The Revolution found Stravinsky in Clarens, Switzerland, where he had been stranded behind German lines since the outbreak of war in 1914. 'All my thoughts are with you in these unforgettable days of happiness', he wrote to his mother in Petrograd on hearing of the downfall of the monarchy in 1917.143 Stravinsky had high hopes of the Revolution. In 1914 he had told the French writer Romain Rolland that he was 'counting on a revolution after the war to bring down the dynasty and establish a Slavic United States'. He claimed for Russia, as Rolland put it, 'the role of a splendid and healthy barbarism, pregnant with the seeds of new ideas that will change the thinking of the West'.144 But Stravinsky's disillusionment was swift and emphatic. In the autumn of 1917 his beloved estate at Ustilug was ransacked and destroyed by the peasantry. For years he did not know its fate - though there were signs that it had been destroyed. Rummaging through a bookstall in Moscow in the 1950s, the conductor Gennady Rozh-destvensky found the title page of Debussy's Preludes (Book Two) inscribed by the composer 'To entertain my friend Igor Stravinsky': it had come from Ustilug.145 Not knowing what had happened to the place for all these years could only have intensified Stravinsky's sense of loss. Ustilug was where Stravinsky had spent the happy summers of his childhood years - it was the patch of Russia which he felt to be his own - and his profound loathing of the Soviet regime was intimately linked to the anger which he felt at being robbed of his own past. (Nabokov's politics were similarly defined by his 'lost childhood' at the family estate of Vyra, a vanished world he retrieved through Speak, Memory.)
19. Stravinsky transcribes a folk song sung by a peasant gusli player on the
porch of the Stravinsky house at Ustilug, 1909. Stravinsky's mother, Anna,
holds Theodore, his son
Stravinsky did the same through his music. Cut off from Russia, he felt an intense longing for his native land. His notebooks from the war years are filled with notations of Russian peasant songs which reappeared in Four Russian Songs (1918-19). The final song in this quartet was taken from an Old Believer story about a sinful man who cannot find a path back towards God. Its words read like a lament of the exile's tortured soul: 'Snowstorms and blizzards close all the roads to Thy Kingdom.' Stravinsky seldom talked about this brief and haunting song. Yet his notebooks show that he laboured over it, and that he made frequent changes to the score. The song's five pages are the product of no fewer than thirty-two pages of musical sketching. It suggests how much he struggled to find the right musical expression for these words.146
Stravinsky laboured even longer on The Peasant Wedding (Svad-ebka), a work begun before the First World War and first performed in Paris (as Let Noces) nine years later, in 1923. He worked on it
