Paradoxically, the monarchist idea refracted through Balanchine’s ballets gained sympathy among the American liberal elite. Audiences left the traditional American egalitarian values at the doorstep of Balanchine’s theater, where elegance, brilliance, and pomp andcircumstance reigned. Imperial Petersburg was rehabilitated there, and along with it, Tchaikovsky’s music. Its romantic impulses were no longer held in suspicion by ballet connoisseurs, for Tchaikovsky was being interpreted by the same company that had proven itsmodernist allegiance with its productions of Stravinsky’s most avantgarde works. So it might be said Stravinsky finally “rehabilitated” Tchaikovsky partly through the New York City Ballet by the coexistence of his works with those of Tchaikovsky on the stage of Balanchine’s theater.
Balanchine’s 1954 production of
Zinaida Hippius is credited with a well-known phrase (which may also have originated with Nina Berberova) that the Russian émigré cultural elite in the twentieth century were in the West “not as exiles, but as emissaries.” This was a reference to the cultural and political “mission” of the group, which had a two-part goal: to preserve the Russian heritage that had come under attack by the new Communist masters of Russia, for world civilization; and to warn about the tragic consequences of the Communist experiment if it were to be attempted in the West.
The influence of Russian émigrés on the policies of Western governments was, of course, negligible. Their cultural message was much more effective, and it too divided into two parts: it was addressed to the modern Western public but also to a certain future “post-Communist” audience in Russia. The power of the signal to the future depended significantly on the success of the idea in the present, that is, on the talent, dynamism, and conviction of the Russian cultural figures in exile. Also exceptionally important was the environment, its receptiveness, lack of prejudice, and enthusiasm.
In that sense the Petersburg modernists and America were a happy match. Neither Stravinsky nor Balanchine nor Nabokov had planned to become American artists or citizens. But western Europe proved inhospitable to the Petersburger’s strain of refined, aristocratic modernism. It was only in the United States that the Petersburg modernists could formulate, then plant in the Western mind a legendary, mystical image of their native city in that tragic period, when the Petersburg mythos was being systematically uprooted in their homeland.
CHAPTER 5
There are black days in people’s lives. They are like eclipses of the sun.”1 This is how Galina Serebryakova, the writer and one-time lover of Dmitri Shostakovich, looked back in the 1960s at January 21, 1924, the day the glorified leader of Soviet and world Communists died, the ruler of Russia for over six fateful years, a clever polemicist, brilliant tactician, and ruthless politician, a man who spoke with a thick burr and had a skull shaped like that of Socrates or Verlaine—Vladimir Lenin.
The coffin with Lenin’s body was laid out in the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions in Moscow. The poet Vera Inber described the endless line of people come to say their farewells to the legendary Bolshevik. “A cloud composed of the breath of hundreds of thousands blanketed those waiting in line. The frigid air was motionless. In the sky, a triple halo that occurs only in extreme frosts veiled the moon.”2 Inside the Hall of Columns “the light of the chandeliers, wrapped in crepe, as if through a dark haze of fog, illuminated the coffin, banked with blood-red tulips.”3
