Natasha's Dance (87 page)

    of her father’s Moscow house at Three Ponds Lane. The house was stripped apart for firewood in the cold winter of 1918. But after nearly twenty years of exile, when she returned to it in 1939, she found her favourite rowanberry growing as before. The tree was all that remained of her ‘Russia’, and she begged Akhmatova not to tell a soul of its existence, unless ‘they find out and cut it down’.
³

    Of the many factors that lay behind Tsvetaeva’s return to Stalin’s Russia, the most important was her desire to feel the Russian soil beneath her feet. She needed to be near that rowanberry tree. Her return was the outcome of a long and painful struggle within herself. Like most emigres, she was torn between two different notions of her native land. The first was the Russia that ‘remains inside yourself: the written language, the literature, the cultural tradition of which all Russian poets felt themselves a part.
⁴
This interior Russia was a country that was not confined to any territory. ‘One can live outside of Russia and have it in one’s heart,’ Tsvetaeva explained to the writer Roman Gul. It was a country that one could ‘live in anywhere’.
⁵
As Khodasev-ich put it when he left for Berlin in 1922, this was a ‘Russia’ that could be encapsulated in the works of Pushkin and ‘packed up in a bag’.

    All I possess are eight slim volumes, And they contain my native land.
⁶

    The other Russia was the land itself - the place that still contained memories of home. For all her declarations of indifference, Tsvetaeva could not resist its pull. Like an absent lover, she ached for its physical presence. She missed the open landscape, the sound of Russian speech, and this visceral web of associations was the inspiration of her creativity.

    Three million Russians fled their native land between 1917 and 1929. They made up a shadow nation stretching from Manchuria to California, with major centres of Russian cultural life in Berlin, Paris and New York. Here were the remnants of a vanished world: former advisers to the Tsar and government officials lived from the sale of their last jewels; ex-landowners worked as waiters; ruined businessmen as factory hands; officers of the defeated White armies worked by night as taxi drivers and by day composed their memoirs about the

    mistakes of the White Army leader, General Denikin. Large families, like the Sheremetevs, were fragmented as their members fled in all directions. The main branch of the Sheremetevs left in 1918 with Count Sergei, travelling to Paris and then to New York. But others fled to South America, Belgium, Greece and Morocco.

    Berlin was the first major centre of the emigration. It was a natural crossroads between Russia and Europe. The post-First World War economic crisis and the collapse of the mark made the city relatively inexpensive for those Russians who arrived with jewels or Western currency, and in the suburbs of the ruined middle classes a large but cheap apartment could be easily obtained. In 1921 the Soviet government lifted its controls on exit visas as part of its New Economic Policy. At that time Germany was the only major European country to have diplomatic and commercial relations with Soviet Russia. Still paying for the war through reparations and trade embargoes imposed by the victorious Western governments, it looked to Soviet Russia as a trading partner and a diplomatic friend. Half a million Russians crowded into Charlottenburg and the other south-western suburbs of the German capital in the early 1920s. Berliners dubbed the city’s major shopping street, the Kurfurstendamm, the ‘Nepskii Prospekt’. Berlin had its own Russian cafes, its own Russian theatres and bookshops, its own Russian cabaret. In the suburbs there were Russian everythings: Russian hairdressers, Russian grocers, Russian pawn shops and Russian antique stores. There was even a Russian orchestra. And a Russian football team (with a young Vladimir Nabokov playing in goal).
⁷

    Berlin was the undisputed cultural capital of the Russian emigre community. Its musical talent was extraordinary: Stravinsky, Rach-maninov, Heifetz, Horowitz and Nathan Milstein could have shared the stage in any concert there. By the time Tsvetaeva arrived, in 1922, Berlin had become the adopted home of some of the most brilliant literary talents of the Russian avant-garde (Khodasevich, Nabokov, Berberova, Remizov). The city had an astounding eighty-six Russian-language publishers - comfortably outnumbering the German ones -while its Russian newspapers were sold throughout the world.
⁸

    Berlin was also a halfway house between Soviet Russia and the West for writers such as Gorky, Bely, Pasternak, Aleksei Tolstoy and Ilya

    Ehrenburg, who were yet to make up their minds where they wanted to be based. It became a meeting place for writers from the Soviet Union, their literary confreres from the West, and the already-established Russian emigre community. Publishing costs in Berlin were extremely low - so low that several Soviet publishers and periodicals set up offices in the German capital. In the Russian Berlin of the early 1920s there was still no clear divide between Soviet and emigre culture. The city was the centre of the left-wing avant-garde, among whom the idea of a common Russian culture uniting Soviet Russia with the emigration remained strongest after 1917. Such ideas were generally rejected in the other major centres of the emigration. But Berlin was different - and for a brief period it was possible for writers to move freely between Moscow and Berlin. The climate changed in the middle of the decade when a group of emigres known as
Smena vekh
(Change of Landmarks) began to campaign for a permanent return to the Soviet Union and established their own journal
Nakanune (On the Eve)
with Soviet backing. The turning point came in 1923, when the historical novelist Aleksei Tolstoy defected back to Moscow. In the ensuing scandal the Berlin emigre community became sharply polarized between left and right - between those who wanted to build bridges to the Soviet homeland and those who wanted to burn them.

    During the middle of the 1920s the German mark was stabilized, the economy began to recover, and Berlin suddenly became expensive for the Russian emigres. Its Russian population halved as the emigres dispersed across the continent. Tsvetaeva and her husband, Sergei Efron, left for Prague so that he could study at the Charles University. Prague was a centre of Russian scholarship. Tomas Masaryk, the first President of Czechoslovakia, was a distinguished Russian scholar. The Czechs welcomed the ‘White Russians’ as their fellow Slavs and allies in the Russian civil war. In 1918 a legion of Czech nationalists had fought alongside the anti-Bolsheviks in the hope of getting Russia to rejoin the war against the Central Powers.* After the establishment of

    * As nationalists fighting for independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the 35,000 soldiers of the Czech Legion wanted to return to the battlefields in France to continue their own struggle against Austria. Rather than run the risk of crossing enemy lines, they resolved to travel eastwards, right around the world, reaching Europe via Vladivostok and the USA. But as they moved east along the Trans-Siberian Railway (continued)

    an independent Czechoslovakia that year, the government in Prague gave grants to Russian students like Efron.

    In 1925, Tsvetaeva and Efron moved on to Paris. If Berlin was the cultural centre of Russia Abroad, Paris was its political capital. The post-war Versailles Conference had attracted delegates from all the major parties and would-be governments of Russia-in-exile. By the middle of the 1920s Paris was a hotbed of political intrigue, with Russian factions and movements of all types vying for attention from the Western governments and for the support of the wealthy Russian emigres who tended to live there. Tsvetaeva and Efron stayed with their two young children in the cramped apartment of Olga Chernov, former wife of Viktor Chernov, the veteran Socialist Revolutionary leader who had been chairman of the short-lived Constituent Assembly which had been closed down by the Bolsheviks in January 1918. In the ‘Little Russia’ that formed around the Rue Daru, the Efrons regularly came across the other fallen heroes of the Revolution: Prince Lvov, Prime Minister of the first Provisional Government; Pavel Miliukov, its Foreign Minister; and the dashing young Alexander Kerensky, another former Prime Minister whom Tsvetaeva had compared to her idol Bonaparte in that fateful summer of 1917.

    And someone, falling on the map, Does not sleep in his dreams. There came a Bonaparte In my country.
⁹

    By the end of the 1920s Paris had become the undisputed centre of the Russian emigration in Europe. Its status was confirmed in the years

    (continued) they soon became bogged down in petty fighting with the local Soviets, who tried to seize their arms. The Czechs ended up joining forces with the Socialist Revolutionaries, who had fled from Moscow and St Petersburg to the Volga provinces to rally the support of the peasantry against the Bolshevik regime and the ending of the war following the closure of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918. On 8 June the Czech Legion captured the Volga city of Samara, where a government composed of former members of the Constituent Assembly was in tenuous control until its defeat by the Red Army the following October, when the Czech Legion broke up and lost the will to fight, following the declaration of Czech independence on 28 October 1918.

    of the depression, as Russians fled to the French capital from Hitler’s Germany. The literary and artistic life of Russian Paris flourished in the cafes of the sixteenth
arrondissement,
where artists such as Goncharova and her husband Mikhail Larionov, Benois, Bakst and Alexandra Exter mixed with Stravinsky and Prokofiev and writers like Bunin and Merezhkovsky, or Nina Berberova and her husband Khodasevich, who had moved there from Berlin in 1925.

    As most of the exiles saw it, Russia had ceased to exist in October 1917.
‘Sovdepia’,
as they contemptuously referred to Soviet Russia (from the acronym for Soviet department), was in their view an impostor unworthy of the name. Stravinsky always said that when he went into exile he did not so much leave as ‘lose’ Russia for good.
¹⁰
In her ‘Poems to a Son’, written in the early 1930s, Tsvetaeva concluded that there was no Russia to which she could return:

    With a lantern search through The whole world under the moon. That country exists not On the map, nor yet in space.

    Drunk up as though from the Saucer: the bottom of it shines! Can one return to a House which has been razed?
¹¹

    The idea of Russia as an optical illusion, as something that had vanished like a childhood memory, was a central theme of Russian verse abroad. As Georgy Ivanov put it:

    Russia is happiness, Russia is all light.

    Or perhaps Russia disappeared into the night.

    And on the Neva the sun does not go down, And Pushkin never died in our European town,

    And there is no Petersburg, no Kremlin in Moscow -Only fields and fields, snow and yet more snow.’
²

    For Tsvetaeva the mirage of Russia was the fading memory of her dismantled house at Three Ponds Lane. For Nabokov, in his poem ‘The Cyclist’ (1922), it was the dream of a bike ride to Vyra, his family’s country house, which always promised to appear round the next bend - yet never did.
¹³
This nostalgic longing for an irretrievable patch of one’s own childhood is beautifully evoked by Nabokov in
Speak, Memory
(1951). To be cut off from the place of one’s childhood is to watch one’s own past vanish into myth.

    Tsvetaeva was the daughter of Ivan Tsvetaev, Professor of Art History at Moscow University and founding director of Moscow’s Museum of Fine Arts (today known as the Pushkin Gallery). Like Tatiana in Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin,
the young poet lived in a world of books. ‘I am all manuscript,’ Tsvetaeva once said.
¹⁴
Pushkin and Napoleon were her first romantic attachments and many of the real people (both men and women) with whom she fell in love were probably no more than projections of her literary ideals. She called these affairs
‘amities litteraires’
- and the objects of her affections included the poets Blok and Bely, Pasternak and Mandelstam. It was never clear to what degree the passion was in her own mind. Efron was the exception - the single lasting human contact in her tragic life and the one person she could not live without. So desperate was her longing to be needed that for him she was prepared to ruin her own life. They met in 1911 when he was still at school, and she barely out of it, on a summer holiday in the Crimea. Efron was a beautiful young man -slender-faced with enormous eyes - and she cast him as her ‘Bonaparte’. The two shared a romantic attachment to the idea of the Revolution (Efron’s father had been a terrorist in the revolutionary underground). But when the Revolution finally arrived they both sided with the Whites. Tsvetaeva was repulsed by the crowd mentality, which seemed to her to trample individuals underfoot. When Efron left Moscow to join Denikin’s army in south Russia, she portrayed him as her hero in
The Camp of Swans
(1917-21).

    White guards: Gordian knot

    Of Russian valour.

    White Guards: white mushrooms

    Ot the Russian folksong.