Natasha's Dance полностью

The Russia Bunin re-creates in his stories is a dreamland. In 'The Mowers' (1923) and 'Unhurried Spring' (1924) he conjures up a vision of the old rural Russia that had never been - a sunny happy land of virgin forests and boundless steppes where the peasants were hardworking and happy in their work, in harmony with nature and their fellow farmers - the nobility. There could not have been a starker contrast with Bunin's dark portrayal of provincial rot in The Village, the novel that had first brought him to fame in 1910, nor a more ironic one. For Bunin was now escaping to precisely the sort of rural fantasy which he himself had done so much to puncture in his earlier work. In exile, his literary mission was to contrast the idyll he imagined in the Russian countryside with the evil of the cities where Bolshevism had corrupted the good old Russian ways. But the land he portrayed was, in his own admission, 'an Elysium of the Past', a shift 'into a kind of dream',³⁶ and not an actual place to which the exiles could return. Retreating into a legendary past is perhaps a natural response of the artist who is dislocated from his native land. Nabokov even took artistic

inspiration from the experience of exile. But for Bunin it must have been particularly difficult to write when he was cut off from his own country. How could a realist write about a Russia that no longer was?

Emigration tends to breed conservatives in art. Retrospection and nostalgia are its moods. Even Stravinsky found himself moving away from the ultra-modernism of The Rite of Spring, the last major work of his 'Russian period', to the neoclassicism of the Bach-like works of his Parisian exile. Others became stuck in the style they had developed in their native land - unable to move on in the new world. This was true of Rachmaninov. Like Bunin's writing, his music remained trapped in the late Romantic mode of the nineteenth century.

Sergei Rachmaninov had learned composition at the Moscow Conservatory at a time when Tchaikovsky was its musical hero, and it was Tchaikovsky who had made the deepest impact on his life and art. In exile in New York after 1917, Rachmaninov remained untouched by the avant-garde - the last of the Romantics in the modern age. In a revealing interview in 1939, which the composer forbade to be published in his own lifetime, he explained to Leonard Liebling of The Musical Courier his feelings of estrangement from the world of modernism. His musical philosophy was rooted in the Russian spiritual tradition, where the role of the artist was to create beauty and to speak the truth from the depths of his heart.

I felt like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien. I cannot cast out the old way of writing, and I cannot acquire the new. I have made intense efforts to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me… I always feel that my own music and my reactions to all music remain spiritually the same, unendingly obedient in trying to create beauty… The new kind of music seems to come not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt - they mediate, protest, analyse, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt.'⁷

In his last major interview, in 1941, Rachmaninov revealed the spiritual connection between this outpouring of emotion and his Russianness.

I am a Russian composer, and the land of my birth has influenced my temperament and outlook. My music is a product of the temperament, and so it is

Russian music. I never consciously attempt to write Russian music, or any other kind of music. What I try to do when writing down my music is to say simply and directly what is in my heart.³⁸

The 'Russianness' of Rachmaninov's music, a kind of lyrical nostalgia, became the emotional source of his musical conservatism in exile.