Natasha's Dance полностью

The chateau-like house, Le Pavilion, protected from the street by a solid wrought fence, lent itself well to this Russian life on a large scale… The wide steps of the open veranda led into the park. The view was lovely: an unpretentious green in front of the house, a tennis court tucked away among shrubs, sandy avenues flanked with tall, old trees, leading into the depths of the park, where there was a large pond. The whole arrangement was very much like that of an old Russian estate… A small gate opened into the vast hunting grounds: pine woods with innumerable rabbits. Rachmaninov loved to sit under the pine trees and watch the pranks of the rabbits. In the morning the big table in the dining room was set for breakfast. As in the country in Russia, tea was served and with it cream, ham, cheese, hard-boiled eggs. Everybody strolled in leisurely. There were no rigid rules or schedules to disturb the morning sleep.⁴³

Gradually, as the old routines of Ivanovka were resumed, Rachmaninov returned to composing music once again - full-blown nostalgic works like the Third Symphony (1936). Western critics were surprised by the conservatism of the symphony's harmonic language, comparing it to the romanticism of a bygone age. But this was to miss its Russianness. The Third Symphony was a retrospective work - a farewell to the Russian tradition - and its whole purpose was to dwell on the spirit of the past. At a rehearsal of the Three Russian Songs (1926) in the USA in the 1930s Rachmaninov implored the chorus to slow down. 'I beg you,' he told the singers, 'do not spoil it for a devout Russian Orthodox churchman. Please, sing more slowly.'⁴⁴

'Our tragedy', wrote Nina Berberova of the younger exiled writers in the 1920s, was 'our inability to evolve in terms of style.'⁴⁵ The renewal of style entailed a fundamental problem for the emigres. If their purpose as Russian artists was to preserve their national culture, how could they evolve Stylistically without adapting to their new environment and

hence, in some ways, abandoning Russia? The problem mainly affected the younger generation - writers like Nabokov who had 'emerged naked from the Revolution'.⁴⁶ Older writers like Bunin brought with them to the West an established readership and written style from which they could not break. There was too much pressure on them to continue in the comforting traditions of the past - to churn out plays and stories about nests of Russian gentlefolk - and those who tried to break away were little prized or understood. Tsvetaeva's tragedy - to lose the readership that had sustained her as the rising star of the pre-revolutionary avant-garde - was yet another variant of this experience.

Scattered in bookshops, greyed by dust and time, Unseen, unsought, unopened, and unsold, My poems will be savoured as are rarest wines -When they are old.⁴⁷

Even Miliukov, former statesman, historian and editor of the Parisian journal Poslednie novosti, said, 'I don't understand Tsvetaeva.'⁴⁸ But for writers like Nabokov who had yet to find their feet there was little point or prospect in returning to the past. The old generation was dying out and the new becoming less Russian by the day as it assimilated into the mainstream of European culture. To create a new readership such writers had to break out of the mould.

Nabokov was the first major writer to complete this literary metamorphosis. According to Berberova, he was the only Russian-language writer of her generation with the genius to create not just a new style of writing but a new reader, too. 'Through him we learned to identify not with his fictional heroes' - as the nineteenth-century writers expected of their readers - 'but with the author, with Nabokov, and his existential themes became our theme as well.'⁴⁹ Nabokov always claimed that his writings were not about Russia or the emigres. But exile was their central theme. And even if he saw that as a universal theme, a metaphor of the human condition, the appearance of Nabokov's writings in the Berlin of the 1920s was received by the Russian emigres as an affirmation of their own national identity. Nabokov's writings were proof that 'Russia' (as embodied in its culture) was still with them in the West. As Berberova put it, with the

publication of his first great novel, The Luzhin Defence, in 1930, 'a great Russian writer had been born, like a phoenix from the ashes of the Revolution and exile. Our existence acquired a new meaning. All my generation were justified. We were saved.'⁵⁰