Natasha's Dance (36 page)

    satire of the old-world gentry and the cult of rural Russia which grew up around it. What are we to think of Pishchik, for example, the landowner who sings the praises of the ‘gentry on the land’ and yet at the first opportunity sells his land to some English businessmen who want it for its special clay (no doubt to be used for the manufacturing of lavatories in Stoke-on-Trent)? What are we to make of the Ranev-skys who set such store by the old paternal ways? Their ancient butler Feers looks back nostalgically to the days of serfdom (‘when the peasants belonged to the gentry and the gentry belonged to the peasants’). But he is left behind on the estate when its owners all pack up and go away. Chekhov himself felt nothing but contempt for such hypocrisy. He wrote
The Cherry Orchard
while staying on the estate of Maria Yakunchikova near Moscow. ‘A more disgracefully idle, absurd and tasteless life would be hard to find’, he wrote. ‘These people live exclusively for pleasure.’
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The merchant Lopakhin, on the other hand, was intended by Chekhov as the hero of the play. He is portrayed as an honest businessman, industrious and modest, kind and generous, with a real nobility of spirit underneath his peasant-like exterior. Although he stands to gain from buying the estate (where his father was a serf), Lopakhin does everything he can to persuade the Ranevskys to develop it themselves, offering to lend them money to help them (and no doubt giving money to them all the time). Here was the first merchant hero to be represented on the Russian stage. From the start Chekhov had the part in mind for Stanislavsky himself, who was of course the son of a merchant family from peasant stock. But mindful of this parallel, Stanislavsky took the role of the feckless noble Gaev, leaving Lopakhin to be played by Leonidov as the usual merchant stereotype - fat and badly dressed (in checkered trousers), speaking boorishly in a loud voice and ‘flailing with his arms’.
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As Meyerhold concluded, the effect was to deprive Chekhov’s play of its hero: ‘when the curtain falls one senses no such presence and one retains only an impression of “types”’.
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    The Moscow Arts’ production of
The Cherry Orchard,
which became the standard view, has taken us away from the real conception of the play - and from the real Chekhov, too. For everything suggests that, by temperament and background, he identified himself with the outsider crashing through the barriers of society. Like Lopakhin,

    Chekhov’s father was a merchant who had risen from the enserfed peasantry. He taught himself to play the violin, sang in the church choir, and became the choir master in the Taganrog cathedral in 1864. Chekhov shared his father’s industry. He understood that common people could be artists, too. Far from lamenting the old gentry world, his last play embraces the cultural forces that emerged in Moscow on the eve of the twentieth century.

    On a trip to the city in the 1900s Diaghilev remarked that in the visual arts Moscow produced everything worth looking at. Moscow was the centre of the avant-garde; Petersburg was ‘a city of artistic gossiping, academic professors and Friday watercolour classes’.
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Coming as it did from an arch-patriot of Petrine culture, this was a remarkable acknowledgement. But Moscow really was the place to be in 1900, when the Russian avant-garde first burst on to the scene. Along with Paris, Berlin and Milan, it became a major centre in the world of art, and its extraordinary collection of avant-garde artists were as much influenced by trends in Europe as they were by Moscow’s heritage. Its progressive politics, its relaxed atmosphere, its noisy modern ways and new technologies - there was so much in Moscow’s cultural milieu to inspire artists in experimental forms. The poet Mikhail Kuzmin, another patriot of Petersburg, noted on a trip to Moscow at this time:

    … the loud Moscow accent, the peculiar words, the way they clicked their heels as they walked along, the Tatar cheekbones and eyes, the moustaches twirled upwards, the shocking neckties, brightly coloured waistcoats and jackets, the sheer bravado and implacability of their ideas and judgements -all this made me think: new people have come forward.
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    Moscow’s younger generation of merchant patrons embraced and collected modern art. They saw it as an ally of their own campaign to transform the old Russia along modern lines. As young playboys and decadents, these rich merchants’ sons moved in the same bohemian circles, the cafes, clubs and parties, as the young artists of the Moscow

    avant-garde. The poet Andrei Bely recalled sardonically that the Society of Free Aesthetics, the most fashionable of the artists’ clubs in Moscow, had been forced to close in 1917 because of an ‘excess of lady millionaires’. The merchant couples were everywhere, Bely noted.

    The husbands would give subsidies to societies that tried to obtain something from us with the persistence of goats. The wives were languorous and, like Venuses, they would appear from a beautiful gossamer of muslin and diamond constellations.
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    The most colourful of these younger merchant patrons was Nikolai Riabushinsky, who was famous for his decadent lifestyle - ‘I love beauty and I love a lot of women’ - and for his outrageous parties at his Moscow mansion, the Black Swan. Riabushinsky promoted avant-garde artists in the journal
Golden Fleece
and its exhibitions between 1908 and 1910. From his patronage stemmed the Blue Rose group of Moscow Symbolist painters who, together with their literary confreres and composers like Alexander Scriabin, sought a synthesis of art with poetry, music, religion and philosophy. Riabushinky also funded the famous ‘Jack of Diamonds’ exhibitions (1910-14), at which more than forty of the city’s youngest and most brilliant artists (Kandinsky, Malevich, Goncharova, Larionov, Lentulov, Rodchenko and Tatlin) declared war on the realist tradition and shocked the public with their art. Exhibits were assembled from a broken table leg, a sheet of iron and bits of a glass jug. Painters decorated their own naked bodies and walked as works of art through Moscow’s streets.

    The critics fumed with rage. Sergei Yablonovsky said that none of it was art - whereupon Lentulov squeezed out some ochre paint on to a piece of cardboard and hung it in the exhibition he had criticized, with the caption ‘Sergei Yablonovsky’s Brain’.
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In other art forms, too, Moscow led the way in experimentation. Meyerhold branched out from the naturalism of the Moscow Arts to experiment with Symbolist drama, establishing his Theatre Studio, with its highly stylized acting, in 1905. Scriabin was the first Russian composer to experiment with what was later known as ‘serial music’ (Schoenberg, Berg and Webern were doing the same thing). Scriabin was an inspiration to the avant-garde. The young Stravinsky was greatly influenced by Scria-

    bin (and mortified to learn that Scriabin did not know his music when he went to visit him in 1913).
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In 1962, when Stravinsky revisited Russia for the first time after the 1917 Revolution, he made a pilgrimage to the Scriabin Museum in Moscow and learned that it had become a sort of underground meeting place for avant-garde electronic composers. The writer Boris Pasternak, a Scriabin devotee,* blazed the Futurist trail in poetry along with Vladimir Mayakovsky, his close friend and (from 1906) a fellow Muscovite. They were searching for a new poetic language and they heard it in the discord of the Moscow streets:

    A juggler

    pulls rails

    from the mouth of a tram,

    hidden by clock-faces of a tower.

    We are conquered!

    Bathtubs.

    Showers.

    An elevator.

    The bodice of a soul is unfastened.

    Hands burn the body.

    Scream, or don’t scream:

    ’I didn’t mean…’ -

    torments

    burn

    sharp.

    The prickly wind

    tears out

    a shred of smoky wool

    * The poet’s father, Leonid Pasternak, was a fashionable painter in Moscow and his

    mother, Rozalia Kaufman, a well-known pianist. Scriabin was a close friend of the

    family. Under his impact the teenage Boris studied music composition for six years. ‘I loved music more than anything else, and I loved Scriabin more than anyone else in the world of music. Scriabin was my god and idol’ (F. Bowers,
Scriabin,
2 vols. (London,

    1969), vol. 1, p. 321).

    from a chimney.

    A bald-head streetlamp

    seductively

    peels off

    a black stocking

    from the street.
¹²⁷

    Malevich called Maytovsky’s ‘From Street into Street’ (1913) the finest illustration of ‘versified Cubism’.
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    Marina Tsvetaeva was equally a poet of Moscow. Her father was Ivan Tsvetaev, sometime professor of Art History at Moscow University and the founding director of the Pushkin Gallery, so, like Pasternak, she grew up in the middle of the Moscow intelligentsia. The spirit of the city breathed in every line of her poetry. She herself once wrote that her early verse was meant to ‘elevate the name of Moscow to the level of the name of Akhmatova… I wanted to present in myself Moscow… not with the goal of conquering Petersburg but of giving Moscow to Petersburg’:

    Cupolas blaze in my singing city,

    And a wandering blind man praises the Holy Saviour,

    And I present to you my city of church bells

    - Akhmatova! - and also my heart.
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    Through their friendship in these years, Tsvetaeva gave Moscow to fellow poet Mandelstam as well. ‘It was a magic gift’, wrote the poet’s wife Nadezhda, ‘because with only Petersburg, without Moscow, it would have been impossible to breathe freely, to acquire the true feeling for Russia.’
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    After 1917 Moscow superseded Petersburg. It became the Soviet capital, the cultural centre of the state, a city of modernity and a model of the new industrial society the Bolsheviks wanted to build. Moscow was the workshop of the avant-garde, the left-wing artists of the Proletkult (Proletarian Culture) and Constructivists like Malevich and Tatlin, Rodchenko and Stepanova, who sought to construct the new Soviet man and society through art. It was a city of unprecedented freedom and experimentation in life as in art, and the avant-garde

    believed, if only for a few years in the 1920s, that they saw their ideal city taking shape in it. Tatlin’s ‘tower’ - his unrealized design for a monument to the Third International on Red Square - expressed these revolutionary hopes. A giant striding figure to be made out of steel and iron girders, tiered and rounded like the churches of medieval Muscovy, his would-be creation symbolized the city’s messianic role, in the words of the refrain of the Internationale, to ‘make the world anew’. From the old idea of Moscow as the Third Rome to the Soviet one of it as leader of the Third International, it was but a short step in the city’s mission to save humanity.

    Soviet Moscow was supremely confident, its confidence reflected in the huge building projects of the 1930s, the mass manufacture of motor cars, the first metros, and the forward-upward images of Socialist Realist ‘art’. Moscow’s old wooden houses were bulldozed. Churches were destroyed. A vast new parade route was constructed through the centre of the city: the old Tver Boulevard was broadened out (and renamed Gorky Street), a Revolution Square was laid out on the site of the old market, and Red Square was cleared of its market stalls. In this way the Lenin Mausoleum, the sacred altar of the Revolution, became the destination of the mass parades on May Day and Revolution Day. With their armed march past the Kremlin, the citadel of Holy Russia, these parades were imitations of the old religious processions they had replaced. There were even plans to blow up St Basil’s cathedral so that the marchers could file past the Revolution’s leaders, standing in salute on the Mausoleum’s roof, and march off in one unbroken line.

    Stalin’s Moscow was thus recast as an imperial city - a Soviet Petersburg - and, like that unreal city, it became a subject of apocalyp-tic myths. In Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel
The Master and Margarita
(1940), the Devil visits Moscow and brings its cultural temples crashing down; Satan descends on the city in the person of a magician called Woland, with a band of sorcerers and a supernatural cat called Behemoth. They cause havoc in the capital, exposing it as morally corrupt, before flying off from the Sparrow Hills, where Napoleon (that other devil) had first set his sights on the city. Flying off with them was a young Moscow girl called Margarita, who had sacrificed herself to Woland so as to redeem her beloved Master, the author of

    a suppressed manuscript about Pontius Pilate and the trial of Christ. As their horses leaped into the air and galloped upwards to the sky, Margarita ‘turned round in flight and saw that not only the many-coloured towers but the whole city had long vanished from sight, swallowed by the earth, leaving only mist and smoke where it had been’.
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    And yet throughout the twentieth century Moscow was still ‘home’. It was still the mother city it had always been, and, when Hitler attacked it in the autumn of 1941, its people fought to defend it. There was no question of abandoning the city, as Kutuzov had abandoned it to Napoleon in 1812. A quarter of a million Muscovites dug last-ditch defences, carted food to the soldiers at the front and cared for the injured in their homes. With one last desperate effort the Germans were pushed back from the city’s gates - a spot still marked today by a giant iron cross on the road from Moscow to the Sheremetevo airport. It was not the Soviet capital but Mother Moscow which was saved. In the words of Pasternak:

    A haze of legend will be cast Over all, like scroll and spiral Bedecking gilded boyar chambers And the Cathedral of St Basil.