Natasha's Dance полностью

There was much of Russia in Stravinsky's heart. It was made up of more than the icons in his house, the books he read, or the favourite childhood spoon from which he ate. He retained a physical sensation and memory of the land, Russian habits and customs, Russian ways of speech and social interaction, and all these feelings came flooding back to him from the moment he set foot on his native soil. A culture is more than a tradition. It cannot be contained in a library, let alone the 'eight slim volumes' which the exiles packed up in their bags. It is something visceral, emotional, instinctive, a sensibility that shapes the personality and binds that person to a people and a place. The Western public saw Stravinsky as an exile visiting the country of his birth. The Russians recognized him as a Russian coming home.

Stravinsky barely knew Moscow. He had only been there once on a short day trip sixty years or so before.¹⁵² His return to Petersburg, the city of his birth, was even more emotional. At the airport the Stravinskys were welcomed by an elderly gentleman who began to weep. Craft recalls the encounter:

It is Vladimir Rimsky-Korsakov [the son of the composer], and I.S. has failed to recognize him, for the given reason that he has a moustache instead of, as when last seen (1910), a beard; but the real reason, I.S. tells me later, is that 'He said "Igor Fedorovich" instead of "Gima". He always called us, me and my brother, "Gury and Gima".'¹⁵³

In the few days since arriving in Russia Stravinsky had stepped back some fifty years. His face rippled with pleasure on recognizing the Marinsky Theatre (at that time renamed the Kirov) where, as a boy, he had sat in his father's box and watched the ballet. He remembered the winged cupids in the box, the ornate blue and gold decoration of the auditorium, the glittering chandeliers, the richly perfumed audience, and on one occasion, in 1892, as he had stepped out of the box into the foyer at a gala performance of Glinka's Ruslan and Liudmila (in which his father had sung the role of Farlaf), catching sight of Tchaikovsky, all white-haired at the age of fifty-two.¹⁵⁴ Stravinsky had practically grown up in the Marinsky Theatre. It was only a few yards from his family's apartment on the Kryukov Canal. When they went to see the house where he had lived for the first twenty-four years of

his life, Stravinsky displayed no emotion. But, as he explained to Craft, it was only because 'I could not let myself'.¹⁵⁵ Every building was 'chudno' (magical) or 'krasivo' (beautiful). The queue for the concert in Stravinsky's honour at the Great Hall of the Philharmonia was a living monument to the role of art in Russia and his own place in that sacred tradition: the queue had begun a year before and had developed as a complex social system, with people taking turns to stand in the line for a large block of seats. An 84-year-old cousin of Stravinsky was forced to watch the concert on the television because her number in the queue was 5001.¹⁵⁶

'Where is Shostakovich?' Stravinsky kept asking from the moment he arrived. While Stravinsky was in Moscow, Shostakovich was in Leningrad; and just as Stravinsky went to Leningrad, Shostakovich returned to Moscow. 'What is the matter with this Shostakovich?' Stravinsky asked Khachaturian. 'Why does he keep running away from me?'¹⁵⁷ As an artist Shostakovich worshipped Stravinsky. He was his secret muse. Underneath the glass of his working desk Shostakovich kept two photographs: one of himself with the Beethoven Quartet; the other, a large portrait of Stravinsky.¹⁵⁸ Although he never expressed any public sympathy for Stravinsky's music, its influence is clear on many of his works (such as the Petrushka motif in the Tenth Symphony, or the adagio of the Seventh Symphony, which is clearly reminiscent of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms).

The Khrushchev thaw was a huge release for Shostakovich. It enabled him to re-establish links with the classical tradition of St Petersburg where he and Stravinsky had been born. Not that his life was entirely trouble-free. The Thirteenth Symphony (1962), based on Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poem Babi Yar (1961), was attacked by the Party (which tried to prevent its first performance) for supposedly belittling the suffering of the Russians in the war by focusing attention on the Nazi massacre of the Jews in Kiev. But otherwise the thaw was a creative spring for Shostakovich. He returned to his teaching post at the Leningrad Conservatory. His music was widely performed. He was honoured with official prizes and allowed to travel abroad extensively. Some of his most sublime music was composed in the last years of his life - the last three string quartets and the Viola Sonata, a personal requiem and artistic summing-up of his own life which was completed