Natasha's Dance полностью

in France he became attracted intellectually to the Catholic tradition, which he celebrated in his Symphony of Psalms (1930). In the mid-1920s, after nearly thirty years of non-observance, Stravinsky resumed an active life in the Orthodox community, in part under the influence of his wife Katya, who became increasingly devout during the long illness from which she eventually died in 1939. As an artist and as an emigre, Stravinsky found solace in the discipline and order of the Russian Church. 'The more you cut yourself off from the canons of the Christian Church,' he told an interviewer while at work on the Symphony of Psalms, 'the more you cut yourself off from the truth.'

These canons are as true for the composition of an orchestra as they are for the life of an individual. They are the only place where order is practised to the full: not a speculative, artificial order, but the divine order which is given to us and which must reveal itself as much in the inner life as in its exteriorization in painting, music, etc. It's the struggle against anarchy, not so much disorder as the absence of order. I'm an advocate of architecture in art, since architecture is the embodiment of order; creative work is a protest against anarchy and nonexistence.⁹⁷

Stravinsky became a regular attender at services in the Russian church in the Rue Daru. He surrounded himself with the paraphernalia of Orthodox worship - his homes in Nice and Paris were filled with icons and crosses. He dated his musical sketches by the Orthodox calendar. He corresponded with Russian priests in all the major centres of the emigration, and the Russian priest in Nice became 'practically a member' of his household there.⁹⁸ Stravinsky claimed that the strongest pull of the Russian Church was 'linguistic': he liked the sound of the Slavonic liturgy." It comes across in his Slavonic chants for the Russian church.*

This desire to return to the religion of his birth was connected to a profound love of Russia, too. Throughout his life Stravinsky adhered to the Russian customs of his childhood in pre-revolutionary Petersburg. Even in Los Angeles, his home remained an outpost of the old Russia.

* Before switching to Latin he had intended to set the Symphony of Psalms in Slavonic,

too.

The living room was filled with Russian books and ornaments, pictures and icons. The Stravinskys mixed with Russian friends. They employed Russian servants. They spoke Russian in their home. Stravinsky spoke in English or in French only if he had to, and then in a thick accent. He drank tea in the Russian way - in a glass with jam. He ate his soup from the same spoon with which as a child he had been fed by his babushka.¹⁰⁰

Chagall was another Artist of the World who concealed a Russian heart. Like Stravinsky, he invented his own image as a cosmopolitan. He liked to claim that the questions of identity which critics always asked ('Are you a Jewish artist? A Russian? Or a French?') did not actually bother him. 'You talk, I will work,' he used to say.¹⁰¹ But such statements cannot be taken at face value. Chagall made up his own biography - and he frequently changed it. The major decisions of his life were taken, he claimed, on the basis of his own convenience as a practising artist. In 1912 he emigrated from Soviet Russia because conditions there made it hard for him to work. In western Europe, by contrast, he was already famous and he knew that he could become rich. There is no evidence to suggest that he was affected by the Bolshevik destruction of the synagogues and a good deal of the Jewish quarter in his home town of Vitebsk.¹⁰² In 1941, when Chagall fled Paris for America, the danger from the Nazis was real enough - though here again he justified the move in terms of personal convenience. Throughout his life Chagall remained a wanderer, never settling down in any land, or calling it his own. Like the subjects of his paintings, he lived with his feet off the ground.

None the less, the unanswered question of his nationality was central to the painter's life and art. Of the diverse elements that were fused together in his personality (Jewish, Russian, French, American and international), it was the Russian that meant the most to him. 'The title "A Russian Painter"', Chagall once remarked, 'means more to me than any international fame. In my pictures there is not one centimetre free from nostalgia for my native land.'¹⁰³ Chagall's homesickness was focused on Vitebsk, the half-Jewish half-Russian town on the border between Russia and Belarus, where he had grown up, the son of a petty trader, in the 1890s. In 1941 it was overrun by the Nazis and all its Jewish inhabitants were killed. Three years later Chagall

wrote a moving lamentation 'To My Native Town, Vitebsk' that was published as a letter in The New York Times.