easily received visas and could even exchange tsarist Russian currency at relatively favorable rates. The Soviet governm ent launched a campaign to get people to return; Soviet sources claimed that nearly one half the W hite officers took up service in the Red Army, and the food shortages and cholera in the m ilitary camps made such shifts of allegiance understandable. Inevitably, Soviet intelligence attempted to infiltrate émigrés’ ranks. Altogether more than 4,000 officers returned to the Crimea, together with approxim ately 5,000 women, children, and elderly people. One of the chief regrouping areas for the Russian army was G allipoli13, a bleak peninsula projecting into the Sea of Marmara and referred to by the Russians as "Golo-pole” (Naked Field). Living conditions for Russians, who constituted 50 percent of the population, were harsh; people found themselves sleeping in tents, caves, earthen dugouts, or under an open sky. In Istanbul itself the Russians found
•The ém igré historian Vertepov, for example, gives an overall figure of 135,000 evacuees, rather than 150,000. bThe First Corps of General Kutepov (25,000 men) was bivouacked in Gallipoli. The so-called Don Corps (20,000) was put up in the environs of Constantinople, and the Kuban' troops
(15,000) w ere on the island of Lemnos.
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them selves in difficult straits; 2,655 Russian women were registered as prostitutes in Constantinople, and generals became waiters. An intense effort was launched to maintain m ilitary discipline, but French reluctance to continue supporting the Russian army inevitably cut short the Turkish chapter in the history of the Russian em igration. Nevertheless, in the course of one and one half years some 80 cultural, educational, and professional organizations were form ed which were brought together on April 24, 1922, under the um brella organization The Russian Committee in Turkey (Russkii konntet v Turtsii). Publishing activities were surprisingly vigorous. Some of the magazines and newspapers leaned toward the pious: A Conversational Partner Useful to the Soul: A Spiritually Enlightening Magazine o f the Panteleim onov M onastery and O ther Russian M onasteries on M ount Athos. Others were early attem pts at preserving the Russian cultural tradition: the weekly Economic and Literary Newspaper, and The Path: A Social, Financial-Economic, and Literary-Cultural Journal. In this community of largely m ilitary men many of the publications carried tongue-in-cheek titles: Cheerful Bombs, Stray Thoughts, The Jackal, The Scaffold, The Canard, and Scatter Your Troubles in a Naked Field. One, at least, had a rather sad title: The Pariah. The Scaffold was prepared on a typewriter in an edition of 48 copies.a The illustrator, Colonel Murav'êv, had to repeat the drawing 48 times. During the Russians’ brief sojourn in Turkey, several more or less serious literary societies were created, among them the Chekhov Society*3, the Society of Russian Scientists, Scholars and W riters in Constantinople6, The League of Russian W riters and Journalists in
•Russian titles: Dushepoleznyi sobesednik: Dukhovno-prosvetitel'nyi ireligioznyi zhum al russkogo Panteleimonovskogo monastyrya iprochikh obitelei na Sv. Afone Constantinople, 1922; Èkonomicheskaya i literatum aya gazeta, Constantinople, 1922; P u t Z h u m a l obshchestvennyi, finansovo-èkonomicheskii i literatum okhudozhestvennyi, Constantinople, 1924; Vesèlye bomby, Gallipoli, 1921; Dum ki zalêtnye, Gallipoli, 1921; Shakal, Gallipoli, 1921; Utka, Lemnos, 1920-21; R azvei gore v chistom pole, Gallipoli, 1921; Izgoi, Gallipoli, 1921; Èshafot, Gallipoli, 1921). bObshchestvo imeni A. P. Chekhova, Kamensky, ll'ya Surguchêv, and A. Sokolov.
founded
by the writers
Anatoly
cÔbshchestvo russkikh uchênykh i pisatelei v Konstantinopole, chaired by Sergei Gogel', with N. Litvin as Secretary. In 1922 the society published Alien Distant Lands (Chuzhaya dal'), by Anatoly Bumakin.
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Constantinople®, and the Tsargrad Poets’ Guild5. A number of short lived publishing houses even sprang up in Istanbul.6 The number of Russians resident in Istanbul alone in November 1920 is estimated at 167,000, but by 1923 only about 8,000 were left. Nevertheless, many a refugee retained a firm belief in a successful renewal of hostilities and a return to Mother-Russia: In the Crimea we could be overwhelmed by numbers; in G allipoli we could be forcibly scattered; and on Lemnos we were literally starved. B ut now there is no force capable o f crushing the Russian ranks. Tomorrow, a t the first command, the men w ill gather beside their banners and come down from the mountains, out o f the forests, and up from the mines, leaving behind their huts and falling into graceful ranks. The trum pet w ill call, and like m agical spirits, regim ent w ill fa ll in behind regim ent as Russian warriors again make the sign o f the cross and advance, their banners flowing, to liberate Russia. Russia will be saved by self-sacrifice and the feats o f people in whose hearts the commandments o f old have not been extinguished: "Rem em ber that you belong to Russia. ” "O nly death can free you from fulfilling your obligations." The number of Russians still residing in Turkey in 1930 is estim ated at only 1,400.
•Soyuz russkikh pisatelei i zhurnalistov v Konstantinopole, founded in 1920. The League organized literary evenings and published Russian translations of Turkish writers in the newspaper Presse du soir, and some of their undertakings w ere even attended by Abd al-M ajid, who later was proclaimed Sultan. The founders of the League w ere Professors Sergei Gogel' and Nikolai Alekseev, and also S . I. Varshavsky. In 1923, after a majority of its members moved on to other countries, the League ceased to function. bTsaregradskii tsekh poètov. The group called for simplicity of style and an end to revolutionary "clowning"; they published the m agazine Teatr and at least one book, a collection of verse by Andrei Allin. cVerba, Z a rubezhom, Tovarishchestvo Zarya Rossii, Tovarishchestvo Ku'ltura, Novyi Satirikon, and M. Shul’man.
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Berlin
Mr. Zimmerman calls Berlin Sodom and Gomorrah, but Berlin has not collapsed and heaven's rage is not incinerating it Nikolai Karamzin, 1789 You d o n t have to love Berlin; a lo t o f people dont. B ut you c a n t help feeling a deep respect for the concentrated, alm ost tragic seriousness which constitutes the character o f this city. Nowhere does the pulse o f contem porary history beat with such m alignant precision. Lpv Trotsky Before W orld W ar I Germany had served as a strong m agnet for ethnic Russians, Russified German Balts, and Russian Jews, who complained almost as much about discrimination by German Jews as by Russians back home. No visas were required, and the Russian aristocracy was closely intermarried with German royalty, owned property in Germany, and liked to vacation there. Many young Russians, half of them Jews, visited what was for them a sort of cultural Mecca as early as the 1730s, studying in Berlin, Halle, Marburg, Göttingen, and Jena. In the 1890s Russian artists such as Vasily Kandinsky, Igor' Grabar’, and Dmitry Kardovsky came to study contem porary European art movements. Prior to 1917 the political left was well represented in that country among a number of émigré groups, and revolutionaries often used it as a base of operations. The journal of the Russian Social Democrat W orkers’ Party, Iskra, for example, was published in Munich from late 1900 to the spring of 1902. At the same tim e the current did not flow in one direction only; in the period 1828-1915, some 1,459,000 Germans had settled in Russia, and the interactions of Germans in Russia created a peculiar m irror image of the complex interactions of Russians in Germany. After the civil war, there was a significant stream of evacuees from the Crimean operation via Turkey, the Balkans, and Paris into Germany, despite the country's post-war impoverishment. Ever a magnet for Russian émigrés, Berlin continued to attract them, particularly following a sharp rise in prices in Paris in late 1921, and large numbers of Russians came over the "green border” between the
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two countries.3 The Soviet government made its own contribution to this influx, employing some 3,000 persons in its embassy and trade offices. A t first, the German government viewed its Russian guests as tem porary refugees who would eventually return to Russia and occupy influential positions. The Germans even welcomed the Russian refugees in the hope that they could be swayed in favor of Germany and against France. But this optimism soon faded. So prom inent were the Russians in the "stepm other of all Russian cities,” as Berlin was known, that one German newspaper published a cartoon showing all Berlin shop signs in Russian except for one that read: "German Spoken Here.” The Germans suspected (undoubtedly correctly) the Russian community of harboring a substantial contingent of Soviet spies — this despite the fact that the W eim ar governm ent had reached an accommodation with the Soviets with regard to the terms of the Versailles treaty and the creation of the new Polish state. There was also hostility to the Russians on the part of Germans who feared the newcomers would take their jobs, and also over worries about Russian Francophiles (Cadets and socialists), who tended to the left of the political spectrum, as opposed to the conservatives, who were more often Germanophiles (nationalists and communists). There was even a group of extreme conservatives who dream ed of using the Red Army to achieve a revanche over the French. The League of Nations stated that its goal was to return the Russians to Russia, and the German government attempted to deport at least some of the country's numerous guests. In 1925 one young Russian, about to be deported, committed suicide — an event that was covered extensively in the émigré press. Nor did the Germans’ desire to be rid of their Russian guests dissipate with the passage of tim e. In 1936 the Berlin chief of police even proposed that unemployed Russian im m igrants be placed in labor camps, but the government rejected his recommendation.
•Betw een 60,000 and 100,000 Russians are estimated to have been residing on Germ an territory by 1919. By 1920 the American Red Cross in Germ any was rendering assistance to 560,000 Russians in Germ any, but many w ere only passing through the country, so that the total number of immigrants is estimated by the G erm an historian Hans-Erich Volkmann to be approximately 300,000 for that year. The "Russian Archive" in Prague lists 230,000 to 250,000 emigrants from Russia in Germ any for 1921, and the League of Nations estimated 600,000 for 1922 and 1923. In 1923 alone, 360,000 emigrants applied for refugee status in Berlin. Reliable figures are hard to come by for later years, but by 1928 a League of Nations document listed only 150,000 emigrants from Russia in Germ any, as opposed to 400,000 for France. After the exodus of 1923-1925 the number of Russians in Germ any is estimated to have been in the 100,000 range.
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W hile Russians were scattered throughout Berlin, they were especially heavily concentrated in the southwest part of the city — W ilmersdorf, Schöneberg, Friedenau, and Charlottenburg, which was christened "Charlottengrad.” Aside from Berlin, there were com m unities of Russian émigrés in the so-called "Russian provinces” — Munich, Leipzig, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, and Danzig. Virtually every town had some Russians: Düsseldorf, Baden-Baden, Breslau, Stuttgart, Heidelberg, Göttingen, Königsberg, to name only some. A significant portion of these emigrants were Volksdeutsche.a Two associations were especially active in the late 1920s: the Organization for the Protection of the Interests of Russian Refugeesb and an office of the League of Nations that worked with Russian émigrés. In term s of social structure, 1920 witnessed the arrival of a large number of W hite Army officers, while 1921 brought in a massive influx of persons of less aristocratic origins, those fleeing^ the famine, and 1922 was the year of leftists and liberals. This was a very elite group — more so than Paris. On the whole, the émigrés were not covered by German labor laws, and living conditions were difficult (although, curiously enough, Russian memoirs of the period depict a much rosier picture than do German documents about the Russians). In 1929 stateless persons were equated with Germans for purposes of unemployment compensation, and the normalized legal status of Russians in Germany was a significant factor in maintaining their numbers at a high level. The sheer number of the immigrants, plus the fact that many of them were politically active, was a cause of concern for officials in the M inistry of the Interior, which viewed the newcomers as undesirable and even dangerous. Shady figures such as the Russian émigré painter and inveterate counterfeiter Ivan Myasoedov (pseudonym: Eugen Zotow) only confirmed these suspicions. The Soviet governm ent had established relations with the W eim ar Republic, and authors whose books were published sim ultaneously in Berlin and Petrograd were perm itted to retain copyright. Èrenburg commented that if France was the country of
•Among their organizations w ere: D er Verein der Wolgadeutschen, D er Verein der Deutschen aus Südrußland, D ie Deutsch-Sibirische Vereinigung, and Das Provinzialkom itee der Deutschen aus Rußland der Provinz Ostpreußen. ‘O rganizatsiya zashchity interesov russkikh bezhentsev, referred to as the Vertrauenstelle by the Germ ans and headed by the form er Russian am bassador to Italy, Sergei Botkin.
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painting, Germany was the country of books. A primary engine for this publishing activity was, strangely enough, inflation — at least in its early stages. Stripped bare by the victorious Allies after the Treaty of Versailles and forced to pay enormous reparations, calculated in marks, the beleaguered German governm ent ran the printing presses round the clock. The currency was so devalued (2.7 million marks for $1 by August 16, 1923) that books could be published in Berlin at prices far below those possible in other countries. The émigré editor Iosif Gessen recalled owing a debt of 75 million marks, which he paid off with 50 American cents. But if an issue of the newspaper R ul' cost 10,000 marks in August 1923, by early December the price had risen to 200 billion marks — an increase of twenty million tim es (I) in just three months. In the early 1920s Berlin boasted at least 47 Russian publishing housesa, of which eight maintained Russian libraries.6 Roman Gul’ quotes the Börsenblatt des deutschen Buchhändlers as listing more Russian books appearing in Germany one year than German books. Altogether, between 2,100 and 2,200 titles were published by 86 publishers. Petropolis0 alone issued more than 1,000 books between 1922 and 1935, when it was forced to move to Brussels, where it survived until W orld W ar II began. Some ninety percent of the books published by Petropolis were exported for sale outside of Germany. Paper was extremely hard to come by in Russia, and ém igré publishing houses thus received a unique, albeit tem porary opportunity to capture much of that market. The Soviet writers who published in Berlin included, among others, Boris Pil'nyak (Vogau),
•These included such publishing houses as Akadem iya, Alkonost, Bibliofil, Dvuglavyi orêl, O. D'yakova i Ko., S . Èfron, Èpokha, Èver, Gam ayun, Tovarishchestvo Gliksman, Gelikon, Glagol, Grani, Grzhebin, Gutonov, O . Kirkhiner, Ladyzhnikov, Literature, Logos, Moskva, Mysl', Nauka i zhizn', Neva, Ogon'ki, Petropolis, Povolotsky i Ko., Progress, Rossiya, Russkoe iskusstvo, Russkoe tvorchestvo, Russkoe universal'noe izdatel'stvo, Slovo, Skify, A. Syrkin, Siyal’sky i Kreishman (one reference refers to this publishing house as Siyal'sky i Krechm er), Szio-Verlag, Teatr i zhizn', Trud, Vek kul'tury, Volga, Vostok, Vozrozhdenie, Vrach, Zarya, Znanie. For the most com plete list of Russian publishing houses in Berlin see: Gottfried Kratz, "Russische Verlage in Berlin nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg." * 0 . D'yakova i Ko., Tovarishchestvo Gliksman, O. Kirkhner i Ko., Knizhnyi Salon, Moskva, Obrazovanie, Rus', Rodina. «Petropolis w as founded as a cooperative, chaired by M. A. Kuz'min, with an editorial com m ittee consisting of Yakov Blokh, Abram Kagan, and Grigory Lozinsky. Blokh w as evidently the committee's most active member.
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Konstantin Fedin (later head of the Soviet W riters’ Union), Vsevolod Ivanov, and Anatoly Mariengof. One of the major publishers, Zinovy Grzhebin, published prose and poetry by Maksim Gor'ky, Aleksei Remizov, Vladislav Khodasevich, Boris Pasternak, Fëdor Sologub, and others. Grzhebin, who was Gor'ky's protégé, for a tim e had an arrangem ent with the Soviet authorities to sell his books to them .a The other major publishers in Berlin were Gelikonb, Èpokhac, and Slovo (backed by Ullstein Publishers), and that of Ivan Ladyzhnikov.d Slovo published almost all the works of Mark Aldanov and som e of Nabokov's. One of the magazines published by Èpokha was Beseda (Conversation), which was conceived by Viktor Shklovsky. Gor'ky was so determ ined that Beseda survive that he would not allow any of his writings to be published in Soviet Russia unless issues of Beseda could be legally imported. Beseda was popular enough to enjoy a printrun of 1,200 to 1,500 copies abroad — very respectable by ém igré standards — but the hope was for greater sales in Russia itself. To propitiate Gor'ky, the Politbyuro in 1924 issued a special decree, perm itting the importation of Beseda, but then refused to order any copies. Besedäs life span was thus a short one — although not an unusually brief one by émigré standards — from June 1923 to March 1925. A number of newspapers were published in Berlin. Golos Rossii (The Voice of Russia) was a daily publication with a rather vague political orientation; it was eventually purchased by the Social Revolutionaries and renamed D ni (Days). A second daily newspaper was R ul' (The Helm), co-edited by Iosif Gessen and the senior Vladim ir
•The Soviets did not keep their end of the bargain, and Grzhebin's publishing venture w as bankrupted. Supposedly the Soviet publisher Sam uil Zaks (pseudonym: G ladnev) w as sent to Berlin in 1920 to undermine Grzhebin's activities. bGelikon, which existed from 1922 to 1924, w as founded by Abram Vishnyak, who w as to perish in a Germ an concentration camp. cÈpokha w as founded and managed by Solomon Kaplun (pseudonym: Sum sky), who managed to go bankrupt, like his fellow ém igré publishers, Zinovy Grzhebin and Ivan Ladyzhnikov. dLadyzhnikov had been in charge of Bol'shevik publishing abroad as early as 1905, first in G eneva and only later in Berlin. His publishing house Kniga (renam ed Mezhdunarodnaya kniga in 1923) w as the official Soviet book company abroad. Ladyzhnikov eventually returned to Russia and becam e literary executor for the estate of Maksim Gor'ky, whom he had known since the 1890s.
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Nabokov, father of the writer.® A weekly publication, Vremya (Time), was published by Grigory Breitman. There was even a communist Russian-language newspaper Novyi m ir (The New W orld), supposedly financed by the Soviet governm ent and intended to cover politics, literature, and economics. The Monarchists published Gryadushchaya Rossiya (Future Russia). Another weekly was the Changing Landmarks publication Nakanune (On the Eve).b And, of course, there were the Russian Nazis, who first published Prizyv (The Call) and then Zhidoved (Judenkenner). Dozens of Russian magazines were published in Berlin — on all sorts of topics. There were periodicals published by the Moderate Democrats, the Leftist Democrats, the Peasant Union, the AnarchoSyndicalists, the Social Democrats, the Social Revolutionaries, the Leftist Social Revolutionaries, the Monarchists, the Communists, and Russian Jewish organizations.® Zhar-ptitsa (Firebird) was a glossy illustrated literary-artistic monthly. Grzhebin's Putnik published both Soviet and émigré authors. N ovosti literatury (Literary News), edited by Mark Slonim, was a "critical-bibliographical journal.” Announced for publication was a satirical journal Plokhie shutki (Bad Jokes), to be edited by Nadezhda Tèffi. Golos èm igranta (The Émigré's Voice) appeared every two weeks and was devoted to the cultural, legal, and economic questions of interest to the émigré community. Aleksandr Yashchenko's Novaya russkaya kniga (New Russian Book), a non-political bibliographical and
•The paper appeared from Novem ber 16, 1920, until October 1 2 ,1 9 3 1 , with a circulation of som e 20,000 copies in the early 1920s, roughly half of which w ere sold in Germ any. Altogether R ul' w as sold in some 369 cities in 34 countries. Evidently the publication w as made possible thanks to an agreem ent between the G erm an publisher Ulstein and Gessen. bRodina (The Fatherland) w as published weekly in Russian and Germ an. Spolokhi (Northern Lights) was a literary and artistic monthly. CA partial list: Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii, Byulleteni Dom a Iskusstv, Dvuglavyi orêl, Èpopeya, Ezhenedel'nik Vysshego Monarkhistkogo Soveta, Golos èmigranta, Istorik i sovremennik, Kresfyanskoe delo, Letopis' revolyutsii, Novosti literatury, Pechatnoe iskusstvo, Revolyutsionnaya Rossiya, Russkii Ökonomist (in German), Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, Spolokhi, Teatr i zhizn', Trudy russkikh uchënykh za granitsei, Veretênysh, Zarya. Vestnik samoobrazovaniya, Vostanovlenie. W hile many of these publications w ere in no way literary, the list does help to give a general picture of the scope of Russian publishing in Berlin.
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critical journal which kept track of Russian publishing activity all over the world, appeared m onthly.3 There were dozens of Russian cultural organizations in Berlin, among them the W riters’ Club, the House of the Arts, the Russian Institute of Science and Scholarship, the League of Russian Journalists and W riters, and the League of Russian Publishers.11 The Academy of Prose was launched in 1923 with a reading by Aleksei Tolstoi from his A M anuscript Found in the Garbage Under the Bed, while Vereteno (Spindle) proclaimed that it was going to "struggle against the decay of Russian literature” and debunk "pseudo-scientific” distinctions between "younger” and "older” writers.0 The local W riters’ Union was headed by Iosif Gessen. Needless to say, there was no shortage of clubs and restaurants in Russian Berlin: Strel'nya with Prince Golitsyn's gypsy chorus, Tikhii om ut (The Quiet Quagmire), M edved' (The Bear), Alaverdi, the Leon Café on Nollendorfplatz, and the café Landgraf, where a so-called "Russian Club” gathered on Sundays/1 There was also the Russian Literary and Artistic Circle6, which was actually a kind of club. The Chamber of Poets (Palata poètov) gathered in the café Chameleon and devoted a special evening to Charlie Chaplin on the occasion of one of his visits to Paris.1 Since the ruble was still convertible, many Soviet writers were able to visit Berlin, and the Berlin
‘The archives of Novaya russkaya kniga w ere taken by Boris Nikolaevsky to Paris and have been at least partially preserved in the Hoover Institute Library in California. bSom e members of these organizations: Yury Aikhenval’d, Andrei Bely, Nikolai Berdyaev, Boris Zaitsev, Georgy Ivanov, Pavel Muratov, Irina Odoevtseva, Nikolai Otsup, Sergei Rafalovich, and Vladim ir Khodasevich. Dorn iskusstv w as founded in 1921 and chaired first by Nikolai Minsky and then by Andrei Bely, with the active participation of Aleksei Rem izov, Viktor Shklovsky, Ivan Sokolov-Mikitov, and others. clts board members included: Gleb Alekseev, Vladim ir Am fiteatrov-Kadashev, Aleksandr Drozdov, Sergei Gorny, Vladim ir Korvin-Piotrovsky, and Yury Ofrosimov. dAmong the writers who gave readings there w ere ll'ya Èrenburg, Pavel Muratov, Vyacheslav Khodasevich, Viktor Shklovsky, Vladim ir Gom berg (Lidin), Aleksandr Yashchenko, Andrei Bely, Boris Vysheslavtsev, Boris Zaitsev, and Nina Berberova. •In 1926 its board included M. A. Anatra, Aleksandr Kulisher, V . Y a. Nazim ov, I. M. Troitsky, and Pêtr Zvezdich. »Some members: Aleksandr Ginger, Georgy Evangulov, Valentin Parnakh, Sergei Sharshun, Mikhail Struve, and Mark-Lyudovik-Mariya Talov.
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House of the Arts maintained close relations with the Petrograd House of the Arts. The W riters’ Club included Andrei Bely and Viktor Shklovsky, both of whom eventually returned to Russia, as well as Il'ya Èrenburg, whose relations with the émigré community were themselves an interesting elem ent of the cultural scene. The League of Poets was founded in February 1928. It met twice a month, and called for total seriousness and a cautious attitude toward form, while rejecting aestheticism (but not romanticism). The League published the verse collections Housewarming, The Grove, and The Net.* Russian Berlin could boast of a number of women poets: M arina Tsvetaeva, Nina Berberova, Raisa Blokh, and Èmiliya Chegrintseva all published collections of verse there. Naturally, Russian cultural activities in the German-speaking countries were not limited to Berlin. Ivan Nazhivin's publishing house Detinets (Citadel) listed its location as Berlin/Vienna, and he had another, Ikar (Icarus), in Reichenhall. And there were other publishing operations in Vienna: Laguna, Novaya Rossiya (New Russia), Persky Publishers (Izdatel'stvo Perskogo), and Rus'. Vostok was located in Dresden, Insel in Leipzig, and Milavida in Munich, where there lived some 500 to 600 Russians, most of them monarchists. The places of publication of Russian magazines are indicative of where the writers were clustered. Although a handful of Russian magazines and journals had been published in Germany before 1917, their number subsequently increased, and 1922 was destined to become the first peak in Russian serials publication in Germany. Despite all the cultural activities and institutions for which postW orld W ar I Germany is famous — the Bauhaus, Expressionism, the theater of Max Reinhardt, avant-garde music and film — the country was seething with resentment. In April 1922 the Soviet and German governm ents unexpectedly signed the Treaty of Rapallo, launching a period of collaboration between the two countries in producing weaponry forbidden in Germany under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Indeed, it was the very terms of the treaty that forced the W eim ar Republic into the arms of the Soviets. Rapallo put an end to the claim s of Russian émigrés to represent Russia at the negotiating table. W orst of all, once the Rapallo treaty had been concluded, Russian ém igrés could be tried in German courts in accordance with Soviet law. The German government, already troubled by the huge influx of Russian émigrés, took a dim view of the tum ult created by its Russian guests, and the rumor spread that Germany had concluded a secret agreem ent with the Soviets to put an end to émigré
“Novosel'e (1931), Roshcha (1932), Nevod (1933).
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counterrevolutionary activities. By the end of 1924 a massive exodus of Russian emigrants to Paris had commenced: inflation was replaced by deflation, and Germany had simply become too expensive for them. Iosif Gessen's diary reads: "Russian Berlin is dying.” In April 1924 the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev asked his colleague Lev Shestov for assistance in moving to Paris. Later Berdyaev was to write that Russians in Berlin did not feel they were cut off from Russia, as was the case in Paris. W hile conceding that the mood in Germany was far from upbeat, Shestov had noted as late as August 1923 that people were working and he felt that talk of disaster was exaggerated. By the tim e Berdyaev's letter reached him, however, his guarded optimism had all but disappeared. Èrenburg commented that, if Berlin was a depressing place in 1923, by 1927 the chaos left over from the war had been swept away and replaced with expensive jewelry stores and orchids. A year later he wrote that Germany was unquestionably the most fascinating country in Europe. At the same tim e the Germans were becoming even more unhappy with the large Russian presence inside their borders. Early in 1930 the head of the M inistry of the Interior (das Auswärtige Amt, Ostabteilung) even wanted to give Moscow a free hand in putting a stop to anti-Soviet activities. Germany continued to be of compelling interest to both émigrés and Soviets when the National Socialist Party came to power in 1933, but for different reasons. The Russian Institute of Science and Scholarship (Russkii nauchnyi institut) was purged of "non-Aryan” members, and many books— German as well as fo re ig n — suffered the same fate. Roman Gul' witnessed the book burning on Opera Square: When m y wife and I arrived a t Friedrichstraße, the crowd was already enormous. Autom obile horns were sounding, tram s caught in the traffic jam were im patiently ringing their bells, and an all-consum ing nocturnal chaos reigned. The crowd was pressed up along the sidewalk. Brown Shirts with swastikas on their sleeves m arched in closed ranks down the pavement, red torches smoking in their hands. Their footsteps resounded as if their boots were cast o f pig iron. They sang in unison, with a chorus: "B lut m uß fließen! B lut m uß fließenl” (Blood m ust flowI) We m anaged to squeeze through the crowd and made our way along Unter den Linden to the bonfire, which was casting quivering orange shadows on the windows o f the old buildings; the flame in front o f the university m ore and more took on the color o f blood. Drums rolled, flutes squealed, and m ilitary marches resounded. Shafts o f light leapt into the night sky. Suddenly, raising their right hands to the fire-breathing
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sky, the crowd began to sing: Die Fahne hoch! A nd when this Horst Wessel song had died down in the darkness, an incredibly pow erful loudspeaker scream ed into the redness o f the night: "/ condemn to the flames Erich M aria R em arquer A roar o f approval rolled over the square, even though I doubt that m any there had actually read A ll Quiet on the Western Front. Hands red from the fire's reflection began flinging books into the flame, which suddenly leapt upward into the darkness, and book sheets spun through the a ir as if alive. Joy spread over the square.... Gul' him self remained in Germany until 1933, when he was arrested and spent several weeks in a Nazi concentration camp. As soon as he was released, he left for France. Iosif Gessen, editor of Rul', wrote of the Berlin apartm ent that had been home to him and his w ife for ten years: The furniture rem ained alien and som ehow not ours; I felt no attachm ent to these things, no associations. As if dead, they preserved a lifeless dull muteness, and I came to know them better only ju s t before the auction, when the appraisers were conducting an inventory and asked me to examine each item individually and state how much I thought it was worth. Despite numerous attempts by the émigrés to curry favor with the new government, the general attitude toward things Russian took a radical turn for the worse.The largely anti-Russian and naively proGerman Ukrainian emigration, which was very much sm aller than the Russian, was far more successful in this respect. Most Russians who had stuck it out in Germany through the inflation, arising every morning to wonder what that day's dollar exchange rate would be, decided it was tim e to move on. A second, sm aller "peak” of Russian arrivals in Germany came in 1948, and a third after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. — but more about those events later.
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Paris No m atter what anyone says, gentlemen, Paris is the only place in the perishing W est where you can perish in so ample and convenient a fashion. Aleksandr Gertsen, 1847 A t first I denied Paris and even attem pted to ignore it. Essentially this was the struggle o f a barbarian for survival. I sensed that if I wanted to approach Paris and truly encompass it I had to expend too m uch o f myself. Lev Trotsky Do you love Paris? So do I. It's sheer paradise, and when I was driven from that paradise, a ll I could do was smile shyly, like Adam. It's a rem arkable city! Remember the salesgirls beneath the chestnut trees, the girls playing hopscotch on the sidewalk, the used bookshops along the Seine, the blackbirds and the Sym bolist poets in the Luxembourg Gardens, the "terrible" anarchist Sebastien Faure, who taught babies to sing. Just rem em ber it all. Is it not a grandiose province, a transplanted village o f happy people? Il’ya Erenburg The Russian fascination with France goes back to the 18th century. The 19th-century memoirist Pavel Annenkov saw this obsession as an enthrallm ent with an idealized, even phantasized country. Gertsen, on the other hand, perceived the French capital as a gloom y city of death. Still, as Vladim ir Burtsev put it, France was "every Russian's second fatherland,” and Paris was the true émigré capital. Any number of Russian poets devoted verse to the city — Blok, Voloshin, Akhmatova, Gumilêv, Mandel’shtam, and Mayakovsky, to name but a few. Pavel Annenkov commented that when he arrived in Paris in the spring of 1846, he discovered an entire Russian colony led by Bakunin and Sazonov engaged in an interminable discussion of everyday, historical, and philosophical questions, such as were constantly being stirred up by social life in Paris under the liberal King Louis Philippe. At that tim e there was still no trace of any Russian political émigré community; that came into being only after the 1848 revolution. By 1875 so many Russians had relocated to Paris from Switzerland, where they had been studying, that Ivan Turgenev made
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a donation to create a Russian reading room, renamed the Turgenev Library after his death. Beginning with Russkii parizhanin (Russian Parisian) in 1892, Paris was home to several short-lived Russian newspapers.® Parizhskii vestnik (Parisian Herald, 1913) was actually quite successful, with printruns of 10,000 copies, but it closed down when World W ar I broke out. Ya. Povolotsky Publishers was founded in 1910 to bring Russia and France closer together; it was reactivated after W orld W ar I came to a close. The number of Russians in Paris had increased steadily toward the end of the 19th century, and it rose even more steeply after the 1905 revolution, making Paris the most im portant Western European city for Russians. There were actually three Russian colonies residing in different parts of the city. The largest concentration, consisting of intellectuals, artists, and students, was on the Left Bank. The wealthy Russian aristocracy preferred the Right bank — in the sixteenth arrondissem ent (Auteuil and Passy), and there was a Russian-Jewish colony in the fourth arrondissem ent — in the area of Saint Paul and the Bastille. Outside Paris the chief areas where Russians lived were Niceb, Lyon0, Cannes, and Marseilles. The acm eist poet Nikolai Gumilëv, a twenty-one-year-old student in Paris in 1907, published a literary journal entitled Sirius?, proclaim ing Paris ”a second Alexandria of elegance and enlightenm ent.” The general tone was typical of turn of the century ecstatic aestheticism :
aA partial list: Echo de Russie (1893, in French and Russian), Parizhskaya gazeta (Parisian Newspaper, 1900, intended for visitors to the World's Fair), Parizhskii listok (Parisian Flyer, 1910), Inostranets (Foreigner, 1912-1914), Novosti (New s, 1914-1915, published by Nikolai Avksent'ev, ll'ya Bunakov, and Boris Savinkov, with verse by Voloshin and Bal'mont), Golos (Voice, 1914-1915), Novaya èpokha (N ew Era, 1917), and Druz'ya russkogo soldata (Friends of the Russian Soldier, 1916, published by the Society of Friends of the Russian Soldier, organized by Paul Doumer for Russian soldiers in France). bAleksandra Fedorovna, mother of Tsar Aleksandr II, had fallen in love with Nice in 1856, when she w as negotiating for port rights for Russian ships with the Kingdom of Sardinia. Russian nobility followed the imperial fam ily to the Riviera, and by 1860 there w ere 214 Russian fam ilies resident in Nice. After the 1917 revolution the number of Russians in that city grew to 5,300. «Roughly 7,000 persons. »Together with Mstislav Farmakovsky and Aleksandr Bozheryanov.
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We will fall in love with everything that w ill im part an aesthetic fluttering to the soul, whether it is degenerate but luxurious Pom peii o r a New Egypt, where the tim es have intertw ined in madness and dance, the golden middle ages, o r our own severe, thoughtful time. The second issue of Sirius contained verse of Gum ilêv's future wife, Anna Gorenko, later to become famous as Anna Akhmatova. A second, and equally short-lived, literary journal appeared only six years later — Gelios — whose editors declared they wanted "to reflect the efforts of contemporaries to draw nearer to the sun.” Lunacharsky wrote an article on the theater, and the Soviet w riter Vera Inber, who lived in Europe as a journalist from 1924 to 1926, was represented with two poems in the second issue. When the 1917 October coup delivered a huge mass of Russians to France, the French saw no reason to lessen their traditional hostility to foreigners. Despite Dyagilev's popular 1909-11 "Russian Seasons,” little seemed to have changed for Russians in Paris after 1917. The émigré editor Mark Vishnyak com plained that foreigners frequently heard themselves referred to in the streets as "sale étranger” (dirty foreigner) and "métèque” (wop), and that even French intellectuals rarely sympathized with the plight of the Russian exiles. Nevertheless, even though opportunities for integration into French society were limited, France had suffered from a shortage of workers since the 1880s, and when W orld W ar I came to an end, the governm ent was eager to recruit foreign workers to rebuild the country — particularly in the face of agrow ing German population already nearly twice that of France. The heavy losses at the front had resulted in a dearth of French men, while the military evacuations had produced a male majority among the Russian émigrés. Since Russian women were relatively few in numbers, most Russo-French marriages were between Russian men and French women (a circumstance that contributed to the Russians’ rapid assimilation). Russians were treated quite hospitably in a number of ways. In 1923 the French Assembly voted a credit of 450,000 francs to create educational scholarships for some 200 Russian students, and the French attitude toward the émigrés was immeasurably better than toward the new Soviet government. Vasily Maklakov, a member of the last Duma, had been appointed Ambassador of the Russian Provisional Government, but when he presented him self at the Quai d'Orsay to deliver his credentials, he was informed that Kerensky's governm ent had been overthrown. Nevertheless, he was officially recognized as Russian Ambassador to France and actually resided in the Russian Embassy until October 1924, when France finally granted diplom atic recognition to the Soviet government. The following year the
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French governm ent extended its generosity to the Russian refugees and granted official status to the so-called "offices russes," and Maklakov continued to represent the civil affairs of Russian immigrants right up to his death in 1957, only by then as a French civil servant. French naturalization laws were sim ilar to those of most European countries, and between 1921 and 1934 17,033 Russians received French citizenship — most of them young men eligible for military service, agricultural laborers, and fam ilies with many children. Persons over 30, particularly if they were childless, generally suffered discrim ination. As of spring 1926, however, the Labor Ministry no longer perm itted foreigners to take the qualifying examination for naturalization. Thus, the majority of Russians in France never became French citizens; for many doing so would have meant to betray Russia. Estimates of the number of Russians living in Paris at the time range from 72,000 to 400,000. In the words of the émigré editor Mark Vishnyak, the city had been transformed into "both Babylon and Mecca, sim ultaneously a market and a tem ple.” Some 2,500 Russians worked as taxicab drivers in Paris, often emblazoning the doors of their cabs with the emblem of the Russian bear. The Russians, who had the lowest crim e rate of all foreign residents, maintained so many restaurants and manicure shops and had so many singers, balalaika players, and ballet dancers that one French observer noted in 1937 that the French themselves could totally immerse themselves in Russian life, should they wish to. There were 14 Russian bookstores, plus any number of Russian schools, shops, lotteries, orchestras, pharmacies, banks, hotels, butchers, mechanics, tailors, typesetters, and printers. One could even buy Russian Sappho cigarettes, and the magazine llyustrirovannaya Rossiya (Illustrated Russia) sponsored a Miss Russia to the Miss Europe and Miss Universe contests. As the German mark rose in value, the French franc fell, and any savings brought from Russia now went further in Paris than in Berlin.3 Aside from economic reasons for relocating to France from Germany, there were also obviously political factors at work after the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933. Right-wing Russians were more likely to remain in Germany, while liberals and the political left moved on.
•By July 1926 the French franc had fallen from its 1921 exchange rate of 13.5 to the dollar to nearly 50. In Decem ber of that year a currency reform returned the franc to 26 to the dollar, w here it remained until 1934, when the exchange rate was established at 15.2. By the late 1930s the franc began falling again — to 21 to the dollar in 1936, 29 in Decem ber 1937, and 40 in January 1939.
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At that tim e Paris was the unquestioned world center of art, and such Russian émigré artists as Mark Shagal, Natal'ya Goncharova, Vasily Kandinsky, Aleksandr Benua, Mikhail Larionov, and Ivan Bilibin played a significant role in the artistic life of Montparnasse. Sergei Dyagilev had established a name for his Ballets russes even earlier, Fêdor Shalyapin performed to packed houses in the Russian Opera, and there was a Russian Repertoire Theater. Paris had more than 30 Orthodox churches and seven Russian institutions of higher learning. 1921 saw the founding of the Russian People's University. In 1924 the YMCA Press moved to Paris from Berlin. (It had been established in Prague before moving to Berlin.) The Russian Academy of Religious Philosophy was also transferred from Berlin. The flight of writers from Germany further confirmed Paris's status as the capital of Russian émigré culture. Among the leaders of the Paris émigré com m unity were Zinaida Gippius and Dmitry Merezhkovsky, who continued a popular fin-de-siècle tradition — the literary salon. It was called the Green Lamp Society, and its ideas were promulgated in the magazine N ovyi korabl' (The New Ship). The society's name was taken from the Green Lamp Circle which met in the St. Petersburg home of Nikita Vsevolozhsky in the first quarter of the 19th century. Before 1917, the Merezhkovskys had conducted regular soirées in their St. Petersburg apartment, where Merezhkovsky held forth on the new religious consciousness and Gippius discussed such topics as the metaphysics of sex and the Second Coming. Their guests, who included Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Bely, the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, Vasily Rozanov, and Fêdor Sologub, delivered talks and lectures on virtually every topic regarded as significant either for contemporary Russian culture or in the broader world context. The Society met regularly from 1927 until 1939. Among the first three papers delivered were "On Literary Criticism ” (M ark Tsetlin), "The Russian Intelligentsia as a Spiritual Order” (ll'ya Bunakov-Fondaminsky), and "Does Poetry Have a Purpose?” (Georgy Adamovich). The meetings, which were by invitation only, were attended by a wide spectrum of Russian intellectuals and writers, ranging from such established figures as Ivan Bunin, Boris Zaitsev, Mark Aldanov, Aleksei Remizov, Vladislav Khodasevich, Nadezhda Tèffi, Nikolai Berdyaev, Lev Shestov, Georgy Adamovich, Konstantin Mochul'sky, and Georgy Fedotov to members of the "younger generation” — Boris Poplavsky, Dovid Knut, Vladim ir Varshavsky, and Nikolai Bakhtin, among others. Meetings were chaired by Georgy Ivanov, with Gippius and Merezhkovsky seated at the speaker's table as "adm inistrators.” The discussions were conducted in a formal, albeit often heated fashion. Although a large number of speakers held forth over the years on a
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wide range of topics, the "metaphysical” implications of these topics appear to have been a frequent focus of discussion — a feature sharply attacked by the so-called "Formists” Anna Prismanova and Vladimir Korvin-Piotrovsky. The Merezhkovskys had a wide circle of friends among the "older” generation of writers, and Gippius, an accomplished society hostess, often did even more than was required to draw younger writers into the literary fold. Supposedly only platonically involved with her husband and Dmitry Zlobin, the poet who had accompanied her and Merezhkovsky in their escape to the West, Gippius evidently played the role of vamp with young men who attended the Green Lamp meetings. At the same time, she also had more than passing interest in androgyny, and the high-society mixture of mysticism and unusual sex lent an added twist to her role of mystic poet and salon hostess. Another literary "circle” was that of Il'ya Fondaminsky, which met in his apartm ent on the avenue de Versailles on alternating Mondays.3 The wealthy Mikhail and Mariya Tsetlin also held "teas” in their spacious apartment, dedicating the proceeds to the Committee to Assist Russian W riters. The Arzamas group was interested in literature, music, and ballet.6 The National League of Russian W riters and Journalists in France was created in 1937 with the goal of being a sort of mutual assistance society. The Perekrêstok (Intersection) group organized lectures on literary topics. Cherez (Through) brought poets and artists together. The magazine Chisla (Numbers) gave lectures and readings in a group with the same name. In 1937 even the Cossacks had their own literary group.0 A number of journals were produced in Paris, including Sovremennye zapiski (Contemporary Annals)d, the chief "thick” literarypolitical journal of the émigré community, founded with financial support from the Czechoslovak government. Paris was also home to the two chief émigré newspapers — the liberal Poslednie novosti, edited
“Most of the members w ere involved in the collection Krug (Circle), and the group even called itself by this name. •»Chaired by N. D. Yanchevsky. cKruzhok kazakov-IKeratorov, founded in 1937. The group published Kazachii al'm anakh (Cossack Alm anac) in 1939. «•Founded
by Nikoali Avksent’ev,
Il'ya Bunakov-Fondaminsky,
Gukovsky, Vadim Rudnev, and Mark Vishnyak.
Aleksandr
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by Pavel Milyukov,6 and its conservative opponent Vozrozhdenie, edited by Pêtr Struve with financial backing from the Gukasov brothers, who had been oil magnates in Armenia before emigrating. Milyukov believed in a gradual evolution of Soviet rule into a more dem ocratic form and opposed foreign military intervention in Russia, while Struve did everything in his power to encourage it. In December 1925 Vozrozhdenie even came out in "unambiguous and total” support of Italian fascism, because of the latter's clearcut anti-com m unist thrust. Many new publishing operations sprang up, and Vozrozhdenie and Sovremennye zapiski felt morally obliged to publish books.b Paris became the new home of such prose writers as Ivan Bunin, Aleksandr Kuprin, Boris Zaitsev, Ivan Shmelêv, Aleksei Remizov, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Mikhail ll'in (pseudonym: Mikhail Osorgin), and Mark Landau (Mark Aldanov). Pavel Milyukov headed the local W riters' Union. The Russian poets living in Paris included Vladislav Khodasevich, Nina Berberova, Zinaida Gippius, Georgy Ivanov, Georgy Adamovich, Dovid Knut, Boris Poplavsky, and Marina Tsvetaeva (after 1925), to name but a few. Like so much of world literature at the time, Russian ém igré literature found its focal point in the cafés, and it was Paris that was destined to become the real center of the "café period” in Russian letters. Cafés were not just a place to have breakfast; they were a way of life. Russian Montparnasse had already been a real institution before 1917 and when the revolutionaries went home, their places were soon taken by the new Russian refugees. In 1919 and the early 1920s the Café de la Rotonde was an extremely popular spot — especially since the owner fancied himself a poet and served coffee and onion soup on credit. Later the Rotonde was expanded into a very much larger institution, and many of the writers moved on to sm aller cafés with a more intimate atmosphere. By 1928 the Selecte and the Napoli became the two most popular Russian cafés. Others were Le Dôme and Aux Deux Magots. In 1928, in memory of Charles Leconte de Lisle, Yann'is Papadiamandopulus (Moréas), and Nikolai Gumilêv,
aln 1938 Milyukov claimed a print run of 39,000 copies. A Glavlit document claims that the paper was partially financed by the form er tsarist ambassador Boris Bakhmet'ev. bSom e other Parisian publishers were: B. M. Dombrovsky, Franko-russkaya pechat' (Franco-Russian Press), D. Konovalov, I. Kutyrina, Mishen' (The Target), Molodaya Rossiya (Young Russia), Oven (Ram ), Orfei (Orpheus), Palata poètov (Cham ber of Poets), Ptitselov (Fowler), L. Z. Rodshtein, Russkaya pechat' (Russian Press), Russkaya zem lya (Russian Earth), Sever (North), Teatr i iskusstvo (Theater and Art), M. & M. Tsetlin, and I. S. Zon.
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a group of young Russian poets who called their group Perekrêstok (The Intersection) began to gather in La Closerie des Lilas, and then moved to Montparnasse, on the left bank of the Seine. It was during this period that Russian émigré culture achieved its greatest flowering — in music, art, ballet, dance, and literature. This achievement was the product of a close interaction between Russian and world culture, sometimes promoted by wealthy patrons. For example, Evgraf Kovalevsky (father of the émigré historian Pêtr Kovalevsky) owned an estate in Meudon, a suburb to the southwest of Paris, where some 2,000 émigrés lived, and Prince Grigory Trubetskoi presided over his own grand estate in Clam ait, where some 300 Russian aristocrats resided. The unemployment caused by the depression of the 1930s forced the French government to reexamine its attitude toward foreign workers. In 1932 a law was passed authorizing the Labor M inistry to impose quotas for foreign workers in certain areas — usually five or ten percent, and in 1935 an especially stringent law caused a number of Russian to lose their work permits. By the late 1930s unemployment among the Russians in Lyon, for example, had reached 45 percent. Aside from cases of true hardship, some odd situations arose; for example, a balalaika orchestra could hire only 15 percent Russian musicians, and a Russian choir could employ no more than 10 percent non-citizens. Even slight legal infractions such as late payment of the fee for identification papers could be viewed as sufficient cause for deportation. In 1934-35 the Nansen International Office for Refugees interceded on behalf of 1,596 Russians subject to deportation orders, and another 4,000 may have had such orders standing against them at the time. If no foreign country was willing to accept the deportees, they were imprisoned for six months, and if they still had nowhere to go when they were released, they would be imprisoned again. There was one individual who was incarcerated for ten years. The country which had presented the Statue of Liberty to the United States in com m itm ent of its support of the principle of asylum had become very hard-hearted indeed.
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Brussels A nd Belgium 's capital had gather'd then Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright The lamps shone o'er fa ir women and brave men. Byron, Childe Harolde Russia's relations with the southern Netherlands extend back to Peter the Great, who sent young men there to study and who him self served a brief imperial apprenticeship on Antwerp's wharfs in 1697, consuming — together with his entourage — hundreds of bottles of wine. Today’s visitors to Brussels' Parque Royale can read a bronze plaque commemorating his having been sick on that very spot after overim bibing. Soon Russians began to discover for themselves the homeland of brabant lace and gothic architecture. In 1842 Prince Aleksei Meshchersky wrote a 200-page description of the country, describing its cities, legends, architecture, and numerous political exiles, some of whom were Russian. Belgium was already becoming popular among Russians as an inexpensive tourist destination and a relatively safe haven for radicals (who nevertheless lived in constant anxiety that Russian governmental pressure might cause them to be deported). Among Belgium's many Russian admirers were Aleksandr Gertsen, who became close friends there with Victor Hugo, and Pavel Annenkov, the first Russian to meet Karl Marx, who had been deported there from Paris. In Lüttich (Liège) Annenkov's guide was an old man who had been a prisoner of war in Saratov after Napoleon's unsuccessful invasion of Russia. The man kept repeating the one Russian sentence he remembered from his captivity: "G et outside now, you dog of a Frenchman.” Many other Russian writers were taken with the country, among them Gogol', Zhukovsky, Bakunin, and Turgenev. Later Bryusov, Blok, Èrenburg, and Bely were to visit. Ostend was particularly popular as a spa with well-to-do Russians, who spent their days and evenings in an incessant round of strolls and form al dinners, having put up at either Cour impériale de Russie or Hôtel de Russie. The outbreak of the Crimean war in 1854 caused Nikolai I to sharply cut back the number of exit visas issued to would-be Russian travellers, but even so a Russian diplom atic post was opened in Brussels that same year. After Nikolai's death in 1855, the more liberal Aleksandr II removed most travel limitations for his Russian subjects, and many made their way to Belgium. Their political sym pathies ranged from conservative to liberal to radical, but they appear to have been united in a common com plaint that the locals were provincial,
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petty bourgeois, and stingy. W orst of all, at least according to the Russians, all the most beautiful Flemish women had moved to Paris. The Russian government was sufficiently concerned about leftist inclinations among the Russians in Belgium that from 1855 to 1892 it actually published for them a French-language newspaper, Le Nord. In 1862 Pêtr Dolgorukov founded a biweekly magazine entitled, simply, P ëtr Dolgorukov's Paper, and that same year he induced a liberal émigré, Leonid Blyummer, to move to Brussels from Berlin and bring with him his political magazine Svobodnoe slovo (The Free W ord). But the two men had a falling-out and when Dolgorukov spread the rumor that Blyummer was Russian spy, both publications closed. The number of Russians in Belgium continued to grow, although for many Brussels was only a stopover on the way to Paris. By 1898-99 there were 450 students from the Russian empire, many of them Russian Jews who had difficulty enrolling in universities back home. By the turn of the century there were 2,350 citizens of the Russian empire residing in Belgium, and 7,490 by 1910. Being so close geographically and culturally to France, Belgium inevitably was involved with Russian cultural activities in that country (Gertsen had complained that the locals "aped” the French). Brussels boasted both a literature and arts "society” and a literary and arts "circle,” the latter created by the "society” to inculcate in young Russians a love for Russian culture. In addition there was a Russian w riters’ club and publishing house, Edinorog (The Unicorn). One of the more colorful figures in Edinorog was the novelist and editor Ivan Nazhivin (1874-1940), an ardent Tolstoian who blamed the loss of W orld W ar I on drunken generals and speculators indifferent to young Russian men dying nobly at the front. The émigré com m unity was for him a "suffocating swamp whose deadness was astounding.” When he could not get his angry views published in the émigré press, he applied for Soviet citizenship but then failed to follow up on the undertaking. In 1933 he founded his own "independent’ press, but in a brochure published that same year he was disrespectful to the memory of Nikolai II. As a result, he was drummed out of émigré society. The local Russian newspaper even referred to him as a "mad dog,” and he renewed his attempts to return to Russia. In 1934 he wrote a personal letter to Stalin requesting amnesty and even included the text in his novel N ot Deeply Respected (Neglubokouvazhaemye, 1935). The request was denied — fortunately for Nazhivin, since he would surely have perished in the purges. Many members of the Russian nobility chose to live in Belgium, and the League of Russian Noblemen (Soyuz russkikh dvoryan) was active until the beginning of World W ar II. There was also a Russian library in Brussels, but it closed when World W ar I began.
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Prague G old! G old! G old! G old! Bright and yellow, hard and cold, Molten, graven, hammer'd, and roll'd. Thomas Hood (1799-1845) TornaS Masaryk, Czechoslovakia's head of state from 1918 to 1935 and also an expert on Russian history, was resolutely hostile to the Soviet government. When Czechoslovak troops who had fought in Russia during World W ar I and the Russian civil war brought back with them to their own country some of the Imperial Russian gold reserves, the interest on these funds was rumored to have been used by the Czechoslovak governm ent to support Russian writers in exile. This was the so-called "Russian Initiative”3 that provided support for Russian émigré writers and students, thus attracting a sizeable group of Russian cultural figures to Prague. The city even came to be known as the "Russian Oxford." In the mid-1920s some 25,000 Russians were registered in Czechoslovakia, but the registration requirements were so lax that the actual number must have been considerably higher. The Russians arrived in Czechoslovakia in staggered groups. The majority were ex-soldiers, but there were also scholars and political figures who had been deported in the 1922 group. The Czechoslovak government's support was originally provided through Zerngor*, which awarded 4,663 scholarships to Russian and Ukrainian students in 1924 alone. A number of Russian libraries were also founded with the money, although the bulk of the funds appear actually to have been expended for clandestine political purposes. Like their com patriots in other European countries, Russians in Czechoslovakia felt isolated from the intellectual life of the country which had received them. Czechoslovak politics were usually to the left of those of the Russian émigrés, and the general orientation was W estern, not Russian. In the early years especially, expectations were for a quick and victorious return home. When the liberal Pavel Milyukov arrived from Paris to announce to his compatriots that they m ight
•The Ruskâ akce was managed by the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Supposedly, the financial support was arranged by Kerensky, who had good personal relations with Masaryk and Edward BeneS. bReestablished in 1924, the Ob'edinenie rossiskikh igorodskikh deyatelei, also referred to as Vserossiiskii soyuz zem stv i gorodov, was created on April 3 0 ,1 9 2 1 . O ver tim e its activities gradually becam e focused almost exclusively on providing relief for refugee children.
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indeed eventually return, but certainly not on a white steed, he was furiously hooted down. Many regarded him as a turncoat, even a traitor. Prague was a vibrant center of Russian émigré publishing activities. The publishing house and bookstore Plamya (The Flame) was founded in 1923 and played a significant role for all of Europe, not just Czechoslovakia.3 Other publishing houses were the Slavic Press, Peasant Russia, the Russian School Abroad6, and that of the journal Volya Rossii.c 1923 also saw the founding of the Russian Book Committee6 in Prague. Given the high cultural profile of the city, it seemed only natural that it become the center of an effort to bring together the multifarious cultural activities of the Russian émigré community. In 1924 the Committee published a volume of essays on cultural activities of the émigrés and an accompanying bibliography com piled by Sergei Postnikov. From 1920 to 1928 some 80 Russian magazines and 45 newspapers were published in Czechoslovakia. Among them was Pêtr Struve's monthly "literary-political” Russkaya m ysr (Russian Thought). With the collapse of the German mark and the total loss of the Soviet market, however, it became impractical to publish in Prague and most such ventures came to an end. The Russian émigré community in Prague boasted a number of cultural organizations which were devoted wholly or in part to belles lettres: 1. "The Czech-Russian Union (Ôesko-russkâ jednota),” established in 1919 to serve as a link between Czech and Russian culture.6 2. "The Russian Hearth” (Russkii ochag), created in 1925. Like the Jednota, the Russian Hearth had its own
8Plam ya took over from Nasha rech' (Our Language), which had been founded in 1919. bSlavyanskoe izdatel’stvo, Krest'yanskaya Rossiya, and Russkaya shkola za rubezhom. cUp until October 9, 1921, Volya Rossil had been a daily newspaper; the journal began to appear as of January 1, 1922. Financing w as provided through the Russian Initiative. dKomitet russkoi knigi. •The organization had its own library and branches in BFno, Kladno, Boleslav, Bratislava, and Budéjovice.
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3.
4. 5.
6.
library and organized regular cultural events, including literary "evenings.”3 "The Day of Russian Culture,” founded in 1927, celebrated in Prague and other European cities on June 6-8 to mark Pushkin's birthday. "The Russian Popular Library,”15 established in 1921, boasted a collection of 35,000 volumes as of 1928. "The Hermitage of Poets” (Skit poètov), established in 1922, which included prose writers as well as poets. The group conducted weekly meetings and was directed by the literary scholar Al'fred Bern, who was troubled by what he saw as an inability on the part of traditional, realist émigré writers to find appropriate themes. Although the Hermitage did not adhere to any literary "platform ," one faction was attracted to Acmeism, while the other favored Mayakovsky as a model. Bern tended to deprecate the so-called "Parisian Note” propagated by Georgy Adamovich (discussed below). When W orld W ar II broke out the group fell apart.6 Named after the coffee house where the members originally gathered, the literary circle "Daliborka,” took a particular interest in young writers. Its support was sufficient to allow a beginner to break into print. It held a number of guest lectures.d
•In the first two years of its existence, the Russian Hearth conducted 367 meetings with 111,500 attendees. This figure could have been much higher, since not all events and guests w ere registered. bRusskaya Narodnaya Biblioteka — Chital'nya Zem gora. «Among the members w ere Nikolai Dzevanovsky (Bolestsis), Sem en Dolinsky, Aleksey Èisner, Aleksey Fotinsky, Alla Golovina, Lev Gomolitsky, Kristina Krotkova (Irm antseva), Mikhail Ivannikov, Dmitry Kobyakov, Vyacheslav Lebedev, Vladim ir Mansvetov, Sergei Rafal'sky, Tat'yana Ratgauz, Boris Sem enov, 1.1. Tidem an, Aleksandr Turintsev, A. Vurm, and Elena Yakubovskaya. Skit poètov w as preceded by Masterskaya slova (Workshop of the W ord), founded in 1922 by Sergei Rafal'sky and Aleksandr Turintsev, among others. dFounded in 1924 by Vladim ir Amfiteatrov-Kadyshev, Pëtr Kozhevnikov, Dmitry Nikolaevich Krachkovsky (not to be confused with Dmitry Ivanovich Krachkovsky [Dmitry Klenovsky]), and Sergei Makovsky, all of whom lived in Prague at the tim e.
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9. 10. 11.
12.
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Literary Tuesdays of the journal Volya Rossii, held in the same building where Mozart once lived.3 "The Union of Russian W riters and Journalists in the Czechoslovak Republic,” founded in 1922. The Union regularly conducted literary evenings.15 The Russian People's University. The Russian Historical Society. The Artistic-Literary-M usical-Arts Federation. Founded in mid-1922, the group had 175 members, including 26 writers.0 The Russian Historical Archive Abroad was established in Prague in 1923, financed by a grant from the first Czechoslovak government, and functioned there until 1945.d The Archive was contained within the Slavonic Library3, which was founded as a research library of the M inistry of Foreign Affairs and limited at first to the collection of materials dealing with Russia and the Soviet Union.
•M arkS lonim .N . V . M el’nikova-Papoushkova, Vyacheslav Lebedev, and Sergei Postnikov w ere the chief organizers. Among those who regularly attended w ere S. Dzevanovsky, Aleksei Èisner, Aleksei Fotinsky, V. G . Fêdorov, N. Krotkova, M. Myslinskaya, S. Nailanych, Aleksandr Voevodin, and Nikolai Eienev. Most m em bers of "Daliborka" and the "Skit" generally attended, at least occasionally. bHeaded by Vasily Nem irovich-Danchenko, prose writer and brother of Vladim ir Nem irovich-Danchenko, the famous theater director. cArtistichesko-literaturno-muzykarno-khudozhestvennaya federatsiya, chaired by the writer Evgeny Chirikov, with the actor V . Kh. Vladimirov as Secretary. Som e of the speakers were: M. Bozheryanov, Dorofei Bokhan, Konstantin Olenin, I. Petrov, A. Rumyantsev, T. Sokolova, and Georgy Sorgonin. «Originally called Arkhiv russkoi èmigratsii, renamed Russkii zagranichnyi istoricheskii arkhiv in 1925. In the process its management w as shifted from Zem gor to the Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which also administered the Russian Initiative. By the 1930s the Archive had 50,000 volumes, a newspaper collection with over 3,000 titles, and ajournai collection with over 1,500 titles. In 1936 the Archive had 30 representatives in 20 countries in Europe, North and South America, and the N ear and Far East. One of them w as Gleb Struve. After World W ar II ended the collection w as closed to the general public for 45 years on the grounds that it subverted Soviet interests. •Slovanskâ knihovna. By 1900 the Library had 700,000 volumes, most of which w ere in Russian.
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Literary activities were not totally confined to Prague. There were also groups in Zbraslav®, ÖernoSice, ftevnice, VSenory, and Mokropsy which featured literary evenings among their activities. Czechoslovakia was tem porarily the home of Marina Tsvetaeva and also Roman Yakobson (Jakobson), the famous Russian linguist and literary scholar, who arrived with a Soviet passport as a representative of the Russian Red Cross. In general, the interaction of the Russian "Formalists” and the Czech "Structuralists,” as well as the Prague linguistic school, played a major role in the developm ent of modern literary theory. The literary scholars Dmitry Chizhevsky and M ark Slonim, the theologians Sergei Bulgakov and Georgy Florovsky, the historian Georgy Vernadsky, and the philosopher Nikolai Lossky were all residents of the Czechoslovak Republic at one tim e or another. There was also the Circle for the Study of Modem Russian Literature, founded at the so-called Russian Free University*3. When the Russian émigré specialist on Byzantine and Russian icons Nikodim Kondakov died in 1925, a number of his colleagues came together to found the Kondakov Seminar. Masaryk approached an American, Charles R. Crane, for financial support, and the Seminar was able to publish eleven impressive collections under the title Seminarium Kondakovianum, plus the final volume of Kondakov's great study of Russian icons.c
•"Zbraslav Fridays" (Zbraslavskie pyatnitsy) w ere held from 1923 to 1925 in that city, which is located only 13 kilometers from Prague. The local castle even housed a Russian historical and cultural museum with 14 rooms. Up to 100 guests would arrive from Prague to attend the literary and musical "teas." Som e of the members w ere: Al'fred Bern, Valentin Bulgakov, M. V . Vasnetsov, N. N. Ipat'ev, Nikolai Lossky, K. N. Nibur, V . F. Nibur, Pêtr Potêmkin, M ariya Stoyunina (honorary Chair), E. P. Sveshnikov, V . V . Stratonov, N. S. Tim ashev. Among the speakers w ere: Professor Evgeny Anichkov, Evgeny Chirikov, Professor Anatoly Florovsky, Professor D. V . Ivantsov, Professor Aleksandr Kizevetter, Professor Ivan Lapshin, Dalm at Lutokhin, Professor Nikolai Mogilyansky, Professor N. L. Okunev, Professor M. V . Shakhmatov, Professor Georgy Vernadsky, Professor S. V. Zavadsky. bKruzhok po izucheniyu sovremennoi russkoi literatury, chaired first by Leonty Kopetsky, then by Konstantin Chkheidze, and finally by Valentin Bulgakov. Som e of those who gave either readings or lectures were: Nikolai Andreev, Èm iliya Chegrintseva, V . G. Fëdorov, E. N. Kotsiubinskaya, Sofiya Taube, N. N. Terletsky, and Aleksandr Voevodin. cThe Sem inar was able to w eather the economic depression of the early 1930s reasonably well, thanks to various sources of financial support and income from the sale of art reproductions; but academic life being what it is, this prosperity engendered allegations of corruption and considerable ill will on the part of less affluent ém igré associations. Nikolai Rerikh (Roerich), the well-known Russian
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Russian cultural activities in Czechoslovakia peaked in the 1920s, declined during the depression of the 1930s, and, as might be expected, were reduced to a minimum during World W ar II. With the close of the war, the Soviet occupation authorities arrested hundreds of Russian emigrants and shipped them off to the U.S.S.R. A number of Russians managed to move on before the communist takeover of 1948. The Russian Prague of old was eloquently mourned by Yury lofe: The Russian cem etery is too shabby for dawdlers; In sm oky Prague nightingales don't sing In the old orthography To Orthodox archpriests and yesterday's colonels. The fires o f a confused and anguished Empire Have been crushed between the m ilky glass o f those years, A nd in the émigré Cathedral o f the Assumption A local deacon sobs for an unknown Moscow. The wounded Empire died under the knife, Its grave heaped with dusty thorns instead o f live flowers. There's nothing le ft but dead colonels A nd broken markers in an alien town.
painter and writer, had offered to raise funds to transfer the sem inar into an institute under the charter of New York University, but on Septem ber 2 0 ,1 9 3 0 , the Director of the Sem inar w as jailed on charges of improprieties. There he supposedly suffered a total nervous breakdown, although some claimed he w as feigning illness to avoid being sentenced to a lengthy jail term . Rerikh withdrew his support. But this incident w as only part of the difficulties experienced by the Sem inar. As tensions with Germ any grew, the Czechoslovakian government found itself hard pressed by the Soviets to close down what Moscow viewed as a suspicious ém igré organization. Since the Czechoslovaks regarded the U .S .S .R . as an important ally, the threat had to be taken seriously, especially after it becam e evident that publishing the works of Russian scholars resident in the U .S .S .R . threatened their physical safety. By 1937, fearing that Czechoslovakian governmental support would be term inated, the Sem inar directors resolved to transfer som e of the more important library holdings to Belgrade. This had to be done clandestinely, however, since the Czechoslovakian Slavonic Institute, a rival organization, would have used this violation of Czechoslovakian law to take over the Sem inar. The Belgrade office, believing that the new Director was intentionally refusing to send more books to Belgrade, wrote a letter to the Rector of the Charles University denouncing him for allegedly spending government funds improperly.
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Stem colonels, where are they today? Perhaps in the netherworld they're recalling the free Don A nd a t a Divine ball they kiss the fingers O f rosy-cheeked ghosts, dead prim a donnas.... The Russian deacon sobs softly, trustingly In the cathedral's quiet. W hat can I do with this old m an? Outside, the Sun laughs over Averchenko's grave As if it were reading his Satyricon.
Belgrade It would puzzle a convocation o f casuists to resolve their degrees o f consanguinity. Cervantes, Don Quixote To appreciate the situation of the Russian émigrés in Yugoslavia, one needs some understanding of the historical developm ent of relations between the East and South Slavs. As late as 500 A.D., the Slavs still spoke a more or less common tongue. In the tenth century Russia adopted the Byzantine version of Christianity through the medium of liturgical texts translated into South Slavic, and the late philologist Boris Unbegaun even made the case that modern Russian has more of the South Slavic in it than of the East Slavic. Although Russia's ties with the W est were interrupted by the Mongol invasion and the subsequent dominance of the Golden Horde in the 13th and 14th centuries, medieval Russian culture was later to be deeply affected by the so-called "second South-Slavic influence,” when South-Slavic exiled writers and scholars found refuge in Ukraine and Russia from the Turks before and after the taking of Constantinople in 1453. By the end of the 17th century, the spiritual and cultural ties binding Serbia and Russia had acquired a deepened political dimension as Russia attempted to play the role of defender of the South Slavs against the Ottomans and Austro-Hungary. W hen W orld W ar I first broke out, a hard-pressed Russia managed to send considerable assistance to the Serbs. On March 24, 1917, the future exile Pavel Milyukov (then Foreign Minister) gave an interview proclaiming Russia's passionate desire to liberate the South Slavs from "German imperialism.” All this made for a strong Russophile mood among the Serbs. Serbian King Aleksandr I was related to the Russian imperial fam ily and had been enrolled in the Imperial Corps of Pages in St. Petersburg before World W ar I, and there was even an émigré
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faction which envisaged him as the future heir to the Russian throne. In this favorable political clim ate the new arrivals were issued a monthly stipend, and the tsarist embassy was allowed to retain its status. It is alleged to have received a subsidy until Yugoslavia recognized the Soviet government.® In June 1920 the assets of the St. Petersburg Loan Association were delivered to the refugees. A State Commission was appointed to assist the Russians in their cultural and everyday affairs.6 There were Russians residing in Yugoslavia even before World W ar I, and a Russian Club had been founded in Zagreb as early as 1906. The Russians who arrived in Yugoslavia after the war came in three consecutive groups: a) those who were evacuated by the French from Odessa in April 1919, b) the evacuees from Novorossiisk and Odessa in January 1920, and c) a large contingent from the major evacuation from the Crimea in November 11-16,1920. As can readily be imagined, a significant percentage of the new arrivals were military men. Altogether, 73,431 refugees reached Yugoslavia, of whom 33,231 were civilians and 40,200 were soldiers and officers of VrangeF’s army. In the 1930s their numbers dwindled to between 25,000 and 35,000, and by 1939 only some 8,000 were still residing in Belgrade itself. Yugoslavia played an im portant role for the Russian Orthodox Church. The First Constitutional Assembly (Sobor) of the Russian Church Abroad was held in Sremski Karlovci in 1921, and the second in 1938. The two basic organizations rendering humanitarian assistance to the émigrés were the Russian Red Cross, regarded by many as a front for Soviet espionage, and Zemgor. A number of Russian schools were recreated in Yugoslavia and preserved Russian as the language of instruction. These included three "Cadet Corps,” which existed until September 1944. Government support of Russian schools was generous, allowing them to survive for several decades. The Russians created a number of formal and semi-formal institutions: the Literary-Artistic Society; the Lermontov Book Circle;
•The ém igré historian Nikolai Chukhnov claimed the subsidy w as 1,000,000 dinars a month, but another historian, Yury M eier, denied that it even existed. bDespite the traditional ties between the Serbs and the Russians, however, there w as a low-key resentment among some Serbs who felt Russia favored Bulgaria over Serbia. Bishop Evlogy, for example, recalled that when he sang the Bulgarian hymn in Serbia in a small group, expressions of gloom appeared on som e Serbian faces, and the comment was heard that Bulgaria was like a daughter to the Russians while Serbia was only a stepdaughter.
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the Russian-Serbian Club; the New Arzamas, founded in 1928 by a group of "lonely” young writers; and the League of Devotees of the Russian Language in Yugoslavia, which numbered 110 members. The League of Russian W riters and Journalists, which was established in 1925 but dissolved before the War, had 200 members. Three-quarters of all Yugoslavs were engaged in agriculture and half were illiterate, so that Russian professionals were highly welcome immigrants. Sixty-two percent of them had com pleted a secondary education, and thirteen percent had degrees from institutions of higher learning, all of which were form ally recognized as valid. The tim e in service in Russia of Russian professors was counted toward a Yugoslav pension. As a result, Yugoslavia became a significant intellectual center for the émigrés. The Academic Group was active in scholarship, science, and teaching. The Russian Scientific and Scholarly Institute had 472 members and conducted 23 conferences and 670 lectures and seminars in the first ten years of its existence alone. Belgrade was also the home of the Society of Russian Scientists and Scholars and the Russian Press. In 1928 and 1929 the Committee on Russian Culture was created with the goal of supporting Russian culture in exile. The Committee received a monthly subsidy of 50,000 dinars from the State Commission on Russian Refugees. From 1928 to 1934 the Publications Commission issued 61 titles and the Russian Library published 63. Altogether, it is estimated that 900,000 copies of Russian books were published. Virtually all books were printed in the old orthography, and those few books that were printed with the new spelling were mostly devoted to politics and were either to the extreme right or left of the political spectrum. In October 1934 Il'ya Golenishchev-Kutuzov, who had returned from his doctoral studies in Paris, founded the most im portant literary group, the so-called Literary Wednesdays. Although books by Soviet authors were prohibited, there were a number of Russian libraries in Yugoslavia, among them that of the Union of Russian W riters and Journalists, and the Zem gor Library, which numbered some 20,000 volumes. The Russian Public Library was established, and eventually it built up a collection of some 120,000 volumes. On April 9, 1933, King Aleksandr dedicated the Nikolai II Russian House, newly erected for the support of Russian culture, and the Russian Public Library was moved there. In 1920 the All-Slavic Mutual Society purchased the library of Ivan Sytin with some 70,000 volum es and immediately established a public library. The Renaissance Library housed some 60,000 volumes. A conference of Russian émigré writers was held in Belgrade under the patronage of King Aleksandr in 1928 and attended by 111 participants, guests, and observers. It was chaired by Vasily
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Nemirovich-Danchenko. Among the topics discussed were copyright problems for émigré authors, the legal status of writers residing abroad, the situation of the émigré and Soviet press, the Russian Archive in Prague, and the creation of a W riters’ Center. Most of the writers who attended came from countries other than Yugoslavia, including 39 from Paris, 16 from Prague, 10 from Berlin, and 5 from W arsaw. Their expenses were covered by the Yugoslav government. Only eight participants were from Belgrade. Inevitably, there was friction between the political "conservatives” and the "liberals” in the organization. Nonetheless, the conference resulted in a series of volum es published by the Serbian Academy of Sciences under the title The Russian Library. A second series, entitled A Child's Library, was devoted to Russian fairy tales and poems, including some works by ém igré authors. When King Aleksandr was assassinated in Marseilles in October 1934 by Croatian and Macedonian terrorists, the Union of Russian W riters and Journalists in Belgrade issued a one-day newspaper Rossiya (Russia), honoring his memory. A number of conservative political groups were active among the Russians, including the National Union of the New G eneration and the Mladorossy, represented by ll'ya Tolstoi, a grandson of Lev Tolstoi. He saw no contradiction in preaching that international communism would save Russia, and returned to the U.S.S.R. in 1945. Belgrade was the new home of the daily "literary-political” newspaper Russkoe delo (The Russian Cause), after it was closed in Sofia. Novoe vremya (New Times) had been a prominent Petersburg newspaper, and when the son of its editor-in-chief, Mikhail Suvorin, arrived in Belgrade with a number of his father's form er colleagues, Novoe vremya arose from the ashes, only to eventually close once more for financial reasons. Meanwhile, Suvorin published books as well as the newspaper. One of Suvorin's contributors was Prince Fêdor Kasatkin-Rostovsky, a prose writer, poet, and playwright who had joined the W hites after learning of the execution of his mother and sister. Altogether there were more than twenty publishing houses in Belgrade in the interwar period, while S. F. Filonov issued 142 titles in Novi Sad. The magazine Meduza was founded in 1923, edited by Dmitry Kobyakov. Stupeni (Steps) was the focal point of a group of eighteen writers. And, of course, Russkii Arkhiv (Russian Archive) was an im portant journal. There was a de facto preliminary censorship of newspapers, carried out by the Press Bureau in the Council of Ministers. After 1933
•Created in Yugoslavia in 1930 by Mikhail Georgievsky and Viktor Baidalakov.
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censorship became more rigid, when the governm ent became concerned that the anti-communist Russian immigrants m ight spoil relations with the Soviet state. Many Russian writers spent significant periods of tim e in Belgrade. In general, the poets were most prominent: Yury Bek-Sofiev, Aleksei Durakov, Ekaterina Tauber, and ll'ya Golenishchev-Kutuzov, who held up Vyacheslav Ivanov as a model. Sergei Mintslov (1870-1933), a historical novelist, was especially popular among the émigrés; in 1933 the Turgenev Library reviewed its borrowings and discovered that Mintslov was the author most in demand by its readers. His books had been checked out 255 times, with Turgenev only in second place (92 checkouts), and Shmelêv running third (43 requests). Yugoslavia was also home to the future literary scholars Kirill Taranovsky (1911-1993), who also composed some verse as a young man and later became an expert on the verse of Osip Mandel'shtam, and Rostislav Pletnêv (1903-1985), who wrote a 65-page chapter on Russian exile literature in his History o f Russian Literature o f the Twentieth Century. Yugoslavia in general and Belgrade specifically proved to be a sort of way station for Russian writers, who tended to move on to other countries. By the mid-1920s the number of Russian émigrés in Yugoslavia began to dwindle, partly because they were hired by factories in France and partly because of the cultural draw of Paris. But other countries also attracted Russian émigrés, many of them writers. Sergei Mintslov moved to Riga and Aleksei Durakov to Bulgaria, ll'ya Golenishchev-Kutuzov and Nikolai Agnivtsev even returned to Russia. During the war years Russian cultural activities declined radically. In their early stages, Russian-Yugoslav relations were very warm, particularly on the part of the Serbs, but the Yugoslavs gradually became more oriented toward the W est (and wished to study French and German rather than Russian), and Yugoslav intellectuals began to look down on their impoverished and politically more conservative Russian neighbors, despite the large number of intellectuals among the émigrés. This downward slide was eventually to be transform ed into a free fall as a result of massive Russian émigré participation on the side of the Germans during the Second World War.
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Warsaw M ay no soul cross that border a n d ... no raven fly from Krakow. Aleksandr Pushkin, Boris Godunov The whole question of what is Poland and what is Russia has been fiercely fought over for centuries. W hereas Poland once controlled a large portion of the Baltic states and of what is now Belorussia and Ukraine (Kiev itself was in Polish hands until 1655), the country was forced to endure three partitions: that of 1772, which ceded the three northeastern provinces to Russia; the 1793 partition, which reduced Poland to one-third of its form er territory; and the 1795 partition, which com pletely abolished Poland as a state. The three copartitioners — Austria, Prussia, and Russia — even vowed never to use the word "Poland” again. Under Tsar Nikolai I, the Russian language was imposed in schools, courts, and administration, and after the insurrection of 1863-64 Polish provinces were downgraded to ordinary adm inistrative units of the Empire. This situation prevailed until the Germans and Austrians occupied the country in 1915 and on Nov. 5,1916, declared an independent Poland on territory form erly occupied by Russia. More important, of course, the victorious allies — France, Britain, and the U.S.A. — all recognized Polish independence and statehood. By the beginning of 1920 the war with Russia resulted in Polish occupation of territory roughly equal to that occupied up to the second partition. The Russians briefly advanced even into "ethnic” Poland near Warsaw, but were routed by Poland's future president, Josef Pksudki, who had the advice of a French military mission, including a young French officer by the name of Charles de Gaulle. W hen Poland annexed the eastern territories, the Russianspeaking population of Poland numbered 5,250,000, out of a total population of 27,177,000.a A centuries-long history of co-existence of two national groups, as in Poland, the Baltic countries, or Bessarabia, for example, is quite a different situation from that which obtains when an entire com m unity appears abruptly on another nation's borders
•The above figure is from the census of Septem ber 30, 1921. A 1927 Polish encyclopedia quoted by the ém igré historian Pêtr Kovalevsky provides quite a different figure. Out of a total Polish population of 27,192,674, of which "Ruthenians" comprised 14.3% , Russians supposedly made up only 0.7% of the total population, which would mean a total Russian population of slightly over 190,000. The enormous discrepancy here lies partially in how one classifies a Ukrainian or "Ruthenian" whose chief language is Russian, and also perhaps in the sym pathies of the researcher in treating such a politically sensitive topic.
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petitioning for admission as refugees, as happened in the Balkans at the end of the Russian civil war. Thus, Russians in Poland did not consider themselves émigrés. After the Russian civil war, an additional 50,000 Russians spilled over the border into that country as refugees. In some of the Eastern provinces Russians comprised the overwhelming majority of the population, and the Polish authorities were intent on polonizing these groups (as well as converting them to Catholicism). Many Russian schools were closed and the slogan "There are no Russians in Poland” was proclaimed. The wheel had come full circle. in January 1919 the Russian Committee was founded, with quasi-diplom atic status. A year later Boris Savinkov, who had served in the governm ent of Admiral Kolchak until its collapse, and Nikolai Chaikovsky, a veteran of the pre-Soviet anti-tsarist opposition, arrived in W arsaw to negotiate with PHsudski. PHsudski, who distrusted the Russians’ willingness to accept Polish, Ukrainian, and Baltic independence, had resolved to recover by m ilitary means Polish territories ceded to the Russians. Thus, he found the visit of Savinkov and Chaikovsky opportune. But the Russian exiles were less enthusiastic than Savinkov about concessions to W arsaw. In the spring of 1920, when Polish and Ukrainian armies seemed on the verge of capturing Kiev and establishing an independent Ukraine, Russian émigrés were indignant over the conduct of the "base, ungrateful” Poles and regarded Poland's persistent struggle for independence as insulting. It was a view that did little to ingratiate them with their hosts. PHsudski appointed Savinkov head of a secret m ilitary unit composed of Russian soldiers. Savinkov, who had his visiting card printed Ancien M inistre de la guerre de Russie, appointed Dmitry Merezhkovsky his second-in-command, for non-m ilitary affairs, of course, and Zinaida Gippius headed the propaganda branch, publishing the newspaper Svoboda (Freedom). In addition to Savinkov's Russian Committee, there existed a number of other ém igré political organizations, including the Agrarian Party, the Party of Socialists and Revolutionaries, and the Russian National Party. On March 18, 1921, the Riga Accord was signed, granting Volynia, Polesye, and parts of Belorussia to Poland. The Russian émigrés in W arsaw were horrified, comparing it to the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. In October 1921, an agreement was signed between the U.S.S.R. and Poland, promising W arsaw 20 million gold rubles and the return of seized Polish property, in exchange for which the Poles were to deport the Russian and Ukrainian armies. A number of Russians left for Czechoslovakia, which had agreed to accept them, and the first payment of 10 million rubles was made. Savinkov was afraid Lenin would demand his extradition, and the question was even debated in
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the Sejm after PHsudski denied Savinkov asylum. Nevertheless, PHsudski did manage to obtain a Czechoslovakian visa for Savinkov, even though he yielded to Soviet pressure to deport him. Savinkov felt betrayed, especially by his fellow Russian exiles in London, Paris, and New York, whom he accused of having abandoned the cause. In 1924, the same year his last novel, Black Horse (Kon' voronoi) appeared, Savinkov declared to Vladim ir Burtsev, the man who exposed the notorious double agent Evno Azef: I'll show a ll these Chernovs, Lebedevs, Zenzinovs and others how you die fo r Russial Under tsarism they preached terror, bu t now they've rejected not only terror, but even the revolutionary struggle with the Bol'sheviks. With m y judgm ent and m y death I w ill protest against the Bol'sheviks, and that protest w ill be heard by everyone! Savinkov was arrested crossing the Soviet border and sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to ten years. On Septem ber 13,1924, Izvestiya published an article supposedly penned by him and entitled "W hy I Accepted Soviet Rule.” The following year he supposedly committed suicide by throwing himself from the fifth floor of Moscow's Lubyanka prison, but may have been executed. Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Gippius spent some ten months in Minsk and Warsaw, attempting to form a government in exile. In August 1920 Merezhkovsky was received by PHsudski, who responded in Russian when Merezhkovsky addressed him in French. Merezhkovsky was ecstatic over PHsudski, proclaiming him a hero "selected by God ... an unshakable revelation of the Godhead, a Theophany” sent to save Poland and the world: "The barbarian hordes,” he declared to PHsudki, "march against you, against all of Europe, like the Antichrist.” PHsudki, who had long believed that Poland's only hope for freedom lay in Russia's military defeat, did not need much convincing. Merezhkovsky also gave lectures on Mickiewicz and communism. The Poles, who not only remembered Russia's im perial past but could also easily see that the Russian ém igrés were still keenly interested in preserving "a united and inviolable Russia,” were only partly receptive; one Polish writer, Stefan Zeromski, called Merezhkovsky "a mystic (or perhaps a m ystifier).” But Merezhkovsky was not about to let his political activities erase his literary interests. Most of his prose works were translated into Polish, and his play Pavel I, which had premiered on Oct. 15, 1915, ran for 52 performances. His verse, however, was generally ignored. The local Russians, for their part, condemned the Merezhkovskys as pro-Polish, and the Russian Jewish community boycotted them over a controversial Mickiewicz lecture. Attacked by the newspaper Varshavskoe slovo (The W arsaw Word), whose editor was later tried
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as a paid Soviet agent, the Merezhkovskys became disenchanted with what they perceived as the Poles’ insufficient support for anticommunism. After a falling-out with Savinkov they eventually left for Paris, where, curiously, they had an apartm ent in the same building in which the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz had once lived. W hile many of the Russians remaining in Poland began to lose hope of ever returning home, others were less inclined to accept the status quo. On June 7,1927, the Soviet ambassador to Poland, Pavel Voikov, was assassinated by a 19-year old Russian émigré, Boris Koverda. The Russian émigrés were accused of abusing Polish hospitality, and Koverda's deed clearly jeopardized the position of the Russians in Poland. The issue of the newspaper Za svobodu! (For Freedom I) which reported the act was confiscated, and a dozen or so monarchists were arrested. Nevertheless, the sense of satisfaction over the assassination among Poland's Russians was palpable. But the violence continued. Osip Traikovich was a Russian em igrant from Vilnius whose brothers had died fighting in Denikin's army and the rest of whose fam ily had perished during the civil war. Traikovich had vowed to take vengeance on the Soviets. Shortly after the assassination of Voikov, he and his brother were shot dead in the Soviet Mission in Warsaw. And there was more. A year later, on May 22, 1928, another Russian émigré, Yury Voitsekhovsky, attem pted to assassinate the head of the Soviet Trade Mission.3 Angry over the exiles’ demand that Russia be reestablished in its pre-1917 borders and exasperated that their acts of violence were endangering the country, the editors of the newspaper Express Poranny exclaimed that Poland was not Mexico and would not tolerate such conduct. The Russian Committee — the senior association of the exiles — was shut down until 1931, and its chairman was deported. By then the situation had calmed down, and some of the Russians had returned home, while others were following the events unfolding in Hitler's Germany. But literature continued to be created. The League of Russian W riters and Journalists, which In 1929 had created the Literary Commonwealth6, had a branch in W arsaw and in 1937 published A n
■Koverda was imprisoned for ten years, but Voitsekhovsky w as simply deported to Belgium. bLiteraturnoe sodruzhestvo; it ceased functioning in 1935. Som e of the members: Vsevolod Baikin, A. S. Dombrovsky, Dmitry Filosofov (chair), Lev Gomolitsky, Sergei Kapel'man (pseudonym: Bart), Aleksandr Khir'yakov, S o fy a Kindyakova, S. Kontsevich, Lev Lyshchinsky-Troekurov, Andrei Luganov, V . F. Martsinkovsky, V . K. Mikhailov, Sergei Shovgenov (Nal'yanch), and E. S . Veber.
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Anthology o f Russian Poetry in Poland, in which 37 poets were represented. Dmitry Filosofov, who in 1898 had helped found M ir iskusstva (W orld of Art), the first journal in Russia devoted to the fine arts, had lived with the Merezhkovskys since 1900 and had fled Russia together with them and Vladim ir Zlobin in 1919.a But now, when the Merezhkovskys moved on to Paris, Filosofov remained in Poland. W hile Filosofov was impoverished and not very influential in Polish circles, he was co-editor of the weekly Mech (Sword), wrote for Za svobodul, and held regular literary meetings and discussions in his tiny apartment, which could accommodate no more than 15 persons. The group called itself Domik v Kolomne (A Little House in Kolomna), after a work by Aleksandr Pushkin, and proclaimed universality (vsemimost') as the basic tradition of Russian national culture, echoing Dostoevsky's fam ous Pushkin speech. Arrangements for the meetings were made together by the poet Lev Gomolitsky and Polish friends. The older Poles spoke Russian and were fam iliar with Russian literature, and younger writers were also interested. Topics ranged from émigré literature to aesthetic criteria to the state of contemporary Russian literature. Translations from the Russian were also read. Filosofov, who impressed the Poles with his elegant, old-regime manners, died in 1940 in Otwock, near Warsaw. Russian-language W arsaw newspapers included the daily Varshavskoe slovo and the weeklies Svoboda (Freedom)0, Rus', Varshavskie otkliki (Warsaw Resonances), and Golos kazachestva (Cossack Voice). Varshavskoe èkho (Warsaw Echo) was a Russianlanguage newspaper intended for "national minorities.”0
«Gippius called Filosofov her "Adonis" (he was evidently a handsome man), maintaining that there w as a mystical significance in the number three and that sex w as the divine m eans of attaining the Godhead. W hether Filosofov agreed with her metaphysical views and whether he w as even interested in women remains open to question, but it would appear that Merezhkovsky and Gippius never consummated their m arriage. »»Renamed Z a svobodul only later. It was founded by the Merezhkovskys, Savinkov, and Filosofov, and appeared until Septem ber 1939. cThe two most important Russian publishing houses w ere Dobro and Russpress, both located in W arsaw, along with Rossica, E. Sakovich, Svyashchennaya lira (Sacred Lyre, directed by Lev Gomolitsky), and Vek kul'tury (Age of Culture). Lvov (Lwow, Lviv) was home to the publishing houses Zaikin and Rusalka (M erm aid), as well as Chëtki (Rosary), an association of Russian writers (directed by Panteleimon Yur'ev [Sem ën Vityazevsky]), and M uza (M use, founded in 1922).
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The Russian Academic Group had a branch in W arsaw which was considered to be more sympathetic to the Prague school of verse than to the "Parisian Note,” in no small measure due to the influence of the scholar Al'fred Bern. Among that city's poets were Lev Gom olitsky and Sergei Kapei'man, who wrote under the pseudonym S. Bart. One small group, which existed from 1921 to 1925, called itself The Poets' Tavern a. Prior to W orld W ar I, Russian writers interested in modernism had found Poland to be an intriguing country, and this preoccupation had grown in the first year of the war. The new Russian arrivals created a sort of club for émigrés, Russkii dom (Russian House), with branches in Warsaw, Wilnius, and Rovno. There was also the League of Russian Minority Organizations (Soyuz russkikh men'shinstvennykh organizatsii) and a Russian branch of Matica srbska, a Serbian cultural um brella association. The Union of Russian Students published its own newspaper, Svetoch. After W orld W ar I a definite shabbiness set in in W arsaw (Gippius later wrote that it created the impression of an "alien and unpleasant Paris”), and many Russians decided to move on. Among those who passed through W arsaw were Arkady Averchenko and Vladim ir Chaikin. The playwright and prose w riter Mikhail Artsybashev, who had come to W arsaw in 1923, published the book A W riter's Notes (Zapiski pisatelya) in 1925 and died in Poland in 1927. Artsybashev criticized the Russian émigré community for being fixated on its own problems. In Septem ber 1939, as a result of the Ribbentrop-M olotov secret agreement, Poland was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union. In effect, it was the fourth partition of this essentially W estern country. During the German occupation, Russian books continued to be published, especially the 19th-century classics.
“Taverna poètov. Som e of the participants w ere Vsevolod Baikin, Al’fred Bern (group’s last Chairm an), Vladim ir Brand, Boris Evreinov, R. Gutuev, Oleg Kolody, M. Konstantinovich, A. Topol'sky, and Oleg Voinov. The Tavern maintained close relations with the Skam andrites, a celebrated group of young Polish poets.
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Sofia
When the m ilitary man approaches, the world locks up its spoons and packs o ff its womankind. George Bernard Shaw C'est magnifique, m ais ce n'est pas la guerre. General Pierre Bosquet, 1854
W hen Russia drove Turkey out of the Balkans In 1877-78 as part of her plan to capture Constantinople and the Bosphorus, Bulgaria was initially very grateful to Russia, even after the Great Powers abolished the Russian protectorate over Bulgaria. But when Russia refused to support plans for expansion of a "greater Bulgaria,” diplom atic relations were com pletely broken off between the two countries from 1886 to 1896. Despite Moscow's reluctance in the question, Bulgaria's Russian émigré community of populists (>narodniki) and marxists supported the local struggle for independence. The Russians who arrived in Bulgaria after the defeat of the W hite armies, on the other hand, constituted an organized army supporting Russian nationalism . The refugees came in several groups. A small group of aristocrats passed through the country in late 1919, and a second group in the afterm ath of the defeat of Denikin's army in 1920. In July of that year the Russian Red Cross registered 4,000 Russian refugees, but since not all refugees were registered, the total number may well have been closer to 6,000. The third and largest group came via Turkey — some 18,000 to 19,000 were soldiers from Vrangel”s army. Still another 2,600 arrived via Cyprus and Egypt. All in all, the Russian colony in Bulgaria has been estimated at 34,000. Since this was a largely m ilitary group (only a quarter were civilians), all but about 6,000 of them were men. The Russians were housed in military barracks left empty as a result of the requirements of the Versailles Treaty. Inevitably, the predom inantly military nature of the immigrant com m unity determ ined the nature of the cultural activities and organizations which they were later to form. The main areas of settlem ent for the Russians were Sofia, Varna, Burgas, Pernik, Veliko-Tyrnovo, Sliven, Rusçuk (Ruse), and Plovdiv. As in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, those who wished to continue their education received a stipend from a government that
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was still grateful for Russian help in the 1875-78 war of liberation from the Turks. The Slavic Society (Slavyanskoto Druzhestvo), a local charitable institution with a special interest in cultural matters, provided many of the newcomers with food, clothing, train tickets, and cash. By November 1, 1920, it had spent 400,000 levs on Russian arrivals in Bulgaria, dispensed largely through the Russian Refugees Fund and the Russian-Bulgarian Committee,3 which had been created in 1921 by Bulgarian "Russophile intellectuals” and prom inent Russian immigrants. The Committee founded a Russian House, a Russian dormitory, and a Russian high school, in addition to conducting literary readings and lectures. On March 2, 1922, the Stambolisky governm ent passed a resolution perm itting governmental bodies to hire Russian immigrants. The com m unist movement was strong in Bulgaria, and the advent of a Russian émigré army fresh from the struggle against communism engendered considerable hostility and even physical threats from both sides. Vrangel' declared a policy of nonintervention in Bulgarian affairs, but on May 16,1922, he told representatives of the governm ent that Russian troops, when confronted by hatred and slander, might be forced to take action. The governm ent interpreted this statem ent as a threat, and the Russians were accused of trying to set up a state within a state. Several senior officers in V rangel’s arm y were taken into custody, and the W hites' official ambassador was asked to leave the country. Even earlier, on May 11, the Bulgarian cabinet had resolved to deport a number of senior Russian officers, to break up the Russian units into work brigades which were to be scattered throughout the countryside, and to facilitate the repatriation of Russians willing to return to Russia. Finally, the Bulgarian governm ent refused to allow the Russian refugees to refound the Cadet Corps, as was done in Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, Soviet sympathizers were active among the immigrants. Aleksandr Ageev edited the newspaper Na rodinu (Returning Home), later renamed Novaya Rossiya (The New Russia). The very first issue of the paper called upon the émigrés to come together in a general act of repentance for the sin of having resisted the new regime in Moscow. According to one Soviet source, there existed some 65 local branches of Sovnarod — the "League to Return to the Homeland,” with 4,000 members. Supposedly, 9,750 persons eventually went back to Russia, 65 percent of them Cossacks. Many of them actually returned to Russia from Yugoslavia, Romania, Greece,
•Russian names: Fond russkikh bezhentsev and Russko-Bolgarskii komitet. The Com m ittee also received support from the Bulgarian Red Cross, the W om en's Refugee Com m ittee, and the Bulgarian Sacred Synod.
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Turkey, and Italy via Bulgaria. Furthermore, the Soviet government exerted pressure on the Bulgarian authorities to close down the Solidarist newspaper Za Rossiyu (For Russia); beginning with issue 34, no place of publication was indicated. The response of the Whites, who were still intent on defeating the Red enemy, was one of unbridled rage. In November of 1922 a form er W hite officer, Nikolai Boicharov, assassinated Ageev in Sofia. There were also attacks on members of the Russian Red Cross, which was organizing the repatriation operation. The Bulgarian authorities prom ptly closed Rus\ Svobodnaya rech' (Free Speech), and Russkoe delo (Russian Cause). Two editors of Russkoe delo were deported. The situation was worsened by the difficult economic straits in which the country found itself. The Bulgarians were forced to pay war repatriations and to disarm, while the population was being impoverished by devastatingly high prices. On June 9,1923, however, the governm ent of Aleksandr Stamboiisky was overthrown and Stam bolisky and some of his closest aides were killed. Much to the delight of the Russian arrivals, the Communist Party was outlawed, and some of the Russians who had been deported were allowed to return. Still, Bulgaria was a poor country with relatively rare professional opportunities. Many of the Russian officers were com pelled to work in the coal mines in Pernik. When the Russians arrived in Bulgaria, Sofia could boast only one university, founded in 1888.100 full room-and-board government scholarships were awarded to Russian arrivals. A number of Russian scholars received positions at the university and made a major contribution to the scholarly and scientific work being carried on there. Among them was the brilliant Russian literary historian Pëtr Bitsilli (1879-1953). The critic Konstantin M ochul'sky (1892-1948) also resided there for a time. Lyubov' Stolitsa stood out by virtue of her talent as a poet and novelist, although much of her work still remains unpublished. Other writers were the prose w riter and poet Aleksandr Dekhterev, who took vows as a monk, the professor of literature and poet Aleksandr Gindenburg (Fëdorov), the poet and playwright Tat'yana Kondratenko, the prose writer and poet Nikolai Mazurkevich, the memoirist Vera Pushkarëva, the novelist and priest Mikhail Shishkin, and the poet Aleksandr Stoyanov. Between 1920 and 1941, 87 Russian and 4 Ukrainian newspapers and magazines were founded in Bulgaria.3 The Cossacks
•Among them w ere: Balkanskii zhum al (Balkan Journal, 1921-1923), G obs truda (The Voice of Labor, a publication of the League of Christian laborers [Soyuz trudyashchikbsya khristian]), Golos Rossii (Russia's Voice, edited by Ivan Solonevich), Izgnannik (The Exile, 1922), Knut, a m agazine of satire and humor
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constituted a large contingent among the immigrants, and published their own newspaper in Sofia: Kazach'i dum y (Cossack Thoughts). Russkaya m ysl' (Russian Thought), which devoted considerable space to contem porary literature, was actually a transplanted publication founded in Russia in 1880. Later it moved to Prague (1922), then to Berlin (1923-25), and lastly to Paris (1927). Easily half of the Russians were professionals, and in the early 1930s there existed 47 political, professional, charitable, and cultural institutions within the Russian community. The monarchists and pro fascist groups were especially active. Some of these groups insisted adamantly on the restoration of the Russian empire, but many Cossacks were more inclined to call for the creation of a separate Cossack state. Sofia boasted five Russian libraries, and a theatrical society was founded in Varna in 1928. Much of the Russians’ 4cultural life revolved around the Russian clubs, which arranged theatrical performances and literary readings. Sofia had several Russian publishing houses: Zlatolira (Golden Lyre), Pechatnoe delo (Printer's Trade), Russian-Bulgarian Publishers, and the Russian-Bulgarian Friendship Society. Since Bulgarian is closely related to Russian, the immigrants were able to achieve a certain command of the language quite easily and thus be absorbed into Bulgarian life. Of no little importance was the fact that this was a group of relatively young soldiers who began marrying Bulgarian women and raising families. And, of course, many Russians moved on to Western Europe. By 1934 the Russian community had shrunk to only 18,000. Nevertheless, in 1936 the Russians in Bulgaria founded two military organizations: the National Organization of Knights and the National Organization of Russian Scouts, which proclaimed discipline, hierarchy, and monarchism to be their ideals.3
(1921), Nedelya (The W eek, 1924), Rossiya (Russia, 1920-21), R us' (1922-28), Russkaya gazeta (A Russian Newspaper, Varna, 1921), Russkaya m ysl' (Russian Thought, 1921), Russkaya pravda (Russian Truth, 1920), Russkaya sofiiskaya gazeta (The Russian Newspaper in Sofia, 1920), Russkaya zhizn' (Russian Life, 1924-26), Russkie sbomiki (Russian Collections, 1921-22), Russkoe delo (The Russian Cause, 1921-22), Russkoe èkho (Russian Echo, 1923), Vam enskoe èkho (The Varna Echo, 1920), and Z a Rossiyu (For Russia, a publication of the N TS ).
“Natsional'naya organizatsiya vityazei (N O V ) and Natsional'naya organizatsiya russkikh razvedchikov (N O R R ). Their slogan w as Z a Rus', z a Veru! (For Russia! For the Faith!).
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Riga A bad neighbor is as great a plague as a good one is a blessing. Hesiod (c. 735 B.C.) An estimated 231,000 Russians resided in Latvia before 1914; as a result of the Russian civil war this historic population of Baltic Russians was augmented by 20,000 Russian refugees. On August 1, 1920, Soviet Russia signed a peace treaty with Latvia, and Russian cultural life in that country developed with considerable vigor. By 1930 12 percent (233,366) of the population consisted of ethnic Russians and 4.8 percent (93,479) were Jews, most of whom spoke Russian as their first language; the rest were German Jews, largely from Courland, but they were in the minority. In some districts in Eastern Latvia Russians made up an absolute majority of the population. The census of 1935 indicated that 226,758 Russians had adopted Latvian citizenship. Of Riga's 1935 population of 385,000, 33,000 were ethnic Russians and 43,000 were Jews. Many of the Russians were illiterate peasants whose interest in literature was minimal, at best. Some of the ethnic Russians were merchants whose fam ilies had established them selves in Latvia in the 19th century, and there was some tension between the Russians long resident in the country and the newer arrivals. Russian and German were widely spoken, along with Latvian, and Russian professors regularly lectured at Latvian universities in Russian. Russian was especially widely spoken in Riga, and many Latvians and local Germans were fluent in it. A significant percentage of the older generation of Baltic Germans had even been educated in Russian schools before 1917. One of the largest émigré newspapers of the period, Segodnya (Today), was founded in Riga in 1919, with two literary supplements, plus morning and evening editions. The readership included a number of Latvians who spoke Russian.® Like the other émigré newspapers with their relatively modest circulations, Segodnya calculated that roughly half of its expenses went for typesetting and used the galleys from the newspaper to publish some 75 books that had been serialized in it. Since the paper’s staff was largely Jewish, as were many of its readers, coverage of Jewish topics was especially thorough, a situation which alienated some of the ethnic Russians. A form er Petersburg
•The editors, however, w ere refugees from Russia: Maksim Ganfm an, Boris Khariton, Mikhail Mil'rud, and Pêtr Pil'sky.
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journalist, Leonard Korol'-Purashevich, founded Rizhskii kur'er (The Riga Courier, 1921-24), evidently with Polish funding, and then Vechernee vremya (Evening), using these publications to attack Segodnya as "non-Russian.” In 1933, he created Zavtra (Tomorrow) to counter Segodnya (Today). Korol'-Purashevich left for Germany in 1939, but Yury Rzhevsky published the weekly Gazeta dlya vsekh (A Newspaper for Everyone, 1936-40), also stressing that it was a truly "Russian,” not a Jewish publication.3 The Soviets published N ovyi p u t' (The New Path).b Riga was home to a number of Russian publishing houses, the largest of which was Salamandre.0The Latvian publisher GramatuDreugs also produced a number of Russian books.d International copyright laws were generally ignored, and many pirated editions were published with cheap bindings and low-quality paper. Altogether, over the course of two decades some 1,200 titles appeared. Among Riga's Russian social and educational institutions and organizations were the National-Democratic League of Russian Citizens, the Russian Society in Latvia, the Society for Enlightenment, the League of Russian Teachers, the Grebenshchikov Commune, and the Library Circle.. There were also 13 Russian elementary schools and a selection of Russian secondary schools. The Riga Russian Dramatic Troupe was considered to be one of the strongest émigré theaters. Latvia's Russian prose writers included Yury Galich; the popular and prolific prose writer Sergei Mintslov, who had lived abroad
O th e r papers w ere Slovo (The W ord, edited by Nikolai Berezhansky), Novyi put' (The New Path), Nasha gazeta (Our Newspaper), M ayak (Lighthouse), D en' (D ay), and the short-lived Povorot (The Turn). Russian newspaper publishers had to be careful about what they printed; when the Social Democrats' paper Svobodnaya m ysl' (Free Thought) offended the government's sensibilities, it w as closed for two w eeks as a warning. Among the journals published in Riga w ere Perezvony (Chim es), 1925-28; Yunyi chitatel' (The Young Reader) 1925-26; Novaya niva (The New Reid) 192627; the critical and biographical monthly Literatura i zhizn' (Literature and Life), 1928; Rodnaya starina (Ancient Haunts), 1928-30; the w eekly Iks (X ), 1923; Iskiy (Sparks), Mansarda (The Attic), 1930; and the humorous w eekly Plyazh (The Beach), 1923-25. bNot to be confused with the pre-revolutionary publication with the sam e title. °Salam andra, along with Perezvony and Belotsvetov brothers, well-to-do businessmen.
Slovo, w as supported
by the
“O ther publishing houses were: Vostok, Gliksman, Dzintars, Didkovsky, The Latvian Publishing House of Russian W riters, Orient, The Siberian Publishing House, Stremniny, O . D. Strok, and D. Tsymlov.
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since 1916; the humorous w riter Mikhail Mironov (pseudonym: Mikhail Tsvik); Pëtr Pil'sky, who was also active as a critic; Irina Saburova (who also composed verse); Leonid Zurov, who left Riga for Paris in 1929 and was elected Chairman of the League of Young W riters and Poets in Paris after the war; and Vasily Vasil'ev (Gadalin). Among Latvia's poets were Nikolai Belotsvetov, Igor' Chinnov, Nikolai Istomin (who returned to the Soviet Union), Aleksandr Perfil'ev (husband of Irina Saburova, he also wrote prose), Tamara Shmeling (wife of Yury Ivask), and Viktor Tret'yakov. In 1929 Georgy Matveev and Istomin founded the literary-scholarship society Na struge slov (In the Boat of W ords), which in turn established Stremniny Publishers, publishers of M ansards* The governm ent formed in 1920 with Karlis Ulmanis (a form er Latvian émigré who had studied agronomy in Nebraska) as Prime M inister had guaranteed limited rights for all minorities residing in Latvia. Nevertheless, although the prevailing attitude to Russians appears to have been more or less positive in the early years of the independent Latvian state, and Latvia's older Russians looked back on the inter-war era as an idyllic time, the relationship between the two national com m unities was marred by increasing tensions. As early as 1921 the newspaper Latvijas Sargs had editorialized that Latvia needed to cut itself free from "Asian Russian culture.” In tim e antiRussian attitudes gained strength. One Latvian journalist advised copying the Finns, who engraved on their knives: "Against the devil and the Russians.” Given their long-standing German heritage, the Baltic states could not remain uninfluenced by contemporary events in Germany, and Latvian nationalism became the order of the day. In 1933 a wave of nationalism swept over the country under the slogan "Latvia for Latvians.” In 1934 Ulmanis carried out a coup d'état and appointed him self President, or "Leader.” Alfreds BerzigS, a Minister in the new government, issued a speech in which he proclaimed: In this country our fate is determ ined by Karlis Ulmanis, the Leader o f our people.... Never ask why. A loyal person will always im m ediately answer, like a warrior: "/ obey, I shall carry out the order.” As early as 1932 the government had decreed that Latvian would be the only official state language, and the teaching of Russian was elim inated in several Latvian schools. In 1934 the Minister of Education L. Adamoviö declared that Latvia had to free itself of the
•The society w as chaired first by Leonid Kavetsky, then by Mikhail Klochkov. Among its m em bers w ere P. Budynsky, Nikolai Belotsvetov, Lev Zander, Aleksandr Magil'nitsky, Sergei Mintslov, Pêtr Pil'sky, and Igor' Chinnov.
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influence of alien cultures that "threatened Latvianism.” In fam ilies where the father was Latvian and the mother Russian, the children could no longer be sent to a Russian school. The readership of Segodnya began to decline when its readers started switching to Latvian. A number of Russian periodicals were closed and censorship was introduced for others. In 1940 Soviet troops occupied Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, and numerous prominent nationals and Russian em igrants were arrested in all these countries; many of them perished. Russian libraries and bookstores were closed, and Russian books were confiscated and pulped. The offices of Segodnya were closed, but the staff was not immediately arrested. Its publishers, Yakov Brams and Boris Polyak, managed to leave the country, but other journalists were arrested by the Soviets in the early morning hours of June 14 ,1941, and disappeared3. Georgy Goncharenko, a form er cavalry general who wrote under the pseudonym Yury Galich, had committed suicide upon receiving a summons from the NKVD in 1940, and Pêtr Pil'sky avoided arrest only because he suffered a heart attack when the NKVD agents came to arrest him. He died a few months later at his home. Subsequent Soviet arrests were prevented by the German occupation, but that event turned out to be a crown of thorns, too. The book publisher Sergei Karachevtsev, for example, was arrested and shot in 1942. O f the 34,000 persons arrested by the Germans in Latvia, 22 percent are estimated to have been Russian, Belorussian, Ukrainian, or Jewish.b Among Riga's several libraries, the most im portant was the Ivanov Library, which was completely destroyed.
•R . Celm s (Tsel'm s), Boris Khariton, Gerasim Levin (G . Lugin), Leonid Meirson, A. Perov, and Sergei Tsivinsky. bAmong those arrested w ere Maksim Aas (Lev Maksim ), Izrail' Kobylyansky, Mikhail Mironov (Mikhail Tsvik), R. G. Rubinshtein (Evgeny Shklyar), and Mark Vaintrob.
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Tallinn Empire is on us bestow'd, Shame and ruin wait for you. William Cowper (1731-1800) Estonia had been part of the Russian Empire for two centuries, and some 73,000 Russians were permanent residents in the country. Russians tended to live in the eastern territories, in Tallinn (Revel), Narva, where they constituted one third of the city's residents, and Tartu. The majority of the Russians were peasants, but many were well-to-do people who had summer homes and even estates there. The Germans occupied the country during World W ar I, but the Estonian Republic was established as an independent state in 1918. In November of the following year the W hite army under General Nikolai Yudenich was defeated, and thousands of soldiers were disarmed and interned by the Estonians. Many, very many, perished from hunger and typhus in the camps. In November and December of 1919 between 50,000 and 60,000 Russian soldiers and refugees left the country, and on February 2, 1920, the Soviet government signed an armistice with Estonia, recognizing the country's independence. Although new refugees continued to arrive, equal numbers moved on, so that the number of Russians in the country did not essentially change. By 1923 Russians in Estonia numbered 91,109, comprising 8.2% of the total population, of whom an estimated 16,422 were refugees. Some of the writers — Ivan Belyaev (Inno Vask), Vadim Belov, and Grigory Sosunov — returned to Russia. Before the Russian civil war, Russian social and cultural activities in Estonia were limited, since most Russians were peasants, with whom the small educated class had little in common. When independence was achieved, the status of local Russians abruptly changed from that of dom inant nationality group in the empire to that of minority, so that when the writer Ivan Belyaev created a journal, he called it Na Chuzhbine, meaning Tn an Alien Country.” Alarmed, local Russians initially resisted Estonian claims to autonomy, and a Provisional Russian Council was created on November 28, 1918, which prom ptly called for a "single and indivisible” Russia. The following year, however, it was forced to abandon this position. Russian religious activities in Estonia were extensive. The Uspensky Orthodox Monastery and the Pukhtitsy Cloister were but part of Russian religious life in Estonia; Tallinn, for example, had four of Estonia's 37 Russian parishes as late as 1940 (plus 14 EstonianRussian churches). There was also a colony of Russian Old Believers.
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The Day of Russian Culture was celebrated in Tallinn with great ceremony on an annual basis, and a collection of prose and verse was published annually from 1928 to 1935 under the title N ov' (Virgin Soil) in connection with the holiday. Two active Russian theaters were created by the new arrivals — one in Tallinn and another in Narva — and the local actor's union took up arms, demanding that the governm ent forbid Russian actors from performing. The Revel newspaper Tallina Teataja supported their request: Revel swarms with Russian perform ers working daily in the restaurants and cabarets, ju s t as if we continued as before to live in nm ighty" Russia. In a ll these cabarets you hear only Russian songs, see Russian clowning. Even The Estonia [the Estonian State Theater] invites Russian perform ers to act in Russian. O ur arm y officers seem to consider it a m atter o f honor to speak Russian. The m anagem ent office o f The Estonia is decorated with full-length portraits o f Lev Trotsky and Maksim Gor'ky. The theater halls are em pty during Estonian perform ances.... Would anything like this be tolerated in Finland o r Germany? There were about twenty Russian newspapers and periodical publications in Estonia. The "democratic national” newspaper Svobodnoe slovo (Free Word) appeared daily, competing with the conservative Poslednie izvestiya (The Latest News, 1920-27). S taryi Narvskii Listok (The Old Narva Newsletter) was the oldest Russian newspaper in Estonia, having been founded in 1889. Vesti dnya (The Day's News, 1926-1940) presented the Estonian point of view, as opposed to Russkii golos (Russian Voice), which was more Russian oriented. Two other papers were Zavtra (Tomorrow) and Russkii golos (Russian Voice). Papers generally were short-lived, going out of business only to be either replaced or refounded under a new name: Novaya Rossiya (New Russia), for example, was replaced by Vernyi p u t' (True Path), which in turn was succeeded by Zhizn' (Life). In February of 1923 Aleksei Janson united the various Russian cultural and social institutions under the umbrella of a single society, which existed until mid-1940, when the country was occupied by the Soviets, who executed Janson. An im portant role was also played by Svyatogor, a cultural society which promoted cultural, literary, and social events. Led by Ivan Lagovsky, the Russian Student Christian Movement had a m ajor center in Estonia, and the im portant journal of this organization was published there. Among the literary societies were the Literary Circle and Vityaz' (Knight) in Tallinn, Raki na sushe (Crayfish on Dry Land) in Tartu, and Skit poètov (Hermitage of Poets) in Revel. Tartu had a Russian "Literary Guild” (Tsekh poètov), run by Boris Pravdin, and a short-lived organization of young poets,
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Chugunnoe kol'tso (Castiron Ring) was founded in 1930. But educated Russians tended to move on to other Western European countries, and by the mid-1930s only Vityaz' still functioned. Publishing was cheaper in Estonia than in many other European countries, and Russian writers often had their works brought out by Bibliofil, founded by Albert Org, the Estonian Counsel in Petrograd; Kol'tso (Ring) was another publishing house founded in Tallinn, while Al'fa was located in Tartu. Literary journals included Gamayun, Veche, Via Sacra, Knut, and Otkliki. There were also a number of Russian publishers.3 The League of Russian Societies for the Promotion of Enlightenm ent and Charity in Estonia published a monthly literary magazine. And there were Russian libraries in Tallinn, Narva, and Tartu. Although many Russians felt slighted by their Estonian hosts, some 100 Russian schools were subsidized by the governm ent. The best known Russian w riter in Estonia was Igor' Severyanin, but Vera Kryzhanovskaya (pseudonym: Rochester) also resided in Estonia after 1917, as did Aleksei Baiov (pseudonym: G otvill'), and Vladim ir Gushchik, among others.b The writers generally preferred traditional realism, and Ivan Belyaev's modernistic Na chuzhbine met with a certain amount of hostility from other writers and readers who disapproved of his lack of social engagement. Although the Estonian government partly subsidized Russian publications, the actual amounts of such assistance were quite small, and writers and cultural activists generally acted out of sheer enthusiasm. Many of them were arrested and perished in Soviet prisons and forced-labor camps in 1940-41.
•In Tallinn: Bibliofil, Kol'tso, Novaya zem lya, and Russkaya kniga. In Tartu: A lfa , Anori, V . Bergman, O dam ees, and Postimees. bEstonia w as richer in Russian poets than in prose writers. Among the poets who had least spent som e tim e there were: Vladim ir Aleksandrovsky-Adams; Irina Bashkirova; Ivan Bazilevsky; Ivan Belyaev (Inno Vask), who returned to the Soviet Union in 1926 and died in a forced-labor camp; Karl Gershel'man (also a prose w riter and painter); Irina Borman; Boris Dikoi (Vil’dej; Yuliya Ivanova; Yury Ivask; Irina Kaigorodova; M ariya Karam zina (arrested by the Soviets in 1940, she allegedly died in a forced-labor camp in 1942); Boris Nartsissov, who later em igrated to the United States, and his sister Ol'ga; Mariya Ryabushkina; Boris Sem enov, who w as arrested by the Soviets in 1940 and disappeared in the camps; Igor' Sheffer; Boris Pravdin; M eta Roos (wife of Mikhail Irtel', she also wrote prose); Elizaveta Ross-Bazilevskaya (sister of M eta Ross); Yury Shumakov, the editor of N ov) Boris Taggo (Boris Novosadov); Natal’ya Tranze; and Yaroslav Voinov. Vasily Nikiforov-Volgin, a prose writer, was arrested in 1940 and apparently died in a forced-labor camp.
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Finland and Scandinavia But in the North long since m y nest is made. O tell her, brief is life but love is long ... Tennyson Finland had been annexed by the Russian Empire after the Swedish-Russian W ar of 1808-09 and granted constitutional status in the Empire. However, inasmuch as the civil service was entirely composed of native Finns (the official languages were Finnish and Swedish), the Russian population in Finland never grew to be very large. The Russian governm ent made persistent but generally unsuccessful attempts to reconcile the Finns to their place in the empire and also established Russian schools and churches to serve the Russian community. In 1840 or 1841 Yakov Grot was appointed professor of Russian language and literature at the Aleksandr University in Helsinki — much to the displeasure of a number of his Finnish colleagues. In 1842 he published an almanac of essays dedicated to the Tsar, and by 1848 the Russian book collection in the Aleksandr University library had increased to 10,000 volumes. W hen the Finns persisted in their hostility to the Russians, however, G rot lost all hope of achieving a reconciliation and returned to Russia in 1853. In the 1890s the tsarist governm ent applied new pressure on the Finns, making the study of the Russian language mandatory in the higher adm inistrative centers in the country. In 1899 a "Grand Petition” was signed by half a million Finns and presented to Nikolai II, protesting efforts to keep Finland in the Russian fold. By 1910 there were only approxim ately 12,000 Russians resident in the country. Among them was Elena Guro (1877-1913), an artist and w riter who was a member of a Cubo-Futurist group. Once the Finns had declared their independence in December 1917, the Russians were declared to be personae non grata, Russian schools were closed, and deportations lowered the Russian population to about four or five thousand. The Finns’ deep-seated suspicions of the Russians were heightened during the Finnish civil war, when Finnish communists received weapons from Moscow while the other side was supported by German troops under General von der Goltz. When the Finnish W hite army marched trium phant into Vyborg (Viipuri), hundreds of Russians — Reds and W hites alike — were shot. The journalist and historical novelist Sergei Mintslov was among those who fled, complaining that "the concept of the ‘Russian’ has now become identical with that of the plague.” The Russian-language Finlyandskaya gazeta (Finland’s Newspaper), which had existed since 1900, folded.
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Nevertheless, the situation in Russia was so desperate that Russians continued to arrive, even though the Finns erected all sorts of barriers, including visa requirements. By the beginning of 1919 there were approxim ately 15,400 Russians who had permission to remain in the country, of whom roughly 11,000 were in Karelia, where Russians had lived since the early 18th century. Many moved on to other W estern Europèan countries, but a considerable number stayed. Finnish authorities attempted to lim it the number of Russians settling in Karelia and the three largest cities — Helsinki, Âbo (Turku), and Vyborg. Since Russians who had formerly owned estates and country houses in Finland were no longer able to visit them, their properties were auctioned off, with the proceeds placed in escrow for possible heirs. A t this point the Soviet consulate suddenly displayed a keen interest in these abandoned homes. In Vyborg, just 70 miles northwest of St. Petersburg, the victorious Finns found themselves with so many Russian residents that 26 associations had to be founded to distribute American humanitarian assistance to them. The Special Committee for Russian Affairs in Finland,3 made up of Russian exiles, raised two million Finnish marks to finance its anti-Bol'shevik plans, and in return agreed to recognize Finland's independence, but the W hite Russian generals persisted in their desire to restore Russia's pre-1917 borders. By the end of 1918 the W hite Russian general Nikolai Yudenich was forced to retreat from Petrograd to Helsinki, together with his troops. The Finnish head of state, General Carl Gustav Mannerheim, hoped to seize Petrograd, ideally using only Finnish forces. Mannerheim, who had spent 30 years as an officer in the old Russian army, demanded that Yudenich recognize Finland's independence, but the W hite Russian Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak was opposed to any such reciprocity. Meanwhile, Yudenich had almost reached Petrograd when he was forced to retreat. Lenin himself believed that if the Finns had supported Yudenich, the city would have been taken. The exiles also pointed an accusing finger at Estonia and Britain. The W hite Russian armies suffered a series of defeats, and A rkhangelsk had to be evacuated, triggering the flight of between
•Osobyi komitet po delam russkikh v Finlyandii. The committee was created by the form er Tsarist official Aleksandr Trepov, who later had to be replaced by Anton Kartashêv because of Trepov's known "germanophile" sympathies. O ther Russian ém igré organizations in Finland w ere the Russian Colony in Finland (Russkaya koloniya v Finlyandii), the Russian Merchants' Club (Russkii kupecheskii klub), and several organizations of form er Tsarist military men. There w as also a Russian school for boys and another for girls.
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1.000 and 1,500 Russians across the Finnish border. In March of 1921 the Soviets suppressed the Kronstadt rebellion, and from 6,000 to 8.000 Russian sailors and civilians fled to Finland. The Soviets quickly established a committee in Vyborg to repatriate the refugees and sent so many spies to the country that the Finnish police estimated that every third Russian immigrant was a Soviet agent. The Finnish border was less than 20 miles from Petrograd, and Russian émigré spies and such W estern agents as Sidney Reilly were so successful in exploiting this "window” to Russia that the Soviets demanded that all Russian exile organizations in the country be disbanded. In 1921-22 the number of Russian immigrants reached its highest level: some 19,000, of whom four or five thousand had resided in the country for generations. Roughly a quarter of them lived in Helsinki. Many of the more prominent Russian émigrés were actually of German descent. From that tim e on their numbers gradually sank, but since naturalized Finns were not distinguished from native Finns in official statistics, the exact Russian population is difficult to determ ine. Given the long and checkered history of diplom atic relations between Russia and Finland, it is not surprising that a good deal of hostility toward Russians was in evidence. When Finland's sm all Orthodox Church attempted to coopt Russian parishioners, the latter felt themselves out of place and established their own community, which joined the Evlogian church. There were several Russian libraries and reading rooms in Finland, and Biblion Publishers put out a number of titles for the Russians until cheaper Russian publishing houses on the continent drove it out of business. In Vyborg the group Sodruzhestvo poètov (Commonwealth of Poets) was active, and there was also a literary-philosophical society, Svetlitsa (The Parlor), active in Vyborg during the latter half of the 1930s. There were also three amateur acting troupes.4 The Day of Russian Culture was actively celebrated every year in Helsinki. The most im portant Russian writers to settle in Finland were Leonid Andreev and, for a time, Aleksandr Kuprin. Ekaterina Dykhova (1849-1936) had studied medicine in the United States and returned to Europe with her American husband. W hile a student at New York University, she had met Harriet BeecherStowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and written a didactic "progressive” novel of her own, published in 1871. In 1918 she left St. Petersburg to live on her estate in Vammelsuu.
•The Russian Dram atic Circle (Russkii dramaticheskii kruzhok), founded in 1920; the Vedrinsky Dramatic Circle; and the Zveno (Link) Dram atic Circle.
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When the Solonevich brothers fled Russia in the early 1930s, they both remained in Finland for about one year and lectured frequently on the evils of communism. The popular writer and literary scholar Komei Chukovsky (1882-1969) had written his first book for children — The Crocodile— in Kuokkala, where he lived from 1912 to 1917, but he chose to shutter up his home and return to Russia. Others who opted not to remain in Finland were Aleksandr Am fiteatrov (1862-1938), Anton Kartashëv (1875-1960), Aleksandr Kuprin (1870-1938), and Igor1 Voinov (18981970). Among those Russian writers who remained in Finland were the poet Vera Bulich (1898-1954), the memoirist of the Imperial fam ily Anna Taneeva-Vyrubova (1884-1964), the poet Juhani Savolainen (pseudonym: Ivan Savin, 1899-1927), and Vadim Gardner (1880-1956), who wrote verse in both English and Russian.3 Given the very small Russian population in Finland, the newspapers proved very short-lived.b Zhum al sodruzhestva (Journal of Concord) was the chief literary publication. Even in the 1930s there was still a modest amount of Russian cultural activity in Helsinki. Helsinki had long been a repository of tsarist governmental duplicate archives, which later were to serve many scholars who could not obtain access to such documents during the Soviet period. When the Finnish-Soviet war broke out in 1939, many Russian organizations were shut down by the Finnish authorities. Russians evidently felt even less welcome in Sweden than in Finland, and thus the Russian community there was far smaller. The Russians who did settle in Sweden were people who had owned real estate in the country before 1917, the wives of Swedes who had worked in Russia, and a handful of military men and diplomats. The other Russians who came to Sweden passed through to France,
•O ther Russian writers and scholars who temporarily resided in the country or at least passed through w ere Evgeny Lyatsky (1868-1942), the painter Nikolai Rerikh (1874-1947), Boris Sove, Vladim ir Sukhomlinov (1848-1926), and Ivan Tkhorzhevsky (1878-1951). Three critics who remained in Finland w ere Konstantin Arabazhin (1865-1929), Yury Grigorkov (1885-1961), and Sergei Rittenberg (18991975). bSevem aya zhizn' (Northern Life, 1918-1919, daily), Rassvet (Dawn, 19191920, daily, published both poetry and fiction), Russkaya zhizn' (Russian life, daily, 1919), Novaya russkaya zhizn' (The New Russian Life, daily, 1919), Put' (The Path, 1921-1922), Russkie vesti (Russian News, daily, 1923), Dni nashei zhizni (Days of O ur Life, 1923), and Ustok russkoi kolonii (Bulletin of the Russian Colony, 1927). O ne newspaper that lasted for twenty years was Probuzhdenie (The Awakening), but it w as chiefly religious in nature.
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Germany, and Czechoslovakia. Russian life centered around a modest church in Stockholm, which possessed a library. The prominent émigré publisher Zinovy Grzhebin placed a large order with Progress Printers in Stockholm which established Novaya Rus' (New Russia) Publishers. Severnye O gni (Northern Lights) was run by I. A. Lundel' and Evgeny Lyatsky. Although Norway and the U.S.S.R. shared a common border, the small Russian émigré contingent came by boat because of a lack of roads. Most of the Russians arrived on February 25, 1920, on two ships: the Kuz'ma Minin and the Lomonosov. Only about 500 Russians — 442 men and 121 women — remained in the country, where they found sympathy among the conservatives and hostility in left-wing circles. The Russians in Norway created three chief societies: the Russian Commonwealth (Russkoe sodruzhestvo), the Russian Émigré Circle in Norway (Russkii èmigrantskii kruzhok v Norvegii), and the Russian National League (Russkoe natsional'noe ob'edinenie). Russian church services were held as early as 1921. The Danish royal fam ily provided refuge to the Dowager Empress (Vdovstvuyushchaya imperatritsa) Mariya Fêdorovna, who in turn provided financial support to m onarchist groups. Although she became som ewhat senile toward the end of her life, she ran a sort of m iniature royal court and received selected visitors. She also financed the "League of the Loyal” (Soyuz vernykh), whose members had vowed to reestablish the monarchy. The European representative of the League was Markov II, who had his office in Munich.
Kovno (Kaunas) He comes too near, that comes to be denied. Sir Thomas Overbury (1581-1613) The incestuous relations of Russia and Lithuania (and we must include here Ukraine and Poland, as well) have their own rich history. In the 15th/16th centuries Lithuania served as a haven for Russians fleeing the anger of the Grand Duke of Moscow, such as Kurbsky. Even earlier Lithuania was the refuge of Prince Vasily Mikhailovich the Bold (Udalyi), who had made the mistake of allowing his wife to accept an expensive necklace as a wedding present from her aunt, who was the w ife of Grand Duke Ivan III. Not suspecting that the fam ily heirloom had changed hands, Ivan decided to make a present of it to his daughter-in-law when she gave birth to his grandson in 1483. Upon learning that Vasily's wife was in possession of the necklace, Ivan flew into a rage and ordered the arrest of both Vasily and his wife, but the two had managed to flee to Lithuania. Only ten years later did Ivan's
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w ife manage to prevail upon him to pardon the two fugitives. While Ivan III was no Ivan the Terrible (IV), neither was he a meek, forgiving type, and Vasily evidently judged it prudent not to accept the invitation to return home. The following year Ivan concluded a treaty with Lithuania, not forgetting Vasily in his spite, who evidently still had the necklace. Peevishly, Ivan stipulated in the document that Vasily "was not to be perm itted to go anywhere, and if he take absence, he was not to be accepted back.” The third partition of the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth in 1795 divided Lithuania between the Prussians and the Russians, but St. Petersburg experienced the usual difficulties in quelling local nationalism, and in 1840 the Russians outlawed the very word "Lithuania.” in 1861-63 the Poles and Lithuanians rose in an unsuccessful rebellion against the Tsar, to which the Russians responded by proscribing even the use of the Latin alphabet, hoping to force the Cyrillic alphabet upon this rebellious province. For a time there was also a ban on the local press, lifted only in 1904. In 1915 the Germans occupied the country briefly, but the Red Army took Vilnius (Vilno) in 1919. Exploiting the constant conflict between Russians and Poles over Lithuania, the Lithuanians were able to achieve independence in 1923 and kept the Polish border closed until 1938. Russians comprised 2.7 percent of the Lithuanian population (some 55,000) at the end of W orld W ar I, and their numbers were soon augmented by an additional 10,000 refugees. Given the small number of Russians, their cultural activities appear to have been relatively modest. However, there were four Russian newspapers: Èkho Litvy (Lithuanian Echo), a "literary-political daily”; Vol'naya Litva (A Free Lithuania), "a daily organ of independent democratic thought”; Ponedel'nik, which appeared on Mondays, as its name indicates; and Vilenskaya rech' (The Talk of Vilnius). Zerkalo (The Mirror) was a m agazine devoted to literature, art, and "social life.” And Kaunas was home to Baltic Publishers. The literary group Barka poètov (Barque of Poets) existed in Vilno from late 1926 to mid-1928. And the city was home to the poet Roman Ryabinin, and — for a brief tim e — to the prose w riter Sergei Mintslov. Some 34,600 persons, many of the Russian, are estimated to have been arrested in Lithuania after the Soviet occupation in 1940.
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Zürich-Geneva M eet the m alady on Its way. Persius (34-62 A.D.) Russians had been coming to Switzerland since the middle of the 19th century either as students or political refugees, or both. Medicine was an especially popular field of study for women, who were long denied the right to m atriculate at Russian universities. W ith over 400 of them studying at the medical school in Beme, critics began to refer to the institution sarcastically as a "Slavic girls’ school.” In the early 1870s the Tsarist governm ent ordered all Russian women students to return home. By 1910, 147 of every 1,000 residents of Switzerland were foreigners. According to the census taken that year, 4,607 persons listed their native language as Russian, most of whom resided either in Zurich or Geneva, with sm aller populations in Lausanne, Beme, and Basel. About a third of them were students, many of whom were so well-to-do that in 1906 the registration fees which they paid constituted about 57 percent of all fees collected. The money brought in by wellheeled Russians was regularly supplemented by fund-raising drives conducted by various political organizations throughout Europe. Editions Internationales Populaires (EDIP) published books for the Russians in their language. The Bibliothèque Leon Tolstoi was established in 1875 and was subsequently converted by Russian students into a circulating library. The largest library was founded by Nikolai Rubakin, who had fled tsarist Russia in 1907. He eventually built the collection up to 100,000 volumes. The tsarist government attempted to put pressure on the Swiss because of the high-profile political activities of the Russians (and Poles) in Switzerland, but with very limited success. When the first W orld W ar began, the émigrés were sharply divided as to whether to resist the war (Lenin's position) or support it (as advocated by Kropotkin and Plekhanov). In the initial stages of the conflict there was a brief rapprochement between the émigrés and the tsarist government, which evacuated a number of them to Russia. In 1915, however, the Russian mission ordered all those subject to the draft to return home — a demand that was widely resisted. On the whole, the activities of the Swiss Russian contingent appear to have been largely political and educational, not literary. By 1930, 2,266 Russians are estimated to have been living in Switzerland.
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Kishinev (Chisinau) Gypsies in boisterous crowds M eander through Bessarabia ... Aleksandr Pushkin What a wind in the Moldavian ste p p e ... Aleksandr Vertinsky Russian-Romanian relations have a very long history. After five Russian invasions of Bessarabia, the first of which occurred in 1711, Russia annexed this frontier territory in 1812 under the Treaty of Bucharest. Apart from the Romanians themselves and a large Jewish population, the population consisted of Germans, Bulgarians, Swiss, Gypsies, Greeks, Armenians, and, of course, a very large number of Russians. Filipp Vigel', a friend of Pushkin, described his first impression of Kishinêv upon being sent there as the first vice-governor of Bessarabia: I have never seen a larger, uglier, and more chaotic village.... When you enter it, your gaze and nose are equally under assault: the place consists entirely o f twisted lanes strung with hovels pressed up tight against each other. The filth and slops flow into the town from the surrounding areas and from there end up in the Byk [River]. In the sum m er the a ir is so infectious that fever is everywhere. Serfdom was never introduced into this relatively autonomous province, and Russian schismatics, runaway serfs, and outlaws found haven there. From 1856 (the Treaty of Paris concluding the Crimean War) to 1878 (The Treaty of Berlin) southern Bessarabia reverted to Moldavia, but was then reincorporated into the Russian Empire. Beginning in the 1880s, Rumania was the most important center of revolutionary activities on the part of Russian émigrés.3 By 1913 the Russian M inister of Education Lev Kasso claimed that a great wave of patriotic feeling had swept over the Russians in Bessarabia in the face of "the common enemy” and that the Bessarabian guberniya (province) was blending more and more with other parts of the Empire. In 1918 Rumania took back Bessarabia and held it until 1940. According to the 1920 census, of a total population of 2,686,000, some three quarters of a million were Russians and Ukrainians. After the Russian civil war, 7,000 additional Russians
■Most of these Russians w ere populists (narodnik).
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arrived as refugees. Aleksandr Vertinsky in his memoirs tells of an "alm ost Russian” landscape with Russian store signs and Russian speech heard everywhere — among cab drivers, salesmen, and even beggars. Nevertheless, conditions for literature do not appear to have been propitious, since 82 percent of the men and 96 percent of the women were illiterate as late as 1900.a Bessarabia was within the Pale of Settlement, and there was a large Jewish population in the area, creating, in the words of the émigré poet Dovid Knut, "a peculiar Jewish-Russian air.” The first Russian newspaper appeared in 1854— Bessarabskie oblastnye vedom osti (Bessarabian Oblast' Ledgers), a governm ent publication. A governm ent decree dated July 2, 1870, forbade the publication of articles containing polemical topics, and even jokes or poems. The year 1889 marked the appearance of the first private periodical — Bessarabskii vestnik (The Bessarabian Herald). By 1899 some 28 periodicals had appeared, among them nine newspapers and two magazines, most of them inconsequential.6 Bessarabia presented one of the numerous territorial questions confronting both Soviets and émigrés drawing plans for the future Russian state. Markov II favored giving Bessarabia to the Rumanians in exchange for their support in the struggle against the Soviet government.
Uzhgorod "A Russian A ustria" Adol'f Dobryansky (1871) Although most "Ruthenians” (Rusiny), or "Carpatho-Russians,” in Galicia, Bukovina, and the Transcarpathian region (what is now western Ukraine and eastern Slovakia) spoke dialects of Ukrainian,
aln this rural setting, even the Bessarabian industrial working class w as very weakly represented, comprising only some 30,000. bln the period 1900-16 254 periodicals appeared, of which 136 w ere newspapers and 78 w ere m agazine-type alm anacs with literary supplements. Prior to 1900, only one publication had been in Romanian, w hile sixteen w ere in Russian. 185 of the 254 periodicals w ere published in Kishinêv, and sixteen appeared in Bendery. Among the Russian periodicals w ere the daily newspapers Bessarabia (1919-12), Bessarabskoe siovo (The Bessarabian Word, 1922-35), Kishinêvskii listok (The Kishinêv Bulletin, 1929-30), and the weekly Bukharestskie novosd (Bucharest News, 1922). There w ere also two Russian knigoizdatel'stvo and Novaya kniga.
publishing
houses:
Bessarabskoe
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there were an estimated 550,000 ethnic Russians in the area. During periods of strain between Hungary and Austria, Vienna promoted Ukrainian nationalism as a counterweight to pro-Hungarian sentiment. The suppression of the Hungarian uprising of 1848-49 by Russian troops gave a strong impetus to pro-Russian sentim ent in the region. The poet Aleksandr Dukhnovich transferred such political sentiments to literature and wrote odes to Nikolai I, much like those Derzhavin used to w rite to Catherine the Great. Dukhnovich went on to write The True H istory o f the Carpathian Russians, or the “Ugric Ruthenians, who had been transform ed into dunces by the envious Magyars.” The Russians had their own newspapers in Lviv and even in Vienna. The Hungarians, for their part, took the view that the local residents were neither Ukrainians nor Russians, but "Hungarians of the Greco-Roman faith.” In view of the "Russian threat,” however, the Hungarians prom oted Ukrainian nationalism, and there were complaints that ethnic Russians were being transformed into Ukrainians. A t the same tim e a portion of the more educated citizenry began to favor the Hungarian language. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918 pro-Hungarian elements attempted to establish a "Russian border area” (Rus'kaya kraina), and in 1919 part of the Carpathian region was occupied by Romanian and Czech troops. On February 20,1920, the area was declared an "autonomous region of the Czecho-Slovak Republic.” This situation, which was as confusing linguistically as it was politically, lasted until 1938.a From 1928 to 1933 the Dukhnovich Society published Karpatskii svet (Carpathian Light), under the editorship of A. V. Popov. A pro-Russian history of the prose and poetry of the "CarpathoRussians” was published by Evgeny Nedzel'sky in Uzhgorod in 1932. In 1939 the Society of Russian W riters in Carpathian Rus' was founded in Mukachevo. Literary evenings were conducted, and writers read their works over the radio.b Immediately thereafter the war broke out and the society became inactive. The historian Evgeny Nedzel'sky
•W hen World W ar II cam e to a close, part of W estern Galicia, the so-called Lemkovshchina, was given to Poland, and local Russians w ere forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union. Another part went to Czechoslovakia, without forced repatriations, and the remainder was declared to be part of W estern Ukraine. The G reat Soviet Encyclopedia (third edition) called the Ruthenians "Western Ukrainians... with a specific language and culture." bObshchestvo russkikh pisatelei v podkarpatskoi Rusi. The organizers w ere Nikolai Terletsky, I. Zhupan, and Andrei Karabelesh. Som e members w ere the monk Aleksei (Dekhterev), Em el’yan Baletsky, Vasily Dobosh, Aleksei Farinich, and A. Patrus.
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viewed the literature which they created as fitting into a CarpathoRussian tradition. Before World W ar II there was a Carpathian Literary League in Prague.3 After the war Carpatho-Ruthenia was incorporated into Ukraine and Slovakia.
London Dear; damn'd, distracting town. Alexander Pope D on't send a poet to London. Heinrich Heine Russian contacts with England date back to the child m arriage of Vladim ir Monomakh with the daughter of the English King Harold II in the 1060s. In 1524, Tsar Vasily III sent an embassy to Spain, which appears to have arrived via England. Relations were established between the two states, and Ivan the Terrible even conducted a correspondence with Elizabeth I. In 1602 Tsar Boris Godunov sent 15 young men to Europe to study, only one of whom returned. Nearly another century passed before Peter the Great paid his colorful visit to England in early 1698. Britain had a long tradition of granting refuge to political exiles, and during the second half of the 19th century London became popular among Russian dissenters. Virtually all the im portant revolutionary figures had lived and worked in the city. Trotsky in his memoirs mentioned Nikolai Chaikovsky as the "patriarch” of the émigré com m unity in London. Iskra (Spark) appeared there for a time, edited by the older generation— Plekhanov, Zasulich, and A ksel'rod— and the younger revolutionaries — Lenin, Martov, and Potresov. With time, however, the center of revolutionary activity had shifted to the continent. Statistical records do not distinguish between the nationalities of arrivals from the Russian empire — Polish, Jewish, Russian, or any other ethnic group. In 1871 there were 9,569 such persons residing in England, but after the assassination of Aleksandr II in 1881, their numbers increased dram atically — to 94,204 in 1911. Prior to the passing of the Aliens Act in 1905, no visitor to England could be prevented from landing. Many, if not most, of the new arrivals were Jews, who settled largely in London's Stepney area, and in Leeds and Manchester. One Briton, upon returning from a trip to the Pale of
•Literaturnoe ob'edinenie studentov-karpatorossov, chaired by Dmitry Vergun.
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Settlem ent, remarked It was just like being in London's East End. The revolutionary activities and terrorism which the visitors engaged in aroused violent disapproval from many of the British, and in 1894 the Foreign Secretary, Lord Salisbury, even referred to them as "enemies of the human race.” Even so, the general British attitude was remarkably tolerant. In 1914 the Aliens Restriction Act was passed, but the commencement of hostilities cut off immigration even without it. After 1917, the number of Russians who gravitated to England was considerably sm aller than to other European capitals. Even earlier most Russian students abroad chose Paris or Switzerland. Kovalevsky quotes "official statistics” estimating the number of Russians in England "and her colonies” at 4,000 as of 1930. Members of Russian high society attempted to maintain the form er social pecking order — an effort that was more easily sustained by virtue of the fact that London's Russians enjoyed better financial circum stances than their colleagues in continental Europe. There were few er financial restrictions placed on employment than in Paris, for example, but it was harder to obtain visas and residence permits. Some im portant Russian businessmen settled in London, and some Russian Jews who had settled in London before 1917 became prosperous. Grand Duchess Kseniya Aleksandrovna (sister of the Tsar) was recognized as the titular head of the local Russian community, which numbered such famous Russian names as Golitsyn, Meshchersky, Belosersky, Trubetskoi, Volkov, Kutaisov, and Shipov, among others. Prince Feliks Yusupov, one of Rasputin's assassins, managed to bring out of Russia with him a good supply of valuables and held elegant receptions. Nevertheless, many Russian nobles found them selves engaged in what for them were rather unexpected occupations: Kolchak's Chief of Staff Admiral Smirnov made women's hats, Admiral Volkov (who in 1940 was accused of spying for the Germans) kept a restaurant, the Golitsyns went into the antique trade, and Grand Duchess Mariya knitted dresses for sale. Religion was as politicized among London's Russians as in other places. The faithful were split between the two Russian Churches abroad. One accepted the authority of the Patriarch in Moscow, while the other viewed him as a Soviet collaborator. The scant support which the English provided for the W hite Arm ies aroused a certain degree of resentment among the Russians. Before launching the Crimean evacuation, Vrangel' even accused all the Allies of treachery (although, admittedly, his words were intended largely for France). The First-Wave historian V. Maevsky wrote that England was a "selfish country” that showed no interest in Russian émigrés.
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Among the 200,000-strong Allied interventionist force fighting on the side of the W hite armies were some 14,000 British troops in Murmansk and another 14,000 in Arkhangelsk. When the British left Arkhangelsk, they took with them a number of Russian businessmen who would have found themselves in dangerous straits under the Soviets. In London the new arrivals formed the "Nordic League” for the support of local cultural activities, including literary evenings, plays, and a Russian school. I. I. Bilibin opened a branch of the nationalist Mladoross League. The most active figure in arranging Russian cultural activities was Princess Ekaterina Georg'evna Golitsyna. For a time, the Russian Academic Group was active in London. The Nordic League arranged literary readings, and Evgeny Sablin, form er chargé d'affaires of the tsarist embassy, named his home Russia House and made it available for cultural events. One émigré described the general atmosphere: Enormous portraits o f our Emperors, covering a whole wall, gazed m ajestically down on the visitors, and Empresses greeted them with kindly smiles. Prints showing regim ental uniforms, buildings in Petersburg and Moscow, and old maps were hung on the walls. On the table old Court silverware was to be seen. "Here is Im perial Russia, here we breathe its a ir.” It was a far cry from the circumstances facing most of the exiles scattered throughout the rest of Europe. Even the stock market crash of 1929-30 and the ensuing depression, which exercised a great levelling effect on the émigrés’ economic circumstances, left intact much of the extreme form ality of London's Russian community. A number of prominent scholars tem porarily made their home in England, among them Prince Dmitry Svyatopolk-Mirsky and also Gleb Struve, who later wrote a history of Russian literature of the First W ave. And Vozrozhdenie (Renaissance) Publishers was located in London. On the whole, the Russians in England found a sym pathetic environm ent there. The words of Alexander Kennaway, a secondgeneration member of the Russian community, could probably have been accepted by many: If som ebody says to me, " What are you?” I would say that I'm Russian. I've g o t a British passport, but it would be foolish to say that I'm English because I'm not. You can't be.... I think that, like a lo t o f Russians, England represents to me a country in which it is nowadays easy to live because the English leave you alone to be yourself.
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Rome If you only knew the jo y I experienced in leaving Switzerland and flew o ff to m y beautiful Italy. She is m ine! A nd no one in the world shall take her from m eI I was born here; Russia, Petersburg, snow, scoundrels, the office, m y University post, the theater— a ll this was a dream. I have awakened in m y homeland. Nikolai Gogol', 1837 ’T o Italy, to Ita lyl”... I wanted rest, I wanted the sea, the sea, warm air, luxurious greenery, and people who were not so cynical and heartless [as in Paris].... Aleksandr Gertsen, 1847 To poeticize Italy and life there a t the expense o f Russia, as did the late G ogol’, you have to have a selfish soul, and a Ukrainian one (khokhlatskuyu) a t that. Apollon Grigor'ev, 1858 Russia's contacts with Italy were first developed in the second half of the 17th century, and by the late 18th century a number of Russians had even settled there. Despite the grumpy tone of G rigor'ev's epigraph above, even he could not resist the country's charm: There is nothing official o r prescribed in m y love for Italy. I have fallen in love with her sublimity, her nature, her art, her people, and their striking garments, ringing voices, and erupting volcanoes. Italy has given me much — a revelation o f what I lacked, a revelation o f the "plastic.” I thank her constantly for so precious a gift. Gertsen wrote that the first tim e he came to the Forum his breath was taken away and he simply stood there, bashful and excited. Denis Fonvizin, however, was the inevitable exception. In his eyes Italy came off only slightly better than France. Its operas were inferior to those in St. Petersburg, and its universities were a joke. If his wife had not restrained him, he would have shot the postman (an offense which, he wrote, was no more serious than shooting a dog). Magnificent as it m ight seem, even Venice reminded him of nothing so much as a funeral.
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The number of Russians resident in the Eternal City continued to increase with the years, and in 1858 Vladim ir Pecherin was sent to preach in Rome, partially in Russian, dem onstrating that there must have been enough Russian émigrés in the city to make such an undertaking worthwhile. Princess Zinaida Volkonskaya had her fam ous salon in Italy, and a fair number of prom inent artists, among them Aleksandr Ivanov and Karl Bryullov, simply emigrated there. Strong as the draw of Italy may have been to Russians during the tsarist period, Russian émigrés did not flock to its shores after 1917, although, of course, the em inent poet Vyacheslav Ivanov made his home there. As of 1930, Kovalevsky estimates the number of Russians in Italy at only 2,500. There was a Russian academic group in Italy. Among the Russians who found the charms of Italy absolutely irresistible were the writer and art historian Pavel Muratov, who lavishly praised the country to his Russian readers, and the w riter Boris Zaitsev, who wrote that Italy had literally become a part of him.
Harbin We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Thoreau As part of its general proselytizing efforts, the Russian Orthodox Church sent the translator Aleksei Agafonov (1746-92) to Peking soon after he graduated from the seminary. Agafonov spent over a decade in China (1771-82) as a member of the Russian Church mission. It is interesting to note that he took an active part in the interrogations of Russian defectors in the capacity of interpreter. Agafonov's translations often deal with religious and philosophical topics, as well as political. Sheer distance was long a limiting factor in contacts between Russians and Chinese, but in 1896 the Chinese governm ent signed a treaty with the tsarist governm ent perm itting the Russians to com plete the rail link to Vladivostok, and many Russians arrived in Northern Manchuria to adm inister this grandiose undertaking, which took from 1898 to 1903 to complete and actually cost more to build than did the Trans-Siberian line. Despite the turm oil caused by the Boxer rebellion in 1900, the new arrivals transformed Harbin into a virtually Russian city. When the Russian civil war ended, the strip of land along both sides of the tracks, which was considered Russian territory, contained 62,000 Russian subjects, of whom about 41,000 lived in Harbin. Between the spring of 1918 and the end of 1922 the railroad colony
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was joined by a contingent of refugees estimated at 200,000 people, most of whom settled in Harbin. By that tim e the number of Russian speakers in the city itself may have been as high as 155,000. This was an interregnum for the Russians, who considered themselves citizens of tsarist Russia, although the tsarist governm ent no longer existed. As of Septem ber 23,1920, the Chinese government no longer recognized the Russians’ diplom atic status, but on May 31, 1924, the railroad began to be operated jointly by the Soviets and the Chinese, and most Russian employees accepted Soviet passports in order to keep their jobs; others accepted Chinese citizenship, while still others remained stateless. Despite the fact that so many Russians accepted Soviet citizenship, the community as a whole was so anti-Soviet that there was even a joking proposal to rename the city Belogvardeisk (W hiteguardsville). During the period from 1923 to 1927 the Soviets exercised broad influence over their Chinese neighbors. In 1923 Chiang Kai-shek was sent to Moscow to study the U.S.S.R. economic and political system, but he returned hostile and distrustful of Soviet intents. By 1924, following instructions from Moscow, Chinese communists began to infiltrate the Kuomintang. In 1926 Chiang became head of the party and proposed the idea of a northern campaign to unify China. Pursuing their own plans for the area, the Soviets attempted to frustrate such efforts. On April 6,1927, Chinese police occupied the Soviet embassy in Peking — with the advance consent of the ambassadors of the U.S.A., G reat Britain, Japan, France, Holland, Spain, and Portugal. Soviet officials were unable to burn hundreds of folders containing an abundance of documents on underground communist activities in China. On December 15, 1927, the Nationalist government broke relations with Moscow, and on May 27,1929, the Chinese conducted a sim ilar raid on the Soviet consulate in Harbin, after which a number of Russians who had accepted Soviet citizenship were arrested. In 1929 bad relations between the U.S.S.R. and China led to a m ilitary conflict in which the Soviets easily came out on top, leaving the largely anti-Soviet émigrés with decidedly mixed feelings. When Japanese troops occupied Harbin on February 5,1932, as part of their general occupation of Manchuria, local Russians celebrated on the streets, anticipating a liberation from both Chinese and Soviet rulers, but those hopes were to prove ephemeral. On December 29,1934, the Japanese created the Bureau of Russian Émigré Affairs in the Manchurian Empire with the intent of controlling the chaotic and often conflicting activities of the Russian community. A number of Russians decided to go "hom e,” and one witness described a banner hanging in the local train station reading "M other Russia, Accept Your Children!”
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Evidently, most of the returnees were arrested. Despite these returns, by 1939 some 45,000 Russian speakers had supposedly been registered in Harbin and other cities in Manchukuo, the name of the puppet state created by the Japanese, and the true figure may have been even higher. There was very little assimilation of the Russians in China. Mixed Russian-Chinese marriages were extremely rare, and the Russian community existed as one of the foreign colonies. Residents had no need to assimilate into the local culture or learn a new language, as was later true in Western Europe or the Americas, and even the street signs in the Russian part of the city were in Russian. The life of the Russian colony before 1917 was quite com fortable in a material sense, but the life of the refugees, who arrived later, was one of relative poverty. Harbin's Russians undertook an impressive amount and variety of cultural activities. The Society for the Study of M anchuria published some 87 books, gathered a library of 9,000 volumes, and created a museum with 62,000 exhibits. There were 70 Russian schools when the Japanese occupation began, and between 1918 and August 1945 110 newspapers and 220 journals were founded. Russian Harbin's periodicals reflected a wide spectrum of political views — the Democrats, the Changing Landmarks group, the Progressives, the Russian Nationalists, the Fascists, the Social Revolutionaries and the Anti-Socialists, the Communists and the Anti-Bol'sheviks, and the nonaligned. O f Harbin's newspapers, the most im portant were the proJapanese Vremya (Time, 25,000 copies), the anti-Soviet Kharbinskii vestnik (Harbin Herald), later renamed Vestnik M anchzhurii (The M anchuria Herald), Nash p u t' (Our Path — a fascist publication, 4,000 copies), the pro-Soviet Molva (Rumor), and the daily Zarya (Dawn, 10,000 copies).3 Between 1918 and 1945 150 one-day newspapers
"Others w ere the communist Kharbinskii den' (Kharbin Day), later renam ed Tribuna (Tribune), the daily anti-Bol'shevik Russkii golos (Russian Voice), the daily Novosti zhizni (Life's News), which published articles by the Change of Landmarks leader Nikolai Ustryalov, the monarchist daily S vet (Light), Gun-Bao, which w as published in Russian, the daily socialist paper Rossiya (Russia), Druzhba narodov (Friendship of Peoples), Kharbinskoe vremya (Harbin Tim es), Luch A zii (R ay of Asia), Segodnya (Today), Vozhd' (Leader), Rupor (Megaphone) — an evening paper with a literary and artistic supplement, and Russkoe sbvo (The Russian W ord). Man'chzhurskii den' (Manchuria Day) was devoted to Chinese-Russian relations, and Novaya èra (New Era) was intended to "defend the interests of the Chinese railroad." Among the m agazines w ere Prozhektor (Projector), Kitezh, and V al (Breaker); the last two devoted considerable space to literature, art and politics.
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were created to raise money for specific causes or to commemorate specific events. In the period 1898-1960 2,300 Russian books were published, 73% of which appeared in 1918-45. From 1922 to 1938 the number of Russian Orthodox churches increased from 28 to 67. Perhaps the main literary group was the "Young Churaevka,” which was organized in 1926 under the auspices of the YMCA and put on regular readings, concerts, plays, and even radio programs. It also issued its own literary newspaper.3 In 1931 the group published a collection of its verse, entitled Semero (The Seven). Other groups were Akmèb, a Far Eastern group of Futurists0, a literary-scholarly group entitled Klin (W edge)d, and the W riters’ and Journalists’ Society®. Despite ail these cultural activities, however, there was a sense of isolation from W estern Europe. Aleksei Achair and "Arseny Nesmelov” (real name: Arseny M itropol'sky) were two of the most popular poets. Mitropol'sky, who
The publishing house of M. V . Zaitsev produced nearly 200 book titles. Gong, Val, and Sinii zhum al (Blue M agazine) w ere devoted to art and literature. There w ere also several publishing houses: I. N. Burkin; A. Z. Belyshev; N. A. G am m er; Katèi-Press; E. S. Kaufman; A. Kryukov, Martenson and Co.; Russkoe delo (Russian Cause); Russko-Man'chzhurskaya knigotorgovlya, Student, and Taiga. ■Originally called Mofodaya Churaevka, the paper was later renamed simply Churaevka. The meetings of the literary group w ere chaired by Aleksei Achair, with Valery Pereleshin as head of the literary section. Som e participants were: Vsevolod Ivanov, M arianna Kolosova, Vasily Loginov, Arseny Mitropol'sky (Nesm elov), Aleksandra Parkau, Sergei Petrov (Sergin), Natal'ya Reznikova, Nikolai Shchegolev, Mikhail Shm eisser, Nikolai Svetlov, and Professor M. A. Talyzin. bParticipants: N. Alyab'ev, Tam ara Andreeva, G. Kopytova, Vasily Obukhov, N atal'ya Reznikova, and Nikolai Svetlov, all of whom participated in a collection of verse published by the group under the title A Ladder Into the Clouds (Lestnitsa v oblaka). cSom e members: Sergei Alymov, Nikolai Aseev (returned to Russia in 1922), Fêdor Kamyshnyuk, Sergei Tret'yakov, V . Sillov. «The group w as founded in early 1932 and in February of the following year published a journal under the sam e title. ■The group functioned from late 1921 until early 1923. Its first chair was the w riter E. I. Shirovskaya, and its writer-m em bers included Sergei Alymov, Lev Amol'dov, Taisiya Bazhenova, Fêdor Kamyshnyuk, Sergei Gusev-Orenburgsky, Venedikt M atveev (M art), Nikolai Dvorzhitsky (All), Stepan Petrov (Skitalets), and Nikolai Ustryalov. A number of professors w ere also members, including Georgy Gins, E. Kh. Nilus, and L. K. Zander.
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wrote a sort of hymn to the Russian fascists in China, using the pseudonym TM. Dozorov," was forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union at the end of the war and died in 1945 in a transit prison cam p.a Stepan Petrov (Skitalets, meaning 'W anderer”) and Sergei GusevOrenburgsky had been known as prose writers in Russia before they arrived in Harbin in 1921 from the 'F a r Eastern Republic,” which existed from April 1920 until November 1922. Gusev-Orenburgsky soon left by way of Japan and died in New York in 1963. PetrovSkitalets returned to Russia in 1934, where he died in 1941 .b In 1935 the U.S.S.R. sold its interest in the Chinese Eastern Railroad to the Manchurian government (although it received only 23 million yen of the agreed price of 140 million), and from 10,000 to 25,000 Russians returned to Russia, not suspecting that the great purges were only two years away. The infatuation that at first characterized the exiles’ attitude toward the new conquerors was soon dissipated. The Japanese proved stricter in their oversight of the émigrés than the Chinese had been. Inevitably, the Japanese supported the fascists, who created a number of social organizations, including even a children's club entitled Fascist Tots (Fashistskie kroshki). Over tim e the Japanese grew distrustful of the Russian fascists, executed 24 of them in 1940, and on July 1,1943, disbanded their organizations altogether. By the end of that year Japanese war fortunes were obviously so dismal that the Japanese instructed Archbishop Milety to have parishioners in his diocese pray to an image of the goddess Amaterasu placed upon the altar (Milety refused). Although more and more Russians began leaving for Shanghai, enough young Russians still remained in Harbin in 1938 that the YMCA and the monarchists were able to organize two literary and art circles that year. But by 1941 the number of Russians in Harbin was reduced to somewhere between 30 and 40 thousand.
•Others who returned to the U .S .S .R ., some possibly deported, w ere Andersen, Faina Dmitrieva, Nina ll'nek, Vasily Loginov, Elena Nedel'skaya, Obukhov, Nikolai Peterets, Vladim ir Pomerantsev, Natal'ya Reznikova, Sergin, Vladim ir Slobodchikov, Nikolai Svetlov, Lidiya Khaindrova, Shchëgolev, Mikhail Shmeisser, Viktor Vetlugin, and M ariya Vizi.
Larisa Vasily Sergei Nikolai
bLidiya Khaindrova, Georgy Saprykin (Granin), Nikolai Shchëgolev, Nikolai Shm eisser, and Arkady Upshinsky wrote prose as well as poetry.
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Shanghai Coral island in a dark blue sea A nd a new Miklukho-Maklai. Half-century's passed since that far-off day When he abandoned Shanghai. (anonymous poem of a Russian émigré on the Island of Tubabao,* Miklukho-Maklai was a 19th-century explorer of south-east Asia.) Shanghai's first contacts with Russians began with the shipm ent of tea to Russia. In 1865 a consulate opened in the city, operated by the British on behalf of the Russians until 1880. With time Shanghai developed a small Russian population, consisting of tsarist governm ent officials, businessmen, and employees of the RussianChinese bank. When the Chinese closed the tsarist consulate in 1920, several thousand Russians in Shanghai, like Russians throughout China, found themselves in a sort of legal limbo. The year 1923 marked the arrival of a ragtag fleet of Russian ships carrying refugees from the Russian civil war. The Soviet-Chinese conflict of 1929 delivered another sizeable contingent of Russians to Shanghai, and by the end of the year Shanghai's Russian colony numbered 13,000 persons. And then the Japanese bought the railroad, acquiring 20,000 Russians for the "Yellow Babylon.” By the mid-1930s there were between 40,000 and 50,000 Russians in the city, many of them Jewish. Shanghai's Russian Em igrants’ Committee combined 52 cultural and charitable organizations and competed with the Council of United Russian Social Organizations (SORO). Shanghai was considerably larger and more cosm opolitan than Harbin, and the Russian community was thus more "diluted” in the new environment. In general, the 1930s were a period of vigorous cultural activity for Shanghai's Russians.® The new arrivals
•There w ere two widely read Russian daily newspapers: Shangkhaiskaya zarya (The Shanghai Dawn), owned by Lembich, and Slovo (The W ord), edited by Pavel Zaitsev. Others w ere Shangkhaiskaya zhizn' (Shanghai Life); Shangkhaiskaya gazeta (The Shanghai G azette), which w as reissued as an evening newspaper with the title Shangkhaiskoe novoe vremya (Shanghai New Tim es) and was specifically devoted to the émigré community; Russkoe èkho (The Russian Echo); Vechem ee vremya (Evening), later renamed Vechem yaya zarya (Evening Dawn); Kopeika (The Kopeck); Kur'er (The Courier); Novosti dnya (New s of the Day); and Russkaya m ysl' (Russian Thought). There was also an English-language weekly entitled Russian Free Thought
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had to com pete with Chinese on the labor market and found themselves in such difficult straits that 75 percent of their children were malnourished,* the Shanghai Municipal Council published a report on Russian prostitutes. All too often, the resident Russians looked upon the new refugees as poor relatives. Shanghai was home to the popular magazine Rubezh (Border), which put out 865 issues between 1927 and 1945, and the city's writers created a literary organization modeled after Harbin's Molodaya Churaevka and bearing the same name.3 Literary meetings supposedly gathered audiences of several hundred. Another literary group was Ponedel'nik (Monday).6 In 1933 a popular light-hearted organization was created under the name KHLAM (JUNK), with a membership of writers, artists, actors, and musicians, including the poet Valentin Prisyazhnikov (Valya Val') and the prose w riter Viktor Petrov. That same year witnessed the founding of Vostok (The East), which brought together intellectuals with a wide range of interests.3 Other Shanghai writers to arrive from Harbin were the poets Aleksandr Vertinsky, Larisa Andersen, and Mariya Vizi.
Russian newspapers w ere not limited to Harbin and Shanghai. Tientsin had two dailies — the communist Luch (The Ray) and the liberal Russkoe s lo w (The Russian W ord). Luch w as later shut down by the Chinese police. Among the m agazines published outside Harbin and Shanghai w ere Z a rubezhom (Abroad), devoted to art, literature, and politics, and N iva (The Sown Field), devoted to literature and art. Shanghai boasted a number of publishing houses: Dal', Dukel'sky Publishers, Kryukov and Martens, The Literature and Arts Co-op (Izdatel'stvo Literaturnokhudozhestvennogo ob'edineniya), A. P. Maliks and V . P. Kamkin, B. Y a. Semichov, Slovo, Èmigrantskaya biblioteka (Ém igré Library), Vostok (East), and Zhëltyi lik (Yellow Face). •Among its members w ere Larisa Andersen, Viktor Petrov, O l'ga Skopichenko, Nikolai Svetlov, and Vladim ir Pomerantsev. blts members included, among others, the prose writers Apollinary Nentsinsky and Pavel von Olbrich (Pavel Severny), and the poets I. V . Fryuaf and Mikhail Spurgot. Reports or readings w ere given by Vsevolod Ivanov, A. D. Lavrent'ev, Arseny Mitropol'sky, Valentin Prisyazhnikov, Mikhail Shcherbakov, among others. cChair: D. A. Petrukhin; Secretary: N. N. Yanovskaya; two writers, Kirill Baturin and Mikhail Shcherbakov, w ere board members.
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Buenos Aires Don't cry for me, Argentina. Evita, Tim Rice Estimates of Russians in Argentina — the Latin American country with the largest Russian population — range from 50,000 to 300,000, most of them having arrived before 1917. Some of the earliest were 800 Russian Jews who arrived in the port of Buenos Aires in 1899. In the early 1920s there were two weekly newspapers in Buenos Aires — the "progressive” Novyi m ir (The New World) and Nasha gazeta (Our Newspaper). There were also the magazines Zarya (Dawn) and the 1932-33 Seyatei' (The Sower), devoted to "culture and enlightenm ent.” An interesting figure in Buenos Aires was Ivan Solonevich (1891-1953 or 1954), who had escaped from forced labor on the Belomorkanal in 1934 and fled to Finland. Shortly thereafter he made his way to Bulgaria, where he founded the newspaper Golos Rossii (Voice of Russia) and wrote Russia in a Concentration Camp (Rossiya v kontslagere), but the W est at that tim e was not particularly interested in reading criticism of its future ally against the Germans. (Later, when that fram e of mind had changed, Solzhenitsyn's exposees were proclaim ed as "relevations.”) When World W ar II began, Solonevich went to Finland to plunge into anti-Soviet war propaganda. Later he hoped to do the same thing in Germany, but was sent instead to a small German village, where he sat out the conflict. Some doubted Solonevich's claim to have escaped from the Soviet Union. Rather, they suspected he had agreed to work for the Soviet governm ent as an agent and later broke that promise. In 1938 a package containing a bomb arrived by mail, killing Solonevich’s wife and secretary. In 1947 or 1948 Solonevich left Bulgaria for Argentina, where he refounded his newspaper as Nasha strana (Our Country), but was deported in the early 1950s for opposing rule by generals. His monarchist paper, however, is still appearing.
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Sao Paolo " You'll end your days somewhere in B razil.” I laughed then ... but now I'm alm ost sure that precisely that w ill happen. From a story by Sergei Dovlatov No one hates his jo b so heartily as a farmer. H. L. Mencken The first Russians arrived in Brazil after the Russian revolution of 1905. This small group was followed by evacuees from the Crimea, who began arriving in 1921.3,000 Russians left for Brazil in 1921 to become farmers, but 1,200 refused to remain and were brought back to Europe by a French ship, evidently ending up in Corsica. Most eventually returned to France. Some 2,000 Russians arrived from China, and by 1934 a Russian church was erected in Rio de Janeiro. The early arrivals had at least two newspapers: Russkaya gazeta (The Russian Gazette) and the Mladorosskaya partiya (The Mladoross Party), both published in Sao Paulo. In 1926-27 another 500 Russians left for Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru. One group of 160 Cossacks returned to Europe from Peru and held a thanksgiving service to celebrate not having perished after months of battling snakes, vam pire bats, and mosquitos. There was also an attem pt to settle Russians in an agricultural colony in Paraguay, where a certain General Belyaev played a prom inent political role for a time.
Jerusalem It has been prophesied to me m any years I should not die but in Jerusalem. Shakespeare, Henry IV The pogroms of the early 1880s triggered the exodus of the first significant group of Russian Jews to Palestine. A second group, consisting of dedicated Zionists, began coming in 1903-06, bringing so much leftist thinking in its luggage that it was even called the "socialist aliyah.” This second aliyah lasted until approxim ately 1910 and numbered some 40,000 persons, mostly from Russia. Immigration to Palestine was hindered by regulations issued by the territory's Turkish adm inistrators requiring that incoming Jews stay no longer than three months and acquire no real estate. At this time, however, Zionism was still gaining strength. In the spring of 1917 the movement suddenly
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became very popular among Russian Jews, who were to play a prom inent role in future Israeli culture. But 1917 reshuffled the entire deck of cards, and at first it was unclear whether Russian Jews would attem pt to build their lives in the new Soviet world or would now be even more eager to relocate to their "historic homeland” of Israel. The Jews who had played so prominent a role in the overthrow of the tsarist governm ent were not about to tolerate any mass exodus of their brethren. Even study of the Hebrew language was declared "counterrevolutionary” in a decree issued in July 1919 (as opposed to Yiddish, which was accepted as the language of instruction for Jewish schools). The third aliyah covered the period 1919-1923; altogether this last group amounted to between 20,000 and 30,000 people. For example, one ship, the Ruslan, delivered 637 Jews to Palestine from Odessa in November 1919. Another group, consisting of 15 Hebrew writers and headed by the Hebrew and Yiddish poet Khaim Byalik, arrived in 1921 by way of Constantinople. By 1927, however, new Russian arrivals in Palestine were down to only several hundred per year. Curiously, not all the arrivals of the third aliyah were Zionists, and many of them — particularly those with Russian spouses — chose to move on to other countries. Russian-Jewish influence dominated the Jewish cultural scene in Palestine, and Russian actively competed with Hebrew and Yiddish. Some writers were even trilingual — Solomon Rabinovich (Sholom Aleikhem), for example. Many writers who lived in Palestine published their works in the United States and Europe. Among these were Abram Vysotsky and Yuly Margolin. Others, among them Elisheva (pseudonym of E. Lisheva-Zhirkova) and Aleksandr Pen, an im itator of Mayakovsky, who preferred to switch to Hebrew. The famous Zionist Vladim ir Zhabotinsky (1880-1940) spent only a few years in Palestine, since he was deported by the British in 1920. Zhabotinsky eventually wrote two novels in Russian: Samson the Nazarene (Samson Nazorei) and The Five (Pyatero). The hero of Samson the Nazarene is an autobiographical figure who devotes himself to his people, but is not understood by them. The Five describes the difficult life of a Jewish fam ily in Odessa on the eve of the 1905 revolution. Zhabotinsky also tried his hand at poetic translation and rendered Poe's "The Raven” into Russian. When he died Mikhail Osorgin wrote of him that for all his Zionism he was nonetheless a Russian writer to his dying day and that his fellow writers were even a little offended that he had abandoned them for politics. It had been a conscious decision on the part of Zhabotinsky, who as tim e passed published fewer and fewer articles in the Russian-language press. In 1930 he had autographed a copy of one of his Russian-language books to a friend with the inscription
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"from a late author” (o t pokoinogo avtora). When asked w hat this meant, he responded that he was now deceased for Russian literature. Evidently there was no Russian-language newspaper in Palestine — not at first, anyway — and the few periodicals tended to be of a religious bent, intended for Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land.
British Columbia Naked came I out o f m y m other’s womb, and naked shall I return thither. Old Testament, Job A number of Russian religious groups settled in the North American Pacific Rim at the turn of the century. The first of these were the Dukhobors, who originally arrived in Alberta but soon moved to British Columbia. The sect was limited to Ukraine until the early 18th century, when its members were gradually pushed out to more distant areas, including Siberia, by a Russian governm ent that feared they could "infect” Russian Orthodox believers. Kovalevsky estimated the 1917 Russian population of Canada at 119,000. In the period 1898-1900 some 8,000 Dukhobors em igrated to Canada, financed in part by the royalties from Lev Tolstoi's novel Resurrection (Voskresenie), and in part by a $200,000 grant from the English Society of Friends (Quakers). The Canadian governm ent granted them land, and probably not much would have been heard of them if it had not been for one particularly unconstrained group which marched naked in protest against compulsory school attendance, the purchase and sale of land, the oath of allegiance, and alm ost any other form s of governm ent regulation. The Canadian governm ent finally passed a law against public nudity in 1932, and over 300 "Freedom ite” men and women were sentenced to three years’ imprisonment.
San Francisco-Los Angeles California — a state so blessed, he said, in climate, none had ever died there a natural death. Robert Frost Russian settlem ent of California dates back to 1812, with the founding of Fort Ross in the vicinity of San Francisco. In one of history's most spectacularly disastrous deals, the Russians sold the settlem ent with all its gold to Johann Sutter in 1841. Between 1901
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and 1912 the Molokans began to arrive, settling in Los Angeles and San Francisco. A considerable number of Russian Baptists and Pentecostals also settled in the state. Even today the city has an area entitled "Russian Hill.” By 1917 nearly 50,000 Russians had resettled in California, Oregon, W ashington, and British Columbia. They were soon joined by refugees from the Crimean evacuation of 1920. It is estimated that some 10,000 to 15,000 Russian émigrés settled in the environs of San Francisco in the 1920s. San Francisco boasted a "Russian Literary Art Society,” founded in 1923. As late as 1957 it issued an anthology entitled A t the Golden Gates (U zolotykh vorot). There was a literary circle, first entitled Laborers of the Pen (Truzheniki pera) and later the Pushkin Society, which was chaired by V. P. Anichkov. The city was home to the newspapers Novaya Zarya (New Dawn) and Russkaya zhizn' (Russian Life), and in 1934 The California Alm anac was published there (although printed in Harbin).3 According to the editors, the goal of the publications was both to support local writers and to recognize the contribution of the overall Russian émigré community. Fourteen established writers, most of them non-Californians, contributed brief autobiographies.11 One California writer, Nina Fëdorova, received a $10,000 prize from the Atlantic M onthly for her novel Fam ily (originally written in English and only later translated in Russian), which was part of a trilogy detailing the saga of an émigré fam ily in Harbin. After the Second W orld War, the largest group to arrive was from the Russian com m unity in China, which arrived via Tubabao.
“It included prose works by Pêtr Balakshin, Taisiya Bazhenova, Yury Bratov, Kam illa Daniels, A. Lifant'ev, Aleksandra Mazurova, and V . Peshekhonov-Kamsky, as w ell as verse by Boris Volkov, Natal'ya Dudorova, and Nina Divish. bEkaterina Bakunina, Sergei Gorny, Georgy Grebenshchikov, Vladim ir Iretsky, Veniam in Korsak, Vladim ir Krymov, G alina Kuznetsova, Aleksandra Mazurova, Iosif Matusevich, Mikhail Osorgin-ll'in, Nikolai Otsup, Georgy Peskov, Pavel Tutkovsky, and Yury Fel'zen.
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New York I am in New York, in the fantastically prosaic city o f capitalist automatism, where the aesthetic theory o f Cubism rules in the streets and in the hearts the philosophy o f the dollar. New York impresses me as the m ost perfect expression o f the spirit o f the current age. Lev Trotsky Boris Bakhmetev had been sent by the Russian governm ent to obtain American support in prosecuting W orld W ar I and in 1917 was Russian Ambassador to the United States. He remained in that position until June 1922 and was able to dispense $77,000,000 in U.S. governm ent credits, much of which went to VrangeP’s army.8 Most Russians in America, however, belonged to the industrial proletariat and thus were sympathetic to the "workers’ revolution” in Russia. Russian Jewish arrivals were particularly inclined to hold leftist views. The Justice Department warned the country of the "red menace” and even supplied newspapers with printing plates for headlines reading "W arns Nation of the Red Peril — U.S. Department of Justice Urges Americans to Guard Against Bolshevism Menace.” In 1919 and 1920 the Lusk Committee instituted a search for communists, and the Justice Department conducted raids in which over 5,000 people were arrested. The Justice Department also established a card catalogue of 200,000 radical individuals and organizations. Of those considered most dangerous, 90 percent were aliens. Records show that 249 persons who had arrived from the Russian Empire were deported. Taken by the Army transport ship Buford (christened the "Red Arc”) from Ellis Island to Finland, they crossed the Soviet border on January 19, 1920. In 1921 nativist political groups were able to push the Immigration Quota Act through Congress, severely restricting any spillover of Russians from Western Europe to the United States. Nevertheless, unlike the Russians in France, Russians in Am erica generally preferred to be naturalized. Novyi m ir (The New World) had been founded in 1911. Nikolai Bukharin was an editor in 1916, and another staff member in early 1917 was Lev Trotsky, who spent two months in New York before returning to Russia, possibly thanks to German money. In 1916 the
•Som e 65 form er tsarist ambassadors formed a council that had at its disposal funds deposited by the tsarist government, which w ere estimated at half a billion French francs.
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Socialist Publishing Association, which had founded the paper, refused to accept w ar bond advertisements, and in October 1917 Novyi m il's second-class mailing privileges were withdrawn by the Post Office. In 1918 postal authorities seized a number of copies of the paper and declared still others unmailable under the Espionage Act. On August 15 a disloyalty act was issued forbidding the publication even to receive mail. In 1920 the Lusk Committee had the paper raided and its printing presses were damaged, forcing it out of business. A number of companies refused to hire "Russian Bol'sheviks.” W hile some Russians decided the tim e had come to bring relatives to the United States, others were discouraged by the U.S. political situation and chose to return to Russia. Between 1922 and 1925 over 5.000 Tsarist émigrés made the journey home, either in groups or individually. An American scholar, Jerome Davis, commented on the situation in 1922: The thousands o f disappointed and em bittered Russians who have already le ft our shores are doubtless now acting in m any cases as agents o f hatred, as they go through city, town, and village; they serve to spread the gospel o f enm ity toward Am erica and prejudice large numbers o f the people against our nation. From the m erely selfish standpoint o f international trade, this will prove costly; from the standpoint o f international peace and m utual understanding it is deplorable. On the whole, pre-1917 Russian emigrants were a poorly educated group, and in this respect the eastern seaboard contingent was several rungs lower on the social ladder than Russians resident in San Francisco. O f the estimated half million (a very rough appraisal) Russians living in North America, the majority were supposedly miners. New York City was home to about 60,000, characterized by the New York Times as "true Russians, not Jews or Lithuanians.” They were joined by another 6,000 after the conclusion of the Russian civil war, many of whom settled in East Harlem. In 1917 the United Russian Organizations in Am erica attempted to bring together the 30 different émigré associations. By 1918 their number had increased to 40, with 15.000 members. The émigré historian Ivan Okuntsov commented that one could meet Russians from the post-war emigration in the New York Public Library, but not from the pre-war "peasant” emigration, which did not read much and evidently included a large number of alcoholics. One American scholar commented that the prohibition am endm ent had "brought a change in the recreational life of many Russians.” There was considerably less political divisiveness than in the Paris émigré community, and the literature written and read by Russians in New York tended to be fairly naive and moralistic. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that between 1923 and 1930 more than
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2,000 émigré publications appeared in North America. Newspapers were estimated to have a combined print run of 25,000 copies. But many of these publications were created by post-1917 exiles whose cultural level was vastly higher than that of their pre-1917 fellowcountrymen. In 1918 the Literary Fund (Literaturnyi fond) was founded, a cultural organization which still exists to arrange cultural events and raise money to help needy Russian writers. The Circle of Proletarian W riters in North America operated out of New York and in 1924 published an almanac whose title — Captive to Skyscrapers (V plenu neboskrêbov) — graphically illustrated the mood of a Russian peasantry abruptly transform ed into the industrial working class. An almanac issued by the same group, undated but evidently published in 1922, stated that all proceeds from the sale of the 35$ publication would be donated to feed the hungry in the Soviet Union. The lead1story tells of a Russian peasant who had lost the money he had saved to buy a cow, but had been given back his money by a sim ple peasant woman who herself was in need. The only thread linking the story to the United States is the fact that the author, Sergei Manenkov, wrote it in New York. A second story, by Aleksandr Sokolovsky, involves an accidental meeting between a Russian man and woman in New York. The woman, who realizes she made a terrible mistake in joining V rangel's army, learns from the man that her fiancé, who had been in the Red Army, committed suicide after he was told she had married another man.a By the mid-1920s Russian New York had grown considerably, but cultural activities were not on the level of many European cities. In 1936 the Society of Admirers of Russian Belles-Lettres sponsored a lecture by the literary scholar Boris Brazol’ on the deep meaning for Russians of a long poem by Georgy Golokhvastov, entitled The Doom o f Atlantis. Golokhvastov himself founded the Arts and Literary Society in New York. Evidently the largest cultural organization in New York (300 members), the Russian Literary and Artistic Society in Am erica was chaired by the poet Lev Kamyshnikov. The form er priest turned Church critic Sergei Gusev (pseudonym: Gusev-Orenburgsky, 1867-1963) arrived in New York by way of China and then Japan. In New York he founded the magazine
•Although the Russian language of the alm anac is correct, the dedication contains a serious grammatical error: Rossie, svetonositse i stradalitse, posvyashchaem ètu knigu. O ther contributors to the alm anac w ere: A. Sanderov, Vladim ir ll'in, V . Karpuk, and David Yuzhanin.
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Z hizn' (Life), of which nine issues appeared in 1924-25, and in 1928 he published a novel entitled Country o f Children. New York was home to the poet, artist, and "father of Futurism” David Burlyuk (1882-1967), who arrived in 1922 after a two-year stay in Japan and hosted Mayakovsky during the latter's 1925 visit. Active in publishing even before emigrating, Burlyuk founded the journal Color and Rhyme, of which 60 issues appeared between 1930 and 1966. Burlyuk served as a bridge between Russian art and Russian literature. In the second half of the 1920s Il'ya Tolstoi, together with Georgy Grebenshchikov, founded a Russian village in Connecticut, not far from New Haven. The village, with its "Tolstoy Lane” and "Russian Village Road,” was named "Churaevka” in honor of Grebenshchikov's novel The Churaevs (Churaevy), which was a best seller among the émigrés and went through eight printings. As many as 4,000 Russians lived in Churaevka, the chief building of which was Grebenshchikov's home. Grebenshchikov established a printing press in his house, which supposedly put out more books during the Second World W ar than any other Russian émigré undertaking. By the mid-1960s the village had ceased to exist as a Russian community. Among the Russian newspapers published in New York in the early 1920s were the daily Novoe russkoe slovo (New Russian Word), the daily Russkii golos (Russian Voice), a union weekly Am erikanskie izvestiya (American News), the "political-economic and literary weekly” Utro (Morning), the religious weekly Nedelya (Week), the CarpathoRussian Golos Rusi (Voice of Rus') and Prikarpatskaya Rus' (Carpathian Russia), and the "democratic” weekly Syn otechestva (Son of the Fatherland).3 Thus it is not surprising that whereas only one or two Russian periodicals appeared in the United States in the early 1860s, by 1917 their number had increased to 24.
•Publishing houses w ere concentrated in New York: Carpatho-Russian Publishers, M. Gurevich, L. M. Kamyshnikov, M aizel', Narodopravstvo, Rabochee knigoizdatel'stvo, Russkoe literaturnoe izdatel’stvo, and Zarnitsa. Working-class Detroit w as home to a publishing house which claimed to represent virtually all the progressive Russian ém igré organizations of the United States and Canada, and there w as also the Chicago Russian Center. Of course, Russian newspapers appeared in other American cities as w ell. For exam ple, Pravda (The Truth) w as published twice weekly in Laska, Pennsylvania. The union paper Golos truzhenika (Voice of the Working Man) and the daily Svobodnaya Rossiya (Free Russia) appeared in Chicago. Chicago had its own cultural society, entitled Prosveshchenie (Enlightenment), which in turn established a literary-dram a group in 1929.
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By 1940, 571,100 U.S. residents indicated their native language was Russian, up from 95,137 in 1910; of these 356,940 were foreign bom. At the same time, the pressure to assim ilate into American life and the total cessation of emigration from Russia was radically undermining the vitality of the émigré community, and the number of newspapers and magazines began to decline after about 1923. Unlike in France, citizenship was accepted without a sense of guilt over betraying Russia.
Athens To happy convents, bosom 'd deep in vines, Where slum ber abbots purple as their wines. Alexander Pope 4
The Christianization of the East Slavs in the tenth century from Byzantium led to a long-standing Russian presence in Greece. The Russian Monastery on Mount Athos was founded sometime before 1016 and still contains some 10,000 manuscripts in its library. It was only natural, even inevitable, that the Russian Church would w ant to remain in contact with its source. In the 19th century the monk Semên Vesnin (1814-53) made a five-year pilgrimage to Mount Athos (1843-47) and then returned for another visit in 1851. Vesnin began by writing humorous verse, and later switched to religious poetry, and also composed a history of Russian monks on Mount Athos and travel memoirs. Gogol' was so taken with Vesnin that he wanted to travel to Mount Athos with him. Perhaps 3,000 Russians found themselves in Greece after the Crimean evacuations. Kovalevsky estimates their number at 1,659 as of 1930. The Soviet political scientist Vadim Belov indicated 4,000, citing unnamed "official sources.” At one point, the historian Georgy Vernadsky wrote a letter to the First-W ave editor Aleksandr Yashchenko, in which he asked for assistance for the tiny Athens Russian Student Union.
Tokyo A nd the epitaph drear: "A fool lies here Who tried to hustle the E ast.” Rudyard Kipling Despite the proxim ity of Japan to the Russian border, the number of Russians in the island empire has never been large. Three years before Russians reached the Pacific in 1638, the Tokugawa
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Shogunate Issued an edict prohibiting its citizens from travelling abroad, or from returning to Japan if they chose to violate the edict. Japan's isolation was so extreme that even foreign ships were driven away — a policy which was slightly relaxed in 1842, and especially after the application of gunboat diplomacy by American Commodore Matthew C. Perry in 1853. Although Japan had form erly outlawed Christianity and even executed a number of Christian missionaries, it did agree to perm it a revival of such activities out of fear of Western intervention. In 1860 The Russian Orthodox church made use of this opportunity to send a 24-year old priest — Father Nikolai Kasatkin — to convert the Japanese. By the tim e of his death in 1912, Kasatkin left behind a heritage of 35,000 believers, over 200 churches, and 35 Japanese priests. His activities were chiefly those of a missionary, and any claim that he was there to serve the diplomatic community was a pure fabrication. The few Russian businessmen residing in Japan in 1917 were only briefly joined by Russians fleeing the events back home and in transit to other countries. Nevertheless, there were enough Russians in Japan to create a literature and arts circle in the 1930s, which published an irregularly appearing collection devoted to the culture of the peoples of the Orient. The group was ostensibly established to build a bridge between Russian and Japanese culture, but it had to be very circum spect in political matters. It even had a clause in its bylaws to the effect that anyone engaging in political discussions would be expelled from membership. Russian books were published in Tokyo by Akkord (later renamed Sputnik, meaning "Fellow Traveller”) and Mir (Peace), and there was a Russian bookstore in Taisiudoo. The Russian émigré philosopher Lev Shestov became a minor cult figure among Japanese intellectuals. The painter and artist David Burlyuk, who lived briefly in Japan, founded "Marusya's Press,” named in honor of his w ife Mariya, and in 1921 published his own book Climbing FujiSan in Yokohoma.
Sydney/Melbourne Russia's pre-1917 emigration included a contingent in Australia, and the initial reaction in that country to the 1917 October coup was one of elation. These were working-class people who were organized in the "Russian W orkers' Association.” Russian emigrants in Brisbane prom ptly christened their organization the "Australian Soviet.” Artêm Sergeev, a political activist who had been exiled to Siberia and escaped to Australia, established a circulating library of proletarian literature and conducted classes on marxist ideas before returning to Russia. Sergeev founded the newspaper The Australian Echo, which
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was shut down by the government, reissued it as The Worker's Life, also banned, and then brought it out again under still another title. The paper's general line was clearly stated: "Follow the Russian example and emancipate yourself in Australia.” The Australian governm ent's response was to refuse to accept the credentials of the first Soviet council and to deport the more politically activist Russian immigrants back to the Soviet Russia which they supported so enthusiastically.
Other Locations He that travels far from his own fam ily has far to travel. Petronius, Satyricon In addition to the countries mentioned above, therç were small communities of Russian émigrés in Austria, the free city of Danzig, Denmark, Egypt (1920-22), Holland, Hungary, Spain, and Syria, as well as a scattering of Russians in India and Africa (Russian sailors in VrangeC’s evacuation fleet ended up in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and a number of them joined the French Foreign Legion). The Soviet scholar Vadim Belov gives a figure of 7,000 in all, citing unnamed "official sources.”
The Nansen Certificate He which hath no stomach to this fight, Let him depart; his passport shall be made, A nd crowns for convoy p u t into his purse ... Shakespeare, King Henry V The number of stateless Russian emigrants scattered over Europe after the conclusion of the Russian civil war presented an enormous adm inistrative problem to the countries involved. The German government, for example, refused to recognize the Soviet governm ent until the treaty of Rapallo was signed on April 16, 1922. Sim ilar policies were pursued by virtually all other European countries. Thus, the émigrés had no government to represent them. On December 15, 1921, the "All-Russian Central Executive Committee” declared stateless all persons who had spent longer than five years abroad and who had no Soviet identification papers issued by June 1, 1922.
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A t an August 22,1921, international conference in Geneva® the Norwegian Polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen was appointed High Com missioner for Affairs of Russian Refugees, who were then issued the so-called "Nansen Certificate” (commonly called the "Nansen Passport”), recognized by 50 governments within the next six years. The Certificate granted political refugee status to émigrés from the Soviet Union and served as an international travel document. It did not, however, resolve the question of citizenship or even the right to work. Still, it did provide a legal basis for residency and travel and saved many refugees from forced repatriation to the Soviet Union. In France, 60,000 Russians held Nansen Certificates, but in Germany the docum ent was never really widely used because of the availability of Soviet and non-Soviet Russian passports.
The Publishing Marketplace O f making books there is no end. Old Testament, Ecclesiastes " W hat is the use o f a book, * thought Alice, " without pictures o r conversation?” Lewis Carroll The sheer number of Russian-language publications appearing abroad was in itself eloquent testimony to a vibrant culture. Lyudmila Foster's Bibliography o f Russian Émigré Literature, 1918-1968 fills 1,389 pages and contains some 17,000 items.6 The major émigré newspapers were Poslednie novosti (The Latest News) — with daily sales of up to 40,000 copies, and Vozrozhdenie (The Renaissance), both published in Paris. In political
•The following countries w ere represented: Bulgaria, China, Finland, France, G reece, Poland, Romania, Serbia-Croatia-Slovenia (East), Switzerland, and Czechoslovakia. b575 literary m agazines and anthologies, 37 almanacs, and collections of poetry, 1,080 novels, 636 collections of short stories, 1,024 verse collections of individual authors, 202 plays, 87 separately published volumes of literary memoirs, plus 260 other memoirs published in magazines and almanacs. Under the heading Historical Mem oirs there are listed 15 collections, 119 separate editions, and 160 articles. One of the collections, Archive of the Russian Revolution, contains 23 volumes. In 1929 V . A. Rozenberg compiled a partial list of Russian émigré periodicals according to the year in which they w ere founded; the peak years w ere 1920-22.
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terms, Poslednie novosti, edited by Pavel Milyukov, was the "liberal” newspaper which supported the Cadets, while Abram Gukasov's Vozrozhdenie was more to the right.® Two sm aller Parisian papers were the weekly D ni (Days), created by the form er head of the Provisional Government, Aleksandr Kerensky, in 1928, when the Berlin daily with the same name folded, and Obshchee delo (Common Cause), edited by Vladim ir Burtsev. The chief newspapers outside Paris were R ul' (The Helm, published by the Cadets in Berlin) and Segodnya (Today, published in Riga). Each of these publications had its own particular political sympathies and corresponding "editorial line.” For example, both Poslednie novosti and Vozrozhdenie, while agreeing that the Bol'shevik coup had been a tragedy for Russia, held to quite different views as to the cause of the revolution. Poslednie novostfs line was that the "obstinate conservatives" were to blame; readers of Vozrozhdenie, on the other hand, were presented with a quite different villain — the "indecisive liberals.” So many newspapers were put out by the Russian émigrés in those years that the then émigré Viktor Shklovsky joked that no one had thought to bring out a newspaper for the monkey in the Berlin Zoo. A time-honored type of publication in Russia is the so-called "thick” journal, which combines politics, history, and culture — particularly literature. The tradition goes back to the 19th century, when educated people lived on their country estates, separated from each other by great distances. Reading became then and remained one of the most popular Russian pastimes (even though the significance of the printed word is rapidly declining in post-Soviet Russia). The most im portant "thick journal” in the émigré world was Sovremennye zapiski (Contemporary Annals), which was founded in 1920 by Social Revolutionary politicians with money from the Czechoslovak governm ent under an agreem ent negotiated by Aleksandr Kerensky with the Czech Minister of Foreign Affairs, Eduard BeneS. Later, after being moved to Paris, it was sponsored in large measure by the wealthy Russian émigré ll'ya Fondaminsky, and also by Mikhail Tsetlin (pseudonym: Amari), who edited the poetry section. The editorship of Sovremennye zapiski was collective, consisting of the Social Revolutionaries Nikolai Avksent'ev, Fondaminsky himself, Vadim Rudnev, and Mark Vishnyak. Later, they were joined by Aleksandr Gukovsky. It is remarkable that a journal edited by public activists and politicians became the chief émigré
•Num erous writers w ere published in Vozrozhdenie, among them Vladim ir Amfiteatrov, Sergei Makovsky, Pavel Muratov, Ivan Shm elêv, ll'ya Surguchêv, Tèffi, Boris Zaitsev, and Vladislav Khodasevich.
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publication in the area of belles lettres and literary criticism and history. Sovremennye zapiski was open to virtually all groups, although "younger” writers often experienced difficulty getting published in it in the early years. A list of all the writers who contributed to Sovremennye zapiski would take up pages. Vladislav Khodasevich calculated that in the first 12 years of its existence it produced 25,000 pages of printed material. Although the journal can be faulted for fielding essentially the same names during the two decades of its existence, Milyukov was correct when he wrote that Sovremennye zapiski was the living history of the Russian emigration. Russkie zapiski (Russian Annals) appeared as a second "thick journal” in 1937 under the editorship of Pavel Milyukov. An earlier journal, Russkaya m ysl' (Russian Thought), appeared somewhat irregularly from 1921 to 1924. At various times its editorial offices were located in Sofia, Prague, and Berlin. Volya Rossii (Russia's Will), which started out as a daily newspaper in Prague was shut down in 1921, reopened in 1922 and survived until 1932.a Like Sovremennye zapiski, it was financed by the Czechoslovak government. In time, these subsidies began to shrink, and in 1927 the editorial offices were moved to Paris, but the publication closed in 1932, partly because many felt it to be "leftist” and not sufficiently anti-Soviet, but mainly due to financial difficulties. The bulkiest émigré magazine, and the one with the largest circulation, was lllyustrirovannaya Rossiya (Illustrated Russia), which appeared first bi-weekly and then weekly and celebrated its 500th issue in 1935, creating an im portant milestone in émigré publishing.1» On the whole, Berlin was the chief center for book publishing in the early 1920s, while Paris was more important for periodicals. On the eve of W orld W ar I book publishing in Russia had been very well developed, but that conflict, combined with the Russian civil war, dealt a disastrous blow to the trade. The Moscow book store Knizhnaya lavka pisatelya (W riters’ Bookshop) began selling manuscripts in October 1920, and by April of the following year was offering an accumulated 220 items for sale! NEP (1921-28) led to the creation of numerous publishing houses. By the spring of 1922 there were 337
•Editors: Vyacheslav Lebedev, Mark Slonim, Vasily Sukhomlin, and — later — Evsei Stalinsky. bSom e other publications w ere Gryadushchaya Rossiya (Russia of the Future, founding editors: M ark Aldanov, V . A. Anri, Nikolai Chaikovsky, and Aleksei Tolstoi) — Paris; Vêrsty (Miles) — Paris; Spotokhi (Northern Lights) — Berlin; Zhar-pHtsa (The Fire Bird) — Paris-Berlin; Zveno (The Link) — Paris; and Chasovoi (Sentinel) — Brussels.
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publishing houses in Moscow and 83 in Petrograd, many of which printed the works of émigré authors. Nevertheless, skepticism about the Bol’sheviks’ ultimate intentions combined with free-wheeling commercial conditions in Berlin led many of the new publishers to hedge their bets by keeping one foot in the East and another in the W est. When Germany initiated true currency reform in 1924, publishers in Berlin found themselves losing money, and they began either to move away or to go bankrupt. In addition to the books published by the émigrés for themselves and for circulation in the U.S.S.R., a great many of their publications were translated into foreign languages. In 1921 alone, 246 émigré works were translated into English, 168 into German, and 103 into French. This was particularly crucial since the émigré market was so limited that it was virtually impossible to live on royalties w ithout the income from translations. Jewish participation in book publishing was exceptionally high. The editor Iosif Gessen claimed that the budget of the League of Russian Jews was several times larger than those of all the other Russian social organizations taken together. According to another contemporary, Isaak Levitan, most of the book publishers and booksellers were Jewish.8 The prominence of Jews in both the late tsarist and the Soviet press was particularly resented among the Russian émigrés. Vasily Shul'gin, for example, who produced a book entitled W hat We D o n t Like About Them (Chto nam v nikh ne nravitsya) and openly called himself an anti-Semite, laid the heaviest blame on Jewish journalists for destroying the old Russia. Zinovy Grzhebin (1877-1929) had studied art in Munich and Paris from 1899 to 1905. He came back to Russia with the idea of creating an art magazine entitled M ir iskusstva (World of Art). He became a successful publisher, but chose to leave Russia again in 1921, moving his publishing operations first to Stockholm and then to Berlin, and later to Paris. Meanwhile Gor'ky had conceived a grandiose plan for a governm ent publishing house, Vsemirnaya literatura (World Literature), but book publishing in Russia had fallen upon desperate times. There was no paper, printing press equipment was not to be had, and skilled employees had been lost during the world war and the following civil
•In Berlin alone Levitan lists such publishing houses as Z. I. Grzhebin, S. E. Èfron, A. È. Kogan, Zal'tsm an, Slovo (W ord), Logos, Petropolis and Obelisk (Yakov Blokh and Abram Kagan), Gelikon, Èpokha, Obrazovanie (Education), Ogon'ki (Lights), Mysl' (Thought), Grani (Facets), and Rossika; he adds that the list is only a partial one, compiled from memory.
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war. It was at this point that Grzhebin proposed to publish books in the W est on order from the Soviet government. The contract was for cost plus 5 percent. Gor'ky enthusiastically supported the proposal, but the very idea of subsidizing a capitalist publisher to service the young com m unist state met with furious opposition, especially since some of the books were not to the authorities’ liking. To make matters worse, Gor'ky again went abroad in 1921 and came to be regarded by many in the governm ent as an émigré and thus an enemy. Pravda published an article, signed by "A Communist W orker,” accusing Grzhebin of being a counterrevolutionary. Grzhebin attempted to sue the author, but Pravda refused to reveal his identity, and Lenin's personal papers them selves carried a reminder that "Grzhebin's counterrevolutionary publishing house should be destroyed.” Grzhebin, whom the Soviet authorities had permitted to take what must have been a fairly large amount of money out of Russia with him, signed a sizeable contract in June 1922 to publish a number of titles with the promise of firm orders from the Soviet government for resale in Russia. He invested his own funds and those of his brother and was planning a general investment of several million marks, but in February 1924 the Soviet government abruptly blacklisted émigré publishers, and their books could not be imported to Russia. Even G or'ky’s and Khodasevich's literary and scholarly journal Beseda (Conversation) was eventually outlawed. To add to Grzhebin's misery, the monarchist newspaper Russkaya gazeta (Russian Newspaper) published an anonymous article accusing him of being a communist agent. Some writers stood up for Grzhebin, but the validity of the accusation remained an open question in many people's minds. When Moscow reneged on the book contract, Grzhebin sued the Soviet Trade Offices in Berlin in arbitration court and won $15,000 plus expenses, but collecting the money proved harder than winning a judgm ent. Unable to pay his bills, the form erly wealthy Grzhebin was evicted from his apartm ent and threatened with deportation from France if he did not pay his taxes. Frantic, Grzhebin wrote to Gor'ky in Sorrento: I had counted on Gosizdat so much and was so confident that this now makes me despair. What do they want from m e? Why are they attacking me on ali sides? What have I done to them? I am totally dismayed. But time is passing, I have less and less strength, and there is no ray o f hope. I haven't the faintest idea what I am to do now. I've invested a ll m y m oney in the firm, gotten into debt, and the books are not selling. Some consider me to be a counterrevolutionary and others a Bol'shevik mercenary. I'd love to send them all to the devil. If only they would le t me ge t on with m y beloved book publishing ...
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Grzhebin had been a firm friend of Gor'ky's for years, and in 1919 Gor'ky had made a form al present to him of the exclusive rights to 20 selected works, but in 1928 the Soviet publishing house Gosizdat announced these particular works for publication as part of Gor'ky's collected works — without Grzhebin's permission. Desperate, Grzhebin wrote to Gor'ky asking to be paid his share of the royalties. He and Gor'ky had had a falling out in 1934, and Gor'ky claimed that he had granted Grzhebin only temporary rights. Nevertheless, he paid Grzhebin the $4,000 which his form er friend said he would settle for, but the strain proved too much for the exhausted publisher. He died in Paris of a heart attack before receiving all the money.
Philosophers and Essayists B ut a ll be that he was a philosopher, Yet had he but little g o ld 'in coffer. Geoffrey Chaucer Some of the lasting contributions made by the ém igré community can be found in the areas of philosophy, essay-writing, and literary criticism — areas which suffered even greater constraints under the burgeoning Soviet censorship than did belles-lettres. It was only beyond Stalin's reach that Russians could debate the "Russian idea,” the Christian unity of Europe and Russia, Russia's purported innate inclination toward despotism, the notion of a state based on law, the crisis of the Russian national character, and literature as a means of self-knowledge. And only outside Russia’s borders could they castigate the utilitarianism inherited from 19th-century thinkers. Despite the liberalization of the NEP period, launched in 1921, the Soviet governm ent deported a large group of scholars and intellectuals in 1922. Expecting to be met by a group of Russian émigrés, they appointed the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev to give a speech to the welcoming committee. On disembarking in Stettin, they lined up, but no one appeared to meet them. The following day the Riga newspaper R ul’ commented on the arrival of the "deported Bol'shevik professors.” Evidently it was Trotsky who made the decision to deport them, in part because he feared their activities in the AllRussian Committee To Aid the Hungry, formed in 1921, would develop into a real political force.a In an interview granted to John Reed's wife,
•Vserossiiskii komitet pomoshchi golodayushchim (P O M G O L). According to Osorgin, all members of the committee w ere to have been shot, but Nansen intervened on their behalf.
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he characterized the persons selected for deportation as "worthless,” but also claimed that he wanted to prevent them from being shot in the event of a m ilitary crisis — a fate which would undoubtedly have befallen them even without any such emergency. According to one Soviet scholar, however, the deportation plan was worked out personally by Lenin. The group included a number of thinkers whose views could be characterized as philosophical idealism and who had spent considerable tim e in Western Europe before 1917. Among them were Semên Frank (1877-1938), Ivan ll'in (1882-1954), who called for the resistance to evil by force in his Russkii kolokol (The Russian Bell), and Boris Vysheslavtsev (1877-1954). Im portant philosophical studies were also undertaken by Nikolai Lossky (1870-1965), Lev Karsavin (1882-1952), Fêdor Stepun (1884-1965), and Vasily Zen’kovsky (1881-1962). The best known of the group was Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948), whose views underwent a number of transform ations. As a young man, he became enamored of Marxism, and was imprisoned and sent into internal exile by the old regime. Before being deported, he was personally interrogated by the fearsom e Feliks Dzerzhinsky and was forced to sign a statem ent recognizing that he would be shot if he attempted to reenter the country.3 His dismay at finding himself cast out of his native country was one shared by other Russians abroad: I brought with me an eschatological sense o f the fates o f history ... thoughts born in the catastrophe o f the Russian revolution, in the finiteness and fearful lim itlessness (zapredel'nosf) o f Russian communism, which posed a problem to which Christianity found no answer.... I brought a consciousness o f the conflict between the personality and world harmony, between individual and communal [values], a conflict unresolved within the confines o f history. As an exile Berdyaev revived his Free Academy of Spiritual Culture, and was the editor of both the Slavophile religious journal P ut' (Path) and the YMCA Press and tem porarily moved in the direction of Kantian idealism. About 1908 these newer views were supplanted by Russian Orthodoxy. Still another metamorphosis ensued after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, when he perceived the Stalinist
•The interrogation took place across a polar-bear rug in Dzerzhinsky’s office, after which Berdyaev was released by his oddly gracious host. Dzerzhinsky expressed concern that there w ere a lot of thieves about and had Berdyaev driven home on a motorcycle.
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system as representing the salvation of Russia. Despite these changes, Berdyaev remained a consistent exponent of Christian personalism, existential freedom, and creativity. He was engrossed by the role of the Russian intelligentsia, which he perceived as a deeply Russian phenomenon, in contrast to Georgy Florovsky, who believed that the very rootlessness of the intelligentsia had brought down the old order. When the war was over, Berdyaev once more turned against the Soviet regime. Throughout his life he published prolifically (some 30 books and a large number of articles) and eventually died at his desk. Like Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov (1871-1944) moved from Marxism to idealism, to Russian Orthodoxy, to strong anti-German feelings during W orld W ar II. He had studied in Berlin, Paris, and London in 1898-1900, was anointed into the priesthood in 1918, and was one of those deported in 1922. In Prague he helped organize the "Brotherhood of Saint Sofia,” and as of 1925 he was Professor and Dean of the Theological Seminary in Paris. In 1935 the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Church Outside Russia found him guilty of heresy — an opinion with which Metropolitan Sergy in Moscow agreed. Since, however, Bulgakov had broken with the Russian Church and subordinated himself to the Patriarch of Constantinople, the judgm ent had no practical consequences for him. Bulgakov wrote extensively about Dostoevsky and was opposed to "positivist self-reliance.” "Lev Shestov” was the penname of leguda Leib Shvartsman (1866-1938), the son of a wealthy dry goods wholesaler in Kiev. Shestov's father was an early participant in the Zionist movement, but Shestov him self was a true citizen of the world. He was close not only to fellow émigré philosophers such as Berdyaev and Bulgakov, but also to Kierkegaard, Buber, and Husserl. Shestov had studied in Berlin for one sem ester and lived mostly abroad from 1896 to 1914. In 1898 he published Shakespeare and His Critic Brandes, a work which did not attract much attention. However, his second book, G ood in the Teachings o f Tolstoi and Nietzsche (1900), in which he sided more with Nietszche than Tolstoi, was widely debated. Although Shestov never failed to protest against the frequent accusations of cynicism and skepticism directed against him, he definitely liked to shock readers with his unorthodox evaluations and analysis. His Apotheosis o f Groundlessness (1905) was a collection of aphorisms that clearly showed the antipositivistic, antirationalistic, and antim aterialistic position he was to champion in later life. Another intentional shocker was his 1905 essay on Chekhov entitled "Creation from the Void,” in which he attacked the traditional view of Chekhov as a humanist. Chekhov, he maintained, was a bard of the irrational, a sadist who relished destroying the last vestiges of hope.
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In 1914 Shestov returned home, and later witnessed the burning of the fam ily's warehouse during the Civil War. It was an especially difficult tim e for Jews, who were accused of having destroyed Russia by organizing sedition, and there were vicious pogroms in Kiev before the Reds took over the city. In January 1920 Shestov managed to obtain a number of falsified documents which perm itted him to leave the country, along with 12 fam ily members, on a French ship travelling from Sevastopol' to Istanbul. Fortunately, the fam ily possessed property outside Russia. Upon arriving abroad, Shestov estimated that there were sufficient funds to perm it the 17 members of the fam ily who eventually managed to escape "to exist modestly for 8 to 10 years” and was thus able to allow himself the luxury of continuing to engage in philosophy and criticism. In W estern Europe Shestov expanded his intellectual horizon still further, publishing Potestas Clavium (Berlin, 1923) and In Job's Balances (Berlin, 1929). One brochure written by him, W hat Is Russian Bolshevism ?, was printed, but never read, because the entire edition was burned by a fellow émigré writer, Evgeny Lundberg, who returned to Russia in 1924. Several of Shestov's books appeared posthumously, among them : Kierkegaard and Existential Philosophy (Paris, 1939) and Athens and Jerusalem (Paris, 1951). One of these posthumous publications was devoted to another Russian expatriate — Ivan Turgenev. Not surprisingly, Shestov fell out with Gippius and Merezhkovsky over the latter's pro-fascist views. Dmitry Filosofov (1872-1940) was an interesting, albeit far less prominent, thinker who had begun his career as an art critic, but then shifted to religious and philosophical topics. Even before 1917, he had collaborated with Merezhkovsky and Gippius and in 1904 became editor of N ovyi p u t' (The New Path). A proponent of "religious-social values,” he was hostile to the new Soviet government and settled in W arsaw in 1920, contributing articles to Za svobodul and Mech. Georgy Fedotov (1886-1951) was an eloquent historian, essayist, and religious thinker, whose major work was the two-volume The Russian Religious Mind. In 1935 Fedotov published an im portant article on the fate and mission of the Russian emigration, rejecting the notion that Russians had committed some original sin that doomed them to live out their lives in idleness abroad, although he conceded that the émigrés found it difficult to "comprehend the truth of exile.” Exile, he wrote, was a "feat,” a "creative act,” in which the electrician still saw him self as a corporal, the cab driver as a colonel, but herein lay the moral danger of placing one's hopes in a general war in which the form er Gallipoleans would end up fighting each other. The émigrés, he agonized, had been alienated from the old intelligentsia by the jealous cult of their own sufferings, while back in Russia they were
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regarded, not as exiles, but as deserters who had declined to drink from the common cup of the people's grief. Ultimately, it was culture that supplied moral justification: Perhaps no emigration in history has received such a pow erful mandate from the nation — to be the bearer o f culture.... We are here, abroad, to serve as the voice o f all those who rem ain silent there, to reestablish the polyphonic wholeness o f the Russian spirit. While not pretending to drown out the revolutionary roar o f building and destruction, we can preserve that which is deepest and m ost precious in the experience o f the revolutionary generation, and will im part this experience to the future. We can become the living link between yesterday's and today's Russia. Another of the scholar-deportees was Semên Frank (18771950), who had become interested in Marxism in the 1890s. After participating in student disturbances, he was denied permission to live in Moscow for two years and went abroad from 1899 to 1901, where he rather quickly adopted a conservative religious position, which he maintained for the rest of his life. In Berlin he gave lectures at the Russian Institute of Science and Scholarship, and after it was moved to Paris in 1924, was appointed dean in the last year of its existence (1931). In Germany he was influenced by the thinking of Martin Buber and came to advocate a Platonic, pantheistic mysticism, consistently maintaining the unknowability of the universe. He viewed the 1917 October coup as a crisis of Russian spirituality. The Nazis were not impressed by the fact that Frank, a Jew, had been baptized an Orthodox Christian and had even written negatively about Judaism. He was denied the right to lecture in Berlin, and in 1937 he finally moved to the south of France, where he was forced to conceal his Jewish ancestry. After the war he moved once more, this tim e to England.
Self-Evaluation: A Mission? Keepers of Culture G reatly unfortunate, he fights the cause O f honor, virtue, liberty and Rome. Joseph Addison The large number of First-Wave émigrés and the prom inent place they had occupied in pre-Soviet Russian society made it inevitable that they could not view themselves as simply an accidental crowd of refugees. Having left Russia behind within a relatively short space of time, often as organized armies, Russians began to search for a meaning in the experience which had overwhelmed them and their country. They had left a Russia basking in its "Silver Age” (a
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coinage of émigré cultural historians), and their sense of loss was greater than the sum of their own personal tragedies. The Russian language itself became a rallying point. The social and economic structures of communist Russia were different than those of tsarist times, and these differences inevitably ushered in linguistic changes. New words appeared, the semantics and stylistics of the language evolved at a dizzying rate, and many verbal items became loaded emotionally and politically. In addition, Russia's new political and economic leaders often were poorly educated or had failed to acquire the distinctive pronunciation of the form er upper classes. Indeed, such mannerisms could even be mortally dangerous in the new "proletarian" culture. The language of the "Sovdepiya” — a derogatory phrase used by many of the émigrés for the Soviet Union — struck the exiles as degraded, as the language of their form er servants. W ithin the exile community itself changes were everywhere. Coming to term s with the realities of life in foreign countries and surrounded by other languages, the émigrés engaged in wholesale foreign borrowing while forging their own linguistic creations and discarding old words and turns of speech — even as the language purists called for strict preservationism. W riters were left confused and at a loss as to how to write. The humorous writer Nadezhda Buchinskaya, who wrote under the pseudonym Tèffi, complained that the literary language was "ugly, because it is dead.” As the original hope of a speedy return home began to fade, it was replaced by the conviction that the very existence of Russian culture was threatened. The exiles came to see themselves as bearing high a torch, as transcending their tim e and surveying Russian culture in broad historical terms. How were they to relate to Russian culture in general and literature in particular? It is a problem faced by virtually any w riter who has left his or her native land, and few possess the self-confidence of a Thomas Mann, who declared "Wo ich bin, ist die deutsche Kultur” (W herever I a m — that is where German culture is), or Karl W olfskehl, who maintained that the German "spirit" (Geist) was with him always. In the words of Alfred Polgar, "Die Fremde is nicht Heimat geworden. Aber die Heimat Fremde” (“A foreign country has not been transform ed into homeland, but the homeland has become alien”). Echoing a phrase of Vladislav Khodasevich, Roman Gul' stressed the portability of culture in the title of his trilogy / Took Russia With Me. The idea was especially popular among the émigrés: One o f the m ajor Jacobins (Danton, it seems), while still in power, said o f the French émigrés: "you can't take your hom eland aw ay with you on the soles o f your shoes.” This is true — but only o f those who possess nothing but the soles o f their shoes. M any French émigrés such as Châteaubriand, the
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Duc d'Enghien, Richelieu, and others presen/ed the m emories o f their hearts and souls and m anaged to bear France aw ay with them. And if the outcast took his homeland with him, it was his sacred obligation to serve it in exile. On February 16,1924, Ivan Bunin gave a speech on the mission of the Russian exile community. Bunin wrote that the overwhelming majority of the émigrés had left Russia involuntarily, and thus were not émigrés, but exiles, and that the tim e had come to recognize the "mission” of the émigrés — to remain faithful to an oppressed Mother Russia, crushed by a satanic Lenin: This abomination, the congenital m oral idiot Lenin, revealed to the world som ething m onstrous and frightening in his activities: he im poverished the greatest country in the world and m urdered several m illion people. Even so, the world has become so insane that people now argue whether o r no t he was a benefactor o f mankind. He crouched on a ll fours on his red throne; when British photographers were taking his picture, he kept sticking out his tongue: and people argue that this m eans nothing! Semashko [a prom inent Soviet official] him self blurted out for everyone to hear that in the skull o f the new Nebuchadnezzar they found nothing but green slime instead o f a brain; the newspapers write that he lay in his red coffin with the m ost terrible grim ace on his yellow-gray face: that m eans nothing, they argue! A nd his coworkers have no reluctance to write: "A new god has died, the creator o f a N ew World, the D em iurgeF ... W ithout doubt, God's anger will strike a ll this down; it has always been this way. "/ shall arise against you, Tyre and Sidon, and cast you into the depths o f the sea...." Fire and brim stone will fall on Sodom, Gomorrah, and a ll these Leningrads, while Zion, God's city o f Peace, w ill stand through the ages. B ut what is a Russian em igrant to do now, on this day, and in this hour? The mission o f the Russian émigré com m u nity... is to dem onstrate that in conscience it will not be frightened into accepting these commandments o f Lenin. O ur mission demands that we persevere in this non-acceptance*
‘ Despite Bunin's unquestionably unambiguous attitude, the Soviet writer Konstantin Simonov was sent to Paris in 1946 to attem pt to convince Bunin to return to Russia! Curiously, Bunin's hatred for the Soviet Union did not prevent him from maintaining a close friendship with Boris Panteleimonov, an ém igré writer who
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Markov II was even more blunt: In going into battle, do not be dism ayed by the thought that you will be killing other Russians. There is no Russia there, no Russians ... The exiles looked around and saw so many of their acquaintances that they had the impression no one was left back home. Baron Boris Nol'de, an economist and historian, declared in Poslednie novosti: We exist as Russia.... It is not a tiny band o f people grouped around a dead principle overthrown by life, but the flow er o f the nation, a ll those who possessed pow er in life, no m atter how we related to that life. This is not an emigration o f Russians, but an emigration of Russia [emphasis mine: JG]. Nol'de’s view was shared not only by Russian émigrés; French prem ier Clemanceau, for example, declared that "Russia no longer exists.” W ithin the context of this demonization of the Soviet government, the literature of exile was seen by many as the only legitim ate heir to the grand tradition of Russian literature. "We are not exiles,” came the call, "but ambassadors” (My ne v izgnanii, a v poslanii). The remark has been attributed to a number of writers, including Zinaida Gippius. In 1924 she wrote that after early 1918 there were no "writers in Russia, no literature, nothing: just a dark abyss”: The cup o f Russian literature has been flung into Europe, spattering a ll o f Europe. It is here [in Europe] that it should be sought.... No m atter what name comes to m ind — we are a ll here. In keeping with her heady evaluation of the accomplishments of Russian writers in exile, Gippius envisaged a suitably grandiose role for her fellow émigré writers: the preservation of Russian culture, which she perceived as being physically and spiritually destroyed by the Soviet governm ent before the eyes of a naive and indifferent West. The charge was stock and trade for the Russian émigrés throughout the Soviet period. In 1976, to cite but one example, Vladim ir Maksimov voiced the same, virtually permanent complaint of the émigré com m unity — that the Soviet government had been warring with intellectuals ever since the 1917 October coup and that the W est's response has been to "rejoice” that Soviet citizens then had "more sausage and brighter textiles.”
wrote in 1945 that "the dawn of a free life was blazing over the ocean of Russian peasantry." Panteleim onov accepted Soviet citizenship in 1945, but despite this act Bunin when dying went so far as to write that he was joining him in death.
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Russian émigrés were not unique in perceiving a special role for themselves. Polish literature, for example, was largely a literature in exile for a whole century, and many German writers in exile during the Nazi period began to feel that they were the true keepers of the flame. Leopold Schwarzschild maintained that the entire body of German literature had been "transferred” abroad. His words were echoed by Ernst Ottwalt, who stated categorically that the true German literature had emigrated and that the literature of emigration was the German literature. But disagreem ent is the lot of any émigré community, and inevitably another German writer, Eduard Korrodi, assaulted such statem ents as "nonsense.” At a 1927 meeting of the Green Lamp Society the journalist Semên Portugeis (1881-1944, writing under the pseudonym "Stepan Ivanovich”) questioned this sense of mission and meaning of ém igré culture. He felt that the émigrés were being strangled by the lack of contact with Russia proper, that even major writers could4"dry up” in exile, and that memories alone were not enough to sustain a m eaningful tradition. Dovid Knut reacted forcefully to Portugeis's views: W hat difference does it make that the supply o f birchtrees and cuckoo birds is being exhausted? W hat is im portant is that Russian writers have brought out o f Russia som ething quite different, som ething which is no t being squandered but, on the contrary, is gaining strength, growing, enriching itself. Russian people took their souls with them out o f Russia carefully and in good time. ... The time is near when it w ill become clear to everyone that the capital o f Russian literature is not Moscow, bu t Paris. Portugeis was equally categorical in rebutting Knut: I d o n t understand how people can fail to see that m ajor talents have wasted away [after emigrating]. We are told that Paris, and not Moscow, is the capital o f Russian literature. To that I say that literature over there m ay be twenty tim es worse than Parisian literature, but even so the capital o f Russian literature is Moscow. Paris with its m agnificent talents is nevertheless a place o f exile, a cursed place. O nly those who sense with pain the degree to which creative efforts have been narrowed here can be uplifted and only he can struggle for a reconquest o f our homeland. There can be no Russia for those who maintain that their affairs are proceeding nicely and that Paris is the capital o f literature. That w ill be literature written in Russian, but not Russian literature. The Gippius-Knut evaluation of the achievements and role of literature in exile was rejected by Mark Slonim, who wrote that Anna
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Akhmatova, Andrei Bely, Maksmilian Voloshin, Valery Bryusov, Boris Pasternak, Vladim ir Mayakovsky, Sergei Esenin, Osip Mandel’shtam, Isaak Babel', Boris PiPnyak and many other writers had remained in the Soviet Union, and that Russian literature would continue there despite governm ent censorship. Ironically, with the exception of Bryusov, none of these writers was to escape suicide, execution, or enforced silence, and even Bryusov would probably have perished in the purges, had he lived longer. The crisis in émigré letters was clearly coming to a head, noted by the novelist Mark Aldanov, who conceded that emigration did indeed deprive the writer of his "native soil,” but that "slavery was worse.” There were plenty of topics, Aldanov wrote, but recent Soviet life was not one of them. On the other hand, Aidanov's perspective could be viewed as one-sided in that he became a writer of stature only after emigrating. A third view, echoes of which could be heard frequently right up until the collapse of the U.S.S.R., was summed up by ll'ya Bunakov-Fondaminsky, who had been strongly influenced by Eurasians — that the emigration and Russia were connecting vessels united in a religious consciousness which would bring forth a blossoming of creativity among the émigrés and a new holistic world view.
Literature "Older” and "Younger” Generations You are young, m y son, and, as the years go by, time will change and even reverse m any o f your present opinions. Refrain therefore awhile from setting yourself up as a judge o f the highest matters. Plato I know thee not, old m an: fall to thy prayers; How ill white hairs become a fool and je ste r! W illiam Shakespeare W riters who had already established their reputations prior to 1917 came to be referred to as the "older generation” — even though some of them were still relatively young. Among these authors who were already well known back in Russia were Arkady Averchenko, Konstantin Bal'mont, Ivan Bunin, Zinaida Gippius, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Aleksandr Kuprin, Sergei Makovsky, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Aleksei Remizov, Igor' Severyanin, Ivan Shmelèv, Aleksei Tolstoi, Nadezhda
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Buchinskaya (pseudonym: Tèffi), and Sasha Chëmy. Some of them were among the 161 writers, journalists, and prom inent cultural figures deported in 1922. W riters who established themselves as writers only after em igrating were lumped together as the "younger” generation — again regardless of age.a A few did not belong definitively to either of these categories. For example, Mark Aldanov began his career as an ém igré writer, but he was nevertheless felt to be closer to the “older generation.” The two Georgy's — Ivanov and Adamovich — and the prose w riter Ivan Lukash also did not conform com pletely to this artificial division, but fit more into the older group in the eyes of their contemporaries. Until the late 1920s the older group dom inated the literary scene, with the same names appearing again and again in the magazines and newspapers. Although the appearance abroad o f so many prom inent writers in the early post-revolutionary years created an exhilarating new environment, in tim e stagnation began to replace excitement. In 1929 the critic Mark Slonim agonized that w hile the French revolutionary exiles had laid the groundwork for the literary
•This group w as by far the largest. The following incomplete list gives som e idea of the size of this group and the magnitude of Russia's loss: M ark Levi (M . Ageev), G leb Alekseev, Vadim Andreev, Ekaterina Bakunina, Elena Bazilevskaya, Yury Bek-Sofiev (Yury Sofiev), Nikolai Belotsvetov, Nina Berberova, Raisa Blokh, Ivan Boldyrev, Boris Bozhnev, A. Brailovsky, V era Bulich, Aleksandr Braslavsky (A. Bulkin), Èm iliya Chegrintseva, Mikhail Chekhonin, Lidiya Chervinskaya, Igor' Chinnov, Vladim ir Dikson, Valerian Dryakhlov, Aleksandr Drozdov, Georgy Evangulov, Nikolai Freidenshtein (Yury Fel’zen), Leonid Gansky, Gaito Gazdanov, Karl Gershel'm an, Aleksei Gessen, Aleksandr Ginger, Alla Golovina, Lev Gomolitsky, Mikhail Gorlin, Antonina Grivtsova (A. Gorskaya), Aleksei Gryzov (Aleksei Achair), Nikolai Gronsky, Roman Gul', Yury Ivask, G alina izdebskaya, Lazar' Kel'berin, Aleksei Kholchev, Mikhail Klochkov, Irina Knorring, Dovid Knut, Dmitry Kobyakov, Vladim ir Korvin-Piotrovsky, G alina Kuznetsova, Anatonin Ladinsky, Vyacheslav Lebedev, Veniam in Levin, Ivan Lukash, V era Lur'e, Viktor Mamchenko, Yury Mandel'shtam , Vladim ir Mansvetov, Georgy Matveev, "Mother Mariya" (Elizaveta Kuz'm ina-Karavaeva, née Pilenko), Vadim Morkovin, O. Mozhaiskaya, Vladim ir Nabokov, Arseny Nesmelov, Yury Odarchenko, Yury Ofrosimov (G . Rosimov), Georgy Otsup (Georgy Raevsky), Nikolai Otsup, Georgy Peskov, Boris Poplavsky, Sofiya Pregel', Anna Prismanova, Elena Rubisova, Juhani Savolainen (Ivan Savin), Sergei Sharshun, Zinaida Shakhovskaya, Aglaida Shim anskaya, Sergei Shishmarëv, Vladim ir Sm olensky, Perikl Stavrov, Anatoly Shteiger, Gleb Struve, Boris Taggo (Boris Novosadov), Ekaterina Tauber, Yury Terapiano, Tat'yana Tim asheva, M ariya Tolstaya, M arina Tsvetaeva, Aleksandr Turintsev, Nikolai Turoverov, Vladim ir Varshavsky, Tam ara Velichkovskaya, Anatoly Velichkovsky, Boris Vil'de, Boris Volkov, Irina Yassen, Boris Zakovich, Vladim ir Zlobin, Leonid Zurov, Yakov Tsvibak (Andrei Sedykh).
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movement which was destined to renew French literature and prevail at home, Russia's exiles had failed to produce either theories or works which could serve as such a program. Slonim went on to use the word dozhivanie — living out one's last years — in regard to the established writers, whom he saw as sim ply repeating what they had written before emigrating. He m entioned a contest of younger writers conducted "not so far back” by the journal Volya Rossii (Russia's Will), to which a total of 94 subm issions had been received. Slonim found them "backward,” and said they gave the impression of having been written 25 years earlier, from the standpoint of both subject m atter and style. Nevertheless, he felt that the future of Russian émigré literature was with the younger generation, and he went on in the article to name several of them. Slonim 's article was incisive in many ways, and it was at precisely this point that the "younger generation” began to come to the fore. In 1936 the young novelist Gaito Gazdanov picked up Slonim's argum ent in an article in Sovremennye zapiski. Gazdanov denied that the younger generation of émigré writers (with the exception of Nabokov) had produced anything of lasting value.3 Gazdanov saw this supposed crisis in émigré letters as resulting from a shortage of readers and the absence of a world view or moral structure, and not as the effect of location. Émigré culture in general and literature in particular were sim ply copying past traditions, because they had no "topic.”b With the perspective of tim e we can see that this critical selfevaluation was almost inevitable. The "embarrassment of riches” of the older generation was obvious to all, and it was natural for the younger writers to im itate such recognized literary masters. And when the hope of return began to fade and the younger writers began to perceive them selves as the last doomed bearers of the torch of Russian culture, this striving toward emulation rather than innovation became even
“G azdanov's comments w ere basically to be repeated, only much later, by a representative of a different emigration. W hen Milan Kundera decided not to return to Prague, he wrote a lengthy article for Le Monde, claiming that Czechoslovakia had becom e a cultural desert where everything was stifled. There was an enraged response from his colleagues back home, who felt Kundera was implying that because he had left Czechoslovakia, it meant that now everything else was dead. “»Gazdanov at one point actually requested permission to return to the Soviet Union (a wish he never carried out), stating in a letter to Gor'ky that Russian literary endeavors in the W est w ere useless and unnecessary. Elsewhere, G azdanov w as to claim the real reason for his request was concern for his mother.
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more deeply entrenched. Vladim ir Veidle, for example, wrote of the "poison of modernism” and the "death of art.” The material and literary circumstances of the younger generation were extraordinarily difficult, and their fate was tragic. They arrived in Europe (some in China) without having established a literary reputation in Russia, usually penniless, their education often incomplete, only to learn that the literary magazines gave preference to more established authors. The magazine Chisla (Dates), which was published from 1930 to 1934 and edited by Nikolai Otsup3, was a prom inent exception in this regard. The magazine was welcomed as an outlet for the "younger” generation of writers, but its apolitical content impressed many people unfavorably in the clim ate of the time. Before the founding of Chisla, Volya Rossii (Russia's W ill), which many older writers considered too friendly to the Soviets, was one of the first to allot significant space to younger authors. O ther magazines that devoted special attention to younger writers were Novyi dom (New Home), Vstrechi (Meetings) and Novyi korabl' (New Ship) in Paris, and N ov' (Virgin Soil) in Tallinn. Mikhail Osorgin founded the publishing house Novye pisateli (New W riters) in the early 1930s to help younger writers break into print, while the critic and scholar Al'fred Bern in Prague went out of his way to be helpful to budding writers. In 1925 the League of Young W riters and Poets was founded in Paris to hold readings and even published several collections of verse by its members.6 Three years later Mark Slonim, who was only 34 at the time, helped a group of young writers establish Kochev'e (Nomad's Camp), a literary society whose very name, testified to the younger w riters’ perception of their situation. These young writers soon found themselves in the middle of runaway inflation in Germany, followed in a few years by a worldwide depression. Then came W orld W ar II, and they eagerly joined the fight against communism, only to forfeit their lives. The sense of alienation from their fathers’ generation was still further heightened by a sense of betrayal on the part of many, a conviction that the older generation had "gambled away” Russia while the younger men had been forced to spill their blood futilely on the field of battle. The young exiles studying at the Russian Law School in Prague were particularly
•Otsup, who had originally emigrated to Berlin in 1922 and later moved to Paris, w as an Acmeist poet and one of the most loyal followers of Nikolai Gum ilev, whom he had unsuccessfully attempted to save from execution. bSoyuz molodykh poètov i pisatelei (v Parizhe). Som e members w ere: ll'ya Golenishchev-Kutuzov, Lazar' Kel'berin, Yury Mandel'shtam , (Raevsky), Boris Poplavsky, Yury Sofiev, and Boris Zakovich.
Georgy
Otsup
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em bittered when they realized that they had wasted four years learning a legal system which, contrary to the assurances of their elders, would not be resurrected. From the viewpoint of the exile, Russia could be a very faraway place. In the words of their contemporary Vladim ir Varshavsky, Adamovich's musings on the fate of man, couched in terms of the eternal Russian quarrel between the Slavophiles and the Westernizers, "seemed as distant and incomprehensible as the Wars of the Roses. The im mediate reality was that of loneliness, homelessness, rootlessness.” The sense of futility, perhaps common to the intelligentsia in all countries and all periods, was particularly overwhelm ing for the Russians. In his memoirs Berdyaev speaks of feeling "caught up by primordial, fatal forces,” of feeling "alienated, unneeded, lonely.” It was this sense of remoteness that the newspaper M olodaya Rossiya (Young Russia) was attempting to oppose and dispel when it first appeared in Paris in 1923 under the slogan A ll for RussiaI (Vsê dlya Rossii). A "Eurasian" view of the situation was provided by Semên Portugeis, who commiserated with the young people, pointing out that the image they had of Russia was cloudy, since they never knew her: It is possible to create an ideology that will allow young writers to become Europeans, but they will cease to be Russians. Russian literature is not Russian because it describes birch trees, samovars, and sarafans [peasant sundresses]. It is Russian literature because it expresses specific peculiarities o f the Russian m oral and artistic consciousness. The tragedy is not that young Russians have never seen a sarafan, but that they have not absorbed the basic elements o f Russian life and Russian culture. An unfinished novel by Boris Poplavsky gives a sense of the atm osphere of alienation and self-loathing in which many representatives of the younger generation lived: I had arrived recently and had ju s t now been separated from m y family. I was stoop-shouldered, and m y entire appearance gave o ff the impression o f a sort o f transcendental hum iliation, which clung to me like a skin infection. I wandered around the town, from one acquaintance to another. Im m ediately regretting that I had come but nevertheless staying on, I would keep up m y end o f the émigré conversation with degrading politeness. From time to time the boring half hearted talk would be interrupted by sighs and tea, drunk from badly washed china....
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Dragging m y feet, I le ft m y fam ily; dragging m y thoughts, I le ft God, dignity, and freedom; dragging m y days, I reached the age o f 24. In those years m y clothing was wrinkled and lost its shape a ll by itself, sprinkled with ashes and shreds o f tobacco. I washed rarely and liked to sleep without undressing. I lived in twilight, and in tw ilight I would wake up on a strange, unmade bed. I drank water from a glass that sm elled o f soap and would stare out o f the window for a long time, inhaling the smoke o f a butt discarded by the apartm ent's owner.... But, if you think about it, what had actually happened, other than the fact that a m illion people lost some tasteless Viennese couches, paintings b y unknown artists o f the Dutch school (undoubtedly forged), and featherbeds and m eatpies that lu ll a person hopelessly into a heavy, degrading afterdinner sleep sim ilar to d e a th ? ... Proudly I would step out into the street, the shirt unbuttoned on m y narrow hairless chest, and I would stare a t passers-by with a patronizing, absent, and sleepy gaze. W riters with established reputations supposedly disdained the ragtag crowd which frequented the Café de la Rotonde (which, incidentally, Ivan Turgenev had patronized for his morning cup of coffee). Bunin, for example, looked down his nose at the new magazine Svoim i putyam i (By Our Own Paths): I happened to glance through an issue o f the Prague m agazine Svoimi putyami. These are bad paths, and the level is deplorablel With the exception o f Remizov, the nam es are hardly prom inent: Bolestsis, Krotkov, Rafal'sky, Spinadel', Turintsev, Ginger, Knut, Lutsky, Terapiano, Gazdanov, Dolinsky, Elenev, Tideman, Èfron, etc. True, a ll o f them are people finding their own paths in the new Russian culture; no wonder they use the Bol'shevik orthography. B ut are there really people who have no need for a minimum o f taste, common sense, and a knowledge o f Russian? The older émigrés were still attem pting to hold onto the Russia they had known, and the literature of that Russia was usually understood to be in the realist tradition. Readers generally favored General Pêtr Krasnov and his historical epic From Double-Headed Eagle to Red Banner (OX dvuglavogo orla k krasnomu znameni), which was translated into twelve languages, over experimentation. Krasnov was a political conservative who wrote that ”to be a Russian means to be a Black Hundreds man, a participant in pogroms and surely a monarchist, a restorationist, and an extreme reactionary.”
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Toward the end of the 1920s, Vladislav Khodasevich announced that In the future he intended to devote more of his tim e to "poets of his own generation and stature.” In a classic "fathers and sons” conflict of views, the younger writers often failed to see any relevance for themselves in that tradition. Theirs was a world of dreams and hallucinations, of mirages and feelings, of mysticism and decadence. It was this lonely, alienated condition which gave birth to Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading, in which the hero's erotic fantasies, fears and hopes, allies and enemies all turn out to be figm ents of his own imagination. But it was precisely in this form that the younger generation found expression. In the 40th issue of Sovremennye zapiski Nina Berberova wrote about Nabokov: A tremendous, mature, sophisticated modem w riter was before m e; a great Russian writer, like a phoenix, was born from the fire and ashes o f revolution and exile. O ur existence from now on acquired a meaning. A ll m y generation was justified. We were saved. Boris Pasternak was a focus of controversy. His early manner, often intentionally complex and highly stylized, was the model for a number of younger poets, but was vehemently rejected by the "neoclassicists.” (After 1940 Pasternak himself steadily moved away from the modernism of his younger days to a more traditionalist mode.) In prose, the influential Georgy Adamovich not only lambasted Nabokov regularly, but himself led a movement heading in the opposite direction, searching for the "eternal themes” of human existence. This was the so-called "Parisian Note.” Often the younger writers did not know or even want to know the Russian tradition from which they them selves sprang. Berberova complained that those who left Russia at an early age had brought virtually nothing with them: Knut had neither studied nor fought; he had helped his father in his produce shop in Kishinëv. Ladinsky had been a White officer. Poplavsky lived with his family. Nabokov le ft with his parents, having published in 1 9 1 7 a collection o f adolescent verse. Sm olensky was evacuated from the south o f Russia. Zlobin, who lived with the Merezhkovskys through the entire revolution, arrived with them in Paris. I m yself appeared as "Khodasevich's w ife,” having published one poem in the Petersburg collection Ushkuiniki (Pirates) in February o f 1 9 2 2 . I did not know if any o f them, aside from myself, had ever been to Moscow. B ut I know that neither Knut nor Sm olensky had ever been to Petersburg. W hether Ladinsky had ever visited the city I d o n t know. Had Knut ever read Lom onosov o r Vyacheslav Ivanov, Veselovsky, o r the Form alists? I doubt it. Certainly Sm olensky had never read them, although he was
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vaguely acquainted with their names. Ladinsky had thrown him self into reading and studying French in the 1930s, when he switched from house painting to being a messenger. A t that tim e Knut read whatever he could lay hands on — usually random books. Sm olensky read alm ost nothing, believing that to do so would only undermine his own uniqueness (even though he was less unique than the others). Once he and I spoke o f Tyutchev, but he did not even want to know about him fo r fear that Tyutchev could impinge upon the totality o f his work and that he would not be strong enough to resist. Poplavsky probably read more than the others — the Dadaists, Verlaine, Apollinaire, Gide. Zlobin m erely ingested the atm osphere o f the M erezhkovsky household. This was a question not only of knowledge, but of relevance. After interviewing Andrei Sedykh in 1982, I asked him if he had any desire to visit Moscow. Sedykh, already an old man but in his youth a member of the so-called "younger generation” of writers, had lived his entire life in the very center of Russian cultural life abroad. He had been Bunin's personal secretary when Bunin received the Nobel Prize. The author of a number of books, he was also the editor of a m ajor publication of Russian émigré culture, the New York daily newspaper Novoe russkoe slovo (New Russian W ord). Sedykh appeared puzzled by the question, but then responded: "I don't know. W hat would I do there? I never travelled outside the Crimea before I em igrated. Going to Moscow would be like going to Peking."
Symbolism ... I behold upon the night's start'd face, Huge cloudy symbols o f a high romance. John Keats Émigré poets in this period can be divided into four basic groups: a) late Symbolists; b) followers of the "Parisian Note”; c) Tsvetaeva and poets who tried to emulate not only her, but also Mayakovsky, the pre-1940 Pasternak, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Apollinaire; d) those who followed Khodasevich's dictum sim ply to write good poetry and not try to fit into any specific model. Symbolism had been the dom inant poetic school in Russia from the 1890s to 1910. As in W estern Europe, it was at first fundam entally an art-for-art's sake movement, but later Symbolists saw them selves more as prophets than as players of aesthetic games. Underlying the philosophy of Symbolism was the Neoplatonic idea of a "higher reality” and Schopenhauer's concept of an ideal inaccessible
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to the rational faculty. Creativity was viewed as a spiritual act which did not so much communicate as suggest. A line of Tyutchev's — "A thought expressed is a lie” — became an im portant slogan for the Russian Symbolists. The mysterious and the exotic became almost prescriptive elements in poetry, and social-mindedness was generally rejected in favor of a highly personal, individualistic view. Synaesthesia in art caught the imagination of many, and there were numerous attem pts to duplicate the effects of music in poetry. The Russian version of Symbolism was linked to a general eschatological mood and to a sense of art as a mystic experience leading to a spiritual rebirth. Decadence played a strong role in the early developm ent of Russian Symbolism, while mystic and prophetic notes were characteristic of later developments in the movement. The chief émigré holdovers from Symbolism were Konstantin Bal'mont, Lev Èllis, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and Andrei Bely. A lesser figure was Nikolai Minsky, who loved to shock listeners at poetry readings by including such lines as "Proletarians of all lands, unite!”. And of course there were Zinaida Gippius and Dmitry Merezhkovsky, who had first come to Paris in 1906 to pursue their interest in religion and mysticism in general, and Catholicism specifically. Before settling in Switzerland in 1913, Lev Kobylinsky (pseudonym: Èllis, 1874-1947) had played an active role as a religious thinker, sym bolist poet, and active opponent of traditional realism, a trend which was prom inent not only in Russia, but among those writers who were ultim ately destined to emigrate — Evgeny Chirikov, Maksim Gor'ky, Aleksandr Kuprin, and Ivan Shmelev, to name only a few. After em igrating, Èllis devoted himself chiefly to scholarship and translation. Konstantin Bal'mont (1867-1942) was a man of broad culture who had traveled all over the world. A poet, critic, and essayist, he was also a translator from Norwegian, English, Spanish, and Polish, as well as a number of other languages. In Paris he was sometimes referred to as "the Russian Verlaine.” At the same tim e he had such a strong love of English literature that Aleksis Rannit called him "an English poet writing in Russian.” Before the 1917 October coup Bal'mont frequently had difficulties with the tsarist government for his rebellious if vague political leanings. As a twenty-year-old student he was tem porarily expelled from Moscow University and placed under police observation. Several of his books were confiscated by the police, and in 1904 he was denied permission to live in Moscow or any university town for two years. Fearing arrest, he fled to France in 1905 and remained in Paris until 1913, when a general amnesty was announced for political émigrés. A representative of the older, "decadent” branch of Russian symbolism, with all its flamboyance, rebelliousness, subjectivism , extreme aestheticism, and fascination with the exotic and
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the sensual, Bal'mont was in close contact with other sym bolists who were eventually to find their way to the W est — the Russian-Lithuanian poet Jurgis BaltruSaitis (1873-1944) and Dmitry Merezhkovsky. He combined these views with a Pan-Slavist world view and steadfast devotion to abstract beauty. In April 1920 the "Commissar for E nlightenm enf (meaning "Education”) and form er émigré Anatoly Lunacharsky sent Bal'm ont abroad on a literary assignment. When he was filling out the exit-visa application, Bal'mont was asked which political party he belonged to and responded: "I'm a poet.” Although he had originally supported the Bol'shevik cause, he defected, settling once again in France, where he worked for Poslednie novosti and Sovremennye zapiski, and suffered from repeated bouts of mental illness: he had first attem pted suicide in 1890. In his early verse he dwelt on death and the transitory nature of being, but later attem pted to create a positive, "free,” "sun-lit” image of the whole man. During the last years of his life he had to be institutionalized. Impoverished and abandoned by his readers as a holdover from the turn of the century, he died a sad and lonely death. Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949), a poet, critic, and literary theoretician, spent most of the period from 1886 to 1905 abroad, and then returned to Petersburg, where he maintained a literary salon called The Tower (Bashnya). Ivanov's poetry was strongly inspired by his second wife, with whom he professed to be maintaining contact even after her death. When he married her daughter, he again went abroad under pressure from colleagues who were personally offended by the marriage. Upon returning to Russia he found it wiser to settle in Moscow, not St. Petersburg. In 1920, after his wife/stepdaughter died from hunger and deprivation, he made an unsuccessful attem pt to leave the Soviet Union, after which he moved to the northern Caucasus region and from there to Baku, where he was appointed professor of classical philology and became engrossed in the cult of Dionysos. He left Russia in 1924 with the permission of the Soviet authorities, having promised Lunacharsky not to participate in any acts hostile to the Soviet government. Two years later he converted to Catholicism, but he continued to receive a Soviet salary until 1930, and kept his Soviet citizenship until at least 1936 and may have retained it until his death. Thus, his departure from Russia was less a political act than it was for the majority of his contemporaries. Living out his life in Rome, Ivanov seemed divorced from contem porary politics and devoted his energies to the aesthetics of the Silver Age. His personal contacts with other members of the ém igré community were fewer than was typical of many of his fellow exiles, although he did correspond with a number of them.
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Ivanov laid heavy stress on the literary symbol, which he viewed as the core of religious myth rather than just an aesthetic device. Literature itself was for him a form of mythmaking, and he saw the work of art as a striving for the Divine and a means of going beyond the barriers of the individual personality: Roving Magus, fierce thief, gray wolf, I compose these winter verses to your glory. A nd hear your hungry how l! The earth has W elcomed me and human speech is kind. B ut not for you, despised. What the host's dog knows Is a slavish debt and the seers o f Polyhymnia w ill know You, m ore m agical and kindred than the Delphic Beast, as one o f their own until their voices fail. N ear the place where the dugout o f the soul is moored, Where I was given over to the Fates, igor', leader o f the wolves, stands his watch. You pack o f shamans, howl. From m y childhood I've known it as a summons, this drawn-out wailing O f hom eless fire on the frozen steppe* Zinaida Gippius (1869-1945) wrote a memoir describing her life with Dmitry Merezhkovsky, which was published posthumously. Unfortunately, she tells virtually nothing about herself and there are only a few pages devoted to the inter-war period, since she died before the m anuscript was finished. She was certainly an extravagant woman given to theatrical effects, having, for example, casually commented to the international revolutionary and terrorist Boris Savinkov that he was a "weakling.” Gippius debuted as a poet in the late 1880s, composing "decadent’ verse, railing against the tedium of life, and searching for a higher, exotic beauty. Often she would begin a poem with a nature description and then shift into a parallel presentation of her own feelings. She also composed prose works in which she linked religious m otifs with revolutionary ideas, and then backed up these concepts with theoretical tracts.
•Translation by Mary Jane W hite,
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The Parisian Note ... then worms shall try That long preserved virginity: A nd your quaint honor turned to dust; A nd into ashes a ll m y lust. The grave's a fine and private place, B ut none I think there do embrace. Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) Acmeism established itself in Russia with the poetry of Nikolai Gumilêv, Osip Mandel'shtam, and Anna Akhmatova as a reaction against the vagueness and other-worldliness of Symbolism, which enjoyed its heyday in Russia at the turn of the century. It was Acmeism, and to a degree the poetry of Innokenty Annensky, which form ed the basis for the Parisian Note — a movement that first found expression in 1914 in the Russian émigré poetry journal Vechera (Evenings). The phrase was probably inspired by the "Parisian School” of painters resident in the city since the 1910s. The Parisian Note came into its own in the second half of the 1920s and exercised a considerable influence throughout the interwar period. Among its adherents were Georgy Adamovich, Lidiya Chervinskaya, Georgy Ivanov, Antonin Ladinsky, Irina Odoevtseva, Nikolai Otsup, and Anatoly Shteiger. Symbolism, the poetic background against which both Soviet and émigré poetry developed, had taken on an eschatological tone even before 1917. And when the tsarist governm ent finally collapsed and so many refugees from the "Russian Pompeii” (a phrase coined by Sasha Chêrny) found themselves scattered abroad, there was a feeling that their mission in exile was to preserve the memory of a doomed heritage. The basic thrust of the movement thus had its roots more in a philosophy of life than in an interest in poetic form (a feature which led to a rift between its chief prophet, Georgy Adamovich, and Khodasevich, who laid greater emphasis on style). The belief was that the poet should avoid radical experimentation and aspire to sim plicity by working with such so-called "eternal” themes as life, God, love, and death. Behind all these concepts loomed a consciousness of irrevocable catastrophe, of the collapse of culture. Boris Zaitsev saw the striving toward the "eternal and the spiritual” as a consequence of the loss of the native soil in which Russian culture had been rooted, while Yury Terapiano wrote that the vicissitudes of émigré existence had brought about a disenchantm ent with the "irresponsible word games” of past poetic traditions:
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Contem porary man is im poverished and naked because he has a conscience. If he so desired, he could still drape him self in a ll m anner o f verbal garments, ju s t as well as people did before, selecting colors and shades according to his own tastes; but he has no such desire. It seems to me that the exercise o f w ill amounts to the denial o f external glitter; this impoverishment, this will to survive loneliness is the m ost significant acquisition o f the new generation, and we m ust hope that the best o f the young poets and prose writers w ill not be tem pted b y the cheap success achieved by pandering to the crowd.... Through poverty and hunger, through isolation and loneliness, in a culture which is alien and strange to us (despite any ”continuities o f culture,” Louvres, and Dresden Museums) a few young people hoped to bring home an unextinguished sm all flam e: two o r three lines, a few words in which they hoped would be reflected that which is m ost im portant in life, in which would be expressed the inexpressible, in which would be revealed a new, unique m usic which had never before been heard. Adamovich (1892-1972) came to exert considerable influence over the younger poets who had not yet published much while they were still in Russian He believed that if the artist was to achieve anything of lasting value, he had to search out those themes which had concerned all men in all times. W hile Adamovich did not believe that literature should serve as a vehicle for social change, as advocated by Marxist critics, he laid heavy stress on the affective power of the written word to deepen the individual's sensitivity. The writer, he maintained, must first of all express his own inner self. The principle of freedom of personality had to take precedence over the accidental circumstances of history. A t the
■Adamovich’s collaboration with various ém igré magazines reads like a catalogue of periodicals of the period. H e began to write for the new literary review Zveno (Link) as its chief literary critic, and then switched to Poslednie novosti in 1928, when Zveno ceased publication. Other periodicals to which he contributed included: Blagonamerennyi (The W ell-Intentioned), Chisla (Num bers), Novyi korabl' (The New Ship), lllyustrirovannaya Rossiya (Illustrated Russia), Novaya gazeta (The New G azette), Vstrechi (Encounters), Russkie zapiski (Russian Annals), Novosel'e (Housewarm ing), Sovrem ennye zapiski (Contemporary Annals), Opyty (Experim ents), Vozdushnye puti (Aerial W ays), Novoe russkoe slovo (The New Russian W ord), Novyi zhum al (The New Review), and Mosty (Bridges). He also contributed to Russkie novosti (Russian News), a pro-Soviet publication that appeared after the end of World W ar II.
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same time, he promoted the moral message of art, believing that even in Soviet literature all the truly valuable works had posed one and the same question to the reader: "How shall we live?” The artist, in Adamovich's view, should view sincerity, truthfulness, and high seriousness as essential features of art, which should not be a verbal, form alistic game but a sincere statem ent of the author to the reader. Literature was of value only if the author had som ething to say. Adamovich opposed the exaggerated use of metaphor, eloquence for its own sake, picturesque or ornam ental imagery, and "modernism" in general. He preferred blank to rhymed verse, because he considered it less artificial and because it created fewer artificial barriers between artist and reader and thus promoted the general com m unicative function of art. In his view, Lev Tolstoi, Aleksandr Blok, and Innokenty Annensky were models of absolute sincerity, and he was frequently critical of what he considered an excessive preoccupation with literary frills in the works of such figures as Bely, Pilnyak, Babel', Severyanin, Tsvetaeva, Mayakovsky, Nabokov, and the early Pasternak. Adamovich's basically negative attitude toward Nabokov is illustrative of his position. He praised Nabokov as an "exceptional w riter,” "an unusual phenomenon,” but in the same breath questioned whether "this constant, insistent striving to amaze” was meaningful. And he was critical of Nabokov for failing to concern him self with moral issues: [W e see here] a feature o f Nabokov’s a rt which is very un-Russian: a lack o f concern with "sim plicity and truth” in the Tolstoian sense o f those words, o r at the very least an elem ent o f bravado, a slippery quality, an absence o f pauses and inner movements, the rubbery, soundless litheness o f style, the coldly castrated, childishly im pudent taste, the infantile selfconfident and im perturbable coloring o f his writings. Nabokov, he wrote, had created an empty world in an essentially amoral fashion and approached the eternal them e of death with the "indifference ... of a fish.”3 Ultimately, it is sad to realize that the most influential émigré critic spent so much of his tim e attacking the most talented émigré prose w riter and the most talented émigré p o e t— Marina Tsvetaeva. Adamovich never did realize a goal which he had set for him self for years — the creation of a collection of émigré writings, a so-called Golden Book.
•The animosity between Adamovich and Nabokov w as mutual. In his The G ift (D ar) Nabokov satirized Adamovich in the figure of "Christopher Mortus."
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Anatoly Shtelger (1907-1944), who was of Swiss descent and settled in that country as a Swiss citizen, created some exquisite m iniatures in the style of the "Parisian Note.” He is unusual (but not alone) in the generally puritanical context of Russian literature in that he wrote homosexual verse3: H ow can I shout, to be heard in that prison, Beyond those ramparts, through those walls, That not everyone has betrayed him, That he is not abandoned, alone in the world? I dream ed that I broke in to see you, S at on your bed and held you in m y arms. (Though he's long lost the habit, surely, O f tenderness and soft, fam iliar words.) Yet friendship exists, it really exists, A nd tenderness o f male for male as w e ll... It is not obligation, but particular nobility To say so, with unwavering eyes. From Prague, Al'fred Bern summed up his own critical attitude toward the Parisian Note: M uted intonations, perplexed-questioning phraseology, the unexpected aphorism which fits precisely into the last line o r two o f the poem, a perpetually parenthetical mode o f expression, the forced sim plicity o f language, and fragmented syntax — such is the repertoire o f this "diary" poetry. Having developed a literary manner, the poetry o f intim acy and sim plicity inevitably self-destructs, for its entire meaning lay in breaking free o f literary posing; more than that, it strove not to be literature a t all. The struggle with "prettiness” and literary convention led "diary" poetry down the very worst path — that o f artificiality, mannerism, and pose. Georgy Ivanov (1894-1958) escaped the constrictions of the Parisian Note through irony, that is, by actually mocking the form er "eternal” themes. One of the most popular poets in exile, he began his literary career with a brief flirtation with "Ego-Futurism” and then as a m ember of the Acm eist group in Petersburg. His style continued to evolve, and in the last decade of his life he was able to slough off all
■Marina Tsvetaeva fell in love with Shteiger, but she herself wrote som e lesbian verse, as also did Sofiya Parnok (1885-1993).
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the aestheticism and refinem ent of his Petersburg period while retaining the technical mastery he had acquired so early in his career. O f all the émigré poets, the sardonic Ivanov was one of the more successful in transcending the "exquisite clarity” of Acmeism: Now our daily bread is potassium cyanide, M ercuric chloride our drink. No matter. We g o t used to it, we grew accustomed, A nd did not go out o f our minds. Quite the contrary even — we resist evil In this senselessly wicked world. In a sepulchral waltz, tender couples W hirl a t the émigré ball. In 1938 Ivanov published The Decay o f the Atom (Raspad atoma), a slender volume reflecting his isolation and loneliness in the pre-war period and his longing for love and intimacy. Many of the reflections are intended to shock the reader, such as a phantasized act of necrophilia, which symbolized his sense of life and art. Ivanov wrote that he wanted to speak to his soul in simple words — the language of the acmeists, from whom he had learned his art — but that life had taken him too far from that form er ideal. Truth was only in the present — this day, this hour, this fleeting moment. Life as such was meaningless: ... Its spiral is flung deep into eternity, carrying everything with it: cigarette butts, sunsets, toenail clippings and the d irt under those nails, world-shaking ideas, the blood spilled for those ideas, hem orrhoidal blood, blood from festering sores, birdcherry blossoms, stars, innocence, sew er pipes, cancer tumors, the commandments o f bliss, irony, Alpine snow, a M inister who signed the Treaty o f Versailles flies while singing " Germany m ust pay.” The pus has congealed on his sharp teeth, and the rat poison glim m ers through the walls o f his stomach. In many ways Ivanov was a controversial, even som ewhat scandalous figure. His memoirs, Petersburg W inters (Peterburgskie zimy), bordered on the fictional, and during W orld W ar II he declared he would "prefer to be the chief of police in [German-occupied) Smolensk to editing a literary magazine in a Soviet Smolensk.” O ther younger writers, regardless of their attitude toward the Parisian Note, ultim ately became dissatisfied with their own work and began to seek out new forms. Nina Berberova saw the search for manner giving birth to a new ideology:
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The new a rt o f the period brought me jo y precisely in its renewal. O ur tragedy, the tragedy o f a ll the younger émigré writers, was rooted in the absence o f a style, in the im possibility o f any stylistic renewal. N either I nor m y contem poraries could have a style. Nabokov alone in his genius brought with him a renewal o f style. It was not the question o f topics o r language which proved to be decisive for émigré literature; rather it was the question o f style. The "older” writers frankly adm itted that they had no need for a renewal o f style; they had ready-made forms which they continued to use and whose obsolescence they attem pted to ignore. "There can be no renewal o f ideas without a renewal o f style,” said Châteaubriand. We brought nothing new to literature, either in sentence structure o r in lexicon. In fact, the predominance of the Parisian Note as a movement has been exaggerated; poets of the period were far from unified in their creative method. Such figures as the Symbolist Konstantin Bal'mont, the classicist Vladislav Khodasevich, the phantasmagorical Boris Poplavsky, M arina Tsvetaeva with her startling verbal experimen tations, and Dovid Knut with his exotic but nostalgic longings for Jewish life often had little in common with the sim plicity of an Adamovich or a Shteiger. The conservativism of the Parisian Note was not limited to Paris, or even Europe. The 1925 verse collection From Am erica (Iz Ameriki) by Vladim ir ll'yashenko, Georgy Golokhvastov, Dmitry Magula, and Evgeniya Khristiani was quite lyrical in nature and would have fit quite well into that tradition. The author of the brief preface, A. I. Nazarov, w ent out of his way to denounce Futurism, so popular in Russia at the tim e. The émigrés clung tenaciously to the grand tradition of 19th-century Russian literature, and so their political ideology and aesthetic theory dovetailed almost perfectly.
Experimenters Is there any thing whereof it m ay be said, See, this is new? it hath been already o f old time, which was before us. Old Testament: Ecclesiastes, i, 10 M arina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) emigrated to Berlin in 1922 and then moved on to Prague that same year, where she and her husband spent three relatively bucolic years while receiving a stipend from the Czech governm ent. In 1925 the fam ily left for Paris. Although she had
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already written im portant poetry before emigrating, the greater part of her writing was accomplished in exile. Tsvetaeva's ecstatic identification with the forces of life, the powerful driving rhythm of her lines, her ability to dip into the reservoir of folk poetry, and the comprehensiveness and intensity of her themes and manner made her an absolutely unique, even startling talent; there was no way she could fit into the "Parisian Note." Adamovich conceded that some of Tsvetaeva's highly idiosyncratic verse was "incom parable,” but he saw no way that other poets could profit from her example. In the U.S.S.R. Gor'ky went even further, claim ing she was "hysterical” and "controlled by the word rather than controlling it.” He even faulted her for a weak command of Russian. In the émigré world Tsvetaeva felt herself not only unappreciated, but generally "hated.” Part of this perception was som ewhat exaggerated — at least at first. She was, for example, published in almost every other issue of the leading émigré journal of the day, Sovremennye zapiski, but it is true that she received far less critical attention from émigré critics than she deserved. Her estrangem ent was deepened when the first issue of the Eurasian journal Vërsty (Versts) appeared under the tutelage of Dmitry Svyatopolk-Mirsky, who later was to return to the Soviet Union, and many of her fellow émigrés began to look upon her as pro-Soviet. The actions of Tsvetaeva's husband Sergei Èfron compromised her totally. It was discovered that Èfron, an active member of the movement to repatriate émigrés to the Soviet Union, had been an agent of the GPU and had helped track down the Soviet agent Ignaty Reiss (who had actually defected and whose real name was Poretsky), as well as Trotsky's son Andrei Sedov, and had directed the assassination of both men. He is also rumored to have participated in the kidnappings of Generals M iller and Kutepov. The portrait of this idealistic actor, poet, editor, secret agent, would-be monk and real-life henchman remains a mystery to this day. The w riter Vladim ir Varshavsky left us a description of him: I became a Eurasian. I was converted by a form er White officer who was later a student. Tall, with huge Byzantine eyes, this uncommon m an was o f half-Jewish origin. His whole life was one o f selfless service to the cause o f Russia and Truth. I did not quite understand the Eurasian teachings, but when he told me that the Eurasians wanted to build everything on Christianity, I believed him a t once. I believed that Eurasianism stood for that highest Truth to which Russia had always aspired. Later on, this man was converted to Bolshevism . When someone asked him what had happened to his Christianity, he replied that communism was also a religion.
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Having adopted this faith, he stopped reasoning and in the name o f the one true teaching was ready to sacrifice his own life and the lives o f others. When Èfron fled to Spain to escape arrest, Tsvetaeva found herself ostracized by the émigrés, who refused to believe that she had been ignorant of her husband's activities. Tsvetaeva's political circumstances were interwoven with the classic émigré disease — poverty. The responsibilities involved in raising a fam ily were overwhelming in her circumstances. Even after Èfron's subsequent flight to Moscow, Tsvetaeva continued to accept money from the Soviet Consulate. As her daughter Alya grew up, she came to share her father's political views and worked for a French com m unist newspaper. As early as 1931 Tsvetaeva wrote to her Czech friend Anna Teskova that everything was pushing her back to Russia, but she could not imagine herself going there. In the W est she was superfluous; in Russia — impossible. Five years later her situation had become even more desperate: M y dear Anna Antonovna, do you happen to know a good soothsayer in Prague? If I don't find one, I w o n t know what to do. Everything revolves around the question: to go o r not to go? (And if we do go, then forever.) To sum things up, Sergei Yakovlevich, Alya, and M ur [ Tsvetaeva's husband and two children] definitely want to go. A ll around us we see the danger o f war, revolutions, and general catastrophic events. I c a n t stay here alone. The émigrés d o n t like m e; I've been driven out o f Poslednie novosti; no one will publish me a t all. The Parisian patronesses hate me because o f m y independent character. Tsvetaeva became infatuated with the critic Mark Slonim, but he rejected her. On November 19,1924, the day of Slonim's marriage to a young Czech woman, she poured out her fury in verse: Yesterday he lay a t m y feet, Swore he w ouldnt give me up For a ll o f China. B ut then his hands unclenched, A nd life fell from them like a rusty kopeck. Unloved, frightened, a m urderer o f children, I stand accused. B ut even in Hell I will say to you: nM y love, how have I wronged you?”
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I'll ask the table, the chair: " Why; for what reason do I suffer?” He's through kissing ... me. Now others respond. He taught me to live in fire ... A nd threw me on an icy steppe. Tell me ju s t one thing, m y love: "How have I wronged you?” There's no need to shake a tree; A ripe apple picks its own time ... Forgive me — fo r everything. ”M y love, how have I wronged you?” 4
Despite numerous vows never to return, she did in fact go back to Russia for good in 1939, following her husband just as she had followed him out of Russia in 1922, even though she did not know if he was alive or dead. In 1941 she was evacuated to the small town of Elabuga when the Germans were already approaching Moscow. W hile on her way there she wrote to the W riters’ Union requesting employment as a literary translator, since she had no other profession. She never received an answer, but the letter was later found with the words written across it: "Attach to file.” Ten days after arriving in Elabuga she committed suicide by hanging herself, and her poetry was not published in the Soviet Union for many years thereafter. Two weeks later Èfron was executed as a foreign spy. The First Secretary of the Soviet W riters' Union, Konstantin Fedin, and the poet Nikolai Aseev, another émigré who had returned home, had been in nearby Chistopol' when Tsvetaeva committed suicide, and she had visited Aseev a few days before her death — evidently in hopes of receiving some assistance. A quarter of a century later the critic Viktoriya Shveitser wrote an essay for the chief Soviet literary journal N ovyi m ir (New W orld) about a pilgrimage she had undertaken to Elabuga and about Tsvetaeva's death. The essay had already been set in type when Fedin wrote to Novyi mir, demanding that publication be stopped: "How long,” he wrote, "must we bear the burden of this guilt?” In the words of the poet and literary critic Yury Terapiano, Boris Poplavsky (1903-1935) was "the first and last Russian Surrealist.” He was a member of the so-called "younger generation,” and against the stark and decorous background of the "Parisian Note,” his hyperboles, fantastic images, and impressionism show the indisputable im print of Rimbaud and Apollinaire:
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Below; m ilky land glistens. A train belching sparks is clearly visible. A pattern o f rivers ornam ents the fields, and over there is the sea, its waters waist-deep. Raising their tails like aeroplanes, our pilots are gaining altitude, and we fly o ff to Venus — but not the one that wrecks the charts o f our life. A m otionless blue mountain, like a nose. Glassy lakes in the shadow o f mountains. Joy, like a tray, shakes us. We head for a landing, our lights fading out. W hy are these fires burning on the bright sun's surface? No, already they cry and whisper — They are dragonfly people, they are butterflies as light as tears and no stronger than a flower. Toads like fa t mushrooms come galloping, carrots buck and rear and quiver, and along with them toothed plants that cast no shadow are reaching for u s * Poplavsky was only 32 when he died. An acquaintance had invited him to experiment with drugs. Poplavsky turned up at the agreed tim e and place, and the two were found dead the following morning. A few days later a woman who knew the acquaintance published a letter the man had written to her on the very day he and Poplavsky died. The man wrote that he wanted to commit suicide, but being afraid to die alone, had decided to take someone with him. Igor' Severyanin (pseudonym of Igor' Lotarëv, 1887-1941) was a poet who liked nothing better than to shock his readers. In 1915, while so many other young men were being sent to their deaths at the front, he published a collection entitled Pineapples in Champagne (Ananasy v shampanskom). Like his fellow Futurists, he rejected the classic Russian writers and decked his own verse with outlandish neologisms and elaborate verbal and rhythmic experimentation. In 1918 Severyanin emigrated to Estonia, which had been recognized as a separate nation, and adopted Estonian citizenship. Lionized before
■Translation by Emmett Jarrett and Dick Lourie.
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1917, he fell upon hard tim es as an émigré but even so refused to heed a 1922 missive from the fem ininist author and Soviet official Aleksandra Kollontai to return home. He remained in Estonia until the country was occupied by Soviet troops and in 1940 published some poems in the Soviet journals Krasnaya nov' (Red Virgin Soil) and Ogonëk (Flame), welcoming the annexation of his second homeland by his first — an act of betrayal which did him no good since he died the next year. His grave stone reads: How lovely, how fresh will be the roses Tossed by m y country into m y coffin! (Kak khoroshi, kak svezhi budut rozy m oei strany mne broshennye v grob!) 4
Ironically, it was only outside Russia that Severyanin developed his talents to the full.
Independents Plunge your heart into this apple tree, O ur days float to the ground — like leaves. Aleksandr Vertinsky Competing with Adamovich was the influential critic and poet Vladislav Khodasevich (1886-1939). Khodasevich em igrated in 1922 and lived in Berlin, Prague, and Rome before settling in Paris in 1925. For a tim e he was married to Nina Berberova and lived with her in Gor'ky's house in Sorrento. A more or less established poet before emigrating, Khodasevich began his career as an epigone of Symbolism with four published collections of verse to his credit before leaving Russia; as an émigré he reaped numerous accolades, the most exaggerated of which was Nabokov's claim that he was "the greatest Russian poet that the 20th century has yet produced.” By the late 1920s Khodasevich had largely ceased to compose verse and had devoted himself to criticism and biography (his book on Derzhavin is recognized as a classic study). He disapproved of Adamovich's prescriptions for replacing art with "human docum ents,” however sincere they might be. His poetic practices were consistent with this approach, devoted as they were to the ideal of culture and displaying relatively little concern with his own personal experiences. Dovid Knut (pseudonym of David Fiksman, 1900-1955) was a poet who not only felt his Jewish roots strongly, but possessed a gift
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for introducing a truly biblical, exotic grandeur into Russian verse; his poetry has a poignant charm in its nostalgia for Jewish Odessa: W hat can I tell you o f Palestine? I rem em ber deserted Sedzhera, The orange cloud o f the Khamsin, The dignified voice o f an Astrakhan Ger, The narrow insulted back o f a m urdered Shom er boy. A haughty cam el a t the watering trough, The peyas o f mute Zaddiks from Tsfat, The dry sky o f a hungry eternity Hovering over the world's doom ed childhood, The sm ooth endless tombstones O f the Josephate's insane dead, A nd a g irl nam ed Judith Who waited for a long time, Waving a tanned hand after me. Knut was married to Ariadna Skryabina (Scriabin), daughter of the composer. When the war broke out, Knut helped to organize the Jewish resistance. Supposedly, Ariadna was captured while accompanying a group of Jewish children and shot on the spot by French collaborationists. Knut, who had been close to Zhabotinsky in the 1930s, emigrated to Palestine in 1949, where he began to write in Hebrew. Aleksandr Vertinsky (1889-1957) had already become popular as a singer and actor before being evacuated from the Crimea in 1919 and evidently opened a restaurant in Constantinople called La Rose noire. Abroad he was beloved as a cabaret singer, often using his own verse as lyrics. For a quarter of a century he toured Europe, China, and the United States, singing poignantly of a lost homeland and in no hurry to hand him self over to Stalin's Spartan utopia, which was so out of keeping with all his sensibilities and even his exaggerated ancien régim e speech with its French “r’s” and nasal vowels: I rem em ber the night, you r eyes, blue from eyeliner, the diam ond o f your tear as it slid into the wine glass.
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I rem em ber a past moment, your blouses — white on the armchairs, the day — gray and em pty after you left, and your parrot grieving in the corner. It kept shrieking "jam ais” and crying in French. Drawn by the exotic surroundings of Shanghai and its Russian community, Vertinsky settled there and attempted, unsuccessfully, to open a nightclub, The Gardenia, and saw him self lost in an indifferent and even hostile world. During W orld W ar II he left the "neon city” to return to the Soviet Union and published a surprisingly hostile memoir of his émigré years. It is hard not to believe that parts of the book were inserted by a government-imposed ghost writer. A t one point Vertinsky tells of meeting the ballet dancers Tam ara Karsavina and Pêtr Vladim irov in W arsaw: Karsavina was silent. The tears stream ed down her cheeks. "W hat do you think, Sasha,” she asked me, "w ill we ever return to our Hom eland?” Having been twice denied perm ission to return, I no longer believed it was possible. Still, I didn't want to hurt her. "If we earn the right,” I answered in a serious tone. "B ut how can we earn it? ” "W e m ust prove our love fo r the Hom eland.” "Prove it? B ut how?” "W e m ust think only o f h e rl We m ust wake up and fall asleep with her name on our lips. Do you understand? A nd even in these conditions, surrounded by strangers, glorify and exalt her nam e!” We fell silent. "If I could only go back to the theater!” she said, “Even as a costume g irl o r cashier in the ticket booth.” "I'd be willing to go as an usher,” Vladimirov attem pted to joke. No one smiled. The candles were being extinguished. The m usicians were putting away their instruments. The piano was being covered with som ething black, as if it were a corpse. It was inexpressibly sad.... I kissed her hand and we parted.
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The Realists Real are the dreams o f the Gods, and sm oothly pass Their pleasures in a long im m ortal dream. John Keats Even as Vertinsky, Karsavina, and Vladimirov were supposed to have craved so piously to return home, the Soviet authorities in both theory and practice were busy demolishing the favorite theory of the Formalist critics — that art was an aesthetic system independent from life: Pilnyak and Gumilëv were shot, Mayakovsky and Esenin com m itted suicide, and the truly massive terror of the late 1930s was close at hand. Socialist Realism was being hailed as the only perm issible literary tradition, and literary dissent, which was now equated with political dissent, had become a mortally dangerous enterprise. Although Socialist Realism in the U.S.S.R. was prim arily a product of political coercion, the prominent role of realism in Russian émigré literature — from Bunin and Kuprin to Solzhenitsyn and Maksimov — derived partly from a desire to hold on to tradition in a hostile new world and partly from nostalgia for a Russia of the past. The prom inent role of memoirs in émigré literature has at least some of its roots in this fram e of mind. The older generation of émigré writers brought with them the grand tradition of Russian realism — even though realism was already in decline in Russia itself by 1917. Ivan Bunin (1870-1953) had travelled extensively abroad before 1917. In 1918 he left Moscow for Odessa, where he edited the newspaper Nashe slovo (Our W ord). When the Red Army occupied the Crimea in 1920 he was evacuated to Istanbul by ship, and from there left for France. It was a typical émigré "itinerary.” On November 9, 1933, Bunin became the first Russian to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. The fact that he was an émigré and not a Soviet writer was viewed not only as a recognition of his own writing, but as a legitimation of Russian émigré literature in general. The award marked a high-water mark for Russian émigré letters, marred only by the indignity of a strip search by German customs officers when he travelled to Sweden to collect the prize. Bunin was not a kind judge of his contemporaries. He represented the grand tradition of Russian literature, and he had no use for either the Futurism of Mayakovsky or the fantasies of Remizov. Such feelings were often mutual; Marina Tsvetaeva in a letter dated November 24,1933, wrote that she would sit on the stage, since to not attend would be the equivalent of protest; she was not protesting, but she did disagree. Both Merezhkovsky and Gor'ky, she felt, deserved
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the prize much more than Bunin, whose influence was negligible compared to theirs. Uncomfortable as the Soviet government was over the fact that the only Russian Nobel laureate in literature was an émigré, it nevertheless attempted to find some common ground with him after the end of W orld W ar II; after Bunin's death Konstantin Fedin, the head of the Soviet W riters’ Union, even spread the rumor that Bunin had secretly received a Soviet passport. Bunin did visit the Soviet embassy after the close of W orld W ar II, and it is not impossible that he toyed with the idea of accepting citizenship, but in fact this never occurred. In 1966 Konstantin Simonov admitted that the rumor was an invention: In the fall o f 1946 Bunin had already come out against us in a rather hostile fashion. It seems to me that certain prefaces and articles leave out this fact. Bunin's last book o f memoirs, published in Paris in 1950, is very bad, in m y opinioh ... and is full o f cheap, vicious anti-Soviet statem ents.... This was his last blow against us, delivered in his feeble old age. It is sim ply not perm issible to pretend that he returned to us in his later years. During the so-called ‘Thaw ” following the death of Stalin, the Soviets actually began to publish many of Bunin's works, albeit with considerable cuts by the censor, and these editions were sold in the hundreds of thousands of copies in the U.S.S.R. In the West, however, even the Nobel Prize was not enough to gain any appreciable popularity for Bunin. Western bookstores carry Dostoevsky, Pasternak, and Solzhenitsyn, but Bunin's books are rarely in evidence. A man of a different age, Bunin now receives only lip service as a w riter (unlike Lev Tolstoi, who was a sort of cult figure for Bunin). Bunin's art is a sort of minimalism, and the subtle understatement he practiced was swept aside by an action-oriented age. W hile Bunin's prodigious memory enabled him to write about Russia for decades after he had left his native land, Aleksandr Kuprin (1870-1938) seemed to wither away as a writer in exile. He had fled Soviet Russia in 1919 and lived abroad, chiefly in Paris. "Russian m ilitant communism,” he wrote, "was the most negative, most infinitely evil phenomenon of world history.” In 1937, however, on the eve of the great purges, his daughter took him home to Russia, seriously ill and drinking heavily. Soviet disclaimers to the contrary, he was evidently either senile or a stroke had rendered him incapable of understanding what was happening around him. He died the following year. In the difficult post-1917 years Maksim Gor'ky (pseudonym of Aleksei Peshkov, 1868-1936) enjoyed a great deal of influence with the authorities and helped many writers, either in a material sense or by literally saving their lives. In 1921 he emigrated again and settled in Sorrento, Italy in 1924, clearly tormented by the necessity of taking a
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position vis-à-vis the Soviet regime. When he learned in 1923 that the works of Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer, Ruskin, Nietzsche, Taine, Vladim ir Solov'êv, and Lev Tolstoi were to be withdrawn from Soviet public libraries, he wrote to Khodasevich: I w o n t believe it till I've seen the "index” with m y own eyes. B ut m y first reaction was so strong that I began writing a letter to M oscow saying that I was renouncing m y Soviet citizenship. W hat can I do if that bestiality proves to be true? If you only knew how painful m y m oral situation is l It was during this émigré period that Gor'ky wrote the novel The Artam onov Business (Delo Artamonovykh) and began the epic novel which he viewed as the culmination of his life's work: The Life o f Klim Samgin (Zhizn' Klima Samgina), which was an attack on liberal intellectuals who opposed the revolution. His relations with other émigré writers, many of whom regarded him as an opportunist and others as only a "semi-emigrant,” were less than cordial. In a letter to Fedin he wrote: I am am azed and alm ost horrified to see how men who only yesterday were "cultured” are now rotting away. Zaitsev writes m ediocre books on the lives o f the saints, Shm elëv is so hysterical as to be unbearable, Kuprin drinks instead o f writing, and Bunin rewrites The Kreutzer Sonata under the title o f Mitya's Love. Aldanov also apes Tolstoi. I will not even speak o f M erezhkovsky and Gippius. You cannot imagine how hard it is to have to note a ll this. W hen Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the murderous head of the CHEKA, died in 1926, Gor'ky wrote an official letter bemoaning his loss. In 1928 and 1929 he was persuaded to visit the Soviet Union, and he finally returned to Russia in 1931, evidently concerned that he might actually be forgotten in his native land. "Émigré intellectuals,” he wrote on June 12, 1931, "spread slander about Soviet Russia, fom ent plots, and in general, behave basely; most of these intellectuals are Samgins.” His form er friend Bunin fell out with him, and Tat'yana Aleksinskaya published a devastating attack upon him in Le Journal des Débats. W hat post did he take among the Bol'sheviks? That o f supreme corrupter o f the intellectuals. He was appointed "D irector o f the Literary Section o f State Publications.” He had exclusive control o f literary publishing and he became the distributor o f subsidies to starving writers. Those who were willing to work with him could live, the others could only die o f starvation. But, unfortunately, that was not all. Gor'ky proclaim ed his sym pathy with the Bol'sheviks in cases where an elem entary feeling o f self-respect should have made him keep silent. When a young revolutionary, revolted by Bol'shevik
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tyranny, tried to kill Lenin, G or’k y prostrated him self before the dictator with a message o f servile congratulations. When, in Petrograd, a young socialist student killed the bloodthirsty Uritsky, the Bol'sheviks took vengeance that same night by slaughtering 900 hostages and political prisoners in Petrograd prisons.* A fte r that m onstrous crime, G or'ky attended a m eeting o f the Petrograd Soviet am ong the m embers o f its presidium, including the professional m urderer Zinov'ev, the Red murderer, Zorin, and other drinkers o f Russian blood.... To us Russians, G or'ky is one o f those who are m orally and politically responsible for the great calam ities that the Bol'shevik regim e has brought upon our country. Years w ill pass, but he will never be forgotten. In the show trials of 1938 two doctors "confessed” to having murdered Gor'ky through improper treatm ent. One of them, a Dr. Pletnêv, later told a fellow prisoner that Stalin had sent Gor'ky a box of poisoned chocolates, and that Gor'ky and two of his nurses had died from eating them. It was a finale that Gor'ky never imagined when he originally uttered his famous: "He who is not with us is against us.” Stalin had attacked Gor'ky in 1917 in what now, in retrospect, seems an altogether sinister tone: The Russian Revolution has overthrown m any authorities. Its pow er is evident in its unwillingness to bow down before "big nam es." Either it took them into its service o r cast them out into non-being when they did not wish to learn from it. There exists an entire roster o f "big nam es” later rejected by the revolution: Plekhanov, Kropotkin, Breshkovskaya, Zasulich, and generally a ll those old revolutionaries who were rem arkable only in that they were "o ld.” We fear that the laurels o f those "pillars” disturb Gor'ky's sleep. We are afraid that G or'ky is drawn in a "d e a th !/' fashion [quotation m arks b y Stalin] to jo in them in the archives. To each his ow n! The revolution is incapable o f either pitying o r burying its dead. The "father of Socialist Realism” must ultim ately be judged as a w riter of very mixed achievement. His best writings were his perceptive literary memoirs of fellow writers and a sensitive
aMoisei Uritsky, who as head of the Petrograd Cheka had conducted a policy of massive terror in the city, w as assassinated by Leonid Kannegiser, student and poet, on August 30, 1918, in revenge for the execution of a friend. Kannegiser's act reflected the conviction of earlier revolutionaries that state leaders responsible for crimes should be held personally responsible for their acts.
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autobiographical trilogy — Childhood, In the World, and M y Universities, of which volumes 1 and 3 were produced in emigration. The prose and plays of Semën Yushkevich (1868-1927), a melodramatic chronicler of the difficult life of the Jewish working class, were very much in harmony with Gor'ky's approach to literature. Thus, it was only natural that Gor'ky's publishing house Znanie (Knowledge) was the chief outlet for his work before the revolution of 1905. By the end of the 1910's, however, Yushkevich had become disenchanted with Gor'ky's revolutionary ideals and when in 1920 he was reduced to selling his personal possessions to pay for daily essentials, he decided he had finally had enough and fled across the Romanian border to Paris, where he had studied medicine from 1893 to 1902. Having brought with him some pictures of the artist Isaak Levitan, he was able to sell them and so avoid the financial misery experienced by so many of his émigré colleagues. In 1921 Yushkevich decided to try his luck in America, and upon getting off the boat in New York, the first thing he saw was a poster advertising an unauthorized performance of his own play, Taie o f Mr. Sonkin (Povest' o gospodine Son'kine). New York fascinated him, and in the story Am erichka he described it through one of his characters as a place where you could find anything — cholera and communism, scoundrels and happiness. After three years, however, he decided to return to Europe, but did later make a last visit to the New W orld. In Europe he led a somewhat peripatetic life, moving to Berlin at the height of the inflation, and attempted unsuccessfully to found a theater in Paris. He continued to publish in Paris and Berlin, but at the same tim e began to look into the possibility of returning to the Soviet Union. W hen in 1922 the Soviet publishing house Moskva reissued his three-volum e 1911 novel Leon Drei, the editors of the YMCA Press, whose galleys had been used for the edition, were so outraged that they bought up the entire print run and had it burned — an event that caused some consternation among his fellow writers, who were concerned with the issue of artistic freedom. When Yushkevich died in 1927, Pravda published a laudatory obituary. A realist and adm irer of Gor'ky, Mikhail Artsybashev (18781927) eventually went on to devote his prose and plays to the themes of sex and violence and became an im portant figure in the neonaturalist movement in the first decade of the 20th century. As tim e passed, his innate pessimism and penchant for shock effects became even more pronounced, and he wrote increasingly of death. Artsybashev's most popular work was the 1907 novel Sanin, in which the protagonist displays a supreme disregard for the rights of others and devotes him self to a violent hedonism. Bishop Germogen threatened Artsybashev with excommunication, and the Church Synod
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instituted court proceedings against him for pornography and blasphemy. His lawyer refused to defend him, and prom inent writers such as Bunin and Leonid Andreev refused to be published by any m agazine w hich also accepted his w orks. The term artsybashevshchina even appeared, indicating a literary preference for sexual topics combined with social indifference. In 1923 Artsybashev emigrated to Warsaw, where together with Dmitry Filosofov he edited Za svobodu! (For Freedom!). His émigré works include: The W ild Ones (Dikie) and a play, The Devil (D'yavol). Artsybashev adopted Soviet citizenship and died in Warsaw. Mikhail Osorgin (pseudonym of Mikhail ll'in, 1878-1942) had been active in the Social Revolutionary Party before 1917 and later frankly described how he had helped conceal an im portant terrorist in the organization. He was arrested and sentenced to death in 1905, but the sentence was rescinded in 1906, and he was soon able to flee to Helsinki and thence to Italy. There he lived in a sort of commune near Genoa and became a journalist. He returned to Russia in 1916 and contributed regularly to left-wing publications. He was critical of the Soviet governm ent and became a member of the All-Russian Famine Relief Committee. Lenin felt that the Committee was hostile to the governm ent and ordered its members arrested. Held in the basem ent of Moscow's Lubyanka Prison (the notorious "Ship of Death”), Osorgin was sentenced to be shot, but when American President Hoover and Fridtjof Nansen protested, his sentence was commuted. Osorgin was one of the large group of intellectuals deported to the W est in September 1922. There he continued his journalistic activities, but at first worked for Aleksander Kerensky, the form er head of the Provisional Government, who employed him as an editor in his newspaper D ni (Days). Kerensky's political views were further to the right than those of Milyukov’s more liberal Poslednie novosti, and Osorgin's leftist views (he even kept his Soviet citizenship), combined with his increasing collaboration with Poslednie novosti, induced Kerensky to challenge him to declare which side of the barriers he stood on: was Osorgin prepared to continue the struggle against the Soviet regime, or did he wish to be reconciled with it? Osorgin responded that October 1917 was a logical consequence of the February Revolution; that a government run by Kerensky m ight be a lesser evil than the Soviet government, but nevertheless an evil; that the émigré press reflected chiefly the émigré community's hatred and so distorted the real Russia that the appearance of such publications could arouse only amazement, pity, and boredom; and that Kerensky's m indset was alien and irrelevant to Russia. At that point Kerensky accused Osorgin, not inaccurately, of being an anarchist and, having published his response together with Osorgin's statement, announced
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that he would never again repeat the error of permitting Osorgin to publish in Dni. Passions ran high, but in 1927 Kerensky rehired Osorgin as editor of the literary page of Dni. Named for a street in Moscow, Osorgin's 1928 novel Sivtsev vrazhek (English title: Quiet Street) is a kaleidoscopic replication of the early Soviet period. The work is a multi-generational chronicle of a fam ily representing the intelligentsia: there is the figure of the old professor engrossed in his ornithology, his granddaughter, with whom all the young men fall in love, and the epic alternation of eternal nature with the frantic cares and anxieties of a society undergoing major upheaval. The granddaughter falls in love with a man who was an émigré before 1917. Disgusted with the new society, this former revolutionary finds himself sharing an apartment with a government executioner. The latter, who is perpetually drunk, takes solace in treating his neighbor to the special rations and liquor paid him for plying his trade. Eventually the revolutionary is brought to him to be executed and tells him impatiently to get it over with. Later, when asked by his wife to slaughter a pig, the executioner hysterically pumps the animal full of bullets. Eventually, the executioner himself dies after an operation. This short novel is a mosaic of 86 mini-chapters, the last of which are set in the house on Sivtsev Vrazhek, where the girl and her grandfather talk of the swallows returning in the spring.
Exaggerated Prose N or can one word be chang’d but fo r a worse. Homer Some émigré writers had already chosen an experimental, ornam ental manner very different from that of their more traditional colleagues — what Andrei Sinyavsky called "exaggerated” (u triro v a n n a y a ) prose in my 1983 interview with him. A poet, prose writer, and literary theoretician, Andrei Bely (pseudonym of Boris Bugaev, 1880-1934) was a brilliant but unstable representative of the second-generation Symbolist movement. In both chronology and spirit, Bely was a member of the younger generation of Symbolists who saw them selves as prophets rather than decadents. Influenced by Nietzsche's tragic unity of Apollonian beauty and Dionysian chaos, a belief in the coexistence of the nominal and the phenomenal, and Vladim ir Solov'êv's predictions of a crisis in Western civilization, Bely eagerly awaited the coming of a new "theurgic” ideal, to be accomplished through intuition and art — especially music. He attem pted to combine mysticism, the occult, and alogicality with mathem atical analysis of prosody, relying on irony to mediate between
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the two ideals. On a political level he could not decide whether to be ecstatic or horrified at his own eschatological prem onitions of a changing world. In 1912 Bely went abroad to study under Rudolph Steiner and adopted Steiner's anthroposophie ideal of self-perfection and knowledge of the godhead. It was abroad that he began work on his fantasized childhood autobiography, Kotik Letaev. Although he broke with Steiner, he remained abroad until 1916, when he was called up for m ilitary service, but ended up not being drafted, after all. The figure of Sophia, embodying the Eternal Feminine and Divine Wisdom, which loomed large in Bely's hopes, was hardly consonant with the realities of Soviet life, and he re-emigrated to Berlin in 1921 (where, incidentally, he became enamored of the foxtrot), but returned to Russia just two years later — a fact which makes him more of an onagain-off-again expatriate than an émigré. Bely's influence was stylistic, rather than ideological, and he is frequently referred to in the same breath as James Joyce, particularly on the strength of his most famous novel, Petersburg, which he completed in 1913 in W estern Europe. Evgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937) was very much a Bol'shevik sym pathizer at one time, but is best known for his anti-utopian novel We, which appeared in English in 1924 (before the 1927 Prague Russian-language edition) and may have served as a prototype for Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984. Zamyatin, a naval architect, had worked in England in 1916-17, but made the mistake of returning to Russia. After the appearance of We, Zamyatin came under severe pressure from orthodox Party critics, and in 1931 — after writing a personal letter to Stalin — he was permitted to leave the Soviet Union for one year, and then opted not to return home. Like many Russian émigrés, Zamyatin was in dire financial straits, which he hoped to improve by writing film scenarios (he even met with Cecile deMille), but nothing came of these efforts or of the plays he wrote. The unfinished novel he was working on when he died — The Scourge o f God (Bich bozhii) — compared the Soviet threat to Europe with that posed by Attila to Rome. In general, Zam yatin's émigré period was an artistic disappointm ent; things m ight have worked out differently, had he lived longer. One of the most brilliant and best known of all the émigré prose writers was Vladim ir Nabokov (1899-1977), an author who eventually switched not only countries, but even languages. Nabokov liked to cast him self in the role of the nonchalant intellectual — playing chess with his father on the deck of the ship evacuating the fam ily from Russia; but for him, as for so many other émigré writers, exile was a financial
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disaster, although in his case not a permanent one. Born into a wealthy family, he found himself giving private lessons in Berlin. Unsuited to work in an organization, he lasted only three hours as a clerk in a German bank. After moving to the United States in 1940 he was so reduced in circumstances that he interviewed for a job as a bicycle delivery boy for Scribner's Bookstore. It must have been quite a jo lt for a man whose fam ily had been so wealthy that a chauffeured Rolls-Royce limousine took the future w riter to school. (When the 1917 revolution broke out, Russia's head of state, Aleksandr Kerensky, wanted to use it to flee abroad.) Nabokov's father, who had been a prominent member of the Constitutional Democrat Party (the Cadets), emigrated with his fam ily from Russia in 1919. In 1922 he fell victim to an assassination attem pt whose intended target was the historian Pavel Milyukov, who had outraged the monarchists by proclaiming a "new tactic" of attempting to find positive aspects in the October revolution. Milyukov, who as early as November 1921 had declared reestablishment of the monarchy to be a hopeless undertaking, had just given a talk in a rented hall at the Berlin Philharmonic when the assassination took place. Shouting "Vengeance for the Empress Aleksandra Fêdorovnal”, a man began firing shots in the sumptuous hall. The elder Nabokov attem pted to restrain him and was shot in the back by a second assassin. The two assailants were both Russian émigrés — Pètr Shabel'sky-Bork, who had previously attempted to free the Tsar and his fam ily from captivity in Ekaterinburg, and Sergei Taboritsky, who had earlier attem pted to assassinate Aleksandr Guchkov, the man who had persuaded Nikolai to abdicate in favor of his brother Mikhail. According to one witness, Taboritsky fired the final shot as Shabel'skyBork grappled with Nabokov. Avgust Kaminka, co-editor with Nabokov senior, and Gessen of R ul' (The Helm) were wounded along with some other people. On the day following the assassination their cell was inundated with bouquets of flowers from Russian monarchists who hated the liberal Milyukov. The defense was led by a Balt by the name of Foelkersham, who was a leading supporter of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich. Both men were sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment, but were pardoned by Hindenburg and were politically active during the Hitler period.®
•Shabel'sky eventually emigrated to Argentina, where he died of tuberculosis in August 1952. In a note to a book he wrote glorifying Tsar Paul I he wrote of himself: "Pëtr Nikolaevich burned with a sacred hatred for those who betrayed and enslaved our land. As many know, he was not inactive in this sphere and paid dearly for the attem pt to remove the contemptible Milyukov from Life’s arena." (The
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From 1922 to 1937 Nabokov lived in Berlin, where he wrote the bulk of his Russian works, including M ary (Mèri, 1926), King, Queen, Knave (Korol', dama, valet, 1928), The Eye (Soglyadatai, 1930), The Defense (Zashchita Luzhina, 1930), Laughter in the Dark (Kamera obskura, 1932), G lory (Podvig, 1933), Despair (Otchayanie, 1936), The G ift (Dar, 1937-38, 1952), and Invitation to a Beheading (Priglashenie na kazn', 1938). That a writer whose w ife was Jewish and who had him self been fluent in both English and French since childhood but whose German was rudimentary (or, at least, so he claimed) would choose Berlin was indicative of the continuing significance of the city for Russian cultural life during this period. As late as 1934 he wrote to Khodasevich that he found the city "very attractive,” although he was later to claim that he had remained as long as he did because of his wife's salary as a secretary and was generally negative in his attitude to Germany. In January 1937 Nabokov was finally persuaded that the tim e had come to move on and he left for France, having spent 141/2 years in Germany. Fortunately for Nabokov and his family, he was able to come to the United States on a ship that left France in 1940, just before the Nazis overwhelmed that country. Russian literature had traditionally had a strong ideological bent to it, and Nabokov's writings struck many of the émigrés, who in a literary sense were often quite conservative, as vacuous trickery. Bunin, for example, in a moment of malice once prophesied to him that he would "die in dreadful pain and com plete isolation.” Only with the passage of tim e was the genius of his stories about Russians abroad (his chief topic) properly recognized by the majority of his fellow exiles. Nabokov began writing in English even before crossing the Atlantic, having used the language earlier as the vehicle for some poems and The Real Life o f Sebastian Knight (1941).a At first he had little hope of being able to support himself with the royalties from works published in Russian, but he had always supposed that the income from translations would suffice. This supposition proved to be unfounded. The choice of a new language eventually enabled him to break free of the poverty syndrome of the émigré writer, but it was not an easy decision to make. It took him over two decades to resolve to abandon his native tongue. Although the attraction of English was
book w as entitled A Pavtovian Tapestry [Pavlovskii gobelen] and penned under the pseudonym "Staryi Kiribei"). •Having spoken English as a child, Nabokov liked to claim that English w as actually his first language. On other occasions he phantasized that he could have becom e a great French writer.
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undeniable in his case, his motivation appears to have been largely financial. W hile on a lecture tour in 1942 he wrote to his wife: Yesterday after a tour o f the area around the city, I was wildly bored, and so I went to the cinema and came back on foot. I walked for more than an hour and went to bed a t about eight. On m y walk I was pleasantly pierced b y a lightning bolt o f inspiration, I had a passionate desire to write, and write in Russian, but I m ust not. I d o n t think that anyone who has not experienced this feeling can really understand its tortuousness, its tragic aspect. The English language in this light is illusion and Ersatz. I am in m y usual state o f affairs, i.e., occupied with butterflies and translations o r academic writing, and so I am not fully caught up in the sadness and bittem ess o f m y situation. Not only linguistically, but also socially, Nabokov appears to have withdrawn to a considerable extent from his previous contacts with the world of Russian émigrés, whom he had so often and so ruthlessly satirized in his early novels. The B rief Soviet Literary Encyclopedia referred to him as a "Russian-American writer” who had been become "denationalized.” In the United States Nabokov wrote Bend S inister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and a memoir, Conclusive Evidence (1951). In 1958 the success of Lolita enabled him to move to Switzerland, where he wrote Pale Fire (1962), Ada (1969), Transparent Things (1972), and Look a t the Harlequinsl (1974). Lolita was the turning point in Nabokov's financial fortunes, but it was also a m anuscript which he at one point wanted to destroy. The book's sexual content was such that it could not originally find an American publisher, was banned in New Zealand, and put on mock trial by Nabokov's fellow émigrés. Ultimately Nabokov was to claim a sort of curious high ground, maintaining that the novel was of lofty moral content. His decision to translate the book into Russian himself was in part an attem pt to reestablish his identity as a Russian writer. In the preface to the Russian edition he agonized that the strings of his Russian lyre had grown rusty. Even after abandoning America for Switzerland, Nabokov continued to make much of being an American writer, but he spent nearly two decades in Europe before his death with only two brief visits back to Am erica. He was also active as a memoirist, lepidopterist, and translator, producing a very scholarly but singularly unpoetic rendering of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. Himself a literary scholar of considerable talent, Nabokov had little patience with critics who tried to interpret his work in any sociopolitical context. He stubbornly maintained that Invitation to a Beheading had not been influenced by Kafka, although that novel seems to have the most direct relationship to the Nazi
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regime and the fate of the artist in that country — a circumstance which must be borne in mind when discussing the supposedly "apolitical” nature of his writing. But Nabokov was forever covering his tracks. When one biographer, Andrew Field, proved difficult to control, Nabokov launched a four-year struggle with him through his attorneys, although he never actually sued him. Field's response was to call Nabokov the "great Russian-American Narcissus.” Nabokov was a great and subtle stylist — in both English and Russian, and it is incomprehensible that neither he (nor the Argentine, Borges, with whom he had much in common) ever received the Nobel Prize for literature — perhaps in part because of the topic of Lolita, and also because the Awards Committee seemed to prefer works marked by social commitment.
Historical Novelists Another w riter of Nobel Prize quality was Mark Aldanov (pseudonym of Mark Landau, 1886-1957), whose talents developed alm ost entirely in emigration. Surprisingly, he was able to combine a prolific career as a writer with that of prom inent chem ist — a career which saved him from the penury that beset most of his fellow émigré writers. This brilliant man was also active as a historian, literary scholar, and publisher-editor. The historical novel has a rich tradition in Russian letters, and Aldanov was an ardent adm irer of Pushkin and, especially, Tolstoi, whose W ar and Peace dealt with a period that interested him keenly but which he himself avoided treating, possibly because he did not want to compete with his idol. A particularly fine novel is his Ninth o f Therm idor (Devyatoe Termidora), which is part of a tetralogy describing the French revolution. Aldanov was fascinated with the revolutionary process and felt that only persons who had lived through such upheavals could have a true understanding of their nature. Many parallels are drawn in the novel between the French revolution and the Russian coup of October 1917: the poverty of prominent exiles, the "new policy” of recognizing the achievements of the revolution, the royalists' hopes for the restoration of the Bourbons, the call for foreign intervention, the calls for a return home and the eagerness of some to "repent,” the replacing of fanatical idealists with sheer scoundrels, and the violent suppression of the popular will. At the same time, Aldanov was quick to point out that the Soviets had generally borrowed only the more hideous aspects of the French revolution. The Ninth o f Therm idor is written in elegant Russian, displaying Aldanov's fascination with the speech of earlier ages. The overall tone is one of deep European
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culture and refined irony. Altogether, Aldanov wrote thirteen novels, all of which have been translated into English, as well 23 other languages. Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1865-1941) was an amazingly prolific w riter who had established a major reputation before 1917. His 1914 edition of collected works, which was far from complete, ran to 24 volumes. Primarily known for his novels and critical essays, he began his career as a poet and was also active as a translator. The last decade of the 19th century and the first of the 20th century had been marked by the growing popularity of Symbolism, imported from France. In 1893 Merezhkovsky published a landmark Sym bolist essay, On the Reasons for the Decline and on the New Trends in Contem porary Russian Literature, decrying the utilitarian, didactic trend in literature which had been popular since mid-century. Merezhkovsky's best-known pre-1917 prose work was the trilogy of historical novels: Death o f the Gods: Julian the Apostate (Smert' bogov: Yulian otstupnik, 1896), Resurrected Gods: Leonardo da Vinci (1901), and Antichrist: Peter and Alexis (Antikhrist: Pêtr i Aleksei, 1905). In general, they lack the psychologism of Aldanov's novels, and are centered around Merezhkovsky's religiousphilosophical conceptions. Like a number of other writers, Merezhkovsky ran into difficulties with the tsarist censors. In 1912, when his novel, Paul I, appeared, the public prosecutor immediately charged him with "impudent disrespect of the Supreme Authority.” The charge carried a minimum penalty of one year imprisonment, and he judged it wisest to flee Russia for Paris, informing the prosecutor that he would return later for trial (he kept that promise, and both he and his publisher were acquitted). The Merezhkovskys fled to Poland in 1919. In 1920, after PHsudski made peace with the Soviets, they moved on to France, where Merezhkovsky continued to publish as prolifically as he had prior to 1917. Among his writings were the philosophical works Birth o f the Gods: Tutankhamon on Crete (Rozhdenie bogov: Tuntankamon na Krite), The Messiah, Napoleon (two volumes), Dante (also two volumes), and Jesus the Unknown (lisus Neizvestnyi). Nearly all of Merezhkovsky's works seek to explore the past while predicting the future, and to search for the sources of Christianity and a higher, religious reality. Merezhkovsky evidently saw himself as a sort of eschatological prophet castigating the Russian intelligentsia for having brought about the revolution. Many of his works were translated into various foreign languages, and for a tim e he may well have been more popular with non-Russian readers (particularly in Germany) than among the émigrés themselves. Merezhkovsky became enamored of Mussolini, whom he met in 1934 and who helped him get an advance from the Italian publisher
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Mondadori. He also met with Mussolini's son-in-law, who told him Italy would be proud to give such a man the chance to live and work in Italy. Il Duce inspired in Merezhkovsky a feeling which was "not fear, but a vague disquietude, an inexplicable heaviness, a terror which people feel when they approach and peer into a forbidden place.... It was something like what Faust felt when the Spirit of the Earth appeared to him.” After the meeting with Mussolini, Gippius com plained that Bunin was spreading the rumor that she and Merezhkovsky were leaving France to be supported by Mussolini, and an alm ost conspiratorial flavor creeps into her letters, in which Mussolini is referred to as "the bear,” "the Duke,” "Caesar,” or just by his initials, but even so it is clear that the flirtation was broken off sim ply by M ussolini's busy schedule. Despite Gippius's contemptuous remarks about the "idiot” Hitler, when W orld W ar II broke out, Merezhkovsky saw the Germans as representing salvation from communism. In the summer of 1941, a few months before his death, Merezhkovsky gave a speech over the radio, possibly authored by Vladim ir Zlobin, in which he spoke of the "enorm ity of the heroic feat” accomplished by the Germans in declaring a "crusade” on the Soviet Union.3 After that, the Merezhkovskys were largely boycotted by the same émigré com m unity which they had received so regularly at The Green Lamp. W hen Merezhkovsky died in 1941, Bunin refused to attend his funeral. Gippius survived him by four years and wrote his biography, which was published in 1952.
Whimsical Writers A nd more true jo y M arcellus exiled feels Than Caesar with a Senate a t his heels. Alexander Pope The Formalist literary scholar and novelist Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984) spent 1922-23 in Berlin, where he fell in love ... and was rejected. The experience led to the creation of a charming collection of musings set in the epistolary genre — Zoo: O r Letters not about Love (Zoo: Hi pis'm a ne o lyubvi), written in Berlin but published in Moscow
aTem ira Pachmuss, the most productive scholar of Zinaida Gippius, writes that in an August 7, 1967, interview granted to her by Yury Terapiano, Terapiano claimed that Zlobin had forced Merezhkovsky to deliver the speech. Supposedly, Zlobin's goal had been to improve the difficult material circumstances of the Merezhkovskys.
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— plus a plea to Gor'ky and Mayakovsky to intercede for the author to get permission to return home. Gaito Gazdanov (1903-1971) was a member of the "younger generation” of émigrés, having left Russia with the Crimean evacuation when he was only sixteen. He finally made his way to Paris in 1923. Although he already spoke French as a boy in Russia, he continued to be devoted to the Russian language and never made any attem pt to switch to French as a writer. (Gazdanov was of Ossetian origin.) In 1930 he published his best known work, An Evening a t C laire’s (Vecher u Kler). Like Shklovsky's Zoo ..., the novel was uncharacteristic of the intense tradition of Russian letters, so often dom inated by plot and philosophy. Properly likened by contemporary critics to Proust's musingsa, the novel is filled with a romantic languor, delicate memories of childhood, and an enviable contentm ent with life. Gazdanov's chief biographer, Laszlo Dienes, however, supports Gazdanov's denial of a Proustian influence on An Evening With Claire. W hile still a boy, the protagonist falls in love with Claire, a French girl in Russia, but she marries someone else, and he does not see her for ten years. The meeting with her at the beginning of the book is followed by a reminiscence of childhood and then of the Russian civil war. Finally, the narrator finds himself on a ship which is evacuating refugees from the Crimea to Istanbul. His only thought is of finding Claire in Paris. To use Gazdanov's own phrase, this was a "journey in sound to the unknown.” Nevertheless, the book's rambling nature and lack of structure have an ideological underpinning — that convictions inevitably prove false, that logic is an exercise in self-deception, and that the only realities in life are our impressions of it. For a tim e Gazdanov enjoyed considerable popularity; Gor'ky praised his work, and some of his works were published in English. In 1953 he became an editor at Radio Liberation (later renamed Radio Liberty), a circum stance which permitted him to give up his 20-year job as a cab driver in Paris. As is often the case in émigré letters, the new, more professional occupation evidently took up too much of his creative energies, and he produced less — not more — literary works after his financial fortunes improved. Sadly, the recordings he did as a radio journalist were evidently destroyed. Arkady Averchenko (1881-1925) was a prose w riter who was also active in the theatrical world as a playwright and even founded his own theater before emigrating. In 1907 he was hired to write for the St. Petersburg satirical magazine Strekoza (The Dragonfly), which was
•Another writer compared to Proust was Yury Fel'zen, whose 1930 novel The Deception (Obm an) lacks virtually any plot and is closest in manner to a diary.
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refounded as Satirikon the following year.a Shortly thereafter he published a series of humorous books, including Cheerful Oysters (Vesëlye ustritsy, republished more than 20 times) and Humorous Stories (Rasskazy yumoristicheskie), which earned him the title "King of Laughter.” On November 15, 1920, he arrived in Istanbul and from there moved on to Sofia, but the Stambolisky governm ent was unsympathetic to Russian émigrés, and he left for Belgrade in May 1922. In June he moved to Prague, which was to become his last perm anent abode. It proved impossible for him to earn a living as a writer, and while still in Istanbul he founded a cabaret entitled "The Nest of M igratory Birds,” which toured Germany, the Baltic states, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. W hen asked where he was headed next, he responded: I d o n t care. I used to be a Russian citizen and fo r me a trip from Petersburg to [nearby] Trete Pargoiovo was a feat. B ut now I ’m a citizen o f the world, and the countries flash by me like road posts. The planet has become so sm all that in the last three years it's become a ll dried up and wrinkled, like an old lemon. The tot of a satirical w riter was not an easy one. In Istanbul Averchenko was supposedly challenged to a duel by an "unknown officer” who felt that he had been slandered in one of Averchenko's light-hearted pieces, and in Romania he was nearly deported, supposedly for having said that Romania was not a nation but a profession — that of gypsy fiddler. In 1921 Averchenko published a collection of stories entitled A Dozen Knives in the Back o f the Revolution (Dyuzhina nozhei v spinu revolyutsii). The book was reviewed in Pravda by none other than Lenin himself, who while adm itting it showed considerable talent assailed Averchenko as a "W hite Guard bitter to the point of madness.”6 Many of the later stories
*Strekoza had been founded in 1875 by Germ an Komfel'd and w as renam ed by his son Mikhail in 1907, who modeled the publication after the Germ an humorous m agazine Simplizisimus. W hen this rem ake of the m agazine proved to be a success, Averchenko demanded that he and several fellow contributors receive a more generous share of the profits, but w ere turned down. The dissidents then founded their own N ew Satirikon and managed to drive the old Satirikon out of business within a year, but the events of 1917 rendered their victory meaningless. The younger Komfel'd, who emigrated in 1919, refounded Satirikon in Paris in 1931. But the world depression soured people on humor and, although many of the most prominent émigrés published in the m agazine, it folded just six months later. bLenin maintained a keen interest in those countrymen who had taken his place in exile. His personal library contained 267 ém igré books.
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of this "M ark Twain of Russian literature” are ironic depictions of émigré life. When he died in Prague in 1925, his body was buried in a metal vault in the hope that it would eventually be reburied in Russia. W hen Averchenko left Russia for Kiev late in 1918, he was accompanied by another contributor to the pre-1917 Satirikon, Nadezhda Tèffi (1872-1952)a, a humorous writer who had been extrem ely popular before 1917 and who renewed her Soviet passport as late as 1922. Tèffi was known as a children's author, often writing about animals, but she was popular among her fellow exiles for her light irony about émigré life. In time, however, her tone became more and more heavyhearted. Aleksandr Glikberg (Sasha Chêmy, 18801932) was another w riter known for his humorous and sometimes bitter satirical sketches of émigré life. Mikhail Èizenstadt (pen name: "Argus”) arrived in the United States in 1924, where he wrote both prose and verse in the manner of Tèffi. Totally rejecting ideology, Èizenstadt created brief miniatures intended as newspaper space fillers. One story tells of Russian ém igrés arriving on the moon and discovering another group of Russians already there, publishing competing newspapers. To the question "W here is the Russian emigration heading?” Argus responds — to the cinema, home, to meet their wives, or perhaps staying home tonight. He mercilessly satirized émigré literary-musical "evenings” and jokingly described Prince Kurbsky as a defector making his living as a specialist on Russia. Il'ya Èrenburg (1891-1967) was a prose writer, journalist, and poet who lived abroad for nearly three decades — from 1908 until 1917 and again from 1921 to 1941. During his first sojourn he was at first active politically and came to know Lenin, Kamenev, Zinov'ev, and Trotsky fairly intimately, but then decided to devote himself to writing. He had originally fled Russia out of fear of imprisonment, and upon returning to Russia he was again arrested, but released thanks to the intervention of an old friend, Nikolai Bukharin. For a tim e he lived in the home of Maksimilian Voloshin in Koktebel', together with Vikenty Veresaev and Osip Mandel'shtam, but then once more chose to em igrate. Abroad, he used his political contacts with the Bol'sheviks to maintain his Soviet citizenship and in the early 1930s was hired as the Paris correspondent for Izvestiya. Soon after this appointment, his friends in Moscow began to fall victim to the purges, but this was also the tim e of confrontation with Hitler. Èrenburg, who was an intelligent, cultured, and well-traveled intellectual, was horrified over the purges,
•Born Lokhvitskaya, she later becam e Buchinskaya by marriage; the name "Tèffi” w as evidently taken from the English word "taffy.”
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but keenly aware of his Jewish roots, continued to be a paid agent of the Soviet system and in 1941 returned to Russia. In the Soviet Union he managed to survive the late 1940s and Stalin's campaign against precisely such Jewish "cosmopolites” as himself, and published his fam ous memoir People, Years, Life (Lyudi, gody, zhizn') in the early 1960s. Yury Annenkov (1889-1974), who wrote under the pseudonym "Boris Temiryazev,” was a talented artist, critic, and memoirist who in 1934 attracted a good deal of attention with his sem i-autobiographical Tale o f Trifles (Povest' o pustyakakh), about a young painter who flees Russia out of frustration. Now, however, Annenkov is best known for his two-volum e Diary o f M y M eetings: A Cycle o f Tragedies (Dnevnik moikh vstrech: Tsikl tragedii), a classical work with remarkable illustrations by the author himself. A prose writer, journalist, editor, and critic,* Aleksandr Am fiteatrov (1862-1938) lived abroad for at least 12 years before 1917, and spent the last 17 years of his life in exile, beginning in 1921. As a young man, he had published satirical verse and epigrams in the humorous magazine Oskolki (Fragments), to which Chekhov had also contributed. After penning a lampoon on the Romanovs, he was sent briefly into internal exile and later forbidden to engage in any literary activities. In 1904 he emigrated to Paris, where he edited w hat was intended to be a nonpartisan magazine entitled Krasnoe znam ya (Red Banner, 1906-07). Having been a correspondent for a Russian newspaper in Milan in 1886-87, he moved back to Italy when Krasnoe znam ya proved unsuccessful (a failure which Lenin noted with satisfaction). There he published both fiction and non-fiction, and founded a second such journal, entitled Sovrem ennik (The Contemporary), which was printed in St. Petersburg. Am fiteatrov returned to Russia in 1916 and contributed to a number of periodicals. Horrified by the new Soviet state, however, he fled in a small boat with his fam ily to Finland in 1921. He considered himself a realist; in his case this meant fictionalizing current journalistic themes, often in a sensationalists manner. His popularity with the reading public is evident in the announced scope of his pre-1917 collected works (37 volumes, 34 of which appeared), brought out in St. Petersburg from 1911 to 1916. Cut off from his readers after emigrating, he was largely forgotten in his native country, b u t— like so many of the émigrés — is now being republished.
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Theater To have degenerated into the theatrical arts ... Tacitus The play’s the thing. Hamlet Drama — what literature does a t night. George Jean Nathan The origins of the Russian folk theatrical tradition are lost in tim e. As early as 1068 there is a mention of minstrels (skomorokhi) in the Prim ary Chronicle and there still exists a 1037 fresco depicting a perform ance in Kiev's St. Sophia Cathedral, so it is obvious that the stage tradition actually preceded the arrival of Christianity in Russia in 988. The puppeteering, music, acrobatics, and impious w it of the skom orokhi were actually encouraged by Ivan the Terrible, who was not loath to don a mask and dance along with them; but the Church took an increasingly dim view of their "pagan” activities. In 1648 Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich outlawed their performances, and even had skom orokhi whipped and exiled to Siberia. In 1657 the Church declared them anathem a as part of a systematic and efficient effort to suppress the indigenous culture of the Eastern Slavs and supplant it with an imported, Byzantine tradition. People were encouraged to attend Church services, listen to sermons, saints' lives, and homilies, and sing hymns instead of drinking home-made beer and laughing at the antics of clowns and trained bears. The roots of the modern secular Russian theatrical tradition go back to a quite different heritage, one imported from the W est by such 18th-century neo-classic playwrights as Aleksandr Sumarokov and Denis Fonvizin. Over the course of the 19th century an authentic Russian tradition developed, thanks in no small measure to the major Russian playwright Aleksandr Ostrovsky. This passive, contemplative, often illogical tradition, which was eventually to achieve its full developm ent in the plays of Anton Chekhov (and also his im itator Maksim Gor'ky), exerted a major influence on Western theater and even such distant offspring as Samuel Beckett. W hile there were earlier individual performances of Russian plays abroad by Western troupes, the history of the Russian theater abroad belongs chiefly to the 20th century. It is a complex topic, and
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one little researched* In 1902 the actress Lidiya Yavorskaya took a troupe to Paris, and in 1912 performed at the Little Theatre in London, where she played Arkadina in the first English-language production of Chekhov's The Seagull. In 1905 the Moscow Art Theater toured Europe; by the tim e it reached Berlin, it had nearly run out of money and was saved only by an investment of two of its actors. That same year Pavel Orlenev's tiny St. Petersburg Dramatic Company performed in Berlin, London, and New York. Orlenev and Alla Leventon (Nazimova) were the stars of the program. In New York the major feature of the repertory was a play by the émigré Evgeny Chirikov, entitled Evrei (Jews) in Russian, but renamed The Chosen People in English. The play, which had been proscribed by the Russian censor for its depiction of the plight of Russian Jews, was a big hit with New York’s community of Russian Jewish émigrés. The troupe also put on Aleksei Tolstoi's historical chronicle,4 Tsar Fëdor Ioannovich. So successful was the tour that the Chirikov Circle (with anarchist Èmma G oldm an serving as press agent, fundraiser, and moving force behind the group) donated $2,500 and promised another $3,500. An additional $9,000 was donated by American friends. The following year Orlenev rented the East Third St. Theater, renaming it the "O rleneff Lyceum.” Curiously, the radical support of G oldm an did not put off Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan, who raised an additional $16,000. Ecstatic over such generous support, Orlenev hinted he would like to find a perm anent home in San Francisco, but the earthquake and fire that ravaged the city in 1906 made such an undertaking impossible. Despite the support Orlenev received from an American audience which viewed his troupe as victim s of a despotic regime, the undertaking proved to be a financial disaster. Orlenev returned to Russia, narrowly avoiding arrest for debt, while his mistress and pupil Nazimova remained in the New W orld to become an exotic star of the silent screen. Somehow Orlenev's financial debacle resonated back in Russia as a financial Eldorado. The famous actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya, intent on repeating what she believed to have been Orlenev's success, herself came to New York, where she performed in Daly's Theatre and the Thalia Theatre, but succeeded only in losing some 20,000 rubles. Confident that his old debts had been forgotten, if not forgiven, Orlenev returned in 1912 with his new wife and partner, Lina Korolêva, but was again unsuccessful.
O n e notable exception is Lawrence Senelick's W andering Stars: Russian Ém igré Theatre, 1992.
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With the arrival of the First Wave, numerous attempts were made to establish Russian theaters abroad and not simply invite touring companies from Russia. Some of these enterprises were cabarets, but others were attem pts to establish legitimate theaters — especially in Berlin, where the distinction between "Soviets” and "ém igrés” was so nebulous. O f course, Berlin had its own resident dance troupe, The Russian Romantic Ballet, as well as two resident theaters— The Blue Bird, which toured the United States, and the Jackin-the-Box Theater. The magazine T e a triz h iz n ' (Theater and Life) was devoted specifically to Russian émigré theater and appeared from 1921 to 1923. There was a Russian Dramatic Theater in Riga and a Russian Chamber Theater. Russian performers were so ubiquitous that the city of Revel, Estonia, passed a law requiring that Russian theatrical and cabaret performances could not comprise more than 50 percent of the total. Nikita Baliev (1877-1936), who was actually Armenian and whose real name was Mkritich Balyan, had organized the Letuchaya mysh' (Bat) as a sort of private cabaret of the Moscow Art Theater in 1908. Baliev emigrated in 1920 and reconstituted the Bat as the Chauve-Souris, and it opened a successful six-month season in Manhattan on February 3, 1922. On April 9 the company staged a perform ance for the benefit of starving Russian actors and raised $10,000. Baliev's Russian vaudeville, rechristened "vodkaville,” made its creator, who had been born into a wealthy family, an affluent man again — at least until the stock market crash of 1929, when he again lost everything. By 1931 the Chauve-Souris had fallen upon hard times, and Baliev died indigent. W hen civil war broke out in Russia, a portion of the Moscow A rt Theater found itself in Kharkov, which was occupied by the W hite army of General Denikin. The troupe toured Europe until 1922, at which point some of its members, including Vasily Kachalov (real name: Shverubovich) and Ol'ga Knipper-Chekhova (the widow of Anton Chekhov), returned to Moscow to rejoin the parent theater. Under the leadership of Mariya Germanova, the actors remaining abroad established themselves as the Prague Group of the Moscow Art Theater. In 1923 they received financial support from the Czechoslovak governm ent. In April-M ay 1928 the Prague Group, directed by Germanova, performed in London's Garrick Theater, relying heavily on a repertoire largely fam iliar to Germanova from her days in Moscow.3
aA stage adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov, Chekhov's Cherry Orchard and Uncle Vanya, Gor'ky's Lower Depths, Gogol”s The Marriage, Tolstoi's Pow er o f Darkness and The Living Corpse, and Ostrovsky's Poverty Is No Vice.
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After the tour Germanova left the troupe. In 1931 the Prague Group returned to London, drawing upon a repertoire of Gogol', Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Gor'ky, Valentin Kataev, and Bulgakov. Another prom inent Russian actor abroad was Fêdor Komissarzhevsky (1882-1954), who became fam ous for his performances of Chekhov. Komissarzhevsky had the good fortune to leave for the United States just before W orld W ar II broke out and spent the rest of his life there. In 1923 the parent troupe of the Moscow Art Theater w ent on tour to New York, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Despite the obviously considerable doubts of Soviet authorities as to the appropriateness of Russia's theater leaving the country at such a moment, the decision was taken to dem onstrate to a skeptical W est the viability of Russian culture under Soviet rule. A second tour lasted from November 23, 1923, until May 24, 1924. It was then that the Moscow Art Theater became known chiefly for its perform ances of Chekhov, whose plays were actually a lament for the Russia of old, now ravaged by the Soviet state. The tours were a great success, and the American press made much of Konstantin Stanislavsky, who was described as resembling a southern plantation owner. Throughout the tour Stanislavsky found him self lionized by the Russian émigrés, but at the same tim e he sought to play down any such contacts — a task that proved well-nigh impossible. A t one point a snapshot circulated in Moscow of Stanislavsky, O l'ga KnipperChekhova, and Vasily Luzhsky standing next to Prince Yusupov at a charity bazaar in support of needy Russian performers in Am erica. This association with Yusupov, who had been one of the wealthiest men in tsarist Russia, radically compromised the actors in the eyes of the Soviet authorities. To make matters worse, the rumor spread that the troupe was helping to sell valuables smuggled out of Russia by the émigrés. Vladim ir Nemirovich-Danchenko sent a telegram to the authorities attem pting to calm the storm, and Stanislavsky engaged in hasty excuses. But when Stanislavsky refused to take Mariya Germanova back into the troupe3, he was attacked from the other side of the political spectrum. In Am erica Stanislavsky found him self accused of glorifying Bol'shevik Russia. Nevertheless, the tour was a success and there were a number of offers to remain permanently in the U.S.A. W hile some of the actors were obviously less than eager to return to Russia,
•Germ anova’s ostracism did not end there. W hen the troupe w as on tour in Paris in 1937, Nem irovich-Danchenko refused even to m eet with her.
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Stanislavsky never appears to have contemplated defecting. A telegram was sent from Moscow to be read to the entire troupe requiring them to return by a specific date and disallowing even certificates of illness. Those who failed to return would be regarded as political defectors. Finally, Vladim ir Nemirovich-Danchenko sent Stanislavsky a letter listing a number of the actors who were to be dismissed from the theater upon return to Moscow. Thus it was virtually inevitable that some of the troupe's members would remain behind, as in fact happened. Richard Boleslavsky (real name: Strzeznicki) was a Pole who had come to Russia in his teens and joined the Moscow Art Theater. He fled the Soviet Union in 1920 and joined the Prague Group the following year. When Stanislavsky's troupe arrived in New York in 1923 he was among those waiting to greet Stanislavsky at the pier. Only eight days after the first performance he had already delivered the first of ten lectures on the "Stanislavsky system.” One member of the audience described these lectures as being "like the coming of a new religion which could liberate and awaken American culture.” Boleslavsky thus established himself as Stanislavsky's chief disciple and advocate in the United States. In 1928 he became a U.S. citizen. Decimated by defections, the group eventually arrived home under fire from the Soviet press and did not go on tour again until its trip to Paris in 1937. Evidently, it was sent there as a sort of cam ouflage for the Great Purges. Actors emigrated for largely the same reasons as writers. In 1930 Mikhail Chekhov, the nephew of Anton Chekhov, who had left Russia after a distinguished career in the Moscow Art Theater, explained to Czechoslovakian President TornaS Masaryk that he had chosen to leave Russia because censorship, propaganda, and a general lack of artistic freedom were ruining the Russian theater back home and that he wanted to save it abroad.8
•Ém igré theatrical groups existed in all the major centers of the Russian émigré world. Inevitably, Paris boasted a particularly rich theatrical life. From 1924 to 1925, Baliev directed the Russian Theater; the Theater of Miniatures was founded in 1926 by Fëdor Komissarzhevsky; the Intimate Theater w as established in 1928 by D. Kirova; other theaters w ere the Albert I (1928), the Cham ber Theater Abroad (1930), the Yuzhakov Theater (1923), the W andering Comedians Theater (1934); and yet another Russian Theater (1936). Paris was also home to the playwrightdirector Nikolai Evreinov, who later wrote two books on the history of the Russian theater (Le théâtre en Russie avant 1946 [1946] and Histoire du théâtre russe [1947]). Berlin had its Bluebird Theater and the Van'ka-Vstan'ka (Jack-in-the-Box). Belgrade had two Russian theaters: The Russian Dram a Theater and the Russian Dram atic Theater for Everyone (Russkii obshchedostupnyi dramaticheskii teatr),
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These hopes were not to be realized, if only because foreign audiences obviously could not follow performances in Russian. Large as it was, the émigré community was too scattered to achieve the critical mass necessary to support a theatrical tradition. And there was also the problem of different realities and different traditions. As one Berlin newspaper reviewer put it, Berlin of 1921 was not Tver* or Yaroslavl' of 1908. In contrast, because ballet was not linguistically bound, it proved a fortunate exception to this history of enthusiastic but failed endeavors, but that story would take us beyond the scope of this book.
Poverty and Isolation To a solitary and an exile his friends are everything. W illa Sibert Cather W hile exile is asylum, it can also be a torm ent. One of the glaring realities of Russian émigré literature has been indigence. In his 1933 book on the émigrés W. Chapin Huntington described a regally attired Russian countess whose sole interest in form er tim es had been Court society but who was forced to support herself by giving manicures and selling silk stockings. One of the favored male professions was that of cab driver. A t the same time, aristocratic customs were adhered to tenaciously. For example, on three separate occasions Vladim ir Nabokov was on the verge of dueling. Among the writers, even Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Gippius, who were fortunate to have had their old apartm ent kept for them in Paris, constantly fretted about money. The engineer, doctor, or musician who found him self abroad could take up the tools of his trade. After emigrating, the unskilled laborer sim ply w ent on doing w hat he did at home. W riters, on the other hand, dealt only in words and there was no corner of the globe open to them where Russian was not
which put on performances right up until the Germ ans bombed Belgrade on April 6, 1941. For some 20 years Riga enjoyed daily performances put on by the Russian Dram a Theater, while the producer of the Latvian Art Theater w as none other than Mikhail Chekhov, who later w as to become Marilyn Monroe's dram a coach. Tallinn had its own Russian theater, directed by Aleksandr Pronikov. Russians in China also enjoyed an active theatrical life. Prominent Soviet theatrical groups cam e regularly on tour to the Harbin Russian Theater (Russkii teatr) and the Russian O pera (Russkaya operetta). Harbin even had a newspaper devoted to local theatrical events — Kharbinskoe obozrenie teatrov (The Harbin Theatrical Review). And, of course, the role of Russian Jews in Hollywood itself could be the subject of an entire separate book.
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a foreign tongue. Thus, their situation was radically different from that of Spanish, English, German, or Chinese writers, who could go abroad, see their books published at home or in other countries where their language was spoken, and have their royalties deposited in the local bank. Throughout the Soviet period the Russian émigré writer found it well-nigh impossible even to return home for a visit. Not only could his books not be sold in Russia, but it was a crime to possess or conspire to possess them, to circulate, import, or even make a longhand copy of them. The only acknowledgement the writer could expect if he returned home was a prison sentence ... or worse. Georgy Adamovich named his collection of essays on émigré literature Loneliness and Freedom (Odinochestvo i svoboda). He was right about the loneliness, but in the modern world money is freedom. The penniless w riter is not a free human being. Western literary scholars often discount such talk as "whining,” perhaps because their university salaries have allowed them to fare far better than creative writers. The reality is, however, one of the creative writer working as a night watchman, while the professor assigning the book written by this same w riter to his (largely indifferent) students is com fortably ensconced in his home in the suburbs. Nina Berberova complained bitterly how different life was for Hemingway, who in his memoirs on living in Paris wrote that he was habitually short of cash but how two people could live modestly, but tolerably and even travel to Senlis, Fontainebleu, and the Loire: In our best years, we had 40 francs a day fo r the two o f us; before that we never had more than 30. A new filling in a tooth, a warm coat, two tickets to The Rites o f Spring tore a hole in our dom estic arithmetic, and there was no way to cover it up except b y using our feet as transportation around town for weeks. L a te r... when Khodasevich was dying, he was taken, not to a private clinic, but to a m unicipal hospital— a m onstrous d iffe re n c e !... The people we knew best were the landlords who rented us room s; the man who sold us coal and firewood; the baker; the butcher; the salespeople a t "Dam ois,” where we bought sugar, coffee, tea, and salt; and, the concierges who watched us, our guests, and our m ail with a sharp eye.... We never m et Valery, who published his books in luxurious lim ited editions, o r Katherine Mansfield, a great fan o f Chekhov who wrote about English old maids chatting around elegantly served tea tables. In those years James Joyce dined in a restaurant on the Rue Jacob and conversed with his wife and children in Italian, but we never met. A few tim es we did see the still
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unknown Henry M iller and his wife June; in a way they were a little like us. Poverty was the norm for the First Wave. Those of the Second W ave who were not forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union lived in the tedious but relatively secure limbo of the Displaced Persons Camps as "DPs”, and at least a few of the Third-W ave writers secured positions teaching Russian language and literature in W estern Universities. The First W ave knew no such advantages. Ultimately, of course, the writers came to terms with life and found employment, but only for a few did literature become a source of income. And those who did eke out a living from literature in the rich émigré culture of the inter-W ar period were often stifled by a sense of alienation. Boris Poplavsky: Oh, loneliness, you are always with me, like a disease o f the heart, an illness which you neither recall no r sense. B ut suddenly you feel choked, as if you were in an isolation cell which you always carry around with you. Deaf, mute, unconscious, illiterate, I am alone in the street, ignorant o f m y own name. I stop, blinded by m y own wealth.... I am free, totally free to go right o r left, remain standing on the spot, light up a cigarette, go home and take an afternoon nap. O r I can go to the cinema for a matinée, instantly exchanging day fo r night, delving into the underground kingdom o f sounding shadows. Zinaida Gippius: Here in Paris there is absolutely nothing to do.... The only thing le ft is to depart into one's own inner world and personal work. That's what people do, as much as they can. That was what D. S. [M erezhkovsky] did, and it is what I attem pt to do, even though it is hard to g e t used to writing only for yourself.... Alm ost im perceptibly D. S. and I seem to be m oving toward French circles.... D. S. sometimes writes in French to make money, and even I have sunk to this level o f debauchery, absurd as it m ay seem. Under such circumstances the drive to create literature has to be strong indeed. For example, although Nabokov eventually became very well off as a writer, part of the price he paid was his inability to support his impoverished mother during the lean years.
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Former Tsarist Exiles in Positions of Power It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty. Sir Francis Bacon You shall have joy, o r you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both. Ralph Waldo Emerson Ironically, many of the government officials responsible for driving so many people from Russia were themselves form er émigrés (and are discussed earlier in this book). Vatslav Vorovsky (Wactew Worowski) was appointed head of Gosizdat at its creation in 1919, and as such was the Soviet Union’s chief censor. He continued to reside chiefly in Western Europe as a Soviet diplom at and was assassinated by a W hite émigré, M. Konradi, in Lausanne in 1923.a Trained as a physician, the tsarist émigré and science-fiction novelist Aleksandr Bogdanov conducted a campaign in the 1920s to establish a network of bloodbanks throughout the U.S.S.R. In 1928 he carried out an experiment on himself, exchanging blood with a student who was ill with malaria and tuberculosis. The experiment proved fatal for Bogdanov, but he kept exact records on his own condition right up to his death in 1928. As an émigré Anatoly Lunacharsky had advocated the creation of a proletarian literature, but his position was less radical than that advocated by later Soviet critics in the Stalin period, and he appears even to have moderated his beliefs somewhat toward the end of his life. Lunacharsky was a true intellectual and a sincere man who did much to preserve Russian culture in his capacity as Minister of Education. He is still viewed by many as a symbol of the sort of partial freedom which was still possible in art in the 1920s. In the long run,
•The daughter of Aleksandr Guchkov claimed that her father had financed the assassination. Guchkov, who persuaded Nikolai to renounce the throne, w as himself a fascinating figure, having studied in Germany, travelled to Turkey during strained Russian-Turkish relations, been an officer in the Russian railroad running through China, crossed into Tibet, served as a volunteer in the Boer army in South Africa during the w ar with England, travelled to Macedonia during its rebellion against the Turks, and fought in the Russian-Japanese w ar in 1904-05. Evidently possessed of a fiery personality, he fought six duels before being sent by the governm ent of W hite General Anton Denikin in 1919 to France, where he remained after the W hites lost the Russian civil war.
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however, the cause which he championed as an exile and tried to realize upon returning home proved to be ruinous for Russian culture in general and Russian literature in particular. He died in France in 1933, en route to assume his responsibilities as Soviet Am bassador to Spain. Trotsky returned to Russia in 1917 from the United States via Canada and was arrested on charges of spying for Germany. After a brief stay in prison, however, he was appointed People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs. More importantly, he organized the new Soviet army. After Lenin's death in 1924, Zinov'ev and Kamenev united with Stalin to force him out of the Politbyuro. He was exiled to Alm a-Ata in 1928 and in 1929 deported to Turkey. From Turkey he left for Norway and then for Mexico in 1937. Throughout his life Trotsky was devoted to books, a passion he was able to pursue thanks in part to his ability to read very rapidly. His m ajor achievement in the field of literature is his lively book entitled Literature and Revolution, in which he rejects as inherently unfeasible the attem pt to create a proletarian culture overnight. He began writing the study in 1922, at a moment when Lenin had just offered him the position of Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Deputies. It is an early indication of the importance to be later attached by the Soviet authorities to literature that in this very hectic period of his life he rejected this offer and ensconced himself in a dacha outside Moscow to write a book about belles lettres. Inevitably, Trotsky's relationship to Lenin had its ups and downs, both during the émigré and Soviet periods. Contrary to the claim s of the Soviet press, it was the working association of two intensely dedicated people pursuing a common cause. Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, wrote to Trotsky after Lenin's death, assuring him of Lenin's warm feelings for him right up until his death. In 1918 Stalin himself wrote in Pravda: The entire practical organization o f the uprising [the O ctober coup o f 1917] was directly supervised b y the Chairman o f the Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky. It can be said without any hesitation that the rapid shift o f the garrison to the side o f the Soviet and the skilled organization o f the work o f the M ilitary Revolutionary Committee was prim arily the accom plishm ent o f Comrade Trotsky. An intelligent, well-read, and witty man, Trotsky showed him self capable of making hard, even cruel judgm ents. On August 4 ,1 9 1 8 , he issued a decree as People's Commissar of M ilitary Affairs, demanding that counterrevolutionaries be rooted out mercilessly, that concentration camps be established for suspicious persons, and that opportunists be
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shot, regardless of their past services. In his 1935 diary he wrote approvingly of the murder of the Tsar and his fam ily: The severity o f the action showed that we would fight m ercilessly and without wavering. The execution o f the im perial fam ily was essential not only to frighten and horrify the enemy, and deprive him o f a ll hope, but also to shake up our own ranks and show them that there was no retreat, that ahead lay total victory o r total doom. In intellectual Party circles there were probably those who harbored doubts and shook their heads, but the masses o f workers and soldiers experienced not a m om ent o f doubt.... While abroad, I re a d ... a description o f the execution, the burning o f the bodies, etc. I haven't the faintest idea how much o f this was accurate and how much invented, since I never took the slightest interest in the m anner in which the execution was carried out. I have to adm it not even understanding such an interest. Stalin shared Trotsky's view of such matters and on May 23, 1940, sent an untrained squad of local communists to kill him in his Mexico home. A total of 73 bullets were pumped into his bedroom just a few feet from Trotsky's bed, and the assassins left incendiary bombs behind as well, but the intended victim and his wife were miraculously uninjured. On August 20 the second attem pt proved successful. Jaime Ramon Mercader del Rio Hernandez, a Spanish Moscow-trained agent of Stalin's GPU, had come to Trotsky’s fortified house, having convinced the fam ily that he was the fiancé of a woman working in the house. M ercader himself later described the act: I p u t m y raincoat on the table on purpose so that I could take out the ice-axe which I had in the pocket. I decided not to lose the brilliant opportunity which was offered me and a t the exact m om ent when Trotsky started to read m y article, which served as m y pretext, I rem oved the piolet from m y raincoat, took it in m y fist and, closing m y eyes, I gave him a trem endous blow on the head.... The man scream ed in such a way that I will never forget it as long as I live. His scream was "A a a a "... very long, infinitely long and it still seems to me as if that scream were piercing m y brain. But then I saw Trotsky g e t up like a madman. He threw him self a t me and bit m y hand ... Look, you can still see the marks o f his teeth ... Then I pushed him, so that he fell to the floor. He lifted him self as best he could and then, running o r stumbling, I don't know how, he go t out o f the room. Trotsky died the next day, but was conscious long enough to adm it to having thought earlier: "This man could kill me.” Four years
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earlier, while still en route to Mexico, he him self had written about Stalin: "He seeks to strike not at the ideas of his opponent, but at his skull.” Mercader had a letter in his pocket in which he claimed to be a form er follower of Trotsky's but had been horrified when Trotsky ordered him to go to Moscow to kill Stalin. Four days after the assassination Pravda gloated: When in 1929 the Soviet governm ent expelled from its territory the counterrevolutionary and traitor Trotsky, he was em braced b y the capitalist circles o f Europe and America. This was no accident. It was logical, for Trotsky had long since entered the service o f those who exploit the working class. Trotsky reached the depths o f human depravity and became entangled in his own machinations. He was killed by his own supporters — the same terrorists he had taught the treachery o f murder, treason, and villainy againsVthe working class and the land o f the Soviets. In organizing the atrocious m urders o f Kirov, Kuibyshev, and Gor'ky, Trotsky became the victim o f his own intrigues, betrayals, acts o f treason, evil deeds. Thus did this contem ptible person ingloriously descend into his grave with the seal o f an international spy and m urderer on his brow. Stalin approved an unsuccessful plan to end Mercader's imprisonment. The young man's communist mother was given jewels worth either $50,000 or $60,000 to finance the operation. Mercader was to be injected with the virus of an infectious disease which would necessitate moving him from the prison to a hospital, where his escape could be arranged. The injection, arranged by his own devoted mother, may actually have been intended to be fatal; at one point Mercader was sent a box of poisoned chocolates, and there were attem pts on the life of his mother, who knew too much. But Mercader served out his twenty-year sentence, consoled only by sexual visits from a girl friend — permitted in Mexican jails — and operating a small but profitable electrical business. Upon release, he left for the U.S.S.R., where he was awarded the title "Hero of the Soviet Union.” By then Stalin was dead, but his appointees and successors, the Class of '37, still had decades left to remain in power. As Trotsky him self once noted, "terror can be very effective against a ... class which does not wish to depart from the scene.” Trotsky's house in a suburb of Mexico City has been converted into a museum, with the gaping scars from the bullets of the first assassination attem pt left unrepaired in the walls. His wife, Natal’ya Sedova, lived on in the dwelling for another two decades, and the issues of Novyi zhurnal, to which she subscribed from New York, still stand on its bookshelves.
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Stalin's vengeance on Trotsky extended beyond Trotsky him self to many of his relatives. Trotsky was to write that Yagoda had driven one of his daughters into the grave and forced the other to com m it suicide. One of his sons, forced to renounce his father, suffered the same fate as his father anyway, and another died under suspicious circumstances. Even after Trotsky's death Stalin continued to persecute his family, executing his younger sister, Ol'ga, who was also guilty of being married to the revolutionary Lev Kamenev (pseudonym of Lev Rozenfel'd, 1883-1936). Kamenev had joined the Bol'sheviks abroad in 1903 and was one of Lenin's chief deputies. Stalin executed not only Kamenev himself, but his wife and children, too. There were other tales of fam ily vengeance. Yuly Aikhenval'd's son Aleksandr, a fam ous economist whose books were regarded as classical marxist studies, had visited his father, attempting to convince him — unsuccessfully — to return to Russia. The son was arrested in the beginning of W orld W ar II, and when the Germans were about to take Orlov, where he was held prisoner in 1941, he was executed along with other potential enemies of the Soviet system. It was common practice for the NKVD at the time. The grandson, Yury, a writer, was arrested in 1949 and declared mentally ill for his anti-Soviet views and imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital from 1951 to 1955. Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938) was active in the new field of sociology (which was later to find itself in constant conflict with official Soviet M arxist doctrine). He was also a supporter of the New Economic Policy (NEP). W hereas Trotsky had backed a program of rapid industrialization and collectivization of agriculture, Bukharin advocated a more moderate approach and was supported by Stalin. In 1928, however, Stalin reversed himself and adopted Trotsky's position on this issue. Bukharin was removed from the Politbyuro but appointed editor of Izvestiya. In the sphere of literature Bukharin the form er émigré played a considerable role as an arbiter of public policy. He was probably the author of "Party Policy in the Field of Imaginative Literature.” This resolution, published in Pravda and Izvestiya on July 1, 1925, called for a gradual transition to a proletarian literature (as opposed to any immediate, dram atic leap). At the first conference of the Union of Soviet W riters, held in Moscow in 1934, Bukharin spoke out against the "bureaucratization” of literature and criticized Stalin's literary policy. Bukharin's efforts to save himself from the purges by praising the executions of Zinov'ev and Kamenev were fruitless; in 1937 he was arrested and became a defendant in the show trials of 1938. The prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinsky, accused the group of espionage,
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"wrecking,” terror, and plotting to seize power. Like the others, Bukharin made no protest: I confess m y gu ilt o f having com m itted the crim es which now weigh heavily upon me. I have previously stated to the court and now unreservedly confirm that I recognize m yself as guilty o f the crimes com m itted by "the block o f Rightists and Trotskyites.” I deserve the severest punishment, and I agree with Citizen Prosecutor, who has repeatedly stated that I am staring death in the face. The extrem ely offensive nature o f the crim e is obvious and the political responsibility boundless. The legal responsibility is such that it justifies even the m ost severe sentence. I deserve to be shot ten tim es over. Bukharin's request was honored, albeit only once. Just before his execution he wrote a last, half-crazed letter to Stalin, promising never to retract any of his confessions and swearing his total allegiance. He begged that his life be spared and offered in exchange to go to Am erica as a "sort of anti-Trotsky.” If necessary, he was even willing to leave his wife behind as a hostage. Others of the form er exiles who perished in the purges were Georgy Pyatakov (1890-1937), who had fled tsarist internal exile in Siberia to Europe via Japan and in 1930 became the real overlord of heavy industry, and Aleksandr Shlyapnikov (1885-1937), who had emigrated in 1908 and in Soviet Russia led a workers’ opposition. Shlyapnikov refused to incriminate himself in the show trials but died in prison anyway. Another friend of Lenin's since 1903 was the form er émigré Grigory Zinov'ev (pseudonym of Grigory Radomysl'sky, 18831936), who became head of the Comintern, carried out terrorist actions in 1918, and helped Stalin to defeat Trotsky in 1923-24. "Bol'shevization,” he had written, was the "flaming hatred of the bourgeoisie and of the counterrevolutionary leaders of Social Democracy.” Despite Stalin's promise of special consideration for both him and Kamenev at sentencing, Zinov'ev too was executed. Karl Radek, Zinov'ev and Kamenev had been attacked personally by Dmitry Svyatopolk-Mirsky, himself already doomed, as traitors and agents of Germany and Japan: They were able to soberly take into account how the people hated them but, deprived o f any hum an feelings and creeping about the depths to which they had descended, they were unable to fathom how the people loved their homeland, loved S ta lin ... and how the people had become a type, a mass phenomenon. A nd the purer, the better, the more heroic, the more noble the people o f our country are, the more m ercilessly we
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shall expunge these poisonous beasts — Trotskyites and Zinov’evites — the agents o f fascism. The country is purging itself o f alien trash. The venomous serpents have been captured and shall be exterminated. O ur solidly built Stalinist home w ill be free o f them. How was it that those accused of being "W hite Guard pygmies” and "worthless fascist lackeys” signed confessions and even pleaded to be executed? Varlam Shalamov, who himself spent 17 years as a prisoner in the camps, wrote that there were two schools of investigation, known as "physics” and "chemistry,” i.e. beatings and pharm acological methods. Equally effective was the threat of harm and even death to fam ily members. In 1988 the Soviet governm ent officially, albeit posthumously, "rehabilitated” Bukharin, Rykov, Zinov'ev, and 18 other Party functionaries; i. e., admitted that their confessions had been obtained "by unlawful means.” Emigration had turned out to be a round trip, but the fulfillm ent of their wishes in exile — a trium phant return home — proved to be their doom.
The Approaching War O ft expectation fails, and m ost o ft there Where m ost it prom ises; and o ft it hits, Where hope is coldest and despair m ost fits. Shakespeare, A ll's Well that Ends W ell As tensions began to increase in Europe in the 1930s, the Russian émigrés in countries which did not enjoy particularly good relations with Germany began to be regarded with suspicion because of the pro-German sympathies of many of their comrades in exile. In general, the entire period was one of intense political involvement and stress for the émigrés. In theory, the remnants of the W hite armies were still attem pting to maintain military discipline, although in practice, of course, they had long since been virtually disbanded. After Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, some 50,000 Russians remained in the country, roughly 10,000 of them in Berlin. That year the Russian Popular Liberation Organization (ROND) was created and had 200 "storm troopers” organized according to a German model. ROND published the newspaper Probuzhdenie Rossii (Russia's Awakening) in Russian and German and graced with both the Russian double-headed eagle and the swastika. One of its leaders, Andrei Svetozarov, was shown in it wearing a swastika decorated in the Russian national colors and wearing a Hitler-style mustache.
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Svetozarov liked to be called Führer.8 Closed by the German authorities, who were at that tim e still supporting good relations with the Soviet Union, ROND was replaced by The Russian National and Social Movement. Its representative in Berlin, the form er tsarist general A. V. Meller-Zakomel'sky, paid homage to Hitler and Mussolini as the "spiritual leaders of the world forces of light, which are saving humanity from the pitch blackness of Bolshevism .” Inevitably, after France and Czechoslovakia signed mutual-cooperation treaties with the Soviet Union in 1935, the counterintelligence services of the two countries took a heightened interest in the activities of their Russian émigré guests. The Berlin Cadet newspaper R ul' folded in 1931 after a series of attacks on its editorial offices, evidently by communists, and was replaced by Nash vek (Our Age). The paper was staffed largely by Russian Jews but saw itself as a publication of the Russian‘emigration in its totality, rather than as a Jewish or even Russian-Jewish publication. The editors obviously hoped to find some accommodation with Germany's new rulers, avoided criticizing even Nazi anti-Jewish language and acts, and published letters to the editor welcoming the new government. On April 2,1933, the newspaper published an open letter addressed to Hitler by 28 Russian émigré organizations, congratulating Germany's "chosen and courageous leader of an awakened national Germany”6 on his assumption of office. The letter, which was carried on page one in Russian and German, went on: For years the martyrdom o f our people, who have been deceived and exploited by the Bol'sheviks, has been crying out to the heavens. For years we have watched the red flood approaching Germany and have sought to warn the public. We know well the enem y whom you, H err Reichskanzler, are attacking in selfless love for the Fatherland and from whom you wish to liberate the German people.... M ay a histone new era ensue in Europe together with yo u l M ay Germany be led to the same spiritual renewal which we desire for our people. On April 23, 1933, Nash vek ceased publication, supposedly because of its high printing costs. Its chief editorial w riter on foreign
•R O N D also published the newspapers Golos R O N D a, (The Voice of R O N D ), and Devyatyi val (The Ninth Breaker). b"den berufenen und mutigen Führer des erwachten nationalen Deutschland."
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affairs, Grigory Landau3, was deported that year, and Vladim ir Gessen, who wrote that he had been "impressed” by the torchlight marches, left for France. The Spanish civil war was closely followed by the Russian émigrés. At least 72 of them actually fought on the Nationalist side, while the Soviet Union assisted the Loyalists. In 1936 the W hite general Andrei Turkul created the Russian National League of W ar Participants,5 a military organization of younger people with a strong religious commitment. From 1937 until 1940 it published its own newspaper, Signal, where the platform of the party was laid out quite explicitly: " ... To pursue the goal of overthrowing the Judeo-communist authorities in Russia and reestablish the legitimate, national inherited authority ... that is, the confirmation of the legitim ate heir of the House of the Romanovs — under a scheme of broadly understood legitimism.” Turkul him self summed up his political ideals as "fascist monarchy.” The intent was to create a transitional dictatorship: We conceive the ascent to the throne by the Russian Monarch as a culm ination o f a com plex and, perhaps, lengthy process, whereby the Russian land will be purified o f the international pestilence, revolutionary intoxication, and Bol'shevik de bauchery.... But it is not for the Tsar to bum out the ulcers o f Russian life with searing iron. The hands o f the Russian Tsar should not be stained with blood. If that is necessary, better it be done by the dictator. The determined efforts of W hite General Vasily Biskupsky to establish a position within the German government were finally rewarded in May of 1936, when the informal Russian émigré mission ( Vertrauenstelle), which had been established in 1922, was dissolved by the Nazi governm ent and refounded under his direction. The street name of the new offices must have struck this dedicated monarchist as a favorable omen: "Bleibtreustraße” — literally, "Keep the Faith Street.” He prom ptly appointed as his deputies the same Pêtr Shabel'sky-Bork and Sergei Taboritsky who had murdered the father of the writer, Vladim ir Nabokov. Taboritsky "went German,” refusing to speak Russian and wearing an SS uniform. Basically, the Nazi authorities now intended to use the Vertrauenstelle to keep an eye on the Russian immigrants and serve as a registration bureau, evidently
•Landau moved to Riga, where he worked for the newspaper Segodnya (Today), but in 1940, when the country was annexed by the Soviet Union, he was arrested and executed. bBy 1937 the organization had branches in France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, G reece, Albania, Argentina, and Uruguay.
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run by Taboritsky, but the attem pt was a failure. W hether or not Biskupsky ever handed over the names of Russian Jews, as instructed, has not been established. Throughout this period the impending violence of the war already hung in the air. In 1937 the form er Soviet agent Evgeny Poretsky (Ignaty Reiss) was murdered; Tsvetaeva's husband Sergei Èfron was implicated and was forced to flee to the U.S.S.R. That same year the W hite Army General Evgeny Miller, head of the all-Russian M ilitary League, was kidnapped in Paris by Soviet agents, taken to the Soviet Union, and shot. The W hite Army General Nikolai Skoblin and his wife, the singer Nadezhda Plevitskaya were accomplices in this act. Skoblin managed to flee, but Plevitskaya was sentenced to 15 years at hard labor. Plevitskaya, who was tremendously popular among the Russian émigrés, always wore a Russian national costume when performing and ended each performance with the song: "You've been covered over with snow, Russia” (Zaneslo tebya snegom, Rossiya). In prison Plevitskaya kept a diary, now owned by Columbia University's Bakhmetev Archive, in which she protested her innocence, but before dying she confessed to her lawyer that she had not only known about her husband's plan to kidnap Miller, but had even actively participated in the conspiracy. She and Skoblin, who had gone through six automobiles, were living far beyond their means. In her diary she wrote of seeing "Kolechka” (Skoblin) in a dream: "I threw myself on his chest and exclaimed: ‘W here have you been?’ He answered: 'There!' And suddenly his head disappeared. I shouted: ‘W here is your head?' ‘in the other world,' he answered. A bird was shrieking, an owl. And for a long tim e after that shriek my heart ached.” In Russia both Kutepov and Skoblin were interrogated (supposedly without any transcript being made) and sho t— on Beriya's personal instructions. The French centrist newspaper Le Matin commented on Miller's disappearance with a remarkable lack of foresight: France is not a no m an's land. She belongs to the French. If there are foreigners who have scores to settle between them o r quarrels to fight out, le t them do it in their own countries, not in ours. We are as little interested in the shade o f their opinions as we are in the shade o f their emblems. W hat does interest us is our tranquility. And in 1937, too, the League in France for the Return to the M otherland was renamed the League of Friends of the Soviet Motherland. In 1938, the same year that a mail bomb killed Ivan Solonevich's wife in Bulgaria, Trotsky's son, Lev Sedov, was murdered in France by Stalin's agents. And that same year Boris Pryanishnikov was sent to Berlin from France to set up a secret printing press, financed by the Japanese government, to publish materials of the
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National Labor League of the New Generation for distribution in the Soviet Union.3 In Germany the various Russian émigré organizations were amalgamated into Biskupsky's registration bureau, while in 1939 the French governm ent unexpectedly required registration of all foreign organizations but did not provide specific instructions as to how this was to be implemented. Russian cultural organizations found them selves in a sem i-legal situation. "Undesirable foreigners” were rounded up for deportation. These included Russians who had collaborated with the Nazis in Germany and also members of the proSoviet Union for Return to the Homeland. Earlier deportations had taken place in 1938. Now the Russian anti-communist emigration and the German anti-Nazi emigration found themselves in opposing ideological camps. After the French surrender in 1940 a number of the internees were handed over to the Germans and executed. The Vichy French governm ent also regarded Freemason organizations with suspicion, and on June 22, 1941, the very day Germany invaded the Soviet Union, 120 persons were arrested, among them ll'ya Fondaminsky, Vladim ir Zeeler, Il'ya Gal'perin, and Vasily Maklakov. All were released, with the exception of Fondaminsky, who was handed over to the Germans and perished in Auschwitz. Many of the so-called "conservatives” in the émigré camp openly favored a German attack on the Soviet Union, which they saw as the only way to overthrow the Soviet government. According to the magazine Signal, the W hite General N. N. Golovin viewed a possible German occupation as the price Russia had to pay for having allowed the Bol'sheviks to take power; all the German doctors, engineers, architects, and agronomists who would arrive to adm inister the new territories would, so Golovin claimed, simply be repeating history and would ultim ately be assimilated as Russians into Russia. A considerable number of Russians in France applied for permission to resettle in Germany after Hitler came to power, but the Germans distrusted them and largely disregarded their petitions. Conflicting German and Great Russian imperial ambitions were obviously a sticking point. Nevertheless, the general mood among the émigrés, who hoped to overthrow the communists with German support, was optim istic. In Belgrade a form er tsarist governor was asked what he would do upon returning home. He responded that the
•In general the role of the Japanese in Russian émigré affairs during those years is poorly understood. According to Pryanishnikov, General Turkul probably had connections with the Japanese, as well.
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last decree he had signed on the eve of the October coup was No. 16. W hen he got back he would sign No. 17. No matter how pro-German individual émigré groups may have been, they were regarded with distrust by the Nazi government. The Russian National-Socialist Movement (RNSD)a was intended to coopt the various émigrés and their organizations. A number of lectures were delivered on behalf of the group by Ivan Solonevich in 1938, and there was discussion of a possible translation of Mein Kam pf into Russian, om itting or diluting Hitler's demands for Lebensraum at the expense of Russia. In August 1939 the Molotov-Ribbentropp pact was concluded between the Soviet Union and Germany, leaving the pro-German segm ent of the émigré committee, which had placed all its hopes in Hitler, totally aghast and frightened.6 Russian émigré organizations were perm itted to remain in existence, but were ordered lo severely
“(Russkoe natsional-sotsialisticheskoe dvizhenie). The acronym RNSD has also been interpreted as meaning "Russian National and Social Movement" (Rossiiskoe Natsional'noe i Sotsial'noe Dvizhenie), but this was evidently a camouflage. bThe fate of Germ an writers in Soviet exile is itself a fascinating story which in many w ays runs parallel to and interlocks with that of Russians in Germ any at the tim e. A small group of Germ ans had been living in Moscow since the late 1920s, and in 1933 a large number of Germ an communists and writers sought asylum in the U .S .S .R . (guaranteed under Article 129 of the Soviet Constitution). At that tim e the Soviet government was eager to maintain good relations with the Germ an government, and People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Maksim Litvinov is even rumored to have said that the Soviets did not care if the Germ ans shot their communists. Despite this state of affairs, the Germ an Communist Party instructed a number of writers to flee to Russia, including Willi Bredel and the Hungarian scholar Georg Lukâcs. After the Kirov assassination in Decem ber 1934, it becam e exceedingly difficult to obtain a Soviet entry visa, and in August 1936 the show trials began. In Septem ber 1936 Yagoda w as replaced by Nikolai Ezhov as head of the NK VD , whereupon som e of the Germ ans in the Soviet Union w ere executed. Almost all w ere murdered surreptitiously, Georg Born having been the only Germ an w riter to be publicly denounced as a "Japanese-Germ an spy.” Still others w ere simply handed over to the Germ an authorities during the period beginning with the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact until the Germ an invasion. Lukâcs and Becher w ere given to understand that they would not be handed over, but would be liquidated internally. Germ an writers had previously been required to apply for Soviet citizenship, and those whose applications w ere not approved could at least hope to be deported. In the meantime Heinrich Mann wrote in N eue W eltbühne of the execution of 16 old revolutionaries that "they had to be done away with for the good of the revolution, quickly and thoroughly." His article w as appraised as "excellent" by the Moscow exile Johannes R. Becher.
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curtail any activities and refrain from criticizing the Soviet Union in any way.a That same year the Paris-based newspaper Vozrozhdenie abruptly shifted from a pro-Hitler position to one loyal to the French government. In China the Soviets attempted to win the sympathy of the right-wing émigrés by presenting themselves as supporters of the form er imperial way. In the window of a shop in Harbin, for example, the uniform of a Soviet general was exhibited, decorated with tsarist stripes on the trousers and epaulets in the style of the old regime. In Manchuria the Japanese began closing Russian schools.
•According to the ém igré historian Mikhail Nazarov, Alfred Rosenberg ordered that the so-called National Front (R N S U V , R N SD , RFS and others) be disbanded in early 1939. However, this information appears to be incorrect.
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The Second Wave World War II Die and be dam ned Thomas Mortimer (1785-1824) The fruits so inevitably born of the greedy and vengeful Versailles treaty represented a great hiatus marking the end of the exiles’ long wait. For many the hour appeared to have arrived for a return home, trium phant even if clinging precariously to the saddle of a foreign conqueror, while others could not see themselves fighting on any side other than Russia's, even Soviet Russia's. But for the older First-W ave émigrés, the W ar signalled the last years of their lives and careers; many died either during or quite soon after thé war. The younger exiles, hopeful of finally succeeding where their elders had so ignominiously failed, found themselves caught up in a bloody maelstrom in which many of them were killed in battle, imprisoned in Soviet forced-labor camps as traitors, and even executed by that same holy Russia they had so fervently hoped to save. As for RussianJewish exiles, there was only despair — from vainglorious beginning to calam itous end. For the Second W ave the war was despair and rage, but probably even more of the form er than the latter. In the early stages of the war some of the Russian émigrés in Europe preferred to remain neutral in a struggle which had not yet reached Russia. But even before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the exiles had begun to choose sides. Once the conflict was finally forced upon the Soviet Union, émigré indecision and neutrality were almost totally abandoned. The editors of Novyi zhum al (The New Review), declared in their first issue that any overthrow of the Soviet governm ent under wartime conditions was impossible. Milyukov was even more blunt: "You're not for Stalin? That means you're for Hitler.” Milyukov's transformation became evident at the end of the RussianFinnish war, when he declared that he felt sorry for the Finns, but nevertheless wanted Vyborg Province for Russia. Now he went even further, justifying all of Soviet history: "When one sees the end, one understands better the means to that end.” Thus, this respected and cultured idealist, who had early on called for "Soviet rule w ithout the Bol'sheviks,” hoping for reform of the Soviet system from within, had come a long way indeed, but he was far from alone. Berdyaev wrote that he felt "merged” with the Red Army’s success and that he divided people into those who longed for Russia's victory and those who wanted Germany to win the war. Sources differ on how many Russians fought in the French army. Aside from Russians recruited into the
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Foreign Legion in Turkey and the Balkans, between 3,700 and 10,000 Russians fought in the regular French army, most as volunteers, and at least 450 of them died. Others perished in the Résistance. On the other hand, many Russian émigrés viewed the German invasion of the U.S.S.R. as a long-awaited opportunity to rid Russia of com m unist rule, and the French branch of ROVS registered more than 1,500 volunteers to be used in the fight against Bolshevism . On May 22, 1941, a month before the invasion of Russia by Germany, White General Aleksei von Lampe sent a telegram to German military headquarters asking permission for Russian émigrés to take part in the upcoming war with the Soviet Union, but his request was denied. From Serbia, just one day after the invasion, the W hite General Mikhail Skorodumov requested German permission to form a Russian émigré division to fight on the Eastern front. The request was originally rejected, but permission was finally granted in early fall to form a Russian m ilitary "corps” which was used against Tito's partisans. More than 80 percent of the young Russians in Bulgaria rushed to join m ilitary units that might send them to fight in Russia. Most of them ended up in the Russian Corps or the Russian Liberation Army (ROA). The National Organization of Russian Scouts (NORR) in Bulgaria contributed more than 250 men, many of whom perished. A third camp consisted of persons such as Kerensky and Denikin who desired a Soviet victory over Germany in the hope that the Red Army would then overthrow its own government (even though Kerensky had declared in December 1941 that totalitarian Bol’shevik governm ent was a thing of the past). This hope for a military coup was cherished in both leftist and rightist circles of the émigré community, and was shared by the more conservative Men'sheviks and many SRs. Once the Soviet Union had occupied the Baltic republics and eastern Poland, a series of arrests were carried out in those countries. In Estonia, for example, some 60,000 persons are estimated to have been arrested. Pêtr Bogdanov, a journalist who had been a member of the governm ent of W hite General Nikolai Yudenich, was shot. Some of the other victim s were the prose writers and poets Boris Semënov and Vladim ir Gushchik, and V. A. Peil, a supporter of the Eurasianist movement. The stocks of Russian libraries and book stores were destroyed or confiscated, but charitable and professional associations were allowed to continue to exist. A fter the Germans occupied Paris, a number of Russian émigrés found themselves in somewhat privileged positions. Since the Soviet Union was not yet involved in the war, the Germans used the Russians as interpreters, superintendents of confiscated buildings, and chauffeurs. The privileges they accrued from these jobs stirred up no little ill will on the part of the French, but Russian collaboration was not
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limited to such relatively innocent activities. Yury Zherebkov, the son of a tsarist general and a naturalized German, was appointed Leiter [leader] of the Russian émigré community. Just 36 hours after the German invasion of Russia he issued a communique rejoicing that the "satanic sword of Judeo-Marxism" had been deflected from Europe and celebrating the German invasion as a "resurrection” of the Russian people: In an unprecedented bloody struggle the German arm y is forced to take over the Soviet Union — which now turns out not to be Russia, as we a ll expected. Every Russian nationalist, once he has given the m atter his m ature thought and has killed in him self a ll cloying sentim ental feelings, m ust come to one conclusion: fo r the sake o f Russia it is essential that the Germans lead the Russian people for a num ber o f years — either directly o r through a Russian governm ent guided by them. A fte r a quarter century o f experiments conducted on Russians by the Yid Comintern, only the Germans can lead the Russians ou t o f their nearly bestial state. The Russians in Russia, according to Zherebkov, were anarchic and contam inated by the "Bol'shevik infection.” They needed a firm guiding hand, but definitely not that of the Russian émigrés, who had convincingly demonstrated that they were incapable of achieving a consensus. Any experimenting with democracy would only lead to a civil war that would destroy Russia: A dolf Hitler, the Savior o f Europe and its culture from the Yiddish-Marxist occupiers, and the savior o f the Russian people, will go down in Russian history as one o f its greatest heroes, and the blood spilled on the endless fields o f Russia will sense as the last purifying sacrifice and pledge o f the future springtim e o f the friendship o f two great peoples— the German and the Russian.... This is a terrible battle to the death o f two principles, two world views. On the one hand we have the principle o f destruction and enslavem ent: the remnants o f dem ocracy and plutocracy exploiting the masses, and what fo r m any was an unexpected a lly — blood-drenched communism. A nd behind a ll this is the im pudent Yid. On the other hand we see the creative, liberating principle: National-Socialism and Fascism, which build life on totally different principles and bring happiness and true freedom to the peoples. Zherebkov called upon the Russian émigré com m unity and each individual within that community to decide firm ly and irrevocably where his place was in that struggle and who his true friends were:
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If no coalitions in the world, even the strongest, have proven capable o f resisting the decision made by the German people, can it be that the vicious hissing o f a pitifu l handful o f émigré politicians, slanderers, and petty foreign agents can stop the decisive victory o f German arm s? We now live in a time when any neutral procrastination is a crim e! The Russian émigré com m unity m ust decide whose path it wishes to tread, what is more attractive: the snout o f the Yid with the bloody, five-pointed star on his forehead, o r the German soldier with the inscription on his belt buckle: "God is with u s ln Your decision w ill determine whether you w ill remain apatrides with no rights, o r whether you will regain your Hom eland and be able to take p a rt in the gigantic task o f recreating and resurrecting the Russian people. The tim e has come to decide, for the eleventh hour has struck! Zherebkov announced a mandatory registration of Russians residing in France and nearly half of them complied. Pro-German sym pathies were shared by many Russians, both within the émigré com m unity and in the Soviet Union. Ioann Shakhovskoi, future Archbishop of San Francisco and Russian émigré poet, minced no words in stating his position, proclaiming that "the bloody operation of overthrowing the Third International has been entrusted to a skilled, seasoned surgeon.” By the tim e Germany launched its offensive, the peoples of the Soviet Union had already undergone the horrors of collectivization and starvation, a massive assault on religion, and enormous political purges. As a result, the advancing German armies originally encountered an amazing degree of hospitality from the local population. Imm ediately after the war broke out between Germany and the Soviet Union, the National Cossack Movement was created in Prague with a newspaper, Kazachii Vestnik (Cossack Herald), which appeared twice weekly, beginning on October 1,1941. Alfred Rosenberg, a Baltic German and prom inent Nazi ideologue in charge of the occupied eastern territories, was particularly keen on supporting the Cossacks in their efforts to create their own state, independent of both Russia and Ukraine. On October 22, 1941, he persuaded Hitler to sign a decree creating special military units manned by Cossack prisoners of w ar and led by First-W ave Russian officers. The novelist and form er W hite general Pëtr Krasnov eventually was put in charge of all Cossack units.
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By the fall of 1941 a large number of Russian émigrés had assembled in Berlin to join in the fight against the Bol'sheviks. Among them was the novelist Nikolai Breshko-Breshkovsky, who died during a bombing raid on Berlin in 1943. The w riter Sergei Sokolov-Krechetov, a close friend of Bunin's, spoke at a literary evening devoted to him and used the opportunity to praise the Nazi regime. (Curiously, Sokolov-Krechetov was later accused of being a Mason and had to flee Germany.) Another writer whom the Germans attempted to recruit was Aleksandr Vertinsky. When the Nazis wanted to set up a "Russian Desk” in their new government, he was offered the position of Director, which he refused. Despite all these political flirtations, however, the Germans continued to distrust the Russians; in 1942 the European office of Rodzaevsky's fascist group was shut down by the Gestapo for suspicion of espionage for the Soviets. In December of 1934 the Japanese opened an office of Russian émigré affairs, headed by A. P. Baksheev and evidently controlled by Rodzaevsky, who based his activities on the slogan "To live and die with Japan.” Evidently, the Japanese closed that office in 1942.a Among the émigrés a favorite slogan was "Better a horrible end than a horror without end.” Other slogans were: "A crusade against Bolshevism ,” "W e are not fighting against the Russian People, but against the Soviet governm ent,” and "We wish to see as our neighbor a free and friendly Russia.” The Germans were initially so successful in their Blitzkrieg that by March 1, 1942, they had taken 3,600,000 prisoners of war and controlled millions of civilians in the occupied territories. These mass surrenders were hardly evidence of a "G reat Patriotic W ar” — the term used by the Soviets to describe the conflict. Stalin announced that these millions of prisoners-of-war (including his own son, Yakov Dzhugashvili), as well as all Soviet citizens working for the Germans on either a voluntary or involuntary basis, were to be viewed as traitors. The form er Soviet general Andrei Vlasov had played an im portant role in the defense of Moscow and Kiev. His fam ily background was not unlike that of many other Soviet citizens: one of his brothers had been executed by the Soviet authorities, his father had somehow lost his house, and his wife's parents had been "dekulakized,” that is, at the very least their property had been confiscated during the collectivization of agriculture. One account has it that he learned in 1942 that the NKVD had searched his Moscow apartment, and he suspected that the authorities had learned of his
A ccording to one Soviet source, a sim ilar fascist organization w as created in Tokyo under the leadership of a W hite émigré, Balikov.
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membership in a secret organization of Soviet military officers; this meant alm ost autom atic execution. W hile trying to break through to the besieged Leningrad, Vlasov's troops were encircled, and he himself surrendered to the Germans on July 11-12, 1942. Early in 1943 petitions of the so-called "Smolensk Committee,” signed by both him and form er Soviet general Vasily Malyshkin, were being dropped by the German planes on the front and in the Soviet rear, calling for the creation of a Russian Liberation Army. Stalin refused to recognize the Geneva Convention for prisoners of war, and many men who found themselves in such an intolerable situation were willing, even eager, to do anything to survive the horrendous condition of the camps. Before the war ended, exSoviet citizens serving in the W ehrmacht numbered between 500,000 and 1,000,000. There were also large contingents of param ilitary units, known as Hiwis (for Hilfswilllige, meaning volunteers) who performed armed guard duty. W ithin the German government, Borman, Himmler, and Rosenberg were opposed to the creation of a Russian army, and the Japanese were also actively hostile to the plan. By late March 1943 it had become evident that Germany was losing the war, and the decision was taken to perm it Vlasov to address the ém igrés and the following year to create an army. Vlasov's real views are still a hotly debated topic. After the war the supporters of this "Russian de Gaulle” claimed that he had sided with Hitler only because he had no other alternative in the struggle against Stalin's Russia. His opponents maintained that the Vlasov movement was inherently anti dem ocratic and anti-Jewish. The socialist Grigory Aronson, for example, p o le m iz in g with such pro-Vlasov figures as Boris Nikolaevsky, claimed to be quoting Vlasov, evidently relying on statem ents in 1943 issues of Parizhskii vestnik (Parisian Herald): The future Russia w ill have an authoritarian government. Parliam entarism and a ll sorts o f democratism such as that existing in the Soviet Union is a fraud practiced upon the people, and one which we do not wish to renew. *
An unbreakable and lasting friendship between the Russian and Germanic peoples [is the basis o f our platform on foreign policy] ... O ur enem y no. 1 is England, whose economic and political interests run contrary to the interests o f the Russian people. *
In the new accordance Jews there Bolshevism
Russia a ll her peoples w ill be able to live in with their desires. But there will be no place for the ... The liberation o f Russia from Stalin and w ill purify her o f the Jews.
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W hether these words can actually be attributed to Vlasov or were inserted by others is in dispute. Boris Nikolaevsky, the only nonJew among the Men'sheviks and a person whose credentials were absolutely irreproachable in this regard, quotes Vlasov speaking to an unnamed Kiev "professor" in the winter of 1944-45, uttering sentim ents quite the opposite of those cited above: For me, o f course, it is irrelevant who cooperates with me, whether he is m onarchist o r republican. W hat is im portant is that he be Russian, not, o f course, in the racial, but in the state meaning.... I need more Jews ... but that is not m y fault. I can say frankly that I do not share anti-Sem itic notions. That's a German, not a Russian position.... O f course, I do not attem pt to control the press, but in conversations with a num ber o f journalists I have categorically spoken out against any speeches smacking o f anti-Semitism. That's not the Russian way. Can it be decent to speak out against the Jews after the Hitlerites have been physically destroying them and the Soviet governm ent treated them so treacherously during the war? Throughout Europe Russian émigrés had to come to term s with the events in Germany. After the Russian émigrés had created "The Russian National Socialist Party” in late 1939, the directors of the Kondakov Seminar in Prague found themselves faced with the seem ingly impossible task of convincing the German occupying authorities that the Seminar was not a Russian émigré association and as such subject to the control of the émigré fascist Stützpunkt de r russischen Emigration. In April 1941, when the Germans occupied Belgrade, the Seminar's Belgrade office was destroyed in the shelling, and its director and his wife perished. To save the Seminar’s icon collection, the new Director, Nikolai Andreev, put it on perm anent exhibit and received extensive praise from German adm irers of Russian art. Inevitably, German support led to accusations that Andreev, who had been appointed Institutsleiter, was a Nazi. The Czechoslovak Resistance did not believe these rumors, but in May 1945 Andreev was arrested by agents of SMERSH®, a vicious Soviet counterespionage organization which was responsible for the murder of an untold number of innocent people, and jailed for two years. After the Ribbentrop-Molotov treaty, the Germans had pressured Yugoslavia into recognizing the Soviet governm ent — a rapprochement which confounded the anti-Soviet Russian ém igrés in Yugoslavia no less than their countrymen in Germany. The Russians
•S M E R S H is an acronym for S m art' shpionam, meaning "Death to Spies."
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in Yugoslavia tried to maintain a semblance of normal life and in the course of 1939 sponsored 39 scholarly talks at the Belgrade Institute for the Study of Russia. On July 28, 1940, the anti-Soviet Russian émigré newspaper Tsarskii vestnik (Tsarist Herald) was forced to close, although it was replaced on September 15 — minus the Russian Imperial Two-Headed Eagle — by Russkii narodnyi vestnik (The Russian People's Herald). Later that year the Solidarist newspaper Za Rossiyu was also shut down, although it, too, was replaced by a magazine entitled O gni (Flames). By March 1941, however, political alliances had shifted radically and the Yugoslav government allied itself with the Germans, but was itself overthrown a few days later. The new government was intent on placating the Soviets, and oversight of Russian émigré publications was handed over to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which warned the Russian-language Belgrade newspaper Russkii golos (Russian Voice) not to dwell on German successes in the war. On April 5 the Yugoslav governm ent signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviets, whereupon Germany declared war on Yugoslavia and occupied the country in just 12 days (although the various partisan factions put up resistance all through the war, while at the same time viciously attacking each other). During the occupation the State Commission, which had rendered so much assistance to Russian immigrants, and the form er Russian Embassy were replaced by the Bureau of Russian Refugee Affairs, which was headed by General Skorodumov. As in other European countries occupied by the Germans, Russian émigré publications were term inated. On July 13 the first issue of Russkii byulleten' (The Russian Bulletin) appeared. Its second issue, dated July 20, contained the following announcement: A ll traitors claim ing that "Skorodum ov will soon be rem oved and replaced by someone else" are to be considered provocateurs, because this is not sim ply a m atter o f Skorodumov, but o f our common association. A ll such provocations shall be reported to the [Russian] Bureau. A ll fools claim ing that Skorodumov "is a German official defending exclusively German interests" are to be handed over for study to Professor Krainsky [a psychiatrist]. The Bureau should be advised o f a ll traitors claim ing that our paths diverge from those o f the Germans. A ll traitors who argue for neutrality o r that we should be on the side o f the Soviets "to defend Russian territory” are to be considered Bol'shevik agents, and the Bureau shall be inform ed o f such incidents. Skorodumov returned the two-headed eagle to the form er Russian Embassy and on July 21 arranged a public book burning on the territory of the embassy. Among those authors whose works were
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condemned to the flames were Amfiteatrov, Kerensky, NemirovichDanchenko, Gippius, and even Merezhkovsky. Skorodumov issued an appeal to his fellow Russians: "Give me heroes, give me martyrs, give me patriote!” Russian émigré journalists announced: "On June 22 (the day of the German invasion of the U.S.S.R.) the New O rder commenced a last decisive battle against Bolshevism , which has enslaved Great Russia. As we predicted long ago, a new crusade has been launched against the communist Soviet governm ent.” The facade of the form er Russian embassy was decorated with a poster declaring that the victory of Germany meant the liberation of Russia. Many members of the Solidarist party relocated to Berlin to participate in the forthcom ing invasion of Russia. Some took positions in the newspaper Novoe slovo (New Word), while younger émigrés, who had been brought up in the Cadet Corps, were formed into a battalion of SSHilfspolizei (SS Auxiliary Police) and later into the SS-Sonderregim ent "W aräger” (SS Special Regiment "Varangian”). On Septem ber 12, 1941, Skorodumov finally received permission to form a separate Russian Corps (Russkii korpus), also called the Defense Corps (Okhrannyi korpus or Schutzkorps). He immediately posted a decree on the wall of the Russian House in Belgrade, announcing a draft of all men aged 18 to 55: Today; on the name day o f Blessed and Loyal Aleksandr Nevsky, Protector o f the suffering Russian Land, the cherished desires o f Russian people to begin service to their Hom eland in the Russian Arm y have been fulfilled.... Although Skorodumov was arrested and tem porarily detained3 two days later by the Gestapo for calling the unit the “Russian Corps,” another émigré, General Boris von Steifon, was perm itted to continue the task. By October 1 there were 893 men in uniform, and by November 1st their numbers had grown to 2,383. Originally outfitted in tsarist-style uniforms, the Corps was later reclothed in German uniforms and placed under German command. In 1943, supplem ented by volunteers from the contingent of Soviet prisoners of war, it supposedly numbered 16,000 men. One source shows 12,000 men in the summer of 1944. Some of the volunteers were so young that an entire unit was once caught playing In d ia n s” in their barracks; other members of the Corps were over 70 years old. Some 60 percent had seen service in the Russian civil war. The eager
•After arresting Skorodumov, the Germ ans closed Russkii byulleten'. On February 8, 1942, its place w as taken by Novyi put1 (The New Path), also published by the Russian Bureau. Novyi put' w as edited by B. K. Ganusovsky, a young man who had formerly edited a satirical m agazine entitled Bukh (Plop!).
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participation of the young was surprising in view of the fact that until then the older generation had been complaining of "denationalization,” i.e., cultural assim ilation. By then, two decades had elapsed since the Crimean evacuation. The overall mood was patriotic, enthusiastic, anxious. The poet Nataliya Korovaeva wrote a poem to "knights” of the W hite Army in 1941: G ray-haired warriors tried in battle S till young in heart but m ature in years, You have gathered a soldier's fam ily While native m elodies sing your glory. A thorny path stretches out behind you, Uncertainty lies ahead. The dear distances o f your native land Are swam ped in blood and tears.... 0 . A. Sidorov composed a poem entitled "On the Drina”: In silent nights A t distant anxious sentry posts For you, Russia, in tem pered hearts, We guard a White cross. W hen the various ethnic groups comprising Yugoslavia began to com m it atrocities against each other, the Russians at first performed what were basically police functions. They considered that they were helping the Yugoslavs to defend themselves against communism — a view that many Yugoslavs refused to accept. When two junior Russian officers were assassinated, an opulent military funeral was held in Belgrade, but representatives of the local government refused to attend. In August 1941 a Serbian sixth-grader killed a member of the Defense Corps and was promptly hanged by the Germans, who declared that any act directed against a Russian émigré soldier fighting on the German side would be punished mercilessly. In general, the Yugoslavs’ attitude toward the Russian émigrés worsened rapidly, and a number of Russians were killed by the partisans. On March 4,1942, the ém igré newspaper Vedomosti okhrannoi gruppy (Bulletin of the Defense Group) presented the Russians’ view of worsening relations: O ur adm ission to Yugoslavia was not only an affair o f the heart on the pa rt o f the late King Alexander, but a m atter o f governm ental calculation. We were loved as [Slavic] brothers, but we were also necessary as intellectuals. Serbia, whose
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intelligentsia had been destroyed during the wars, could not possibly have coped with the jo b o f renewing Yugoslavia; Serbia would have been forced to call upon the Croats, and the king chose to Russify Belgrade rather than C roatify it. A nd he was not mistaken.... We are now rebuked for having "eaten Serbian bread" for over 20 years. That is not the case.... The country underpaid us by a t least two m illion dinars a m onth fo r our labors by establishing a pay scale inferior to that observed for native-born citizens o f Yugoslavia. Such views were regarded by the Serbs as black ingratitude, and on July 1,1942, Russians were fired en masse from most Serbian ministries. Many Russians living in the countryside fled to Belgrade to avoid being killed by their form erly hospitable hosts. Others left the country or took up service in the Defense Corps. Meanwhile, the Nicholas II Russian House was the scene of night-long drinking bouts. At dawn the orchestra would parade out into the street to play as drunken Russian and German officers were helped into waiting cars to be taken home. The antagonizing effect on the local population during the difficult war years can easily be imagined. Those Russians who did not support the Germans were totally intimidated. Russian Church figures also threw themselves enthusiastically into the political maelstrom. Metropolitan Anastasy in the Holy Trinity Russian Church in Belgrade attacked the Archbishop of Canterbury for having called for a victory of the Soviet army. The Soviet government, Anastasy maintained, was the embodiment of the Antichrist. In July 1942 Archbishop Germogen accepted the proposal of the Croatian governm ent to form a "Croatian Autocephalic Orthodox Church.” The Germans closed most émigré cultural societies and provided support mainly for those organizations which could be expected to actively support the invasion of the Soviet Union. In France, the Germans funded Russian émigré publications, including the newspaper Parizhskii vestnik (Parisian Herald),3 and in 1943 three Russian theaters opened in Paris.b The Berlin newspaper Novoe slovo (The New Word) had been founded in 1933, when it inherited the
8Parizhskii vestnik appeared from 1942 to 1944 and w as edited by Pavel Bogdanovich. bO ne w as headed by Kseniya Pitoeva in the Salle Chopin, the second w as T e a t bez zanavesa (Theater Without a Curtain), headed by ll'ya Surguchêv, and the third was Sergei Lifar”s T e a t Russkoi dram y (The Russian Dram atic Theater), which opened on October 23. Lifar' was received in Berlin by Hitler three tim es and w as put on trial after the end of the war. Although he was found not guilty, his career never really recovered.
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readership of Rul', which was unable to compete with Parisian newspapers. Until the beginning of the war Novoe slovo had operated on a shoestring, but with German support it built up a circulation of 50,000 by the summer of 1943. The poet Vladim ir Despotuli3 was editor in chief. Nikolai Fevr, a staff correspondent, saw the paper as destined to play the historic role of being the first Russian émigré periodical to reach Russian soil. It was "to serve as a bridge between the émigré com m unity and form er Soviet citizens, and bring up on its pages an entire pleiad of fine anti-Bol'shevik journalists from the ranks of form er Soviet-enslaved people.” By November 2,1941, Novoe slovo proudly announced "the first work of a Soviet journalist to offer his pen” to the newspaper — a short story by Nikolai Terletsky. In 1942 the war still seemed to be heading toward a rapid victory for the Germans, and Evgeny Ryshkov, writing under the pseudonym E. Tarussky, wrote an editorial for the Christmas issue entitled "Hope, Faith, and W ork”: ... Now, for the first time since the founding o f the Christian world, the great holiday is celebrated in such an intense and titanic struggle, among the thunder o f world cataclysms, in the clash o f two principles — justice based on the finest covenants o f Christianity and exploitation o f man by his neighbor. This is an exploitation bom from the complex, age-old system o f Judeo-capitalism and false democracy. It is possible that such passionate hopes have never before burned in the hearts o f man as on this nineteen hundred and forty-second holiday o f Christ’s Birth. During the last quarter century, world-wide evil has revealed itself with an unprecedented and blatant cynicism in the horrible grim ace o f communism and in the goals o f world wide Yiddism — now obvious to all. For the first time since the birth o f Christ evil has m oved so insistently and decisively in its effort to take by storm the souls o f mankind, seeking to deprive them o f a ll that is light, o f all God's commandments and to transform people into two-legged livestock for whom the light would no longer exist and who would replace the greatest com m andm ent "Thou shall not kill" with the com m unist order: "K ill and destroy." This gigantic struggle between light and darkness is now proceeding before the eyes o f our contemporaries. In the hearts o f people there burns a flam ing hope for a victory o f man over beast, o f the Cross over the Jewish star.
•Despotuli had form erly been on the staff of R ul' (The Helm ), Nash vek (Our Age), and Vozrozhdenie (Renaissance).
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B ut mere hope o f victory is no longer sufficient.... We need total and unhesitating participation in the struggle. We m ust place ourselves in the ranks o f those actually carrying on the struggle, and not m erely in the ranks o f those praying fo r victory and hoping for it; we m ust be in the ranks o f those carrying out the last and decisive struggle with the enem ies o f a ll countries and peoples — with communism, Judaism, and plutocracy. The last days are now approaching, and each o f us m ust com prehend the meaning o f the struggle and determ ine his place in it. For he who does not move against communism is its conscious o r unconscious collaborator and ally. The anti-Jewish sentiments expressed regularly in Novoe slovo found their way into the fiction published by the paper. Typical is a short story entitled "Snouts, Snouts All Around” (Rozhi, rdzhi krugom) by Sergei Bel'deninov. The protagonist, who well may have been modelled on Hitler, is a young Russian artist in the Soviet Union whose works are system atically rejected, because the sources from which Russia drinks are poisoned by "Yido-Masonic ‘progressive’ society, through the lying press and the entire leadership, which consists exclusively of Jews.” The young man witnesses a number of street scenes in which people corrupted by Soviet society treat each other rudely. When he gives his seat to a priest on the bus, he is arrested and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment in solitary confinem ent. The lawyer appointed to defend him is a Jew, because "the Soviet state entrusted the defense only to Jews.” When the man's w ife tries to learn her husband's sentence from the lawyer, the lawyer demands her wedding ring in exchange for the information. Verse was totally absent from Novoe slovo during the w ar — obviously because it was felt to be nonessential. Fiction was intended to serve the cause; stories that were not anti-Sem itic were anti-Soviet. Non-fiction often was intended to be both. One essay, entitled The Jews and Russian Literature and sent in from occupied Sm olensk by I. Gorsky, claimed that Russian literature in Russia had been replaced by "Jewish-Soviet” literature and was in danger of becoming "purely Jewish.” According to Gorsky, almost all the editors as well as many writers in the Soviet Union were Jewish. Russian writers were generally unfairly treated by Jewish critics, and Jewish characters predominated in works of fiction. Against such a depressing background, the rich diversity of Russian émigré publications came to an abrupt end. Poslednie novosti, the only daily paper left in Paris, dropped its weekly "literary page” immediately after the outbreak of war and went out of business com pletely as soon as the Germans occupied Paris in 1940. That year
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also marked the end of Sovremennye zapiski, the leading "thick" journal of the Russian emigration. The Turgenev Library in Paris with some 100,000 volumes disappeared — taken to Germany and later possibly ending up in Minsk. The Kondakov Library likewise met with a sad fate. Moved from Prague to Belgrade in 1938, it suffered heavily during the German bombing of Belgrade in 1941. The Russian Public Library in the form er Russian Embassy was plundered by Soviet troops. In his capacity of Czech President, Eduard BeneS, who had been instrum ental in establishing the Russian Historical Archive Abroad in Prague, supposedly presented the collection to the Soviet governm ent in gratitude for the city’s liberation. Officially, the archive was handed over to the Academy of Sciences, but actually it was "m anaged” by the NKVD, which mined it for information identifying people to be arrested — some 18,000 persons, among them were the literary scholar Al'fred Bern.3 There are a number of rumors on how Bern died, from being executed in a Prague prison to committing suicide. Some writers were fortunate enough to have left for America before the Germans occupied France, among them Mark Aldanov, and Mikhail Tsetlin. Gaito Gazdanov, Ivan Shmelêv, and Aleksei Remizov found them selves in the German-occupied zone, while others — Nina Berberova, Nikolai Berdyaev, Zinaida Gippius, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, and Nadezhda Tèffi — later returned to the German zone even before the Germans occupied all of France. Shmelêv published four essays and stories about tsarist Russia in the German sponsored Parizhskii vestnik and was accused of "collaborationism .” A number of writers died at the hands of the Germans: Yury Fel'zen was arrested in 1943 and deported to Germany, where he died in a concentration camp. On March 10,1942, Yury Mandel'shtam (not to be confused with the poet Osip Mandel'shtam) was visiting Igor* Voinov, also a poet, who lived in the same building. Having violated the curfew on Jews, Mandel'shtam spent 17 months in concentration camps and was shipped off to Germany. The nun and poet Mother M ariya (religious name of Elena Skobtsova, a form er revolutionary) died in the gas cham ber in Ravensbruck in 1945. The poet ll'ya KorvinPiotrovsky was arrested in 1944 and condemned to death, but the sentence was annulled five minutes before being carried out, when
•Som e of the materials ended up in the Central State Archive of the October Revolution (TsG A O R ), and at least part is stored in the Russian Governmental Archive for Art and Literature (RG ALI, formerly TsG ALI), and also in TsG IA M , TsG ASA , and TsG A VM F S S S R . Until 1988 access to these materials was extrem ely limited.
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Piotrovsky was included in an exchange for a group of captured SS officers. The couple Mikhail Gorlin and Raisa Blokh, both poète, evidently perished in German death camps. Both had moved to France from Germany after the Nazis came to power. Gorlin was warned by the local police that he would be arrested but could not believe that anything terrible could happen to him and made no effort to escape. He was arrested on May 14,1941, but Blokh remained at liberty until November 1943, when she was handed over to the Germans by Swiss border guards. She managed to throw a letter from the train saying that she did not know where she was being taken. In November 1932 she had written a letter saying that perhaps she was being unfair to the Germans, but she had lived ten years amongst them and they were alien to her. In 1959 friends of Gorlin and Blokh published a joint collection of their verse to honor their memory. In a poem later set to music by Aleksandr Vertinsky she had written that the cities of W estern Europe and even the water in their rivers and lakes was alien. Another Nazi victim was ll'y a Fondaminsky, who supposedly had organized a conspiratorial group in his apartment. Among the members were the writers Boris Vil'de and Anatoly Levitsky, who had begun putting out an underground newspaper, La Résistance (Soprotivlenie). Levitsky was arrested on February 14,1941, and Vil'de in March. Both were executed by firing squad on February 23, 1942, on M ont-Valérien. Before being executed, Vil'de was perm itted to write a letter to his French wife: Forgive me fo r having deceived you. When I came to kiss you once more, I already knew that it would happen today. To te ll the truth, I'm proud o f m y life. You could see that I was not trembling, but sm iling as usual.... M y belovedl I take the m em ory o f your smile with me. Try to smile when you receive this le tte r— ju s t as I am sm iling as I write it. (Just now I looked in the m irror and saw m y face was unchanged.) That seems to be a ll that I have to say to you. I have seen some o f m y friends. They are in good spirits. That gladdens m e.... The eternal sun o f love arises from the abyss o f m y death.... I am ready; I'm going. Meanwhile, the war was grinding to its furious conclusion all over Europe. By spring 1944 the Russian Corps was openly engaged in fighting with Tito's partisans (who themselves included a small number of Russian émigrés), and by September 1944 the Russian émigrés, including Russians from Hungarian-occupied territories and from Bulgaria, found themselves fighting against their own countrymen in the Red Army and Bulgarian communists. In June 1944 the Germans formed a Russian division, which was then reorganized into a "Russian National Army” in February-
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March, 1945a, but by then the war was nearly over. This collaboration with the Germans was regarded as treason by Tito's victorious partisans — a developm ent foreseen by many of the Russians who chose to leave the country as early as 1944. Their lives were mourned by K. Grudzinsky: Distant Leénica, Cossacks in alien uniforms, Dreams o f native Kuban', Shots across the river, Flares, Serbian oaths, The m orning sun's m ilky light, Snow soaked in blood, A corpse, a pistol, G rief frozen On barely twisted lips. On November 14, 1944, from Prague, Vlasov proclaimed the creation of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (KONR). On January 28, 1945, the army, which informally was still called the Russian Liberation Army (ROA), was amalgamated into the German army. The Russians wore German uniforms with Russian chevrons and ROA's cocarde. Zherebkov, who was one of 49 signers of the Prague declaration, was appointed M inister of Foreign Affairs. It may seem incredible that the émigrés chose to join the so obviously defeated Germans at this particular point, but they feared, quite realistically as things turned out, that they would be handed over to a merciless Soviet governm ent after the war. German apprehension that these units could get out of hand proved well founded; it was this army that defended Prague — from the Germans — just a few months later, on May 6-7, 1945. Even before KONR was form ally established, Vlasov's staff published two newspapers: Dobrovolets (The Volunteer), with a circulation of between 40,000 and 60,000 copies, and Zarya (The Dawn), which was intended for prisoners of war and had a circulation of up to 120,000 copies. Despotuli's Novoe slovo in Berlin was suspended by the Germans toward the end of the war and its presses were used to print new KONR newspapers: Volya naroda (The
•There w ere also several other Russian émigré military units, among them the Russian Liberating People's Army (Russkaya osvoboditel'naya narodnaya arm iya — R O N A ) and the Druzhina Brigade.
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People's W ill), Za rodinu (For the Homeland, with a circulation o f 250,000 copies), and Nashi kryl'ya (Our Wings, a Luftwaffe publication). KONR also had its own radio station. When the Russian émigrés in Yugoslavia found them selves on the losing side, many deemed it wise to be evacuated together with the Germans. Bishop Germogen attem pted to flee when Soviet troops were approaching Zagreb, but was stopped by the partisans and executed. The émigré poet Yury Pskovityanin was one who praised the émigrés’ fight as failed heroism: The Drina knows, the Sava recalls The cooled lava flow O f dead warriors’ bodies M arked by no cross. Let Tito's partisans Remember Russian troops A nd m ay the Balkan winds sing their glory through the ages. From Belgrade to the Drava, Across m ountains and bridges, nam eless crosses trace paths o f thorny honor. The war virtually obliterated literature. It was a tim e for survival, not aesthetics. And when the violence was over, literary culture lacked that "critical mass” which had made the interwar period so vibrant. Among the many writers who succumbed to old age or sickness during the w ar were the Sym bolist poet Konstantin Bal'mont, the theater critic Aleksandr Pleshcheev, and the poet Anatoly Shteiger.
The Early Postwar Period Like one that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, A nd having once turned round walks on, A nd turns no m ore his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend doth close behind him tread. Samuel Taylor Coleridge As the war came to a close, many of the Russian refugees judged it wise to continue their exodus westward. A large number had fled together with retreating German troops, concealing their Russian nationality. British Ambassador Archibald Clark Kerr wrote a naive
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letter to Molotov asking that Russians pressed into German service be given "am nesty or considerate treatm ent’ upon conclusion of the war. M olotov rejected the request out of hand, claiming that the number of such persons was insignificant and adding that Stalin saw no reason to make such a concession. The British decided not to follow up on the matter, and one British advisor, Patrick Dean, was of the view that even if such persons were shot, it was no concern of "His Majesty's Governm ent.” On July 17, 1944, despite a protest by Lord Selborne, then M inister for Economic W arfare, the British W ar Cabinet accepted the principle that the prisoners would have to be handed over. Churchill was sympathetic, but Eden wrote that these were men who had served in German m ilitary or param ilitary formations, "the behavior of which in France has often been revolting ... we cannot afford to be sentim ental about this.” Lastly, Eden pointed out that the Soviets were holding large numbers of Allied prisoners and any refusal to return Russians to the U.S.S.R. would arouse Stalin's suspicions. The Secretary of State for War, P. J. Grigg, demanded a cabinet decision, since the Russian prisoners of war would be sent to their death on his instructions, and on September 4 the Cabinet approved Eden's decision "after a short discussion.” In the meantime many of the prisoners who were in danger of being returned were threatening to com m it suicide. On October 4, 1944, the Soviet of People's Commissars resolved that Soviet citizens should be returned to the Soviet Union upon the conclusion of the War, and at the end of that month 10,000 prisoners were shipped out. This first group consisted largely of persons who believed Soviet assurances that there would be no unjust retaliation, and only 12 men resisted and had to be taken on board by force. Ominously, when they arrived in Murmansk they were marched off under armed guard. The Americans, who had collected 28,000 such prisoners, while seeming to accept the British approach, actually agreed to repatriate only "claimants to Soviet nationality.” Thus, any Russian in a German war uniform who claimed to be German was not to be handed over, but the Soviets — as feared — threatened to retaliate against British and American nationals whom they had liberated from German prisoner-of-war camps. Prisoners were interviewed in the presence of a Soviet stenographer who wrote down every word for later use in prosecuting their cases. One man screamed that his fam ily had been wiped out by the Soviets and asked to be shot rather than repatriated, while a woman with a nursing baby (born in Britain and thus a British citizen) threw herself at the feet of a British official, begging for refuge for herself and her family.
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On February 11, 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill signed the Yalta accords, providing for repatriation of persons found outside the borders of their countries. Edward Bridges, Secretary to the British Cabinet, wrote enthusiastically of the "outstanding friendliness o f our Russian allies and of the obvious sincerity of their desire to do us well and their wish to be on good terms with us and to co-operate with us after the war.” De Gaulle concluded his own agreement with Stalin on June 29. Threats by the refugees to commit suicide proved to be more than just words. Upon learning that they were to be forcibly repatriated, men slit their throats or hanged themselves rather than go on board ship. Others literally threw themselves into the sea. Many were executed immediately after arriving in Soviet ports. One Second-W ave writer, Lev Dudin, who wrote under the pseudonym Gradoboev, recalled: For us, people o f the "Second W ave,” the second h a lf o f 1945 and a ll o f 1946 were a nightm arish dream, but this was no dream ; instead, it was a nightm arish reality. A ll our hopes — illusory and im possible as they m ay have been — were crushed, and we had bet everything on them. The future boded nothing good for us.... It is frightening even to recall those times. M ortal danger threatened us from a ll sides, lurked around every comer. Each b it o f news that reached us was more frightening and terrible than the previous item : the Western Allies were handing over Vlasov and other generals o f the Russian A rm y o f Liberation, and there were massive forced repatriations o f Vlasovites and Cossacks in Plattling, Dachau, Lienz, and other places. We learned o f these tragedies only later, but their significance was already clear to us then: the Stalinist regim e had caught up with those who had risen up against it with arms, and soon it would catch up with a ll the others as well. Dragnets were carried out for Russian émigrés in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, France, Italy, Denmark, Norway, and even North Africa. Only Liechtenstein refused to hand over Russians. Among those taken away to the Soviet Union was Sergei Postnikov, the author of a book on Russian émigrés in Prague. The Cossacks, who were especially enraged over Soviet collectivization of agriculture and the suppression of the Church, had been fighting in modified German uniforms even before the Vlasov units were created, and in November 1943 the Nazi governm ent promised to return them their land after the Soviet regime was defeated. Toward the end of the war Alfred Rosenberg's Ostministerium granted them an area around Tolmezzo in the Italian
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Alps, a few miles from the Austrian border, to establish a new Kazakiya (Cossakia). By the spring of 1945 it was home to 35,000 Cossacks. Ernest Bevin, then Foreign Secretary of Britain, maintained that it was difficult to draw a line between traitors and political refugees and that, in any case, the Cossacks were "acknowledged traitors.” From May 28 to June 7,1 94 5, this group was forcibly handed over to Soviet troops by the British army in the area of Judenberg and Lienz, Austria. First the officers were taken away under the pretext that a meeting would be held with the allies to discuss their situation. Although the soldiers had surrendered their weapons, they resisted fiercely, only to be subdued by sticks, rifles, and bayonets. One woman interpreter described the scene: People were rushing past m y legs, scared out o f their wits. Everything was m ixed up: the singing, the prayers, the groans and screams, the cries o f the wretched people the soldiers m anaged to grab, the weeping children, and the foul language o f the soldiers. Everyone was beaten, even the priests, who raised their crosses above their heads and continued to pray. M etropolitan Anastasy wrote a letter to General Eisenhower, protesting the American army's collaboration with the Soviets in Kempten, in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps: They found a ll the émigrés in the church, fervently praying to G od that He m ight save them from deportation.... They were driven out o f the church by force. Women and children were dragged b y the hair and beaten.... The priests did everything in their pow er to protect their flock, but it was all in vain. One o f them, an elderly and respected priest, was dragged b y the beard. A nother priest had blood running from his mouth after a soldier, who attem pted to take the cross from his hand, struck him in the face. In pursuing the people, the soldiers broke into the altar area, and the iconostasis, which separates the alta r from the rest o f the church, was broken in two places, the altar table was overturned and several icons were flung to the ground.... Two persons attem pted to take poison. One woman, attem pting to save her infant, threw the baby out the window, but the man who caught the baby was him self wounded in the stomach. A number of people died in this action, from suffocation, beatings, and gunshot wounds. There were suicides — men hanging themselves, slitting their own throats and wrists, jum ping over bridges and from cliffs. One young woman with two small children ran to a cliff overlooking the river Drau, embraced the first child and flung him into the abyss. The other child, clinging to her skirt, cried out "Mama, don't. Mama, I'm frightened.” But she answered: "Don't be afraid. I'll soon be
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with you.” Then she threw this child, too, into the rushing waters, raised her hands as if to make the sign of the cross, cried out "Lord, receive my sinful soul,” and leapt into the raging whirlpool after her children. One Cossack used his revolver to shoot his w ife and three children before dispatching himself. Many others managed to escape, but over the course of the next two weeks an additional 13,350 Soviet citizens were handed over to the Red Army at Judenberg, bringing the total to 50,000. Forced repatriation also took place across the ocean. On June 29, 1945, 154 Russians in a prisoner-of-war camp at Fort Dix, New Jersey, rioted upon being told that they were to be returned to the Soviet Union. Three men committed suicide. On August 31, however, the Fort Dix contingent was put on a ship and handed over to Soviet representatives in Europe. They offered no resistance, having supposedly been drugged. The Allies were of two minds on forced repatriation. On the one hand, they wanted to observe the Yalta accords in hopes of achieving a new clim ate of cooperation with Stalin. On the other hand, the notion of dispatching large numbers of people to imprisonment or death was obviously incompatible with the Western concept of human rights. On October 4,1945, Eisenhower suspended forcible repatriation of Soviet citizens, and in November a committee representing the U.S. Army, Navy, and State Department prepared a paper rejecting forced repatriation with the exception of Soviet citizens captured in German uniform, deserters from the Soviet armed forces, and persons who had "voluntarily rendered aid and com fort to the enemy.” But the practice had acquired a momentum of its own and continued to produce horrifying scenes. On January 19,1946, Russian prisoners at Dachau rioted in an attem pt to avoid being returned to Russia. One group barricaded itself in a room, and when tear gas was used, two prisoners attem pted to disembowel themselves with broken glass, others stood side by side, slashing at each other's throats with pieces of glass, and still another man struck his head through a pane of glass, then shook it from side to side pressing his neck down against the jagged edges. The floor was literally flowing with blood. Altogether, ten men died immediately, and an unknown number of the remaining 21 who were seriously injured must have died on the way back to Russia. Sadly, The Stars and Stripes entitled its article on the scene: "Red Traitors’ Dachau Suicide Described as Inhuman Orgy.” O f the 271 prisoners, approxim ately 135 were handed over to the Soviets, the rem ainder having been judged to be First-W ave émigrés. But international resistance was growing. On February 20, 1946, Pope Pius XII published an allocution protesting "the repatriation of men against their will and the refusal of the right of asylum ,” but only
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four days later 1,590 Russians at Plattling were handed over to the Soviets. Five men committed suicide, and a number of others were prevented in their attem pts from doing the same. The Western allies were growing rapidly disenchanted with their Soviet partners, but even after Churchill's famous "Iron Curtain” speech at Fulton, Missouri on March 5,1 94 6, the forced repatriations continued. Just eight days later 222 more Russians at Plattling were forcibly handed over to the Soviets, with one suicide recorded. On June 6, the British Cabinet agreed to comply with the American decision to lim it forced repatriations, but on August 11-14 nearly 1,000 Russians in camps in Italy were moved to an American camp near Pisa and a British camp at Riccione, just south of Rimini, under the code names "Operation Keelhaul” and "Operation Eastwind.” The W estern Allies continued to acquiesce to Soviet demands in 1947, despite the prisoners' threats to commit suicide rather than return to Russia. On March 31 of that year the Soviet liaison officer in Rome confirm ed to British Headquarters that Russians under forced repatriation were expected to continue to commit suicide en route. On May 8, when Russians from the British camp in Riccione realized their train was taking them east, they staged a violent riot but were subdued. Afterwards, the men began giving their personal belongings to the British guards, saying the Soviet soldiers would only steal them anyway. Ultimately 255 were given over to the Soviet authorities. The next day they were delivered at St. Valentin, and Soviet receiving officers were informed that the men's wives had refused to accompany them. As can readily be imagined, the conditions for repatriation did not include much "maternal mercy” from the Soviet government for those who had fought against it. Many of the men were shot im m ediately upon being handed over. The form er W hite general and popular novelist Pêtr Krasnov had been active in rightist circles and had helped to form Russian units to fight against the Soviets during the war. Arrested and returned to Moscow, Krasnov was hanged in 1947. There were unconfirmed rumors that both he and Vlasov were suspended on meathooks. According to official Soviet accounts, Vlasov was hanged, and his severed head was reportedly seen exhibited in Red Square. Those who were not executed were taken in freight cars with barely any food or water to the Kemerovo area, just south of Tom sk and 2,000 miles east of Moscow. Upon arrival they were assigned tents and given planks to fashion bunks, but no bedding. Starvation rations, insects, lack of clothing, bitter cold, and illness caused the deaths of an estimated 7,000 the first year. Their im prisonm ent ended only in 1955, after Stalin's death. Later, a small
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number of the form er prisoners were permitted to rem igrate to the W est. As early as December 1946 Andrei Gromyko com plained at the United Nations that the resettlem ent of refugees and displaced persons was being conducted in such a fashion that "war criminals, quislings, and traitors” were escaping punishment. He was not entirely wrong. The same poet-playwright Grigory Shvarts-Bostunich who had maintained that Jewish rituals required the blood of the "host nation” (Wirtsvolk) disappeared after being taken prisoner by American troops.a Despite Gromyko’s complaint, however, the situation of the DP's was desperate: Where could we turn to for protection? In Paris, the Soviet m ilitary mission was directed by high-ranking mem bers o f the secret police (hiding behind the usual m asks o f "diplom ats”) and sew ed as headquarters fo r a grandiose hunt for Soviet citizens in a ll the Western European countries. The Soviets’ bloodhounds stalked through a ll the large and sm all cities. Representatives o f the Western Allies either refused to listen to us and understand us, o r they handed us over to "S talin’s m erdes.... ” The émigrés were left with no recourse except to either hide in the woods or produce some evidence that they had resided outside the borders of the Soviet Union before the war. The most effective ploy was to obtain a Nansen Certificate, issued to First-W ave em igrants and their children born abroad. Viktoria Babenko, a Second-W ave poet from Ukraine who spoke Polish as well as Russian and Ukrainian, passed herself off as a Pole during her escape. Many seized upon any "proof’ that they were not from the Soviet Union — even if it was only an old tram ticket from Prague or Belgrade. People learned Czech, Polish, Serbian, or Bulgarian words, the names of streets, squares, theaters, etc. in Warsaw, Prague, Sofia, or Belgrade. In every sense of the phrase, they were literally clutching at straws. The dem ographer Jacques Vernant quoted the Chief of the Soviet Repatriation Mission as having claimed in about Septem ber 1945, that 5,000,000 Soviet citizens — both prisoners of war and civilians — had been repatriated to the Soviet Union. O f the 2,000,000 Soviet citizens in W estern Germany, 1,393,902 were repatriated within the first two months following the end of the war. Many of them had been conscripted by the Germans for forced labor under conditions summed up by Heinrich Himmler: "If 10,000 Russian fem ales collapse
•By 1942 Shvarts-Bostunich had gathered a new library of 11,000 volumes on the occult, but it evidently fell into Soviet hands, as had his first in Kiev.
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from exhaustion while digging an antitank ditch, this is of interest to me only insofar as the antitank ditch for Germany is finished.” But the narcotic effect of the pro-Soviet propaganda conducted by the Allies during the war was so great that no heed was paid to the plight of such persons. On October 5,1 94 5, The New York Times wrote of "Russian traitors who are being held as prisoners-of-war and presumably will ultim ately face Soviet justice.” Evidently funded by the Soviet authorities, the Parisian newspaper Russkii patriot (Russian Patriot), edited by Dmitry Odinets, was published at the end of the war and during the early post-war period in an attem pt to win the sympathies of the Russian émigré community. Characteristic of its editorial line was the editorial "The Road ‘Home’”, published on page one of the October 1944 issue. The author, N. Borisov (possibly Odinets writing under a pseudonym), dem anded that the émigrés prepare themselves to subm it to the "collective”; the Soviets had no need of the émigrés, and they could only hope for the "maternal mercy of the homeland”: We m ust prepare ourselves to return to our father’s home, to study and accept with every fibre o f our being its custom s and norms. In m any ways we will have to reconstruct ourselves to m atch the type o f new man created b y the revolution. Otherwise we will m erely trade the title o f stateless em igrant for the fate [emphasis mine: JG] o f an "inner em igrant...." The message to the 40,000 Russians in China was largely the same. One 1942 article published in Shanghai proclaimed that the émigrés had no future without Russia. When the Soviet Union announced an "amnesty” for the ém igrés in 1946, a number of Russians in Manchuria and China chose to return home voluntarily. Thousands of others were arrested by the NKVD and taken to Soviet forced-labor camps; a number of persons who had collaborated with the Japanese were executed. In 1947 the Russian Em igrants’ Committee was dissolved. Threats were not eschewed even before the war came to an end. In 1944 Russkii patriot threatened that the "degree of responsibility of Russian journalists and writers who compromised them selves by working for Hitler's anti-Soviet propaganda should be exam ined.” The list provided included ll'ya Surguchêv, ll'in (there are several ll'ins, which one was intended was not specified), Georgy (Yury) Meier, Valentin Ivanov (Valentin Goryansky), Vladim ir Unkovsky, Ivan Shmelêv, Lolly L’vov, Evgeny Ryshkov (pseudonym: E.Tarussky), Nikolai Pyatnitsky, "and others.” Tarussky and Pyatnitsky committed suicide.
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The response of many of the émigrés was essentially the same as that of Kurbsky in responding to Ivan's demand that he return home. The following is an excerpt from a speech given by Nikolai Chukhnov at a displaced-persons camp in Germany on November 7, 1947. The occasion was the annual "Day of Im placability.” The entire stage was backed up with a picture of the Kremlin, wrapped in a fog that dissipated to the hymn "God Save the Tsar.” A curse upon you, Bol'sheviksl Do you think that in occupying the gold-crowned Kremlin you have taken possession o f Rus’? Do you think that, having spilled oceans o f blood, you have now become the m asters o f the Russian people? Do you think that you have obliterated the Russian soul with your collective farms, Stakhanovism, and concentration camps? Do you think that your hordes o f obedient soldiers have given you a reliable basis fo r further brigandage? No, no, and no a g a in !... Fateful tim es are approaching, and the hour o f vengeance will come. A new Nürnberg trial is already being staged on the gray backdrop o f history, and your end will be as inglorious as its beginnings were sham eful.... We, a handful o f Russian people, have escaped your spite, thanks to the W ill o f God and our own efforts, and we proudly raise our heads to laugh a t your bestial sneer. We believe, we know, that the hour o f vengeance approaches. For now, you can revel in the holocaust o f corpses and drown your consciences with foolish marches, herding into parades the hungry people, even as they curse you. B ut in their forced, hoarse shouts can you not hear the voices o f your victims, calling to you from the grave? Can you not hear the curses o f m others and the wail o f orphaned children? ... A curse upon you, Bol'sheviks, fo r the blood o f the m urdered Im perial Family, o f the bishops and priests, the scholars and the writers, the officers, the soldiers and sailors, the workers and the peasantsl A curse upon you for the young girls whom you have violated and the youths whom you have crippled.... We believe, we know, that you w ill not escape the judgm ent o f man, ju s t as you w ill not escape the judgm ent o f God. Chukhnov's damnation of the Soviet governm ent was not shared by all the émigrés. On February 12,1945, a group of prom inent émigré figures, among them the last tsarist Russian ambassador to France, Vasily Maklakov, went to the Soviet embassy in Paris to
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declare that they now recognized the Soviet government as the legitim ate representative of the Russian people and that they were willing to work with, rather than against that regime. The tsarist admiral A. E. Kedrov addressed the Soviet ambassador Aleksandr Bogomolov: Mr. Am bassador; / speak as an officer who com m anded others in the fight against you. Yes, it is true that we were enemies, but the years have thinned our ranks; some have died while others le ft us because they lost faith in that struggle. Those o f us who fought have rem ained behind as m ere husks o f men. As early as 1936 and 1937 others began to realize that a new generation had been born in Russia — a generation that was on your side rather than ours. There was a realization that a new state and a new arm y had been created, a realization that a destructive process had taken a constructive turn. There ensued a great war. A t first the Soviet Union came to an agreem ent with Germany. We Russians living abroad greeted this developm ent in the belief that Russia would not be harm ed and would grow strong if le ft out o f the war. B ut in her pride Germany attacked the Soviet Union, and we shed bloody tears when we learned o f the first defeats; in the depths o f our souls, however, we continued to believe that the Soviet Union would be victorious since it represented the Russian people. One can imagine Bogomolov's reaction: had the Soviets’ form er enem ies-to-the-death really come to surrender or was this a trick? They would have to prove themselves ... Sergei Mel'gunov, editor of the conservative Vozrozhdenie,was outraged by the visit and compared it to the humiliating bare-footed penance performed by the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV before the windows of Pope Gregory VII at Canossa in the eleventh century: We are asked to forget about the hundreds o f thousands o f Russian lives destroyed, not on the field o f battle with a foreign enemy, but in the cellars o f the GPU and in concentration camps, where a ll those end up who disagree with the policies o f the ruling despot. O nly people with an extrem ely short m em ory can so easily spread the foam o f forgetfulness over such recent victims o f the forced collectivization o f the villages, carried out not because o f the country's national interests, but in the name o f party dogma. O nly those who are deaf to their own political conscience can seek out fictional justifications for the crim es com m itted by the com m unist dictatorship against the people and dem and "sincere reconciliation” with that dictatorship. The voices o f the dead do not cease to call to our
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conscience and honor. There can be no forgiveness fo r the exercise o f violence over man. On March 16,1946, a meeting was convoked of members of the W riters’ and Journalists’ Union in Paris. By that tim e the émigré press had been largely taken over by pro-Soviet figures, while the antiSoviet faction had not yet reorganized. More than one hundred people were present — a rare turn-out in Paris at the tim e — and the meeting was opened and chaired by the Union's long-standing General Secretary, Vladim ir Zeeler, form erly a lawyer in Rostov. The leader of the pro-Soviet faction was one Nikolai Fëdorov (pseudonym: Roshchin), a writer and friend of Ivan Bunin. Roshchin had worked for the conservative newspaper Vozrozhdenie (The Renaissance), but was a member of the French Communist Party — a fact which now came to light. His speech was both smooth and surprising; he began by saying that the émigré community was coming to an end and that people "were returning to their homeland.” For this reason he proposed that the association adopt a resolution addressed to the Union of Soviet W riters in Moscow, requesting acceptance as a branch of that organization. His speech was met with faint applause. After Roshchin spoke, the podium was taken by the artist and writer Yury Annenkov, the w riter Gaito Gazdanov, and the editor Sergei Mel'gunov, all of whom delivered passionate speeches in defense of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and human rights. Their presentations were followed by wild applause. Arseny Stupnitsky, editor of Russkie novosti (Russian News) delivered a strong pro-Soviet statement, as did Dmitry Odinets, editor of Sovetskii p a trio ta. When the tim e came to elect members of the association's governing board, the pro-Soviet faction was defeated, 45 to 64.b Despite the defeat, this was a serious new alignm ent of views in the émigré community, or at least among writers and journalists. On June 14,1946, the League voted by a majority of two to one to expel members who had accepted Soviet citizenship. Evidently, Fëdorov-Roshchin, who returned to Russia that same year, was one of those expelled. But the decision engendered enormous dissent, and 25 of the League's 128 members resigned in protest, among them Georgy Adamovich, Vera Bunina, Gaito Gazdanov, Perikl Stavrov, Vladim ir Varshavsky, and Leonid Zurov. Bunin, hardly one to harbor pro-Soviet emotions, himself later withdrew from the
•The new nam e of Russkii patriot as of March 24, 1945. bElected w ere Boris Zaitsev (Chairm an), Sergei M el’gunov and Roman Gul' (Assistant Chairm en), Nikolai Vol'sky (Valentinov), and Professor Sergei Zhaba. Zeeler, who had served uninterruptedly since the twenties, w as reelected as Treasurer and General Secretary.
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association, and his stature as a Nobel laureate lent enormous sym bolic importance to his act. Nina Berberova wrote that it was a "knife in the back.” The important novelist and critic Boris Zaitsev, a long-time friend of Bunin, declared that Bunin was "dead” to him after such an act, and the secretary of Novyi zhurnal, Mariya Tsetlina, broke off her friendship of 30 years with Bunin.3 In examining the split in the émigré community, one must bear in mind the general intellectual background and mood of the period. The French Communist Party was part of the government and French intellectuals were generally pro-Soviet (one lonely exception being André Gide, who had travelled to the Soviet Union before the war and radically altered his pro-Soviet views). In addition, the émigrés, like everyone else, were exhausted by the war. This was, after all, the second tim e in a quarter of a century that their lives had been devastated. In Prague the jubilation over the liberation of the city was overwhelming, and when the Minister of Education, Dr. Zdenek Nejedly, an elderly communist widely known as the "The Red Professor,” proposed in June 1945 that the Russian Archive be presented to the Russian Academy of Sciences as a gift from the grateful Czechoslovak government and people, the idea appears to have enjoyed popular support.11People who had lived for the overthrow of the Soviet governm ent now had to choose whether to rejoice over a Russian victory (which was also a Soviet victory) or remain true to their form er oath of implacability. Social schizophrenia was virtually preprogrammed.
■This chain of resentments led to further repercussions: Mark Aldanov, one of the founders of Novyi zhum al, severed all ties with the publication out of solidarity with Bunin (Tsetlina was the journal's Secretary). Nor did the chain of resentment stop there. In 1951 Tsetlina was not reelected to the board of directors of the Literary Fund, causing Vladim ir Zenzinov to resign from the Board. These w ere only two instances of many, and people took their resentment with them to the grave. bThe Czechoslovak Cabinet, however, voted to hand over only the Documents Section.
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Cynicism ... a man who knew the price o f everything and the value o f nothing. Oscar W ilde In 1947 Adamovich published a book in French entitled L'autre patrie (The Other Homeland), with memoirs of his experiences in France. It is a revealing document of its time. The following are quotes from that book; the first describes the comments of a French officer in 1939 to foreigners in the French army: "And you as well, you Tartars, Poles, Hottentots, who asked you to g e t involved? You would have done better to stay a t home in your own countries! A nd France? France loßthes youI She is only waiting for the m om ent when she can throw you all out. It's Blum, the Jew, your prophet who ...” [Later] we were advised b y the colonel's sta ff that the ardent lieutenant had expressed a "strictly personal point o f view.” *
The Russians o f Nice celebrate — the very same ones who two years ago saw in H itler their liberator and who now feverishly discuss the importance o f the positions which w ill be created for them in their rediscovered country. For such a long time they have felt themselves to be pitifu l and hum iliated! Look a t them now — perked up again, proud to belong to a nation which dom inates the present political and m ilitary scene, willingly com paring Stalin to Peter the Great, and speaking o f nothing but "our” army. A ll the same, I love it... *
A nd me, would I be horrified by the success o f communism? ... Personally, I would like to escape all this; as long as it is applied only to future generations, it does not frighten me in the least. It's cowardly, I kn o w — "A fter me the deluge....” N ot only do I accept communism as som ething inescapable, bu t I salute it and welcome it. I am resigned to welcoming it. There does not exist any other solution to the social problem, and justice cannot be realized in any other way. Everyone senses this, everyone knows this ... *
Well, gentlemen, o r if you prefer, comrades, I am like everyone else. A signature a t the bottom o f a letter o f greetings to Stalin? Very willingly, and without the least afterthought; really, with a ll m y heart.
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Further Dispersion
Thus this brook hath conveyed his ashes into Avon; Avon into Severn; Severn into the narrow seas; they, into the main ocean. A nd thus the ashes o f W ickliff are the emblem o f his doctrine, which now, is dispersed a ll the world over. The Church History (1655)
In June 1946 the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. issued a decree granting Soviet citizenship to form er Soviet citizens and even to émigrés who had been citizens of the Russian Empire. A number of the émigrés rushed to exchange their French passports for Soviet ones, and there were incidents when individuals who were displeased with the treatm ent they had received in France even demonstratively burned their French passports. Soviet sources claim 6,000 émigrés in Yugoslavia and 11,000 in France accepted the offer of citizenship, and that 2,000 actually left France to return to Russia. The popular singer and poet Aleksandr Vertinsky had returned to Russia from Shanghai in 1943. Dismissing a quarter century of em igration as a "misunderstanding,” he married, had two daughters, and found a vast audience of listeners who still adored him. Like Aleksei Tolstoi, he enjoyed a very com fortable life there, in the material sense. Another returnee was the poet Antonin Ladinsky. Some writers preferred to remain in Europe but accepted Soviet citizenship; these included Aleksandr Ginger and his wife Anna Prismanova, Aleksei Remizov, and Nadezhda Tèffi. The poet Vyacheslav Ivanov apparently never form ally renounced Soviet citizenship. On August 15, 1947, the charter meeting of the League of Soviet Citizens was held (to replace the League of Soviet Patriots). The meeting was chaired by Igor' Krivoshein, who had already received a Soviet passport by that tim e and was to return to the Soviet Union, only to be imprisoned once he arrived there.3 A prominent member of the presidium was the Soviet Ambassador Aleksandr Bogomolov. The villa on Rue Gallière which had previously been
•Krivoshein's case w as not reexamined until 1954, and he was permitted to return to France only in 1974.
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appropriated by the Germans for Zherebkov's organization was handed over to the League, which — according to one Soviet source — had a total membership of 11,000. W ary of the anti-Soviet mood of some of the emigrants, the French governm ent delayed granting them permission to relaunch their publications. At the end of the war, the Soviets had established Camp Beauregard just outside Paris for Russian émigrés, and by November 1947 rumors began to circulate that Camp Beauregard was being used as a prison to hold Russian émigrés before forcibly repatriating them to the Soviet Union. The French government became suspicious and sent 2,000 police and six tanks to surround the camp, but by that tim e forced repatriations had ceased altogether. On November 25, 1947, leaders of the League of Soviet Citizens were rounded up by French police for deportation to the Soviet Union.® Others voluntarily accepted Soviet citizenship, acnong them Metropolitan Evlogy. The newspaper Sovetskii patriot was closed by the police. It was replaced by Russkie novosti (Russian News, 194552), edited by Arseny Stupnitsky. Russian émigrés in Yugoslavia had generally supported the Germans, and many deemed it wise to flee along with their allies. By the end of the war, only an estimated 8,000 to 12,000 of some form er 35,000 Russian émigrés were left in the country. The new Yugoslav authorities regarded those who remained as a sort of fifth column, and they arrested some of them as German collaborators. In 1948 and 1949, after the break between Tito and Stalin, Russian em igrants were accused of pro-Soviet espionage, and most emigrated westward via Trieste. Only a handful of persons holding Soviet passports actually returned to the Soviet Union. By 1953 only some 2,000 Russians were left in Yugoslavia, many of whom were old and sick. In China the Nationalist governm ent closed Russian émigré organizations in Shanghai that had collaborated with the Japanese authorities and the Nazis. Several new newspapers were founded: Kitaisko-russkaya gazeta (The Russian-Chinese Newspaper), Russkoe slovo (The Russian Word), Novaya zhizn' (The New Life), and Novosti dnya (News of the Day). At the same tim e the victory of Russian arms stirred up a wave of patriotic pride among the émigrés. Pro-Soviet feelings were so strong that at a Shanghai writers’ meeting a number of writers publicly supported Andrei Zhdanov's attacks on the poet
•Among them w ere: D. Belousov, N. Belyaev, A. Genik, A. Gushchin, N. Kachva, V . Kovalev, Lev Lyubimov, A. Marchenko, A. Paleolog, V . Plikhta, V . Postovsky, A. Prokotilov, T. Rozenkopf, M. Rygalov, S. Sirin, V . Tolli, I. Tserebzhi, and A. Ugrimov.
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Anna Akhmatova. All this failed to Impress the Soviets who, upon occupying Manchuria in 1945, arranged a "literary evening" in Harbin, with personal invitations sent to local writers and journalists. Those who appeared, including Aleksei Gryzov (Aleksei Achair), Arseny M itropol'sky (Arseny Nesmelov), and Mikhail Shmeisser, were arrested and disappeared. Many journalists suffered the same fate. Valery Pereleshin wrote that his mother counted 120 of her friends who had vanished and mentioned two libraries, the books of which were burned publicly in "huge bonfires.” In the meantime an estimated 85,000 to 90.000 files of the Japanese-created Bureau of Russian Emigrant Affairs were taken to the Soviet Union and placed in KGB archives in Moscow and Vladivostok. A number of writers left voluntarily for the Soviet Union.» Some died in Soviet prisons0, while still others® managed to publish their works in the Soviet Union. Altogether, some 15.000 persons returned to Russia. Between August and November 30, 1947, 2,500 Russian émigré families made the one-way journey, their expenses paid by the Soviet government. Many of Shanghai's Russians were hauled off to Siberia in 1947 and resettled in the socalled "virgin lands.” When the news of this practice spread, other émigrés who had retained Soviet citizenship handed in their passports. Others made their way to Californiad, while Larisa Andersen went to France, and Valery Pereleshin ended up in Brazil. On the political front, Rodzaevsky was returned to the Soviet Union and executed (in America, his fellow fascist Anastasy Vonsyatsky was imprisoned in a mental institution, just as was Ezra Pound). In the fall and early winter of 1948, Russian émigrés fled from other cities to Shanghai after it became apparent that the Nationalist governm ent could not win the civil war with the communists. Nevertheless, it was obvious that Shanghai itself would not hold out for long, and further flight became inevitable. On February 26, 1949, the editors of Kitaisko-russkaya gazeta (The Chinese-Russian Newspaper) issued a statem ent rejecting the suggestion of the Chinese National Governm ent that the émigrés be moved south from Shanghai and supporting the general evacuation from Shanghai, which had actually
•Varvara
Ievleva,
Lidiya
Khaindrova,
Vladim ir
Pomerantsev,
Nikolai
Shchegolev, Vladim ir Slobodchikov, and Nikolai Svetlov. bLev Grosse, for one. cLidiya Khaindrova, Pavel von Olbrich (Pavel Severny), and Natal'ya ll'ina. dYustiniya Kruzenshtern-Peterets,
O l'ga Skopichenko, M ariya Vizi, Viktoria
Yanovskaya, and Nikolai Yazykov, among others.
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begun on January 13,1949, and was completed by the end of March, although some remaining Russians emigrated in the 1950s and 1960s. Approxim ately 5,500 Russians were evacuated to the inhabited Island of Tubabao in the Philippine Archipelago, where with virtually bare hands they built a tent city, with streets bearing such grandiose names as Nevskii Prospekt, Admiral'skii Prospekt, and Tverskaya. The refugees were fed by the IRO (International Refugee Organization) and UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration). From Tubabao the refugees were dispersed to Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Paraguay, the Dominican Republic, and the United States. On July 1, 1950, the Conciliatory Commission of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives voted to accept 341,000 displaced persons by the end of July, 1951, including most of the remaining refugees on Tubabao. Finally, in the spring of 1953, the last refugees left the Philippines. It was the end of the Far Eastern chapter in the history of the Russian emigration. Many of the Russians already in Argentina were uneducated Russian Orthodox people from western Belorussia and Ukraine (Volhynia) who had fled Polish rule. They were joined by a sm all contingent of Russian engineers from Czechoslovakia in the early 1930s. When W orld W ar II came to a close, Peron made an effort to attract educated people to bolster the economy and began to perm it immigration — two years before the United States did so, albeit with lim itations. Only men younger than 45 and women under 30 were accepted. Some 5,000 Russians, a surprisingly large number of whom had been journalists, settled in Buenos Aires. Because of the large educational gap between the pre- and post-war immigrants, and the older group's more positive attitude toward the Soviet government, the two communities had very little contact with each other. Alm ost all literary activity was carried out by the newer arrivals. For a tim e Buenos Aires could boast several Russian-language newspapers: Nasha strana (Our country, founded by Ivan Solonevich), Russkoe slovo (The Russian Word, edited by Dmitry Konstantinov and Nikolai Fevr), Suvorovets, and Za Pravdu (In the Name of Truth), which was funded by the Vatican. The émigrés had a sort of cultural society named "The House of Russian W hite Émigrés,” with a library of 8,000 volumes. The Society arranged literary readings and concerts.3 In 1951 Russian writers and journalists in Argentina
•Among its members w ere the novelists Nikolai Tam artsev (Boris Bashilov), Mikhail Boikov, and Nikolai Churilov (Nikolai Kusakov).
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published The Southern Cross (Yuzhnyi krest) — an anthology of prose and poetry, edited by N. I. Fëdorov.b In 1947 Inflation began to pose a serious problem in Argentina, and in 1949 the United States opened the gates for immigration. Over the course of several decades approximately half the post-war group of 5,000 refugees emigrated to the United States, Canada, and Venezuela. After Stalin's death somewhere between several hundred and several thousand Russians— largely from the pre-1917 elem ent— left for the Soviet Union, which they evidently found little to their liking. Those who had been born in Argentina were permitted to leave the Soviet Union, and after that there were no further repatriations from Argentina. In Brazil the largest group of émigrés consisted of form er residents of displaced-persons camps in Germany and Austria after W orld W ar II. A t about the same time, part of the China diaspora also found its way to Brazilian shores. In 1952 the monarchist newspaper Vladim irskii vestnik (The Vladim ir Herald) was founded in Sao Paolo. The total Russian population in that city was sufficiently large that in 1979 there were five Russian churches and several clubs and social organizations. The attention attracted by purported Russian royalty provided a curious footnote to the Brazilian chapter of the Russian émigré com m unity. They included a certain Runge, who arrived in the late 1920s from Argentina claiming to be the illegitim ate son of Nicholas II; Nicholas's supposed niece Anastasiya-lngrid Romanova de Saratov, who visited Brazil either in the late 1960s or early 1970s; a semi literate car mechanic who came to Sao Paulo in the 1970s and claimed to be Nicholas’s son, miraculously escaped from the execution of the imperial fam ily; and an ephemeral "Prince Igor1 Dolgoruky,” who died in the mid-1970s.
•It included poems by M ariya Shelekhova-Benke, Izida Orlova, Valentina Krasnova, M ariya S ., Boris Knyazev, and Viktor Monkevich. The poetry is nostalgic, dealing with the burden of exile and hope of return to the homeland and vengeance. The prose section was contributed by Boris Tam artsev (Bashilov), O . Duretskaya, Georgy Tomin, and Mikhail Boikov; dram a was by Pëtr Potemkin (posthumously), and criticism by M. N. Lebedev and Nikolai Fedorov.
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The Late 1940s and 1950s Twelve years complete he suffer'd in exile A nd kept his father's asses a ll the while. Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) Many, perhaps most, of the displaced persons found themselves in the "DP” camps, run first by UNRRA and then by IRO of the United Nations. These organizations were financed largely by the United States. W hile the camps provided food, shelter, and limited clothing, and some of their residents even managed to "publish” their works with the aid of office duplicating machines, there was always a risk that the camps could be used by the Soviet governm ent to entrap and forcibly repatriate them. For this reason (and because there was money to be made on the outside) many avoided the camps, but this was not an easy task even for those who had ration cards. It was in just such a DP camp that the publishing operation Posev (Possev) was founded in 1945, headed by Boris Pryanishnikov. A t first, the Soviet governm ent was able to exert considerable pressure on UNRRA to censor any materials critical of the Soviet Union, and from November 1946 until mid-1947 all DP publications were suppressed — including Posev. When permission was again granted to the émigrés to publish, they usually did so using only prim itive equipment, reissuing Russian classics and works by the latest e xile s— Ol'ga Anstei's D oor in the W all (Dver' vsten e, Munich, 1949); Ivan Elagin’s You, M y Century (Ty, moê stoletie, Munich, 1948); Evgeny Tverskoi's Sketches (Ètyudy, Regensburg, 1947); and A fte r Plattling (Posle Platlinga, Bavaria, 1946), a panegyric, even dirge-like verse collection, parts of which were written in the style of the Russian folk epos. A surprising num ber of periodicals appeared, some with such — hardly exciting — titles as The News (Novosti, Munich, 1947-48), while others were more colorful in their appellations: The Sniper (Snaiper, 1949); Footsteps o f the Antichrist (Shagi Antikhrista, Hamburg, 1951); and Listen: An AntiBol'shevik M agazine (Slushai: Antibol'shevistskii zhurnal, 1947-48). After the war Russian émigrés in Eastern Europe could hardly look forward to a bright future in the communist order. For example, in 1948 the literary historian Pëtr Bitsilli, who was nearly 70 years old at the time, was fired from his professorship at the University of Sofia and denied any pension. Thus, the late 1940s and early 1950s were a period of remigration from Central and W estern Europe — to a large extent from fear of Soviet expansion. In all, 234,000 First-W ave émigrés found themselves behind the "Iron Curtain” (154,000 in Europe and 80,000 in the Far East), not counting several million ethnic Russians in territories annexed by the U.S.S.R. in 1939-40. If before
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the w ar 80 percent of the émigrés had resided in Europe, by 1952 this figure was reduced to 30 percent. The Cold W ar was at its peak, and on May 7,1 95 2, the same Anthony Eden who had ordered the earlier forced repatriations, stated in the House of Commons that the United Nations Command had no alternative but to resist the forcible repatriation of communist prisoners of w a r— any other decision would be "repugnant.” Later, in 1973, when asked about the earlier forced repatriations, Eden replied that he had no recollection of the details and declined to comment on the matter or provide relevant documentation. Stalin died in 1953 and was denounced by Khrushchêv in 1956. Even before Khrushchêv's famous speech, ll'ya Èrenburg wrote a short novel entitled The Thaw (O ttepel'j, giving hope to the entire world that reform had finally arrived in Russia. The Russian émigrés were no exception; even the implacable NTS was captivated by the possibility. These hopes were to prove premature.
Composition of the Émigré Community For I m ust to the greenwood go, Alone, a banished man. The Nut-Brown M aid Fifteenth century, anonymous The Second W ave consisted of persons who a) found them selves overtaken early in the war by the rapidly advancing German lines, b) were forcibly deported by the Germans to work in the Reich, c) volunteered for such work or chose to escape with the retreating German armies, or d) had defected from the Soviet army or been taken prisoner. Most of the territories which the Germans occupied— the Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine, M oldova— were not part of Russia proper; as a result, only 7 percent of the Second-Wave refugees from territories that later comprised the Soviet Union are estim ated to have been ethnically Russian, although the percentage of russophones among them was, of course, higher. Moreover, there was a good deal of hostility between Russian supporters of empire and Ukrainian separatists, some of whom regarded even Gogol' as a traitor for having written in Russian instead of Ukrainian. W hile the Second Wave included a number of intellectuals, this group did not possess the "critical mass” essential to maintain a cultural tradition abroad on the scale of either its predecessors or its successors in exile. In the words of the Second-Wave writer Tat'yana Fesenko, it was an "emigration of individuals.” In publications of the 1950s and the early 1960s, First-Wave figures still tended to
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predominate. For example, in the poetry collection Sodruzhestvo (Commonwealth), compiled by Tat’yana Fesenko and published in 1966, two-thirds of the poets are from the First Wave. Gennady Khomyakov (G. Andreev) wrote that a general lethargy had made literary activities seem purposeless. Literary evenings were attended by five or six people, and there was nothing even vaguely sim ilar to a literary circle. Khomyakov saw not only Russians, but Europeans as well, as "half-asleep, half-awake, amorphous, undirected.” The Second W ave had relatively few intellectuals and showed major social and intellectual differences from its predecessor. It had no fam ous names; as a rule, the writers, scholars, and publicists of the Second W ave had yet to show their strengths and find a place for themselves, and they were clearly incapable of achieving the goal set for itself by the First W ave — the salvation of Russian culture from the Bol'shevik pogrom. In the words of Andreev-Khomyakov, Russian culture had "gone home, to new generations, and the war played an enormous role in dem onstrating the indestructibility of the Russian spiritual and cultural tradition and in reviving national self-awareness.”
Political Groupings The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oa r and the gear o f foreign dead men. The sea has m any voices. T. S. Eliot A number of old and new groups sprang up in the latter half of the 1940s and the early 1950s, an especially tense period during the Cold War, when W estern counterintelligence funding was generous. The various factions broke down into three basic groups: on the far right were the monarchists, who demanded a total restoration of the ancien régim e; in the center was the nepredreshenchestvo (nonpredeterm inationist) position, which advocated an overthrow of the Soviet government, with the form and nature of the new governm ent to be determined later; and on the left were those who recognized the February 1917 revolution and who were willing to accept some of the changes introduced after 1917. Alm ost without exception, all the various factions believed in continuing Russia's imperial tradition. In general, the émigré political breakdown was significantly different after the war than before. The m onarchist organizations, ROVS, the Men'sheviks, and the Social Revolutionaries lost much of their influence. Among the surviving political groups were:
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the Monarchists, who confirmed Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich as pretender to the throne; the short-lived Anti-Bol'shevik Center of the Liberation Movement of the Peoples of Russia (Antibol'shevistskii Tsentr Osvoboditel'nogo Dvizheniya Narodov Rossii — ATsONDR). Created in 1948, it represented an attem pt to revive KONR on a broad platform ; the Committee of United Vlasovites (Komitet ob'edinënnykh vlasovtsev — KOV), created in 1950 under General Turku!; the nationalist-minded Andreev Flag League (Soyuz Andreevskogo Flaga — SAF), funded at least in part by W est German counterintelligence; the League to Struggle for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (Soyuz bor'by za osvobozhdenie narodov Rossii — SBONR) and the League of Warriors of the Liberation Movement (Soyuz voinov osvoboditel'nogo dvizheniya — SVOD ). SBONR was a political organization and SVOD was its m ilitary arm. This group opposed the restoration of monarchy. Created in 1949, it operated prim arily in Germany but had offices in a number of countries. Its membership consisted predominantly of new arrivals; SBONR, which published Bor'ba (Struggle) and, later, Golos naroda (Voice of the People), which was attacked by the right as "anti-Bol'shevik communists”; created in 1948, the Russian All-National Popular-State Movement (Rossiiskoe obshenatsional'noe NarodnoDerzhavnoe Dvizhenie — RONDD) published Derzhavnyi klich (Imperial Call), Volya naroda (The People's W ill) and Nabat (Alarm), attacked other émigré organizations, and complained about the threat of Judeo-Communism. Supposedly, it was partially funded by W est German intelligence services; created by American counterintelligence in 1952 for defectors, the Central Alliance of Post-W ar (in 1957 changed to "Political”) Émigrés (Tsentral'noe Ob'edinenie Poslevoennykh [Politicheskikh] Èmigrantov — TsOPÈ) published the almanac M osty (Bridges) but lost funding in the early 1960s. Nevertheless, the journal managed to keep going until 1970;
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h)
the National Labor League*, actually the form er NTSNP (Solidarists), headed by Viktor Baidalakov, Vladim ir Poremsky, Evgeny Ostrovsky (Romanov), and others, operating mainly in France and Germany. The largest of all the émigré organizations, it was heavily involved in counterintelligence operations, but also published the journals G rani (Facets) and Posev (The Sowing). To a considerable extent, the organization was created out of a sense of frustration with the older generation; I) Formed in March 1949 to unite the various factions, the League to Struggle for the People's Freedom (Liga bor'by za narodnuyu svobodu), headed by Aleksandr Kerensky and Boris Nikolaevsky, had its headquarters in the U.S.A., with branches in France and Germany; j) the Russian People's Movement (Russkoe narodnoe dvizhenie), founded in 1948 in Paris and4headed by Kerensky as of 1951, when he left the League to Struggle for the People's Freedom; k) the Anti-Bol'shevik Block of Peoples (Antibol'shevistskii blok narodov). The Orthodox Church continued to be involved in politics. As soon as the war was over, four Karlovcian bishops in Soviet-occupied China and Manchuria had applied for readmission to the Moscow Patriarchate. In Septem ber 1945, a year before his death, Evlogy actually rejoined the Moscow Church. Many of the Second-W ave émigrés, some of whom relocated to the United States, were unwilling to tolerate what they perceived as too accepting an attitude on the part of the Russian Orthodox Church in America, and they generally tended to join the Synodal Church, which itself had moved from Munich to the United States in 1950. In 1970 the Russian Church in Am erica accepted autocephaly (autonomy) from the Moscow Patriarchate, only to be roundly condemned by the Synodal Church for having any dealings with Moscow.
■At its founding in 1930, the official title w as the National League of Russian Youth (Natsional'nyi soyuz russkoi molodëzhi). A year later it w as renamed National League of the New Generation (Natsional'nyi soyuz Novogo Pokoleniya), and still later it becam e the National Labor league (Natsional'no-Trudovoi Soyuz), but that, too, w as altered — to the Popular Labor league (Narodno-Trudovoi Soyuz). The acronym NTS has been retained since 1935.
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Relations Between "First” and "Second” Waves 0 blithe newcom erl I have heard, 1 hear thee and rejoice. O cuckoo! Shall I call thee bird O r but a wandering voice. William Wordsworth A quarter of a century had passed between the arrivals of the First and Second Waves, and the encounter of the two groups was not an altogether congenial one. In the flush of postwar pro-Soviet patriotism , there were First W avers who regarded the newcomers as "Vlasovite traitors to the Homeland.” Even without such political confrontations, it was obvious that the two groups came from two quite different environments. The First-Wave philosopher Fëdor Stepun wrote in his memoirs that the Soviet Union was an unknown "blackness” and that the new arrivals needed to overcome their "trench-like” psychology so that they might help to comprehend "the frightening face of the Russia that had given birth to them and raised them .” The tone of such a statem ent was more than condescending, and decades later Second-W ave figures complained both about the purported "elitism ” of the First Wave and also the willingness of ThirdW ave writers to glorify the First W ave at the expense of the Second. In hindsight, however, it is difficult to see how things could have been different, given the material deprivation that the new arrivals had known in Russia. When the writer Ivan Solonevich escaped across the Finnish border, he was treated to a meal by a hospitable Russianspeaking lady who urged him not to hold back, because she knew he must not have enjoyed rolls and coffee for some time. He responded with just two words: "14 years.” And this was in 1934, a decade before the arrival of the first Second Wavers. But the Second W ave struggled vigorously to establish itself as a cultural entity. The Second-Wave w riter and literary scholar Leonid Rzhevsky wrote of the work done in 1958 to put together the collection Literature Abroad (Literaturnoe zarubezh'e): The anthology was the first attem pt a t presenting the literary creations o f the so-called "new” writers, and it encountered a num ber o f objections: was it really necessary— indeed, was it not even artificial — to draw a line o f demarcation between the "new ” and the "o ld”? To me such a distinction, a t least as regards writers, did not seem artificial — so different was the creative reality o f Blok's Russia, brought aw ay by writers o f the first em igrant
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flow, from Stalin's feudal principality with its "enslavem ent o f camps and internal exile." Roman Qui', a First-W ave writer, expressed essentially the same view in my 1982 interview with him: People are people ... B ut psychologically, o f course, there are differences between the first and second emigrations, and particularly between the First and the Third Waves there is a big difference. That's only natural. The third em igration grew up in the Soviet Union; we grew up under His M ajesty the Tsar. Those are two entirely different things. Naturally, there existed not only a difference in age, but also a social-class gap between the First and Second Waves. On the one hand, after nearly three decades of being cut off from Russia, the older émigrés wanted to reach out to newly arrived fellow Russians, but, on the other hand, they identified their new comrades in m isfortune with those who had exiled them from home and country. One woman, a member of the Second Wave, told me how she had despaired of arranging her life and visited a Russian church in Paris in the late 1940s and surprised even herself by bursting into sobs and praying aloud before the altar. When she had calmed down she heard someone hiss: "sovetskaya svoloch’” (Soviet bitch). It was an older woman sitting behind her who could tell by her way of speaking Russian that she was a recent arrival in the West. It would have been naive to assume that the new refugees would immediately flow sm oothly into the pool of older émigrés w ithout any friction, but when all is said and done, the hostility between First and Second W avers was trivial compared to the hostility between tsarist revolutionary émigrés and the First Wave, when the one group had hastened home to cast out the other. And the gap was less than that which would later be felt between a belatedly and im perfectly unified group of First and Second Wavers, who were ethnically Russian (or at least Slavic), and the largely Jewish Third W ave.a Thus, for a long tim e N ovyi zhurnal remained a mainly First-W ave publication which brought a number of Second-W ave writers into its fold, while Third-W ave authors were only gradually accepted as regular contributors. Money was a source of friction between the various W aves. W hereas the First Wave had been sufficiently large in numbers and
•The Third-W ave historian Mikhail Nazarov, whose sympathies are explicitly with the First and Second W aves, has even expressed the view that the appearance of the Third W ave led to a rapprochement of the Rrst and Second W ave in the face of the Third W ave's "cosmopolitanism."
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literary Inclinations to perm it its writers and thinkers to eke out an existence with the pen, the arrival of the Second and Third Waves coincided with the period of the Cold War. Money was spent not only on tanks and planes, but on ideology and propaganda. Literature came to be subsidized and was not so much sold as "distributed.” It is no exaggeration to say that most Second- and Third-Wave literature would never have come into existence without these subsidies, but it is also true that access to these funds could just as easily serve as a bone of contention.
Geography His time is forever, everywhere his place. Abraham Cowley (1618-67) It would be a mistake to view the dispersal of Russians in general and Russian writers in particular solely within the context of massive political upheavals. Global war is, after all, but one aspect of globalization in the larger scheme of things. If there had never been a world war, we might well be witnessing an even greater number of Russians abroad strictly as a result of normal social and commercial intercourse. In the second half of the nineteenth century Russians were routinely and efficiently travelling by train to Europe and communicating with the folks back home by telegraph. In 1867 Dostoevsky left St. Petersburg by train on April 14 at 5:00 pm and arrived in Vilnius the next day at 2:00 pm. He opted to stay overnight in Vilnius and left the next morning for Berlin. A modern traveller would feel quite comfortable under such conditions. Zinaida Gippius, writing about life in Paris from 1906 to 1914, wrote that she and Merezhkovsky had no feeling of separation from Russia; articles and books appeared promptly back home, and they had the feeling they could get on the Nord-Express and be back in Petersburg the next day: "No one lost contact with Russia.” Soviet "locked” borders, on the other hand, cut off such travel alm ost com pletely for over a half century, with the exception of the short-lived exodus of the Second Wave. Thus, communism in Russia both promoted and hindered emigration. The chief centers of the First-Wave Russian émigré community had been in relatively close proximity to Russian borders — Western and Central Europe and the much smaller community in HarbinShanghai. The exiles had long-standing ties to those places and originally settled there in hope of a speedy return home after the anticipated collapse of the Soviet government, but the Second W orld W ar uprooted Russians in Western Europe, and the establishment of
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a com m unist government in China brought about an even more radical displacement from that country. According to official U.S. figures, emigration to the United States by Soviet refugees was modest in the post-war period, the largest totals being reached during the years 1950 to 1952. Nevertheless, in the chaos of the immediate postwar years the center of Russian cultural life in exile shifted from Paris to New York. But an American address was regarded as a mixed blessing by many. There was a feeling, shared by emigrants from a number of countries, not ju st by Russian exiles, that the trip across the ocean was somehow qualitatively different from moving from one European country to another. And this was not simply a matter of distance. In the words of the German critic Hans-Albert W alter, what hope was there "in a continent that did not know Heinrich Mann and had no use for Döblin or Brecht?” On the cultural front, New York was home to the Pushkin Literary Society, the Society of Russian Artists, and the Russian Center.8 The city even boasted its own Russian theaters. Not far from New York, in Lakewood, New Jersey, the Rodina Society and ROOVA Farm arranged concerts and lectures. O ther major U.S. cities where Russians concentrated were San Francisco,b Los Angeles,0 Chicago,0 Boston,® Detroit,* Philadelphia,a W ashington, D.C., and Seattle. The chief Canadian cities where Russians lived were Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, London, and W innipeg.
•Som e other organizations in New York w ere R O VS, K O N R , RO A, S B O N R , the League of Russian Military Invalids, the Association of Russian Lawyers, Sokol, the League of National Russian W om en, the League of Pages, the Alliance of Lycée Students, the League of Russian Nobility in Am erica, the Alliance of Officers of the Imperial Guard, the Radio Liberty Com m ittee, the Aleksandr Nevsky Fund, and the St. George's Association. bA branch of the Literary Fund, the Russian Youth Circle, the League of Russian-American W om en. «The V . Ordynsky Musical Society, the Accessible Theater, the Art Society. «The Russian University Youth Society, the religious and cultural Vladim ir Center, and a Russian radio program "Zarya" (Daw n). •The Society of Russian Emigrants. T h e Gallipoli Society. T h e Beseda Society.
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As of 1970,334,615 persons indicated in the U.S. Census that their native language was Russian. With tim e the Russian community was able to establish some 23 cultural organizations.3 In South Am erica the chief Russian centers were Caracas,6 Buenos Aires,c and Sao Paulo, which had seen vigorous Russian émigré activities even before World W ar II and which received a number of Russians from Yugoslavia and China after the war. W hile Paris still had hundreds of Russian émigré organizations on paper, the greater part of them became inactive after the war.d O ther European cities with Russian populations included Liège, Brussels, Antwerp, Luxembourg, and— especially — Rome. Finland, of course, had a Russian population, but permitted no anti-Soviet activities whatsoever. Occupied by the allies, W est Germany retained a number of Russians who had fought in the Vlasov army and who now offered their services to American counterintelligence and propaganda organizations. NTS and SBONR, for example, were both active in W est Germany. Thanks to American funding, 1950 saw the establishm ent of the Institute for the Study of the Soviet Union, and Radio Liberation
•Among them w ere: the All-Russian Monarchist Front (N Y ), the American Russian Aid Association (N Y ), the American Russian Slavonic Democratic Club (N Y ), the Association of Russian Imperial Naval Officers in Am erica (N Y ), the Federated Russian Orthodox Clubs (W ilkes Barre, Pennsylvania), the Fund for the Relief of Russian W riters and Scientists in Exile (N Y ), the Russian American Congress (N Y; later moved to Washington, D .C .), the Russian Brotherhood Organization of the U .S .A . (Philadelphia), the Russian Children's W elfare Society (N Y ), the Russian Independent Mutual Aid Society (Chicago), the Russian Nobility Association in Am erica (N Y ), the Russian Orthodox Catholic Mutual Aid Society of the U .S .A . (W ilkes Barre, Pennsylvania), the Russian Orthodox Church in the U .S .A . (N Y ), the Russian Orthodox Church of Am erica (N Y ), the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (N Y ), the Russian Orthodox Fraternity Liubov (Jermyn, Pennsylvania), the Russian People's Center (N Y ), the Russian Student Fund (N Y ), the Society of the Russian Veterans of the World W ars (San Francisco), the Tolstoy Foundation (N Y ), and the United Russian Brotherhood of Am erica (Pittsburgh). bThe A. S. Pushkin House and the Russian Cultural Center. cThe Russian W hite Émigré House and a theatrical group. “Among those that managed to keep going w ere the Russian branch of the Y M C A , The Rakhmaninov Conservatory, The Academic Group, The Scholarly and Philosophical Society, The League of Russian W riters and Journalists in France, The Society for the Preservation of Russian Cultural Values, and the Com m ittee for the Assistance of Russian Emigrants in France.
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(renamed Radio Liberty in 1959) was founded in 1953. Franco's Spain provided refuge to an avid group of Russian monarchists, and Spanish National Radio ran a regular Russian program. Since the United States and the Soviet Union were allies during the war, the pro-Soviet tone of American newspapers and magazines of that period was unavoidable. As soon as the conflict came to an end, however, a worsening of relations between the two countries was equally inescapable. The new émigré community was as strongly antiSoviet as the First Wave, and various émigré organizations and publications received financial support from the Americans, albeit not as fast or in such generous amounts as the émigrés would have liked. In 1952 "Lieutenant-Colonel" M. Kolosov wrote: ...w hy d o n t the Am ericans take us refugees to Am erica instead o f leaving us in Germany? The U.S. Supreme Com m ander in Germ any M cCioy has declared that defectors from the Soviet arm y w ill be granted asylum, but why only in Germany, which is already filled to overflowing with refugees? W hy do the Am ericans themselves not wish to resolve the fates o f the people whom they themselves inspired to flee? B itterly disappointed by our m eeting with the West, we m ust say that we do not perceive friendship and sincerity on the p a rt o f the West. O ur efforts to develop anticom m unist activity are not supported. In a m aterial sense, our existence is shabby, and we do not enjoy the full spectrum o f human rights. We are oppressed morally, our hopes are crushed, and we are depressed by uncertainty and disenchantment. The above article appeared in a magazine entitled Kolokol (Bell), the very appearance of which seemed to illustrate Kolosov's mood — typed on cheap sheets of paper stapled together to form an issue. Australia, which received a considerable share of China's Russian community, had Russian populations in Sidney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Stratford, and Brisbane. In Africa, Bizerta had some Russians, but when Tunisia was declared a republic in 1956, most of them left for Paris, Marseilles, and the French Riviera. The Crimean evacuation had even brought a group of Russians to Addis Ababa, who were still in evidence after the war and who built a Russian cathedral there with the blessing of Haile Selassie.
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Periodicals and Radio 01 m any a shaft a t random sent Finds m ark the archer little m eant! A nd m any a word, a t random spoken, M ay soothe o r wound a heart that's brokenl Sir W alter Scott In France, the country which had constituted the center for cultural activity before the War, Russian cultural life was devastated. There was an extremely modest "comeback” in the late 1940s and 1950s, and then a depressing slide downwards until the arrival of the Third W ave in the 1970s. Since so many of the new émigrés found them selves — either voluntarily or involuntarily — in Germany, that country became a chief center for émigré publications in the immediate postwar years. The journal Posev was founded in late 1945 and G rani (Facets) in 1946. Both were conceived by Russian Second-Wave em igrants living in barracks for displaced persons under threat of forced repatriation to the Soviet Union. G rani soon established ties with the First Wave, but ultim ately became a forum for the publication of Soviet underground publications, as did Posev. Curiously, some of the original support for the journals came in the form of American cigarettes and coffee. Before the German currency reform of 1948, these two commodities actually served as money, and the journals’ subscribers — residents of the displaced-persons camps — received generous allotm ents of both and thus were relatively well off in a material sense. Later, in the 1950s, when the subscribers had moved on, largely to the United States, the dollar was very strong relative to the mark, and foreign subscriptions were especially profitable. The growing significance of New York was evident in the various political publications which appeared there. Founded in 1910, the newspaper Novoe russkoe slovo (The New Russian Word) developed into the most widely-read publication of the Russian émigré com m unity worldwide. W hile the monarchist movement was still viable, New York was home to its newspaper Rossiya (Russia, edited by
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Rybakov) and the journal Znamya Rossii (Russia's Banner, edited by Nikolai Chukhnov).a Nasha strana (Our country), a weekly newspaper founded in 1948 by Ivan Solonevich in Buenos Aires as an "organ of Russian m onarchist thought,” still appears. The paper summed up its position at the very top of page one in the words: "After the fall of Bolshevism only the Tsar will save Russia from a new Party slavery.” It adopted as Hs slogan "For Fakh, the Tsar, and the Fatherland,” and sought "to expose the dirty tricks, intrigues, and lies of past, present, and future enemies of Russia and the Orthodox Church.” For a flavor of the publication's spirit, the following passage from an article by Nikolai Nefedov about Mihajlo Mihajlov is revealing. M ihajlov is the son of First-Wave Russian émigrés who settled in Yugoslavia. The article is entitled: "A Soviet Man: A M arxist of 'Russian Descent’”: V. Zarubin in Nasha strana (O ur Country) provid inform ation on the appearance in Munich o f Forum, a Russianlanguage journal, that is a Jewish journal published in Russian. In the article Zarubin notes in passing that the dissident M ihajlo M ih a jlo v is o f R ussian descen t. V. Z a ru b in is m istaken: M. M ihajlov is not o f Russian descent. It is true that his parents came to Yugoslavia from Russia, were citizens o f the Russian empire, and knew Russian, but they were not Russian. Therefore, M ihajlo M ihajlov cannot him self be considered to be o f " Russian descent.” A nd neither is he a Serb o r a Croat. Having arrived in the W est with a Yugoslav passport, M ihajlo M ihajlov did not attach him self to the Russian ém igré community, which is totally alien to him, but jo in e d a group which was near to him — the com pany o f Soviet, leftist
•The S R bi-monthly m agazine Novyi p u f (The New Path), Rossiya (Russia), Russkii golos (The Russian Voice), S o fya Pregel"s Novosel'e (The Housewarming), Novyi zhum al (The New Review), the monthly m agazine Russkii vestnik (The Russian Herald), Sotsialisticheskii vestnik (The Socialist Herald), and the monthly Z a svobodu (For Freedom) w ere also published in New York. Pennsylvania was home to Pravda (The Truth, Philadelphia) and V em osf (Loyalty, Philadelphia), Lyubov1 (Love, Mayfield), S vet (The Light, W ilkes-Barre), the w eekly newspapers Russkii vestnik (The Russian Herald, Pittsburgh) and Amerikansko-russkii vestnik (The Russian-American Herald, Hom estead). The w eekly Russkoe obozrenie (The Russian Review) was founded in Chicago. The m agazine Solntse (The Sun) cam e out in Los Angeles, w hile Novaya zarya (New Dawn) and Russkaya z h iz ri (Russian Life, edited by Pëtr Balakshin) w ere published in San Francisco.
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dissidents, thus declaring a cold war on the Russian émigré community. His goal is to prevent, no m atter what the cost, a Russian national renaissance. He is an agitator working to replace Soviet communism with democracy — a "people's dem ocracy,” o f course, that is "socialism with a human face....” As for the Jewish question, which ought to be o f particular interest to the dissident Mihajlo M ihajlov ... the fact should be noted that, whatever lim itations there m ay have been [under the Tsars], the Jews were far better o ff than the rest o f the population, since they controlled trade* Thanks in part to support from the Ford Foundation, the Chekhov Publishing House published a number of fine volumes, beginning in 1952. The operation was headed by Vera Shvarts (Aleksandrova), who had been the chief literary critic of Sotsialisticheskii vestnik (The Socialist Herald) in the interwar period. N ovyi zhurnal (The New Review) was founded in 1942 by Mark Tsetlin, M ark Aldanov, and Mikhail Karpovich5 — all First-Wave figures who had recently moved from Europe to the New World. It was intended to be a "thick journal” in the Russian tradition and was conceived as a continuation of Sovremennye zapiski. Tsetlin had edited the poetry section of Sovremennye zapiski, and his wife, Mariya Tsetlina, who helped fund Sovremennye zapiski, was one of the supporters of Novyi zhurnal, at least up to the 1950s. To the editors’ surprise, the journal proved to be a viable undertaking with over 1,000 copies of its first issue sold. Although political materials tended to predom inate during the war and the poetry section was weak, the editors published works by a number of prominent prose writers of the First Wave, including Bunin, Gazdanov, Nabokov, Osorgin, Yanovsky, and Zaitsev. Roman Gul' became a full-tim e member of the editorial board in 1952 and, after the death of the historian Mikhail Karpovich, took over as editor-in-chief — at first on a de facto basis, and later form ally. W hen the W orld W ar II made it impossible for Russian writers to publish in Europe, Novyi zhurnal became the major political and literary "thick” journal of the émigré community, uniting the First and Second W aves. 1945 saw the reappearance of Vestnik russkogo [studencheskogo] khristianskogo dvizheniya (Herald of the Russian
•M ihajlov is a rare phenomenon in Russian émigré culture in that he represents the "second-generation," having been born in Yugoslavia. Contrary to Nefedov's assertions, he is not Jewish. bBunin actually considered moving to the United States to help establish and run the journal.
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[Student] Christian Movement), which listed New York, Munich, and Paris as its places of publication. It originally began as a strictly religious YMCA publication and then assumed the title Vestnik tserkovnoi zhizni (Herald of Church Life). Nikita Struve has been the official editor since 1955, althoughly he actually began fulfilling that function several years earlier. With tim e the journal began to publish more and more articles of a secular and literary nature, and by 1971 it was able to celebrate the appearance of its 100th issue. As one m ight expect from its title, it is a conservative publication, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn began supporting it as of 1974. In 1992 Moscow was added as one of the places of publication. In 1953 the journal Opyty (Experiments, New York) began to appear in New York, edited by Roman Qrinberg and Vsevelod Pastukhov under the banner of anti-Bol'shevism and artistic freedom. Editorship of the publication was later taken over by Yury Ivask until it ceased appearing in 1958. O pyty was intended strictly for verse and fiction. Grinberg went on to found the almanac Vozdushnye p u ti (Aerial Ways) in 1960; only five numbers appeared, and it, too, folded, in 1967. Both these publications were literary undertakings and thus lacked the political orientation necessary to attract U.S. governm ent support. But even the almanac M osty (Bridges, Munich), established by the Central Alliance of Political emigrants, eventually folded (19581970) after its publishing costs proved to be unmanageable. The editors of M osty actually saw it as a bridge between émigré and Soviet life, although far from all of its contributes were eager to embrace such a view. Vozrozhdenie (Renaissance, Paris) was a literary and political journal which appeared from 1949 to 1974 in Paris and was printed in the old orthography and financed by the same oil magnate Abram Gukasov who had earlier financed the newspaper with the same name. Over the years it published a large number of literary, philosophical, and critical studies, not to mention a wealth of memoirs. Novosel'e (House Warming) appeared from 1942 to 1948 in New York and then continued on for two more years in Paris. It was edited by the Fist-W ave poet Sofiya Pregel' in cooperation with the critic and literary historian Mark Slonim. Probably it was a mistake to relocate to Paris, since American Cold-W ar assistance m ight have been available, had the publication remained in its original place of publication. Radio was a natural propaganda response to Soviet censoship of the printed word. The Russian Section of the Voice of Am erica was founded in 1947. In 1953, Radio Liberation was founded by the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia, Inc. (Amcomlib), a C.I.A. front organization, to produce broadcasts beamed
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at the peoples of the Soviet Union. Each day the ticking of a clock was to be broadcast, followed by a solemn voice intoning: "Today, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin is 74 years, 2 months, and 9 days old" (pause and more ticking).... "The tim e of Stalin is drawing to a close." After the first rehearsal, however, it was decided that Stalin might actually live for quite a while and such a feature would soon become boring. Ironically, Stalin suffered his fatal stroke that very day. A number of other foreign radio stations directed broadcasts to Soviet audiences; Deutsche Welle, the BBC, Radio Vatican, the Voice of the Andes, even Radio Albania. Thus, twentieth-century technology brought literature back full circle to oral transmission, as if it were folklore. For decades, these radio-wave publishing programs may well have been Russia's chief means of access to its own exiled literature. Indeed, literature was one of the main weapons employed in the Cold War. For example, Radio Liberty broadcast Solzhenitsyn's entire 260,000-word Gulag Archipelago over the air in 1974! Often funding was provided on a clandestine basis. I myself can recall seeing posters in the New York subway in 1966 or 1967 depicting people behind barbed wire and calling on Americans to support Radio Liberty, which was supposedly financed exclusively by their donations. Of course, as was later admitted, this was a total hoax. The late 1940s and early 1950s marked the height of the Cold War, and an undetermined amount of money (evidently all of it American) went into an effort to create a coordinating center for the struggle against communism. It was to have been centered largely around the NTS and the Institute for the Study of the Soviet Union, with headquarters in Munich. The Institute existed for more than 20 years, but the effort to create a coordinating center did not succeed — partly because it was undertaken during a period when Soviet émigrés were being rapidly dispersed to non-European countries. A major effort was launched to smuggle political propaganda into the Soviet Union, including 97 million leaflets and 8.6 million newspapers and brochures dropped by balloon. In response, the Soviets launched a major espionage campaign against such émigré organizations and even instituted The Committee for Return to the Homeland In East Berlin in 1955 with its own radio broadcasts and newspaper, Za vozvrashchenie na rodinu (For a Return to the Homeland).
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Shul'gin's Open Letter N ot o f the letter, but o f the spirit, for the letter killeth ... Paul's Second Epistle to the Corinthians Them that asks no questions isn't told a lie ... Laces for a lady, letters for a spy. Rudyard Kipling On September 18, I96 0, an open letter by Vasily Shul'gin was printed in the New York pro-Soviet newspaper Russkii g o b s (The Russian Voice). A form er member of all four Dumas, Shul'gin had emigrated after the civil war and played an active role in émigré politics. In 1925-26 he made a clandestine trip to the Soviet Union — either as a double agent of the Soviet authorities or sim ply duped by them. When the Soviet army occupied Yugoslavia, he was arrested and sent to the Soviet Union, where he was imprisoned until 1957. In his letter Shul'gin drew an idyllic picture of life in the Soviet Union and called upon the émigré community to renounce its hostility to the Soviet government. The Second World War, he wrote, had been a great trial, in which the Russian people chose to support the Soviet regime: If the émigré com m unity has not drawn any conclusion from the tragic vote which took place in 1941-45 and continues its activities directed a t the overthrow o f the Soviet government, this is a mistake. The very people who are supposed to be helped do not wish this. Leave them in peace. Let them arrange their lives as they choose. They did not support you, the Whites, during the civil war o f 1918-20, and they rejected and destroyed the émigré battalions which tought on Hitler's side.... Isn't that enough? Can it really be that we, who were not uninvited, will attem pt to "liberate” the Russian people fo r a third tim e? A nd under whose banners? Adenauer's? His successors'? The 1961 book from which this letter is taken also contains a second letter entitled "The Return of Odysseus,” in which Shul'gin takes note of the "cult of personality” and writes that he, Shul'gin, is "captivated” by the figure of Khrushchêv. Shul'gin was later interviewed on film telling how he and Aleksandr Guchkov had persuaded Nikolai to abdicate. Shul'gin's exquisitely aristocratic pronunciation, his elegant beard, and his obvious reverence for the Tsar make such feelings of "captivation” difficult to fathom.
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Prose Writers I am thinking o f aurochs and angels, the secret o f durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge o f art. A nd this is the only im m ortality you and I m ay share, m y Lolita. Vladim ir Nabokov Fundamentally, the 1940s were a period of disruption, but Second-W ave writers began to publish their works even before moving to the United States. Like the "younger generation” of writers from the First Wave, most Second W avers established themselves as writers only after leaving Russia. In 1948 Anatoly Darov (1920-1997) used a duplicating machine to bring out his Blockade (Blokada) — about the siege of Leningrad. In 1949 Sergei Maksimov (1917-1967) published the most popular novel of the Wave — Denis Bushuev. The bulk of the novel is im itative in nature, stylized after Sholokhov's Q uiet Don. Like Sholokhov's Grigory Melekhov, the protagonist is a noble peasant in love with a married woman, who is a romantic, violent, even Satanic figure. The action evolves against the background of the purges, but the political elem ent is secondary to the main plot line. The novel's conclusion is com pletely Dostoevskian, replete with murder, suicide, confessions, and passionate love. Linguistically, the work is fairly sophisticated and intended to create a deeply Russian atmosphere — an effect which must have tugged at the heartstrings of the émigré readers. Maksimov followed up with a second novel, Denis Bushuev’s Rebellion (Bunt Denisa Bushueva) in 1956, but his career as a writer was tragically ruined by alcoholism, as indeed was his entire life. Perhaps one of the major achievements of the Second Wave was in the genre of memoirs and the historical novel. The tragedy of the age had not been objectively reflected in Soviet literature, and it had been extremely difficult to smuggle manuscripts out of the Soviet Union before the War. Deserving of mention in this genre are Gennady Andreev's Solovets Islands (Solovetskie ostrova, 1950), Boris Shiryaev's The Inextinguishable Lamp (Neugasimaya lampada, 1954), the novel Enem y o f the People (Vrag Naroda, 1952, later republished in 1972 under the title Parallaks) by Vladim ir Yurasov (pseudonym of Vladim ir Zhabinsky), and Leonid Rzhevsky's Between Two Stars (Mezhdu dvukh zvêzd, 1953). Yury Elagin wrote a book of recollections entitled The Taming o f the Arts (Ukroshchenie iskusstv, 1952) and a book on M eierkhol'd: Dark Genius (Têmnyi genii, 1955). In her 1963 memoir, The Tale o f Ragged Years (Povest' krivykh let), Tat'yana Fesenko described her youth in Kiev, the German occupation, the tim e spent in Germany as an Ostarbeiterin, her resolve
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to com m it suicide if forced to return to the Soviet Union, the German landlord who threatened to hand her and her husband over to the Soviet authorities after the war, Ivan Elagin composing verse in a displaced-persons camp, the rescue by American soldiers of a Soviet repatriation officer from an enraged group of DP's, and her own preparations to leave for the United States. It is an intense, deeply personal tale of one woman, but it is, at the same time, a revealing docum ent of the period and helps us to understand Fesenko's own verse, with its reflections on the transitory nature of life. A novel about the purges of 1937 was published by Nikolai Narokov (pseudonym of Nikolai Marchenko, 1887-1969) in New York in 1952 with the title Im aginary Magnitudes (Mnimye velichiny). W ritten in imitation of Dostoevsky's novels, it was intended to convey a moral message within a sensationalistic plot. A young typist is befriended by a mysterious man who reveals to her that her father is a paid inform er for the NKVD and is responsible for the death of several neighbors and the arrest of her own husband. The typist forgives her father, whom the influential stranger orders released just before the father is about to be executed. When the man is directed to continue slandering his neighbors in order to generate still more arrests and executions, he throws him self under a train. A parallel plot unfolds within the ranks of the NKVD. The mysterious stranger turns out to be a high official in that organization. Intelligent and, above all, strong, he combines his murderous activities with a sincere admiration for the typist, whom he perceives as a "real” human being, unlike the thugs who work for him. In a surprise denouement, he murders his mistress, reveals his true identity to the typist, and lays plans to defect while abroad after realizing that his own days are numbered. Born and raised in Riga, Irina Saburova (1907-1979) did not considered herself to be a member of the Second Wave, since she never actually emigrated from Russia proper. Having fled the approaching Soviet troops in 1943 and settled in Munich, she produced two books — The DP Alphabet (Dipiologicheskaya azbuka) and Queen o f Clubs (Dama tref) — in 1946. Given the conditions at the time, "publication” meant setting the type and binding the books herself and selling each copy for a pack of cigarettes. She published A bout Us (0 nas) in Munich in 1972, a melodramatic novel with a very loose plot line about the immediate post-war years in Germany. The characters are overwhelmed by the struggle to survive — to eat, clothe themselves, and avoid forced repatriation to the Soviet Union. They gradually rebuild their lives and even arrange poetry readings in those difficult tim es. At one point mention is made of Gone With the Wind, and Saburova obviously felt a commonality of experience with M argaret
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M itchell's evocations of chaos, hope, and despair in the American South after the Civil War. Both Im aginary Magnitudes and About Us are traditional realistic novels displaying little artistic innovation, but dealing with the events that so wrenched the lives of the Second Wave and, as such, proved to be particularly meaningful to their readers. However, it would be incorrect to remember Saburova strictly in this key, for she also wrote a number of fairy tales, which she believed would outlast such ephemeral cultural artifacts as political-historical writing.
Poets I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. T. S. Eliot In 1958 an anthology entitled Literature A broad* was published in Munich by a group of Second-Wave émigré writers and poets. The volum e was intended to demonstrate that the Second Wave constituted a literary entity separate from the First Wave. "Modem” Russian literature, as defined by Yury Bol'shukhin in the afterword to the volume, consisted of Second-Wave émigré literature and Soviet literature and was basically "moral” in thrust. Bol'shukhin felt that the division between émigré literature and Soviet literature was artificial: Second-W ave writers saw themselves fundamentally as Soviet writers (or, rather, anti-Soviet writers) who had been dispersed abroad by historical chance. Most First-Wave writers would have concurred in this evaluation of the Second Wave. Bol'shukhin wrote that imaginative writers like Nabokov had been rare among First-Wave writers, who for the most part were inclined toward old-fashioned realism. W hile conceding that the accomplishments of the Second Wave were still modest, Bol'shukhin pointed out that the group was small in number. The verse in the volume is often lofty in manner, with very traditional them es. Basically, the poets sought to transm it their impressions and musings in rhyme and meter. Bol'shukhin's perception of a new modernism (although he did not use that word) now seems very difficult to justify. W hen the First-Wave critic Yury Terapiano in late 1959 summed up the tradition of Russian émigré poetry since 1920, he
•Literaturnoe zarubezh'e. Contributors were: O l'ga Anstei, Ivan Elagin, Sergei Maksimov, Dmitry Klenovsky, Nikolai Morshen, Leonid Rzhevsky, and Aleksandr Kashin.
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sensed an essential commonality of approach and world view between the "two generations” — the First and Second Waves. W hile the form er deliberate sparseness of the "Parisian Note” was gone now, Terapiano felt that an essential unity of manner had been achieved by the early 1950s, evidenced by: 1. a rejection of so-called "leftist” and "chaotic” tendencies; 2. a repudiation of Symbolist vagaries; 3. an adherence to the traditions of the Acmeists (Gumilêv, Akhmatova, early Mandel'shtam, Georgy Ivanov); 4. the influence of Blok and (partially) Tsvetaeva; 5. the influence of nineteenth-century Russian poets (Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev, Baratynsky); and 6. a less than expected influence of Pasternak, Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Esenin, Zabolotsky, Kirsanov, and Bagritsky. Clearly, Terapiano's perceptions were influenced by his own personal tastes (he shakes his head over the way recent arrivals ignored the verse of Innokenty Annensky, for example), but these were the perceptions of a sensitive contemporary critic, and cannot be ignored. Igor' Chinnov (1909-1996) is difficult to fit into either the First or Second Waves. Like Saburova, he grew up in Riga and thus was not really an émigré at all before leaving Latvia, but a Russian w riter born abroad. Chronologically, he would fit into the "Second W ave,” but he began writing verse as an im itator of the First W ave's "Parisian Note.” His verse is characterized by an economy of means (what is now referred to as "m inimalism”), a sense of restraint, and a strong underlying aestheticism: A black bird on a black and snowy branch — A hieroglyph o f sorrow. A black burdock in the snow — An ideogram o f winter. Shadows, mine and yours, on the white snowdrift — G raffiti o f silence. The quivering o f black branches and trees. How restless The Chinese calligraphy o f the winter garden, How fleshless These abstractions o f light and snow. Chinnov's later work, while using the same system of form al devices, is more ironical, with elements of surrealism and the
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grotesque. His literary roots were actually quite cosmopolitan, but his general mood reflected the exile’s underlying pessimism. W hile Chinnov was aesthetically an appendage to the "First W ave,” Ivan Elagin (1918-1987) as a poet was truly a product of the new society. Instead of the idyllic landscapes so often encountered in the verse of poets, Elagin adopted a rhetorical, declamatory manner, preferring hyperbole and political verse, as in the following poem dedicated to the memory of his father, the poet Venedikt Mart (Matveev): The man is still alive Who shot m y father In Kiev in the sum m er o f '38. Probably, he's pensioned now, Lives quietly A nd has given up his old job. A nd if he has died, Probably the man is still alive Who ju s t before the shooting Bound his arms Behind his back With a stout wire. Probably, he too is pensioned off. A nd if he is dead, Then probably The one who questioned him still lives. A nd he, no doubt, Enjoys a particularly generous pension. Perhaps the guard Who took m y father to be shot Is still alive. If I should want now, I could return to m y native land. For I have been told That a ll these people have actually forgiven me.
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Another example of the politicized verse of the Second W ave is a poem by the half-Estonian Boris Nartsissov (1906-1982): A M arated Bastilled age Trumpets the lilies’ doom A nd raises a defiant standard Through the red poppies o f banners and caps. The ages sweep past the naive flotsam o f your dream : The same striking men, the same mouths Crying fo r bread. The writhing streets m irror your crimson sheen, While — two hundred m illion strong — You brandish a pentagram over Moscow. 4
B ut your beloved children are impotent. Like you, they dw ell in, are sim plicity: " One step forw a rd — two back.” Throughout the ages Your labor bears the same fruit: Lavoisier on a scaffold, Gum ilëv in a cell. Nikolai Morshen (pseudonym of Nikolai Marchenko, b. 1917) is a Russian speaker from Ukraine, a group which contributed disproportionately to the Second Wave. Fraught with a sense of time, his philosophical verse reflects the life and movement of an age in which the individual is swept along by events: In superstitious panic I stared a t walls surrounding m e: W hat space encloses me — Four-dimensional o r four-walled? I opened the door. It was twilight. Objects gradually disappeared behind each other A nd the a ir rustled lightly like foam — Palpable, ye t elusive.
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The tide o f dark a ir rose to m y knees, to m y chest A nd I had only to cross the threshold To swim and swim, choking on stars. Nikolai Klenovsky (pseudonym of Nikolai Krachkovsky, 18931976) was a poet whose lyrical and philosophical meditations and "eternal them es” would easily have fit into the Parisian Note. His first collection Palette (Palitra) appeared in 1917, but he did not begin writing verse again until he found himself in a displaced-persons camp in Germany in 1947. His verse remained fundam entally conservative, even classical in manner, and is generally somber and preoccupied with death: A ll evil and a ll good W ill fuse within your soul Into a burden o f song — a partner in conversation o f late days. Oleg ll'insky (b. 1932) is unusual among Second-Wave versifiers in that, although he was taken out of Russia by his parents while still a teenager, he did not assimilate, but remained totally within the current of Russian culture. He is a very visual poet, and his verse is often a verbal still life, with what the Russian call veshchestvennost’ or predm etnost'. He has "fragm ents” reminiscent of haiku: Summ er clim axed in a waterfall and the window's view was ageless: a m aple le a f on a police car's license plate, a grape cluster and a bright wine bottle. *
Lilies floated in cranberry punch while aspens trem bled in the forest, reflections o f brigandish Corsicas played over m y sleeping face. *
Broken chalk by the blackboard, a petrified chunk o f childhood. Like Chinnov, Yury Ivask (1907-1986) had his roots in the Baltic region; his fam ily had left Russia for Estonia in 1920 and in 1944 he fled to Germany. Ivask began writing poetry in a rather conservative fashion — som ewhat in the manner of the "Parisian Note.” Later, he
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abandoned this Acmeistic sim plicity and clarity in favor of a more intimate, personal, associative verse and phonic experimentation. As a young man, he conducted an interesting correspondence with Marina Tsvetaeva, and in his later years he took a strong interest in ThirdW ave poets. Aesthetically closest to the First Wave, he matured as a poet quite late — after the arrival of the Second and even the Third W ave. In 1949 he moved to the United States and taught Russian literature at the University of Massachusetts, where he became enamored of the image of a neighbor in spirit and space, if not in tim e — Emily Dickinson: The m ad old m aid o f Am herst — a face like the moon, eyes on fire, her quill pen scraping. On the le ft a window. Another on the right. A nd from beyond the wild roses, the hawthorn and the maple (the glistening garden) — flowers for Thee, bright Absentee ... To Him ! Staccato down the road roaring with a thousand wheels — the mysterious, generous spendthrift o f a galloping soul. With axle squeaking ... into the churchyard — an open grave. But death is smashed. N ot she — trium phant maiden spinning off, away. Oh, Bliss. Em ily's July! The jo y o f the garden. On Globe Roses: the bee. Psalteries o f summer. Chirruping. A nd she needs nothing else, her honeyed horizon outside o f time. Let's fill the em pty heavens. It is already doneI A nd she, she has become his Noon: and dying flows with summer's paradise....9
•Translation by W illiam Tjalsm a.
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The 2Vi Wave For that fine madness still he did retain Which rightly should possess a poet's brain. Michael Drayton (1563-1631) In the 1950s and 1960s only a handful of Russian writers — the so-called 2Vz Wave — managed to make their way to the West. One of the first to leave was Viktoriya Kochurova (pseudonym: Alla Ktorova) (b. 1926), who married an American tourist and was able to leave the U.S.S.R. with him after Khrushchëv personally intervened in her case. It was a remarkable reversal of policy, since under Stalin such an act would have been classified as treason. The case of Valery Tarsis (1906-1983) is notable in that the Soviet authorities used him to experiment once more with psychiatric im prisonm ent and exile. In the U.S.S.R. Tarsis had been an editor, novelist, and poet. He had also translated 34 books from a variety of languages, including Ukrainian and Greek. In 1961 he smuggled out the manuscript of The Blue Bottle Fly (Skazanie o sinei mukhe), a political allegory of a philosopher who kills a fly and then asks himself why he cannot likewise murder people who get in his way. The book was published in 1962, and that same year Tarsis was imprisoned in the Kashchenko Psychiatric Hospital with a diagnosis of "expansive paranoia,” but was released five months later, after the case received wide publicity in the West. He described his experience in W ard 7 (Palata No. 7), the title of which he modeled after Chekhov's W ard 6. On February 21, 1966, he was stripped of Soviet citizenship "for actions discreditable to a Soviet citizen” and permitted to leave the U.S.S.R. a few weeks later. This was the first permission granted since the case of Zamyatin in 1932. He persistently declared the U.S.S.R. to be a fascist state, and the official Soviet reaction was to accuse him of a "delirium of anti-Sovietism .” In 1968 he published an autobiographical tale, Gray Youth (Sedaya yunost'), followed by a multi-volum e epos of life in the Soviet Union amalgamated under the title The Risky Life o f Valentin Alm azov (Riskovannaya zhizn' Valentina Almazova). The next case to receive wide publicity in the W est was that of Arkady Belinkov (1921-1970), a major critic whose relatively early death was a serious blow to Russian letters abroad. Belinkov had been arrested in 1944 for having contacts with foreigners and for having written an unpublished novel in which he asserted that the 1939 M olotov-Ribbentrop pact had led to World W ar II. During his im prisonm ent he was tortured and permanently crippled. Aleksei Tolstoi and Viktor Shklovsky interceded with Stalin on his behalf, and
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his sentence was about to be commuted to ten years when it was learned that he had written other anti-Soviet works before his imprisonment, and he was sentenced to an additional 25 years. He was eventually amnestied in 1956, under Khrushchëv, and awarded a lectureship at the Gor'ky Literary Institute, but was dismissed after being denounced by a student. During his Soviet period Belinkov had been a master of Aesopian language designed to circumvent the censors. Perhaps as a result of a bureaucratic blunder, the Soviets perm itted him to go abroad. Predictably, he defected and received political asylum in the United States in 1968. His public denunciation of the Union of Soviet W riters and of the Soviet government expresses the despair felt by many intellectuals when Khrushchêv's admissions of the "cult of personality” were stifled in the Brezhnev years: The appearance o f a literary empire with its enormous apparatus o f legislators, managers, judges, and henchmen was inevitable, and took place a t the same time and for the same reasons as the mass m urders o f the 1930s. The chronicle o f Soviet self-destruction begins with the creation o f the Union o f Soviet W riters in 1934 and the m urder o f Kirov. Everything that betrayed any gleam o f talent had to be destroyed, fo r talent does not tolerate evil. The m ost vicious corruption was forced upon the country: the rule o f the dull-witted. The W riters’ Union was created to control literature (which ultim ately became "p a rt o f the general-proletarian cause”); that is, it was created to produce everything essential for intolerant, ignorant, allconsum ing power. The authorities needed to raise vicious, devoted beasts ready to unleash wars, seize lands, m urder those who thought differently, o r in the same way, and blow the trum pets in honor o f that extraordinary man who succeeded in destroying more human beings than anyone else has done. I never wrote so much as a line o f the sort dem anded o f a pious Soviet writer and never considered m yself a loyal citizen o f that kingdom o f liars, tyrants, criminals, and stranglers o f freedom. The W riters’ Union is an institution o f a police state, ju s t like a ll its other institutions, and is no better and no worse than the m ilitia o r the fire department.... I write little about the pow erful W riters’ Union o f the U.S.S.R. and consumptive Soviet literature. Why write about a secondary evil? The chief evil is the bestial, fascist Soviet sociological ideology.
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Belinkov's two major works were a 1960 study of the writer Yury Olesha and a 1961 book on the critic and novelist Yury Tynyanov. The general thrust of his studies was more political than literary. I recall vividly a lecture he delivered at New York University shortly before his death, his voice barely audible as a result of his illness and the anger branded indelibly across his features. In 1966 — a relatively liberal period in Soviet history — Anatoly Kuznetsov (1929-1979), had managed to publish Babii Yar, about the destruction of the Jews by the Germans during the Second World War. He defected shortly after Belinkov, while visiting London in 1969, having received permission to go abroad by working as a KGB informer, and immediately republished the work, highlighting the passages which had been expunged by the censor of the Soviet edition. The story of the tremendously difficult conditions during the war, which included even cannibalism, received wide attention in W estern publications. Back in Moscow the Soviet authorities had not forgotten about the exiles. As part of a general campaign to discourage Russians abroad from defecting, the Soviet writer Anatoly Sofronov wrote the play The Ém igrés (Èmigranty) in 1967, in which a Soviet seaman is hospitalized in Australia for appendicitis. Sinister Vlasovites attem pt to bribe and intim idate him into defecting but, thanks in part to the efforts of other Russian émigrés who long to return home, their diabolic efforts are thwarted. Even without Stalin's open physical terror, the heavy-handed adm inistrative rule of his heirs seemed to strip away all hope that the regime could be overthrown, or at least reformed. For the émigrés there was no going home. Russian borders were effectively sealed off, and the Soviet state presented such a massive military threat that W estern countries were fearful of being overwhelmed by a Soviet Blitzkrieg. Boris Zaitsev summed up the general pessimistic mood of the dwindling émigré community: The W ar threw a ll the cards in the air. And then time carried o ff m any o f the laborers o f our craft. There was a handful o f people, and after the war there rem ained ha lf a handful. Now only a quarter is left, and soon we will a ll be ju s t a memory. But a ll this is meaningless. " Once upon a tim e” is the common lot. Each carries out the task allotted to him by fate. Each o f us did what he could, and m ost are now forever a t peace. Those who remain can only sigh, waiting for their hour to strike and clutching— to the very end o f their lives — the reins entrusted to them.
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The Third Wave Leaving Russian Jews or Jewish Russians? A Crisis of Identity With lime in the blood for an alien tribe, To gather the grasses o f the n ig h t... Osip Mandel'shtam The history of the Russian emigration is inseparable from that of Russia's Jews. Jews comprised the majority in the economic and religious emigration of late tsarist times and also were a significant contingent within the camp of the political émigrés of the era. They were very active both in the workings of the early Soviet state, and in First-W ave politics. As writers and publishers they played à m ajor role in literature of the period. Although the Second Wave numbered very few Jews, who obviously were not about to flee westward to Germany, the Third W ave was, of course, largely Jewish. And as age took its toll on the older community, the Russian émigré community became increasingly a community of Russian Jews. In May 1947 Gromyko made a statem ent (not published in the Soviet media) supporting the right of the Jews in Palestine to a homeland and neglecting to mention Stalin's Jewish Autonomous Republic, created in 1934 in Siberia along the Chinese border, although a small number of Jews actually did move there in 1946-48. In late November, 1947, the United Nations, with the support of the Soviet Union, issued a resolution calling for the creation of a separate Jewish state, but by October 1948 the Soviet press was attacking Zionism, and Jews who displayed an interest in moving to Israel were being arrested. Alm ost all contact between Soviet Jews and Jews in other countries was cut off. In January 1953 the so-called "doctors’ plot” was "uncovered,” in which Jewish physicians were alleged to have conspired to murder Soviet leaders. It appeared that Stalin was planning to launch a new major purge, this tim e specifically targeting the Jews. Prominent Soviet Jews (ll'ya Èrenburg, for one) were pressured to sign statements condemning the doctors, and Jews were attacked in the press as "rootless cosm opolites.” Only Stalin's death forestalled what appears to have been very ominous events in the making. Thus, the period from October 1948 until mid-1953 is regarded as "the black years” for Soviet Jewry. For fear of retaliation against Soviet Jews, Jewish leaders were at first reluctant to make any public accusations, but in May 1950 BenGurion demanded freedom of emigration. Once the "doctors’ plot” was
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announced, the Israelis decided to push for exodus from the Soviet Union, rather than for reforms, and a small committee was formed under Shaul Avigur to clandestinely orchestrate international outrage and exert massive foreign pressure on Soviet authorities. The emigration movement imitated the American civil rights movement, and the slogan "Let my people go” was adopted. In the immediate post-Stalin period Soviet leaders were dismayed to see that millions of Soviet citizens, most of whom had been totally assimilated into Russian culture, were clamoring to flee the country. A powerful factor in the mindset of the would-be expatriates had been the experience of prisoners in the forced-labor camps, where alm ost all the Jews became Zionists. In July 1953 Moscow resumed relations with Israel, and the Israelis cautiously accepted the proffered olive branch, tem porarily setting aside their demands for freedom of em igration. In late 1956 and early 1957, however, a permanent Israeli office was established to choreograph foreign pressure for the right to em igrate. By the early 1960s international conferences were being held in such m ajor world capitals as New York, London, and Rio de Janiero, and Soviet "refuseniks” were being compared to the victim s of Auschwitz. International leftist and communist organizations refused to support the locked-border policy of their form er ally. The Soviet reaction was one of deliberate delays and obfuscation; during all of 1958 and 1959 only 19 persons were perm itted to emigrate to Israel, and the government evidently considered cranking up the traditional anti-Sem itic campaign. Nevertheless, Soviet resistance began to weaken, and in December 1966 Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin declared he would not prevent "fam ily reunification.” The six-day war in June 1967 instilled a new confidence and pride in Soviet Jewry, and a petition of one million signatures was gathered abroad in support of their right to emigrate. The year 1970 witnessed the attempted highjacking of a plane from Leningrad, and then came the Jackson-Vanik trade bill. But the total em igration from 1948 to 1967 remained minute. Soviet Jews received limited permission to emigrate in 1970, along with ethnic Germans and Armenians.® Jewish emigration figures reached a peak of 213,042 in 1990, of whom 181,759 went to Israel.
•This w as not the first ethnic "leakage” in the Soviet dike during the post-war period. In 1950-51 roughly 3,000 Germ ans w ere transferred from East Prussia and M em el; from 1956 to 1959 some quarter million Poles w ere permitted to leave for Poland (14,000 are estimated to have been Jewish); in 1956-60 there w ere 5,500 Spanish repatriates (persons who had fled to the Soviet Union after the Spanish civil w ar); in the late 1950s, 5,500 ethnic Greeks moved to Greece; and 3,500 Koreans repatriated to Korea between 1963 and 1979.
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These figures included a number of non-Jews, since roughly half the Soviet Jews were married to non-Jews, and Soviet authorities actively encouraged non-Jews who wanted to emigrate to request permission to go to Israel as Jews. According to the 1979 Soviet census, 94.5 percent of Russian Jews spoke Russian either as their native language or as a second language. As they themselves testify, the result was cultural assim ilation:
Garry Tabachnik, journalist: The fact is that m ost o f us who em igrated felt ourselves to be Jewish only when we were rem inded o f it. Having lived all m y life in Moscow, I can testify that for the m ajority o f Jews who lived there fo r m any years, their only and m ost firm link to Jew ry was the anti-Sem itism that rem inded them o f their origins. 4
Èfraim Sevela, writer: Physically, I have Jewish roots, but spiritually, culturally, I am a Russian. I cannot tell you now that I am a Jew, because m ost o f m y best qualities, the qualities o f which I'm really proud, are Russian. I have two faces, a Russian and a Jewish, and this will be true a ll m y life.
Efim Ètkind, literary scholar: To divide people into Jews and non-Jews is absurd.... The author o f these lines is a Jew "by blood, ” but he is not separated from the Russia o f Pushkin and Tolstoi, Blok and M andel'shtam by his language, culture, o r his way o f thinking. We who have been brought up on the advanced ideas o f our age will not allow ourselves to be degraded to the zoological consciousness which — alas! — has stained m any o f our contem poraries ... Naturally, such views do not enjoy universal acceptance, and the question of Russian-Jewish identity has always been a subject of vigorous debate within the émigré community. When Semên Yushkevich died in 1924, Pavel Milyukov spoke at his funeral, declaring him to be a truly Russian writer, but the Jewish author Sholom Ash also delivered a speech, pronouncing him to be a Jewish w riter by virtue of his Jewish soul and heart. Despite the friendly tone of this kindly rivalry, the confusion of identity can be painful, as can be seen from a statem ent the Third-W ave w riter ll'ya Suslov made to me during an interview: O f course, I know very little about Jewish language, culture o r religion. I know about it to the extent that I have an interest in it, and I do have a great deal o f interest [siel]. I was assigned
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m y Judaism by the Soviets when they stam ped ■Jew ” on line 5 o f m y passport. That decision is made on the basis o f blood, and not religion. Its a ll blood.... If you read m y books, you'll see that the humor, the intonation, the accent, if you will, is Jewish. I have that accent, inside me, o f course. I feel it. This split identity can lead to outright hostility toward everything Russian. The following quote is from an early-1970s émigré whom I interviewed in 1996. M y fam ily's Jewish roots are really quite distinguished: when Zhabotinsky emigrated, m y aunt m oved into his apartment, and the Jewish Encyclopedia devotes an entire page to m y grandfather. A fte r emigrating, I spoke no Russian whatsoever fo r two decades, so that the Russian language was nothing m ore than an episode in our fam ily history. Now I use the language o f the enem y only as part o f m y jo b as a translator, and if I had any children, they would not know Russian. How can I regard m yself as a Russian when I rem em ber being taunted as a Tid and being beaten by Russian children! When I grew older, I knew I would have to overcome fa r greater obstacles in enrolling in a university and getting a jo b than would a Russian. In Russia I felt m yself to be pa rt o f an outcast underclass. If I had not m anaged to evade the draft, I would have had to be afraid that m y fellow soldiers would m urder me. I was im prisoned in a m ental institution for wanting to m eet Nixon during his visit, and I le ft— in fear and loathing — under threat o f being arrested again. I definitely am not a Russian, and I dislike Russian culture. Their so-called "spirituality” is ju s t hypocritical concealm ent o f their inability to com pete with people who are more talented than they. A nd I'm not the only one who thinks that way: I have friends who agree with me totally. I am here in Russia for the first time in a quarter century — for strictly business reasons — and I'm not one b it m oved by the experience. On the contrary, there is still the same fear and the same resentment. The Soviet governm ent published numerous anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli books (at least 22 between 1967 and 1969), but these publications were perceived by many Russian Jews (and Russian antiSemites) as sim ply anti-Jewish. As late as 1982 the Soviets published a book entitled The Class Essence o f Zionism (Klassovaya sut’ sionizma), written by Lev Korneev. Evidently not intended for sale to the general public, it was distributed to "scientific workers, lecturers, teachers, students, propagandists, and all who are interested in questions of ideological struggle.” Thus, it represented the Russian governm ent's views at the time.
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To say that Korneev's complaints about the Jews are extensive is an understatement. He writes that in ancient tim es wealthy Jewry "was transform ed into a cosmopolitan group of traders and usurers"; that the prim ary cause of anti-Semitism is "the exploitation by the Jewish bourgeoisie of the native population of the region of residence”; that the Jewish bourgeoisie and the Zionist leadership share responsibility for the Holocaust; that Zionism encourages a "gangster-like Russophobia” in Israel; that the Jews in all countries display a "primary loyalty” to Israel which transform s Jews into a "fifth colum n”; and that even the Old Testament is filled with instances of "cruelty and treachery on the part of Jews.” When a small percentage of the emigrants wanted to return to the Soviet Union, Korneev responded: O ur society is humane and magnanimous. B ut it does not forgive treason. A ll those who decided to go to Israel and fo r that reason lost Soviet citizenship were warned in a serious and tim ely fashion that they could find themselves in a difficult situation and thus be deprived o f norm al living conditions. And, o f course, it is im possible to feel anything but indignation a t attem pts to blame our country for refusing to restore citizenship ... to those who do not treasure their motherland. Finally, Korneev argued that Soviet anti-Semitism was a myth and that the small minority of working Jews had always supported the Soviet government. Korneev's book received strong praise from Sovetskaya kultura (Soviet Culture), Izvestiya (News), and Sovetskaya prom yshlennost' (Soviet Industry). In 1978 he published a sim ilar pam phlet entitled The Sword o f David (Mech Davida), changing his name to Leo Korn to give it a Jewish sound. It was distributed in English by the Novosti Press Agency. Inevitably, relations between ethnic Russians and Russian Jews remained a problem in the émigré community. A. Grishin in the Munich nationalist journal Veche (Town Meeting) complained in 1985 that the foreign Russian-language press basically reflected a Jewish point of view, that Jews had played a prom inent role in the overthrow of the tsarist government, that lim itations on Jewish enrollm ent in tsarist institutions of higher learning and on land-holding by Jews had been essential, and that the tsarist Pale of Settlem ent had been merely "a peculiar trade barrier separating eastern Russia from an excessively vigorous onslaught of 'capital relations,' of which she still had little inkling.” At the same tim e Grishin took pains to note that Jews had also taken part in the resistance to Bol'shevik rule and that Russian Jews had made enormous contributions to Russian literature.
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Naturally, such broadsides did not go unanswered. In a series of two articles published in 1986 in the Los Angeles newspaper Panorama, the émigré radio journalist Vadim Belotserkovsky expressed dism ay at what he saw as the growth of anti-Jewish feeling — not just in Soviet governm ent circles, but also among intellectuals. Belotserkovsky quoted statistics demonstrating that the Jewish role in the October 1917 coup had been exaggerated. He then went on to attack Solzhenitsyn, who had criticized Sakharov for the latter's alleged willingness to sacrifice reform in order to achieve freedom of Jewish em igration. Zinaida Shakhovskaya, a First-Wave figure who once referred to the Third W ave as "the second Soviet emigration (with a Jewish m ajority),” in 1984 published an article in Vestnik russkogo khristianskogo dvizheniya (Herald of the Russian Christian Movement), stating that many Jews in the Third Wave are hostile to Russians p e r se and quoting a fantasy of the Israeli writer Amos Oz: The Russian earth groans and trembles. Churches crumble. Kiev, Kharkov, the Dnepr Region, and Rostov are a ll wiped from the face o f the earth. VengeanceI Vengeance! Kishinëv! See our form er oppressors — so tall and strong — raise their hands in surrender. A ll the church bells ring.... No one w ill escape without answering, not the Lithuanians, nor the Poles, nor the Ukrainians. A ll o f Russia is reduced to dust. In the languages o f m y ancestors I whisper "Amen, Am enI" Shakhovskaya went on to quote a poem attributed to David Markish, who left the U.S.S.R. in 1972 and settled in Israel: We ate their bread, but paid in blood. We've kept the bills, but not balanced the books. A t the bedside o f that northern land O ur vengeance w ill be flowers a t its bedstead. Markish's brother Shimon wrote a response to Shakhovskaya's article, which Vestnik russkogo khristianskogo dvizheniya refused to publish but which appeared in the Israeli Russian-language magazine 22. Shimon Markish pointed out that Oz was born in Israel and speaks no Russian, and that the passage quoted consists of the words of a character in the story, not the feelings of the author himself. According to the brother, the poem had been radically rewritten by persons unknown, possibly agents of the KGB, in an effort to stir up hostility to Jews. The original version supposedly reads: We ate their bread, but paid in blood. The evil m em ory won't le t us sleep.... On our forty-year journey we'll take with us The anguished cries o f orphans, widows' tears.
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One of the better known documents in this Russian-Jewish quarrel was Russophobia, published in the late 1980s and written by the well known mathematician and dissident Igor* Shafarevich (b. 1923), who together with Solzhenitysn had contributed to the collection From Under the Rubble (lz-pod glyb). In it Shafarevich attacked "cosm opolitan” intellectuals, whose ranks he saw as consisting largely of Jews consumed with resentment toward Russia. Shafarevich was deeply offended by the negative image of Russia presented by this "elitist group,” which, so he claimed, depicted Russians as having an intolerant mentality that provided fruitful ground for a communism as vicious as it was messianic. Shafarevich argued that the reverse was true: Marxism was alien to the Russian tradition as a form of cultural "occupation” imported from the W est by "THEM,” as opposed to "US” (both words capitalized in the original). The purpose of this purported war was to annihilate Russia's spiritual foundations. W hat Russia needed now was to recognize the harm that W estern thinking had brought and create a strong national governm ent which would provide a unique Russian alternative to democracy. For the Jews, Shafarevich claimed, Russia was merely their "original country of residence.” "Less rooted in life” while still residing in Russia, they became even more isolated abroad and developed an "ém igré attitude” toward life in Russia, viewing it as som ething unrelated to them, insidiously altering their works and even their language to convey this distorted picture. Consciously or subconsciously, in Shafarevich's view, Jewish émigrés became oriented toward other, non-Russian readers and critics. And, although they acquired a sense of freedom, it was the freedom of rootlessness, freedom from responsibility for the fate of their country and from fear of inflicting harm on it. Shafarevich claimed the Jews actually took delight in Russia's failures and were demoralized by her successes. Divorced from the nation's life, they had become more and more fixated upon "intruding” into it and had mutated into a uniquely efficacious kind of disease that created disruption and upheaval. Unlike the First and Second Waves, according to Shafarevich, Third-W ave émigrés left voluntarily, unable to withstand the pressure put on them, and thus betrayed their colleagues. In his opinion, such persons lacked personal values and were incapable of making a contribution to culture, but instead strove to capitalize on their newfound celebrity and transform emigration into career. Even more destructive, in Shafarevich's opinion, was the way in which this "narrow social stratum ” had betrayed the people by maintaining that the chief human right was the right to emigrate. By thus abandoning the people, the émigrés supposedly not only became isolated even among the
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intelligentsia, but by choosing to leave rather than remain behind and fight may well have delayed the advent of perestroika for 20 years. Shafarevich went on to claim that the émigré "pluraliste,” not all of whom were Jewish, had begun to slander Russia, claiming to perceive a toadying national character (Aleksandr Zinov'ev), hostility to Jews (Andrei Sinyavsky), fascism (Aleksandr Yanov), and a lack of historical perspective (Boris Shragin). Rather than fight, they chose the cowardly option of flight. And once having fled, they then proceeded to create a literature depicting a hopelessly flawed, slavish Russian personality. W riters such as H'f and Petrov, Joseph Brodsky, and Aleksandr Galich, said Shafarevich, were creating calumnious images of Russians in a form of hidden psychological warfare. W orst of all, disgusted with the incessant stream of official Soviet propaganda, young Russians were so pleased by the émigrés’ anti-Stalinism that they accepted unquestioningly the émigrés’ chief, albeit hidden message — mockery of Russia and Russian history. Shafarevich then went on to attack Sinyavsky's Strolls With Pushkin (Progulki s Pushkinym), which he presented as a Russian equivalent of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. Both books, in Shafarevich's view, were filthy, giggling insults levelled at entire civilizations. Shafarefich went on to condemn anti-Semitism, but the tone of his text grew increasingly strident and alarming as he expounded his arguments. He concluded by stating that he could not die peacefully without disclosing this "suppressed truth.” A t a lecture delivered on January 9, 1990, in the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in W ashington, D.C., Andrei Sinyavsky responded bitterly. Behind the figure of Shafarevich, Sinyavsky argued, loomed the prestige of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. According to Sinyavsky, Solzhenitsyn had evolved considerably since em igrating — in a negative direction. Sinyavsky expressed dismay that "liberals” in Moscow were attem pting to conduct a dialogue with Shafarevich, who was "playing with matches in an airplane hangar filled with explosive fum es.” Sinyavsky went on to describe conversations he had held with people hostile to Jews while serving his sentence in a forced-labor camp. If necessary, they were prepared to destroy the Jews as though they were "rats.” Thus, the mutual accusations of Shafarevich and Sinyavsky had reached such a feverish pitch that any "dialogue” was out of the question. But the Shafarevich-Sinyavsky clash pales before some of the vituperative anti-Jewish publications in the émigré press, a fact which should not be surprising, since greater freedom of speech by its very definition means that this freedom can be misused. Russkii klich (The
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Russian Battle Cry), run by Nikolai Tetênov in New York State, was devoted to promoting hostility to Jews by republishing the Russian editions of such foreign works as Mein Kampf, speeches of Hitler and Goebbels, The Protocols o f Zion, Henry Ford's The International Jew, etc. Tetënov's 1984 announcement of titles included some 90 items. Tetênov also founded what he called a sam izdat journal entitled Russkoe samosoznanie (Russian Consciousness) in which, to give but one example, he republished a 1921 article calling for the annihilation of the Jews. For the emigrant, national origins determ ine identity to a considerable extent. People hear a foreign accent and ask: "W here are you from ?” When that question is asked of a Soviet em igrant in America, Europe, and even Israel the answer is usually "Russian.” But Jews whose native language is Russian and who have been brought up on the classical works of Russian literature experience an on-going identity crisis: there are always some fellow countrymen who are ready, even eager, to deny them membership in the national community. But Russian Jews know little about Jewish culture, and may not even be interested in learning more. I recall a conversation I had in 1980 with Aleksandr Donat, Director of Holocaust Library Publishers in New York City, for whom I was translating a collection of horrifying Holocaust tales from areas of the Soviet Union occupied by Nazi Germany during W orld W ar II. I pointed out the considerable extent to which Russia's Jews had been assimilated into Russian culture, and Donat agreed. "But their children will be Jews,” he claimed. Third W avers responded to their identity crisis by assim ilating more rapidly into foreign cultures than had previous emigrants, but as can be seen from the opening quotations in this section, there are many other Russian Jews who consider themselves Russians and tenaciously cling to that language and culture. As the reader will recall, the definition of "Russian” in this book is linguistic, not ethnic. Thus, even though there are many ethnic Russians and Russian Jews who would dispute this approach, in this book, Russian Jews are Russians. After all is said and done, anti-Semitism in Russia was and is a grass-roots movement. On the other hand, a majority of Jews married to non-Jews also testifies to quite a different aspect of the relationship: hundreds of years of living together have created love as well as resentment. The cultural scene reflects this situation. In 1990 members of the literary group A pril heard themselves challenged as falsely claiming to be Russian writers and were called upon to leave for Israel. Familiar as such attitudes may have been, nevertheless they came as a shock. These were people who lived for and in Russian
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literature, and if they were not Russian writers, then Mandel'shtam and Pasternak, too, were just "Jews writing in Russian.” I recall talking to a young woman in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, in the early 1990s. She was half-Korean and half-Tadjik, and was no more accepted as an Uzbek in Uzbekistan than she would have been as a Korean in Korea. She was raising a child alone in the very difficult conditions of the post-Soviet world, and was anxious about her own future and that of her child. Although this slender young m other had no Russian blood and had never even visited Russia, she had attended only Russian schools and spoke only Russian as her native language. She, too, is Russian by the standards of this book, and if she ever begins writing verse or prose, she will be an appropriate topic for that unknown researcher in the future who will w rite the history of Russian writers abroad in the post-Soviet period.
Background I'm ... not a Jew, after a ll you know I'm a Buddhist Aleksandr Ginger The Jewish exodus which commenced in the early 1970s does not testify to an unflagging historical desire of the Jews to leave Russia. Under the Tsars, Jewish intellectuals knew quite well the nature of exile and were eager to finally find a home by assimilating into Russian society. Thus, their hopes were for reform rather than revolution. As discussed earlier, massive emigration began in the 1880s, reaching a crescendo on the eve of World W ar I. When the war drew to a close, however, the prominent role played by Jews in the young Soviet state led to a rebirth of Jewish hope for a life in Russia. W hen W orld W ar II broke out, the memory of the purges was suppressed by Russian Jews who looked upon the Soviet state as virtually their sole defender against Nazism (people generally accepted Soviet propaganda belittling the role of the Western allies). And Stalin did, after all, energetically support the establishment of the state of Israel. But the "anti-cosm opolite” campaign, the "doctors’ plot,” and the rupture of diplom atic relations between Tel Aviv and Moscow in 1952 represented for many Russian Jews such a major breaking point that the post-W orld W ar II generation grew up associating Soviet rule with anti-Sem itism . And there were many for whom this association simply m eant Russia. It was this despair that recharged the movement for em igration, even though only a minority of Russian Jews were dedicated Zionists.
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Early in December 1951 the Israeli governm ent informed the Soviet M inistry of Foreign Affairs that Israel's cardinal aim was "the return of Jews to their historic homeland,” and on March 3, 1953, fearing that Stalin was preparing a new bloodbath, an alarmed U.S. House of Representatives urged the Soviet governm ent to perm it the Jews simply to leave. But Stalin died two days later (and only six weeks after the "discovery" of the "doctors’ plot”) w ithout having implemented his plans for the Jews, whatever they may have been. At that point Soviet foreign policy did an about-face, and by July the Soviet Union and Israel resumed diplom atic relations, initiating a tiny flow of emigration to Israel. Just two years later, in 1955, the Israeli Prime Minister, Moshe Sharett, advised Ben-Gurion that the tim e was ripe to press the issue, but 1956 was the year that Soviet tanks crushed the first stirrings of Hungarian independence, and in October of that year the Soviets halted emigration, although in 1957 persons born on Polish territory were perm itted to relocate to Poland. During the period 1954-64, only a modest number of Jews were perm itted to emigrate. Essentially, Khrushchêv equivocated on the question of Jewish emigration, denying that Soviet Jews had any interest in leaving, but in 1957 he did tell Eleanor Roosevelt during her visit to the U.S.S.R. that all Jews who wanted to em igrate would "eventually” receive permission. By the late 1950s the international Jewish community had begun to put pressure on the Soviet government, and the Israeli radio station Kol Zion Lagola increased broadcasts in Russian to the U.S.S.R. to a daily basis. B'nai B'rith was comparing the Soviet treatm ent of the Jews to that of the Nazis, and U.S. congressman Alvin M. Bentley claimed that Soviet Jews were being "liquidated.” When pressed by Israeli journalists in Vienna in 1960, Khrushchêv, however, claimed that more Jews wished to return to Russia than emigrate. On April 5 -6 ,1 9 6 4 ,5 0 0 representatives of 24 Jewish organizations met in W ashington D.C., to discuss strategy for forcing the Soviet Union to allow Jewish emigration. Six months later, on October 14, 1964, Khrushchêv was abruptly removed from all positions, and the new Soviet leadership proved eager to calm international tensions and was now far more willing to perm it emigration than Khrushchêv had been. In December 1966 Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin told an American journalist he could see no barriers to a certain amount of emigration, and the number of departures actually increased, stim ulated in part by a surge of Jewish pride after the Israeli victory in the six-day war of July 1967. The 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia also served to encourage emigration as more and more intellectuals began to lose hope that the political "thaw” would continue and that crude political propaganda would be moderated.
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Now thoughts of exodus won out over hopes of reform. Even as the Soviet authorities resolved to adopt a less restrictive emigration policy for Soviet Jews, however, they also decided to pursue a more repressive policy toward dissidents. Zionists in Russia were aware of the tradeoff and stressed that they were more interested in departure than in reform, thus creating resentment in dissident circles. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was experiencing difficulty controlling the international communist movement with its powerful Jewish constituency. In 1966 a number of national communist parties — including the American Communist Party — protested the Soviet refusal to perm it Jewish emigration, and the following year one million signatures were gathered urging the Soviet Union to reverse its position. Finally, in the fall of 1969, the Israeli government launched a widely publicized campaign calling for the free emigration of Jews to Israel, and the number of requests for exit visas quadrupled. By 1970, more than 30,000 Soviet Jews had received affidavits inviting them to Israel, but only a tiny fraction of those were actually permitted to em igrate. That same year a small group of Jews attempted, unsuccessfully, to hijack a plane in Leningrad. In 1971, 24 men and women, including the w riter Èfraim Sevela, occupied the offices of the Suprem e Soviet to protest the plight of the so-called refuseniks, and by early spring the Soviet authorities decided to perm it large-scale em igration, but introduced an education exit tax to discourage em igration. In what may well have been a quid pro quo, the United States denied the Institute for the Study of the U.S.S.R. in Munich further American funding in 1972, forcing it to close, together with its 80,000-volum e library (no German support was ever provided), and the NTS radio station was shut down by W est German authorities. Evidently appeased by these gestures, the Soviets permitted Jewish em igration rates to escalate in 1972. Some of those departing were gentiles whom the Soviet authorities had encouraged to apply for exit visas as Jews. The chief legal vehicle for Soviet Jews wishing to enter the United States was the award of political refugee status, granted to them in October 1972. In 1974 the U.S. Congress approved the Jackson-Vanik amendment, making Soviet receipt of "most-favored nation” trade status dependent on Jewish emigration. Synagogues everywhere put up signs reading "Free Soviet Jewry.” There were ethical problem s with the legislation, since freedom of movement did not apply to other ethnic groups in the Soviet Union, with the exception of the Germans and the Armenians. When questioned as to how a group could expect support for freedom of emigration from other groups which were being denied that same right, one Chicago rabbi responded that such objections amounted to "absurd universalism.”
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And despite its rhetoric to the contrary, the U.S. governm ent would have actually been horrified at totally open borders in a number o f countries. China alone could have let tens of millions of real political refugees go, and even little Cuba caused enormous problems for the United States with its Mariel boatlift. But the Soviets dug in their heels, and emigration to Israel dropped to the 7,000-8,000 range. Nevertheless, the U.S. State Department wanted to play down the issue for fear that Moscow would retaliate by inciting racial discontent among American blacks. Alarmed by the state of American-Soviet relations, U.S. President Gerald Ford refused in 1975 to receive Solzhenitsyn in the W hite House. In September 1976, 44 Russian Jews wearing the yellow Star of David marched through downtown Moscow to the offices of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, demanding the right to emigrate. Soviet authorities gave in and in 1979 emigration to Israel increased sharply, but then declined again after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Americans boycotted the Moscow Olympic games and refused to perm it the export of technological equipm ent (particularly oil-drilling equipment), and Andropov, who had succeeded Brezhnev, resolved to punish the United States by radically restricting Jewish emigration. If the 1970s were a period of relatively free emigration, the early 1980s represented a U.S.-Soviet standoff: Ronald Reagan christened the Soviet Union the "Evil Empire” and insisted on the Strategic Defense Initiative. During the early 1980s only a handful of Soviet Jews were permitted to depart. When Andropov died in 1984, he was replaced by Chernenko, who continued the Soviet hard line, if only through inertia. By 1985 the confrontation had acquired a special intensity. That year the Soviet magazine Novoe vremya (New Times) accused the émigré Vladim ir Bukovsky, the CIA, and Rabbi Meier Kahane of having murdered the American television journalist, Jessica Savich, for participating in the PBS film The Russians Are Here. The magazine also accused Israel of murdering émigrés from the U.S.S.R. who wished to return home. As late as fall of that year the poet, novelist, and soon-to-be émigré David Shraer-Petrov received a summons from the Moscow prosecutor's office and went underground in such anxiety that he suffered a heart attack. But 1985 was also the year that Chernenko died and Gorbachêv took over the helm of state with his subsequent policies of glasnost' and perestroika. That same year he and Reagan held their first summit, in Malta, and international tensions abruptly relaxed. On January 1, 1987, a new law was adopted, form ally establishing the legal grounds on which a Soviet citizen might em igrate or be refused that right. Under normal circumstances an invitation from
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abroad (yyzov) was to be judged sufficient. Gorbachëv's new doctrine of perestroika led many in the W est and the Soviet Union to hope for an even broader relaxation of emigration restrictions, and in late March 1987 Morris Abram, Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and Edgar Bronfman, Chairman of the W orld Jewish Congress, travelled to Moscow to lobby for "reunification of fam ilies.” The Soviets were accommodating, albeit not immediately, and U.S. President George Bush not only approved suspension of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, but even issued a billion-dollar credit for the purchase of wheat. But the situation was fraught with paradox. The same governm ent that had stirred up hatred against the Jews could not, at the same time, bear to part with them. Equally ironic was the large number of Jews in a governm ent which was bent on preventing Jewish em igration. As late as 1976, 294,744 Jews were members of the Com m unist Party — 13.7 percent of the entire declared Jewish population (and, of course, a considerably larger percentage of the adult Jewish population) at the time. In point of fact, however, Jews obviously represented a much larger contingent in Party ranks. If in 1959 1.1 percent of the Soviet population was supposedly Jewish, the figures decreased to 0.9 percent in 1970, 0.7 percent in 1979, and 0.5 percent in 1989. By itself, emigration was not nearly a large enough factor to account for this loss of half the population of Soviet Jewry over this 20-year period. Clearly, many Soviet Jews were declaring that they belonged to other nationalities; moreover, the practice of concealing one's Jewish identity obviously did not begin only in 1959. Members of the Communist Party obviously were especially highly m otivated to conceal their background in the clim ate of the time. One of the chief causes given by Jewish émigrés for leaving was their concern that their children would not have sufficient educational opportunities in the Soviet Union. This may well have been true; however, four tim es as many Jews had completed a post secondary education than the population as a whole. The official though covert response was the introduction of a numerus clausus by university admissions committees. If Jews comprised 2.6 percent of the student population in 1967-68, by 1976-77 the figure had fallen to 1.4 percent. Even at that, however, this ratio was still double what one would expect solely on the basis of the number of Jews among the total population. Jews were also fearful of discrimination on the job market, even though they enjoyed relatively high professional status. One governm ent lecturer claimed that 30 percent of all professionals were Jews, as were more than 50 percent of members of the Moscow and Leningrad chapters of the W riters’ Union. How much truth was actually
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contained in such claims is impossible to judge, but any pro-Russian affirm ative action program would have radically undermined the professional situation of the country's Jews. O f course, it was more than simply being Jewish that m otivated people to emigrate. People wanted greater freedom and higher incomes. And they wanted to be reunited with their fam ilies — grounds that conceivably would have been equally im portant to ethnic Russians — but Russians abroad were neither sufficiently influential nor sufficiently active in helping their relatives and countrymen.
Self-Image They don’t leave Russia, for it’s im possible to g e t aw ay from her. They flee the state whose enormous carcass covers the sky; they flee from pow er which recognizes nothing as sacred; they flee from apartm ent managers, district committees, regional committees, and radio broadcasts, from informers, from queues and forced-labor camps, from sham eless lies and cold cruelty, from inhuman crudeness and trium phant surliness — they flee to save their m ortal bodies and im m ortal souls from the m onster; they flee, cursing and sobbing. A. Nezhny, journalist The Third Wave went through a legal procedure of form ally applying for permission to emigrate, and even though departure was incomparably easier for them than it had been for earlier groups, people were traumatized by the intentional arbitrariness and uncertainties of a process that followed hard on the heels of a life experience that so em bittered people as to drive them to abandon their homes, their friends and families, their possessions and pensions. This harassment affected anyone who wished to emigrate, not ju st the Jews. The history of Ivan Kopysov, a journalist whose letters to Solzhenitsyn had been intercepted by the KGB in 1968, illustrates the situation. In 1972 Kopysov had been dismissed from his job and arrested. The authorities confiscated a novel and some essays he had written, his home was repeatedly searched, and he eventually moved to a different city. Once more his mail was intercepted, and he was placed under close surveillance by the KGB, his co-workers, and neighbors. In 1973 he was fired a second time. In 1974 he was fired from a third job in a third city. When he then obtained a tem porary position on the staff of Literaturnaya gazeta (Literary Gazette), he was
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again detained and interrogated during a trip to the Urals. In the offices of a local newspaper his nose was broken by a form er colleague who had been coached by the KGB, and the windows in his apartment were broken in the middle of the night. When Kopysov went to the Suprem e Soviet to complain, he was placed in a mental institution, where the psychiatrists did not bother to conceal the fact that they were acting under direct instructions from the KGB. Declared mentally ill, he was not perm itted to work even as a night watchman. In 1978 Kopysov wrote an open letter to the Supreme Soviet, demanding he either be allowed to emigrate or jailed: I harbor no illusions that justice w ill triumph. In our conditions only vengeance can ensue, ju s t as the regime which you control has done aw ay with m illions o f people. I w ill not be surprised even by the death penalty, no m atter how monstrous that m ight appear. A nd I will not petition for mercy, for I prefer death to miserable half-life in this terrible socialism o f the kingdom o f the dead, where people are no longer shot, but neither are they perm itted to live, so that they slowly choke to death. If even the m ost ephemeral grounds are lacking for a trial, I ask that I be perm itted to emigrate. I am willing to go to any country in which neither socialism nor communism is being built.... I flee from captivity, from the vicious prison guards who have made fear and violence the banner o f their red ideology. I never considered m yself a citizen o f this tem porary occupational regime, which is foundering in the blood o f m illions o f innocent persons. I was its prisoner and I never swore allegiance to it, so that I now consider m yself free from a ll its shackles and artificialities. The composition of such a letter required not only considerable courage, but a state of total despair in its writer. At the same tim e it was a request — for permission to emigrate. The resulting self-im age the émigrés took with them was a contradictory one: were they engaging in craven flight or were they boldly defying the authorities? The w riter Zinovy Zinik described emigration as "personal revolution” and "a massive attem pt at non-acceptance of the regime”— a view which was even more vehem ently expounded by Aleksandr Zinov’ev, who in an open letter to the émigré community wrote of the "noble cause” of rebellion. The Zinik/Zinov'ev view stood in crass opposition to that of another émigré, Yury Miloslavsky, then residing in Israel, who described the exiles as wretched, vain creatures: A nd that's the m ildest thing that could be said o f us, unless we m ention the inevitable kicks in the ass — usually delivered with weary scorn: "G et out o f here" o r (sometimes
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with the vexed nervousness o f a man trying to rid him self o f a hated wife who doesn't want him to go to a bachelor's party): "Fuck off, you goddam ned bitch!" Less frequent is the resounding, well-aim ed kick: "G et lost, you scum, o r you'll g e t what's com ing to you...." Having flitted o ff to a respectable distance, we snap back: "Just wait, you'll wish you hadn't been so short-sighted, but b y then it'll be too late; I'll be back — in spirit, if no t in the flesh." It's clear, however, that no one w ill regret your loss, nor will there be anything, o r anybody, to come back to, fo r the gap le ft by your departure soon begins to be filled with healing balm from within. To blame the cruelty o f the adm inistration o r threaten to reveal the whole truth and thereby show up the state in its true colors is ridiculous. Even if anyone other than the narrator (him self a great champion o f truth) shows interest in the exile's pitifu l inside information, his intrinsic untrustwor thiness and refusal to acknowledge defeat (and exile is ju s t that — defeat, not victory!) w ill soon alienate even the sym pathetic listener— assuming, naturally, that polling exiles is not p a rt o f his job. In their heart of hearts most Third-W ave émigrés probably agreed with Miloslavsky, for they could not help suffering from a group inferiority complex. Unlike the First Wave, these were people who had been born in governm ent hospitals, parented by governm ent employees, fed government-supplied food, educated in governm ent schools, healed by governm ent doctors, and entertained by governm ent media. And when they became adults, they them selves were employed by that same governm ent and expected to be buried in governm ent cemeteries. Even the angriest dissidents were convinced of their helplessness in the face of the leviathan state. When in the 1970s and early 1980s I pointed out that no empire lasted forever, my émigré friends were astonished at my "naïveté.” The Soviet state, they all assured me, was an indestructible behemoth. Proceeding from such a mindset, Russian authors often projected an image of themselves reminiscent of Dostoevsky's underground man. In the Soviet Union, Bulat Okudzhava proclaimed him self to be a "Moscow ant.” Cast out of his father's home (a phrase used in a song by Aleksandr Galich), the exile found him self dismissed as an "otrezannyi lom ot',” that is, a fragm ent cut off from the whole to which it belongs. Andrei Sinyavsky adopted the intentionally anti-heroic petty-thief alter-ego of Abram Terts, Vladim ir Voinovich became fam ous for his Schweik-like Chonkin, "Èdichka” Limonov crawled through the debris of New York, engaging in degrading sexual acts, Boris Khazanov and Sergei Dovlatov struck the pose of the perceptive
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fly on the wall, and Viktor Nekrasov — the very image of a Russian officer — seemed lost in the helpless poverty of émigré life. The Zinik/Zinov'ev view of literature as rebellion was simply wrong; it was, as Yury Miloslavsky put it, a rout — sheer and simple. And all exile studies are, in a way, exercises in victimology. The identity crisis of people who were only partially Jewish was particularly cruel. As one Soviet émigré whose mother was Russian but father Jewish put it, "W hat do you do when all the anti-Semites regard you as a Jew, but for the Jewish community you're Russian?” Thus, it was not surprising that in a 1989 longitudinal study, of the estimated one-half of urban Jews who were married to non-Jews, only five percent wanted their children to claim Jewish nationality in their passports.
The Soviet Position on Emigration Then w ilt thou not be loath to leave this paradise ... John Milton So effectively had the borders of the U.S.S.R. been sealed that only a few Soviet citizens on official business in the W est managed to leave Russia behind by defecting. One exception was the artist and poet Oleg Sokhanevich, who, together with a friend, leapt from a passenger ship travelling along the Soviet coast of the Black Sea in 1967, inflated a rubber life raft in the water, and then rowed to Turkey. The incredibly dangerous undertaking succeeded a week later when the two men, weak and exhausted, reached the Turkish coast, having been forced to drink sea water along the way. The poet and singer Aleksei Khvostenko later composed a song which in a sem i-ironic key captured the heroism of the feat. Pressured by the West, Soviet authorities were forced to work out an official position on emigration. One 1985 publication denied that there was any reason for people to want to emigrate. Supposedly, Soviet society lacked any social basis for emigration, intergroup hostility was a thing of the past, unemployment was nonexistent, and religious freedoms were guaranteed. Thus, the only conceivable reason people m ight want to leave was to unite their families. This last caveat was actually a concession relative to earlier Soviet positions. At the sam e time, the fam ily-reunification logic, which was recognized by Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin as early as 1966, contained the core of an earlier, om inous doctrine. On August 19, 1938, the Soviet governm ent had introduced a statute on citizenship decreeing that Soviet citizenship could be lost only as the result of an act of state, and not by an individual's decision, that the children of Soviet citizens
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were also considered to be Soviet citizens, and that any disloyalty by such persons abroad would be regarded as treason to the Soviet state. The 1985 legislation seemed to hark back to the 1938 law, and evidently indicated a compromise between hardliners and reform ers within the Soviet government. The new statute read: O ur specialists on problem s o f em igration are not ye t unanimous even with regard to the term which is m ost precise and universal with regard to such a person — an "em igrant, " a "person with origins in tsarist Russia o r the U.S.S.R.,” o r a "com patriot abroad." We can only note here that, according to established practice in the developm ent o f cultural relations with these m illions o f people residing in foreign lands, the term "com patriot abroad" encompasses both their children and grandchildren ... The grounds for perm itting or denying an individual the right to em igrate were established by law on January 1,1987. Previously, the governm ent's basic tactic for discouraging emigration had amounted to erecting arbitrary barriers after receipt of an exit visa application. Many would-be emigrants lost their jobs and gave up their apartments, but even then had no way of knowing when they would be perm itted to leave or even if they would ever get permission. The new legislation listed causes entitling a Soviet citizen to visit a foreign country: aside from reunification of families, Soviet citizens could apply to go abroad to meet close relatives, to get married, to see seriously ill relatives, to visit fam ily graves of near relatives, or to receive an inheritance. Other, unspecified "serious reasons” supposedly could also be taken into account. As earlier, permission to emigrate could be denied to people who had enjoyed access to classified governmental inform ation (and the definition of classified information was interpreted in the broadest fashion), and to anyone who had a legal obligation to another individual or state institution, had been accused of a crime, or had previously been involved in currency speculation. Lastly, there was a particularly vague form ulation to the effect than an exit visa could be denied on the grounds that emigration was injurious to national interests. Nevertheless, though even these criteria could be grossly violated, the publication of any justified cause at all was a landm ark within the Soviet context. When the U.S.S.R. finally began to perm it emigration, a form al justification had to be provided for granting permission only to Jews, Germans, and Armenians, while denying that privilege to the many other ethnic groups that made up the Soviet empire. The solution was a bald-faced proclamation that only those ethnic groups could em igrate who possessed an independent state entity in the capitalist world.
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Deprivation of Citizenship For if it be but h a lf denied, 1 is ha lf as good as justified. Samuel Butler (1612-1680) Given the anxiety caused by emigration and the uncertain financial and cultural surroundings in which the émigrés found themselves, many of them did not wish to reject totally the possibility of a reconciliation with the Soviet government. Such feelings were naturally strongest just after a person emigrated — precisely the time when he or she was of greatest interest to the Western press. Joseph Brodsky, for example, was very circumspect in his comments to the press when he first left the Soviet Union, claiming that he did not wish to "sm ear the gates of his homeland with tar,” and even the fearless Solzhenitsyn at first maintained he was above politics. Eventually, however, even the more tim id émigrés realized that such reticence would not bring them permission to later visit the U.S.S.R., and they all ended up vehem ently denouncing their form er rulers. Thus, Soviet intransigence left the authorities with very few means of influencing the ém igrés’ conduct. The form er citizens could be verbally attacked in the Soviet press (an approach which was not only ineffective but even counterproductive) or physically assaulted — as in the 1978 arson in the offices of Novoe russkoe slovo, or the bombing of the Munich offices of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in 1981. The critic Arkady Belinkov maintained that the KGB had actually attempted to kill him in a purported autom obile accident, and there were rumors that that organization had been involved in the deaths of Andrei Am al'rik and Aleksandr Galich. When it became evident, however, that even the suspicion of such tactics served only to compromise the reputation of the U.S.S.R. abroad, a new tactic was applied — Soviet émigrés were stripped of citizenship. It was a repeat of a measure previously applied in 1932 to 37 troublesom e émigrés, one of whom was Lev Trotsky. The first victim of this revived tactic was the writer Valery Tarsis, who was deported and stripped of Soviet citizenship in 1966; others soon followed: 1969: Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Allilueva; 1972: physicist and dissident Valery Chalidze; 1973: biologist and social commentator Zhores Medvedev; 1974: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; 1975: novelist Vladim ir Maksimov; 1976: Solzhenitsyn's wife, Natal'ya, and dissident Viktor Sokolov; 1977: poet Tomas Venclova;
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1978:
novelist Aleksandr Zinov'ev; chess champion Viktor Korchnoi; General Pêtr Grigorenko; musician and orchestra director Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, the singer Galina Vishnevskaya; artist Oskar Rabin; 1979: w riter and dissident Èduard Kuznetsov (who attem pted to hijack a Soviet plane to get out of the U.S.S.R. in 1970); novelist Viktor Nekrasov; the dissidents Aleksandr Ginzburg Valentin Moroz, Mark Dymshits, and the Baptist church leader Georgy Vins (all five had been sim ultaneously exchanged to the W est for two imprisoned Soviets); 1980: novelist Vasily Aksênov; dissident and plane hijacker Vasily Sosnovsky; form er Latvian political prisoner Gunars Rode; dissidents Yury Yarym-Agaev, Tat'yana Goricheva, Natal'ya Malakhovskaya, Ada Plyushch, Evgeniya Lebedeva, and Tat'yana Manova; 1981 : literary scholar Lev Kopelev and his wife, critic, memoirist, and translator Raisa Orlova; dissidents Viktor Kovalenko and Serafim a Strubbe; 1983: critic Mikhail Geller; novelist Georgy Vladimov; and 1984: theater director Yury Lyubimov. Some of the émigrés, including Vasily Aksênov, Lev Kopelev, and Raisa Orlova, had been specifically promised that they would not be stripped of Soviet citizenship, and all three attem pted to restrain their comments upon arrival; nevertheless, Soviet officials lost no tim e in declaring that these "renegades” were no longer members of the Soviet family. After Brezhnev's death, this policy was pursued som ewhat less rigorously. In 1983, just before actually losing citizenship, the novelist Georgy Vladim ov commented that, had he received his exit visa under Brezhnev, he would have been 100-percent certain that in the next two or three months he would be stripped of Soviet citizenship. Now, however, he was only 80-percent sure. It was not only people who were already living abroad who were denied citizenship. Soviet citizens applying to em igrate to Israel were required to renounce Soviet citizenship. In the 1970s a fee of 500 rubles was established for this procedure, plus 300 rubles for a passport to travel to a capitalist country. At the time, this was roughly the equivalent of five months’ salary.
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Émigré Politics Malaise Exile ... a narcissistic wound. William H. Qass After W orld W ar II had ended and it became apparent that the rich cultural environm ent of the First Wave would not be repeated by the Second Wave, many (the literary historian, Gleb Struve, for example) felt that Russian literature in exile had come to an end. By the late 1960s the number of subscribers to Novoe russkoe slovo, the ém igré com m unity's chief newspaper, had fallen drastically. But the malaise among the émigrés was more than matched by that being experienced by Soviet writers. Any hopes for reform were extinguished during the Brezhnev era, when the Soviet government entered what later came to be referred to as a period of economic and cultural "stagnation.” By that time, many Soviet writers had come to the conclusion that the sole function of the Soviet W riters' Union was the suppression of literature. One group of émigré writers even christened it "The Soviet Reptiles’ Union.” Literature in Russia was pronounced dead by many thinking persons who believed that only those who had not been compromised by collaboration with the Soviet regime offered hope for the future. Not all those who wished to em igrate were successful; an undetermined number of others applied for permission, but were turned down (Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, for example, in 1972), and still others at least seriously considered that option. W riters were prominent among the émigrés of the Brezhnev years. According to one study, prose writers and poets emigrated at about twice the rate of performing and graphic artists, forcing the Soviet authorities to adopt an especially hard-line stance in dealing with them . The average forced-labor camp sentence meted out to poets, for example, was estimated at 160 percent that for stage perform ers. When the Third W ave began to arrive in the West, its predom inant mood was one of considerable optimism. An impressive number of writers had already enjoyed prominence in the U.S.S.R. w hile others were trying their hand at writing for the first tim e. Both groups felt that whole new worlds of artistic opportunity were opening up to them. Like the "younger” generation of the First Wave, writers who had "found them selves” only after leaving Russia identified them selves specifically as émigré writers, thus setting themselves apart from those whom the First Wave would have referred to as the "older" generation. The prose writer Zinovy Zinik, for example, declared
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him self to be a w riter of the "third Russian revolution. Before revolution-emigration I was nobody.” As was true of earlier groups, Third-W ave émigré authors were part of a much larger stream, including ballet dancers, composers, and musicians, not to mention very ordinary people who were just trying to get on with their lives. Established émigré publications were revitalized by an upsurge in the number of subscribers, and new newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses sprang up. Nevertheless, Russian literature in exile continued to be poor in readers. A book with a print run of 500 or 1,000 copies hardly covered expenses, and certainly could not provide the author with an income. But t