revealing incident. Shortly after his arrival in America, Stravinsky became worried by the possibility of revolution there. He asked an acquaintance whether this was likely and, when he was told that it was possible, he asked in 'an appalled and indignant tone': 'But where will I go?'85 Having lived through the Russian Revolution, Stravinsky's deepest political instinct was a fear of disorder.
After teaching for a year at Harvard University, he found his refuge in Los Angeles, where he purchased his first house, a small suburban villa in West Hollywood which would remain his home for the next thirty years. Los Angeles had attracted many artists from Europe, largely on account of its film industry; the German writer Thomas Mann described wartime Hollywood as a 'more intellectually stimulating and cosmopolitan city than Paris or Munich had ever been'.86 Among the Stravinskys' friends were Bertolt Brecht and Charlie Chaplin, Rene Clair and Greta Garbo, Max Reinhardt and Alma Mahler (married to Franz Werfel), Lion Feuchtwanger and Erich Maria Remarque. Such cosmopolitanism made the United States a natural home for many of the Russian emigres. Its 'melting pot' of nations, in New York and Los Angeles especially, was reminiscent of the cultural milieu in which they had lived in Petersburg. America enabled them to develop as international artists not troubled, as they had been in Europe, by irksome questions of national identity.
This sense of wanting to be rid of Russia - of wanting to break free to a new identity - was expressed by Nabokov in his poem 'To Russia' (1939), written just before his own departure from Paris for the USA.
Will you leave me alone? I implore you! Dusk is ghastly. Life's noises subside. I am helpless. And I am dying Of the blind touch of your whelming tide.
He who freely abandons his country on the heights to bewail it is free. But now I am down in the valley and now do not come close to me.
I'm prepared to lie hidden forever and to live without a name. I'm prepared, lest we only in dreams come together, all conceivable dreams to forswear;
to be drained of my blood, to be crippled, to have done with the books I most love, for the first available idiom to exchange all I have: my own tongue.
But for that, through the tears, oh, Russia, through the grass of two far-parted tombs, through the birch tree's tremulous macules, through all that sustained me since youth,
with your blind eyes, your dear eyes, cease looking
at me, oh, pity my soul,
do not rummage around in the coalpit,
do not grope for my life in this hole
because years have gone by and centuries, and for sufferings, sorrow, and shame, too late - there is no one to pardon and no one to carry the blame.87
Stravinsky's exodus to America followed a similar emotional path. He wanted to forget about the past and move on. His childhood was a painful memory. He had lost his father, two brothers and a daughter before he 'lost' Russia in 1917. He needed to put Russia behind him. But it would not let him be. As an emigre in France, Stravinsky tried to deny his own Russianness. He adopted a sort of European cosmopolitanism which at times became synonymous, as it had once been in St Petersburg itself, with an aristocratic hauteur and contempt for what was thought of as 'Russia' in the West (that is, the version of peasant culture which he had imitated in
Stravinsky mixed in the fashionable circles of Cocteau and Proust, Poulenc and Ravel, Picasso and Coco Chanel. Chanel became his lover and transformed him from the rather unattractive and self-effacing man who had arrived in Paris in 1920 into the
