This is not simply “in the old style,” but “in the old style through the eyes of Tchaikovsky” (the seventeenth century via the Serenade for Strings), that is, mystification with a triple bottom: the first impression is that of Lully’s ballet theater with a classical plot and typical orchestral score (“Les Vingt-quatre Violins du roi”), a closer look reveals the swanny Maryinsky ballet with its elegant pastoral air, and finally we see above the stage the shadow of the Magician controlling everyone; and here we notice that the ballet is for puppets and is really staged today.137
In contrast to Nabokov, Stravinsky did not need “to conquer” America; his reputation had preceded him. Even before moving permanently to the United States, Stravinsky was the subject of a special New York festival in 1937, and as part of it the Metropolitan Opera staged two of his most Petersburgian works—the ballets Apollon Musagète and Le Baiser de la fée. Both ballets (and also Jeu de cartes) were choreographed by Balanchine; this was his first work with Stravinsky’s music in America.
Le Baiser de la fée, composed in 1928, after Alexander Benois’s idea, was Stravinsky’s “Tchaikovskiana.” The composer included in it numerous themes from Tchaikovsky’s piano pieces and songs. The plot, from a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, was an allegory: the Muse, “choosing” a newborn with a kiss, subsequently takes him away at his wedding. This theme Stravinsky and Balanchine shared, the primacy of art over life, an echo of the old argument between the Russian “realists” and “idealists.” Stravinsky and Balanchine considered Tchaikovsky an ally in that argument, and the ballet was dedicated to him.
Moving to America, Stravinsky periodically included Tchaikovsky’s Second and Third Symphonies and his Serenade for Strings in programs when he conducted, but Le Baiser de la fée became his final homage to Tchaikovsky. Nabokov, Stravinsky, and Balanchine all tried to enter the mainstream of American life and to become as Americanized as possible. Still, Petersburg never let go completely.
With Speak, Memory, Nabokov was the first to present the theme of Petersburg in the new American context. Stravinsky followed with his autobiographical dialogue books with Robert Craft. The impetus for those books was the numerous requests for interviews in connection with the composer’s seventy-fifth birthday. Stravinsky always wanted to control his interviews, another trait he shared with Nabokov, who responded only in writing to questions presented in advance and always demanded that resulting texts be reproduced without any cuts. Like Nabokov, Stravinsky discovered that the interview genre could also be profitable.
An important similarity of Nabokov’s and Stravinsky’s memoirs is that they attempt to impose an artistic order on the vision of their Petersburg childhood. They both guarded their past, and for both, this childhood was an inexhaustible reservoir of creative impulses.
During 1959-1968, six books of dialogues between Stravinsky and Craft were published in the United States. The tone of the first is comparatively impersonal, especially when it comes to memories of Stravinsky’s youth. The watershed comes in the third book, Expositions and Developments. Here the approach becomes positively Nabokovian. Many episodes resemble Speak, Memory; and if it is accidental, it is all the more impressive, underscoring the common cultural and emotional basis of the creative development of both men.
In Expositions and Developments, Stravinsky first found the strength to confess that “St. Petersburg is so much a part of my life that I am almost afraid to look further into myself, lest I discover how much of me is still joined to it …. it is dearer to my heart than any other city in the world.”138 The composer begins a journey to the realm of his childhood, evoking—in Nabokov’s style—the memory of the light of a street lamp that came through the parted curtains into the room of little Igor in the Stravinsky’s Petersburg apartment. That light led him to a world “of safety and enclosure,” with reminiscences of the nurse, cook, butler, the priest at the gymnasium, which Stravinsky begins with a typically Nabokovian passage that “memories themselves are ‘safeties,’ of course, far safer than the ‘originals,’ and growing more so all the time.”139
