Natasha's Dance полностью

The effect of the arrival of such emigres was to accentuate two related facets of Russia's cultural image in the West. The first of these was a renewed appreciation of the European character of Russian culture as manifested in the so-called 'neoclassical' style of Stravinsky, Prokofiev and the Ballets Russes. Stravinsky himself disliked the term, claiming that it meant 'absolutely nothing' and that music, by its very nature, could not express anything at all.⁷⁸ But his neoclassicism was itself a statement of artistic principles. It was a conscious rejection of the Russian peasant music of his early neo-nationalist phase, of the violent Scythian rhythms in The Rite of Spring which had erupted in the Revolution of 1917. Forced into exile, Stravinsky now clung nostalgically to the ideal of beauty embodied in the classical inheritance of his native Petersburg. He borrowed from Bach and Pergolesi and, above all, from the Italo-Slavs (Berezovsky, Glinka and Tchaikovsky) who had shaped a particular strand of the Russian musical style in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

An important aspect of this renewed engagement with the Imperial past was Diaghilev's promotion of Tchaikovsky's ballets in Paris. Before 1917 Tchaikovsky had been regarded in the West as the least interesting of the Russian composers. His music, in the words of the French critic Alfred Bruneau in 1903, was 'devoid of the Russian character that pleases and attracts us in the music of the New Slavic school'.⁷⁹ Seen as a pale imitation of Beethoven and Brahms, it lacked the exotic Russian character which the West expected from the Ballets Russes; Tchai-kovksy's ballets did not feature in the saisons russes. But after 1917 a nostalgia for the old Imperial St Petersburg and its classical traditions, which Tchaikovsky's music epitomized, led to a conscious effort by the Paris emigres to redefine themselves by this identity. Diaghilev revived The Sleeping Beauty (1890) for the Paris season of 1921. Stravinsky, who re-orchestrated parts of the score, wrote an open letter to the London Times in which he saluted the ballet as 'the most authentic expression of the epoch in our Russian life that we call the "Petersburg period"'. This tradition, Stravinsky now maintained, was just as

Russian as the folk-based culture which before 1914 the Ballets Russes had pedalled to the West in the form of works like his own Firebird:

The music of Tchaikovsky, which does not seem obviously Russian to everyone, is often more profoundly Russian than that which long ago received the superficial label of Muscovite picturesqueness. This music is every bit as Russian as Pushkin's verse or Glinka's songs. Without specifically cultivating 'the Russian peasant soul' in his art, Tchaikovsky imbibed unconsciously the true national sources of our race.⁸⁰

The second cultural feature of the emigres in Paris was their reassertion of the aristocratic values that lay at the heart of the Petrine Imperial legacy. Beneath the surface gloss of its Slav exotica, this aristocratism constituted the essential spirit of the World of Art. This, too, was rooted in the music of Tchaikovsky, which had first brought together the three co-founders of the World of Art, Benois, Filosofov and Diaghilev, in the early 1890s. What they loved about the ballets of Tchaikovsky, as Benois was to put it in his Reminiscences in 1939, was their 'aristocratic spirit' which remained 'untouched by any democratic deviations' such as were to be found in utilitarian forms of art.⁸¹ These were precisely the 'Art for Art's sake' values which the emigres in Paris came to prize above all. They made a cult of the Alexandrine age with its high French Empire style and raffine artistic aristocracy exemplified by Pushkin. Harking back to these old certainties was a natural response by the emigres. The Revolution had destroyed the aristocratic civilization from which most of them had come, forcing them to find a second home in Europe. To some degree, despite Nabokov's claims to the contrary, they were shaken, too, by the loss of status they had enjoyed as members of their country's propertied elite. With their Nansen (League of Nations) passports* and their Alien

* The Russian passports of the emigres were no longer valid after the formation of the Soviet Union: Russia as a country had ceased to exist. In place of their old papers the emigres and other stateless persons were issued with temporary 'Nansen' passports (named after the polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen, the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). The carriers of these flimsy passports suffered long delays and hostile questioning by functionaries throughout the West whenever they travelled or registered for work.

Registration Cards, landowners' sons like Stravinsky and Nabokov resented being treated by the Western states as 'second-class citizens'.⁸²