Isolde

by Irena Odoevtseva

  IRINA ODOEVTSEVA

  ISOLDE

  Translated from the Russian by

  Bryan Karetnyk and Irina Steinberg

  and with an Introduction by Bryan Karetnyk

  PUSHKIN PRESS

  LONDON

  Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Part One

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  Part Two

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  Part Three

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  Part Four

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  ISOLDE

  Introduction

  “No, I feel it, I know it: nowhere shall I ever again be as happy as I am here, on the banks of the Neva.” Thus did Irina Odoevtseva, writing in Paris in 1967, conclude the first volume of her memoirs, an ode to her youth spent in Petrograd among the great luminaries of Russia’s Silver Age, then in its twilight years. Having fled Russia in the wake of the 1917 Revolution, Odoevtseva went on to become one of the most outstanding and controversial writers of the Russian diaspora: the author of five novels, two sets of memoirs, as well as dozens of poems and short stories. Yet it was the final chapter of her life, the coda, that lent her life and art its unique fatal significance: among her generation in exile, who had for over half a century continued to dream of Russia, returning to it time and again in their art, Odoevtseva alone went back to live there. In 1987, at the grand age of ninety-one, she boarded an aeroplane in Paris, arriving a few hours later in Leningrad to find herself once again on the banks of the Neva, where untold celebrity awaited her.

  Odoevtseva was born Iraida Gustavovna Heinike on 27 July 1895, to a family of Russified Baltic Germans living in Riga, then in the Livonian Governorate of the Russian Empire. A native of the Baltics, Odoevtseva was keen to hide this facet of her heritage at the earliest opportunity; she cared little for the industrial port city of her birth and in time would Russify her given name and adopt her mother’s Russian maiden name in place of her father’s. As a child she enjoyed frequent trips to the imperial capital, St Petersburg, where the family kept an apartment and her father, a distinguished lawyer, prosecuted cases in the Senate. With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the family relocated from Riga to the capital, now renamed Petrograd in concession to the rampant anti-German sentiment of the day. There Odoevtseva was married to her cousin Sergei Popov, also a lawyer and an assistant to her father. Odoevtseva later described the marriage as “purely fictive”, having been arranged in order to alleviate her father’s fears that after his return to Riga she would be “fed to the wolves” (that is, to her numerous suitors). She received a divorce ere long.

  Odoevtseva’s first tentative steps into the world of literature began in Petrograd. In November 1918 she enrolled in the literary faculty of the newly established Institute of the Living Word, which had been founded with revolutionary zeal to democratize the arts and sciences, and offered an array of lectures given by various celebrities of the era, including People’s Commissar for Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky, the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold and the children’s poet Kornei Chukovsky. There, Odoevtseva honed her poetic talent under the tutelage and encouragement of Nikolai Gumilyov, a leading figure of the Acmeist movement, which held compactness of form and clarity of expression as the highest poetic ideals.

  It was during Odoevtseva’s time at the institute, where she took regular classes in literary studies and rhythmic gymnastics (a method devised by the Swiss theoretician Émile Jaques-Dalcroze), that she became acquainted with the stars of Russia’s Silver Age—not only Gumilyov, but also the writers and poets Andrei Bely, Osip Mandelstam, Zinaida Hippius, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Ivan Bunin and her future husband, Georgy Ivanov. Her beauty played no insignificant role in attracting this widespread attention—already for the best part of a decade, Odoevtseva had been admired for her good looks throughout the capital, known in particular for an oversized bow in her hair—but it was not without a modicum of irony that she now set this renown to work in forging her literary career: her early poem, ‘No, I Shall Not Become Famous’ (1918), included the provocative lines:

  Neither Gumilyov nor the wicked press

  Will ever call me talented.

  I’m just a little poetess

  Who wears an enormous bow.

  Recognition of her talent came soon enough, however. Odoevtseva ensconced herself in Acmeist circles, diligently applying herself to her vocation, and eventually became a member of the Guild of Poets, which Gumilyov reestablished in 1920. Public and critical acceptance followed on the back of her daring and wildly successful poem, ‘The Ballad of Powdered Glass’ (1919), which recounts the woeful tale of a Red soldier who, in order to feed his family, sells salt laced with the offending substance. It ends in the manner of a fairy tale, with the murderous soldier borne away and placed in a glass coffin by seven ravens before being thrown into a bog, where his body is to lie until the Last Judgement. The poem was published in the prestigious and influential World of Art journal, where it won Odoevtseva overnight celebrity and prompted a succession of invitations to give public readings of her verses. When Gumilyov fatefully introduced her to Ivanov at one such evening on 30 April 1920, held in honour of Bely, Ivanov’s enraptured response was: “Was it you who wrote that? Can it really have been you?”

  The subsequent two years proved to be some of the most emotionally intense of Odoevtseva’s life. Contrasting the blissful romance of Ivanov’s courtship, walks in the Summer Gardens and budding literary success were the burgeoning privations of life in revolutionary Petrograd; Gumilyov’s execution for his supposed participation in an anti-Bolshevist plot; and ultimately, the death of Odoevtseva’s mother. Having finally divorced her first husband in 1921, Odoevtseva married her beloved “Zhorzhik” in the September of that year. The couple lived together with their friend, the poet and critic Georgy Adamovich. It was also around this time that Odoevtseva’s father returned to newly independent Latvia. The young Odoevtseva’s virulently anti-Bolshevist political stance, set forth with great vigour in her verses, made remaining in Russia an increasingly dangerous prospect, as it was for the many writers, artists, politicians and intellectuals who fled the so-called “Red terror” of the fledgling regime. In the winter of 1922, the couple decided to join the general exodus of over a million Russians fleeing their homeland for Europe and the Far East, Ivanov having obtained permission to leave under the sham pretext of building a “state repertoire for theatres”, Odoevtseva having adopted Latvian citizenship. Very likely the couple absconded in the same expectation held by so many of their compatriots: that the Bolshevist government would soon collapse, and before long they would once again find themselves on the banks of the Neva. But fate held something different in store: for Odoevtseva, the journey to Europe would mark the beginning of an exile that lasted sixty-five years.

  After a month in Riga, Odoevtseva travelled on to rejoin her husband in Berlin, which until the early 1920s constituted the capital of Russian émigré culture. There, the couple lived in relative luxury—in sharp distinction to the majority of their more penurious compatriots—thanks t
o a regular income received from a rental property owned by Odoevtseva’s father in Latvia. Availing herself of the Weimar capital’s many delights, she led a charmed life there, taking classes in the latest dance crazes, dining in the most fashionable restaurants and cafés, attending galas and balls, as well as hobnobbing with literary grandees and visiting celebrities such as the poet Sergei Esenin and his wife Isadora Duncan. True to her calling, however,

  Odoevtseva would still lament that everyone “seemed to have forgotten about poetry” in Berlin. And so it was that in August 1923, she was once again swept along in the general outflow of Russian émigrés leaving Berlin because of the financial crisis, drawn by the literary lure of Paris. Odoevtseva arrived with her husband and her father, filled with fantasies of Parisian glamour and sophistication. Her hopes were dashed from the very outset. The picture she would paint of their new home in the second volume of her memoirs, On the Banks of the Seine (1983), was one of abject disillusionment:

  We arrived in Paris at the worst possible time… My father and I installed ourselves very unsuccessfully in an enormous, gloomy hotel with no lift. An acquaintance of my father’s had said that it was one of the best hotels. To me, however, who was used to Berlin’s elegant pensions, the prospect of such a life seemed utterly insupportable. We would dine in a vast restaurant that was bleak and uncomfortable. I ordinarily dined in the finest restaurants. We would walk along the boulevards. By eleven o’clock everything was shut. The streets were dark… We couldn’t sleep for the racket outside. It was not at all what we had expected.

  To add insult to these material injuries—though they were mere trifles compared to the hardships suffered by so many of Odoevtseva’s contemporaries, who found themselves destitute and working menial jobs as labourers, dockers, waiters and such—by the mid-1920s most Russian refugees were beginning to accept the fact of their exile as a permanent condition. Yet while the reality of Soviet rule in Russia left a bitter taste, it did not prevent these newfound apatrides bearing the torch of Russian culture. Indeed, it was not for nothing that in 1927 the poet Dovid Knut was able to claim: “the capital of Russian literature is not Moscow, but Paris”. By the middle of the decade, the city had succeeded in attracting the great and the good among the exiled Russian political and artistic elites, and this was the milieu in which Odoevtseva set about making a name for herself as she delved into prose writing. She was an habituée of the capital’s most fashionable and prominent literary salons, though she preferred to remain a sideline spectator, rarely if ever partaking in their notoriously tempestuous debates. Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Hippius, the undisputed, eccentric doyens of Russian culture in exile, hosted one such group: by dint of their celebrity status during the Silver Age—and owing also to their fortuitous ownership of an apartment at 11-bis, avenue du Colonel-Bonnet—they were able to recreate something resembling a literary salon à l’ancienne on Sundays in Passy. One of the emigration’s most influential circles, it attracted luminaries such as Ivan Bunin and Teffi, while fostering a younger generation of writers emerging in exile, such as Gaito Gazdanov, Yuri Felsen and Odoevtseva herself.

  Odoevtseva’s first short story, ‘Shooting Star’, appeared in 1926 and a serial publication of her first novel, The Angel of Death, began in the émigré newspaper Dni the following year. Her novel was a runaway success and appeared in English and German translations in 1930. For all her literary progress in Paris, however, Odoevtseva frequently quit the city for the pleasures of the Riviera or to visit her family back in Riga. In fact, she and Ivanov temporarily relocated there in the autumn of 1932 so that Odoevtseva could spend time with her terminally ill father. After a year spent in Riga where they contributed to the local émigré newspaper, Segodnia, the couple returned to Paris in possession of a substantial inheritance that Odoevtseva had received from her father, with which they purchased a villa at Biarritz—a move that doubtless provoked the jealousy and resentment of their less fortunate compatriots in exile. Indeed, the ostentatiousness of the life enjoyed by Odoevtseva and her husband, coupled with Ivanov’s notoriously difficult character and the acerbic criticism he published in the émigré press, would contribute by the end of the decade to the couple’s ostracization from large swathes of the Russian enclave.

  The war in Europe marked a tragic turn in the fate of the entire émigré community, which found its allegiances and loyalties tested to breaking point. Odoevtseva and Ivanov removed to their villa at Biarritz and continued to live there under German occupation. On the back of the widespread resentment that had built up in regard to the couple, malicious rumours of their collaboration with the Nazis now spread, devastating their reputations and turning them into pariahs among their own people. To make matters worse, these rumours appeared to have been started by none other than their erstwhile bosom friend, Adamovich. Odoevtseva later generously wrote them off as a misunderstanding. When the couple arrived in Biarritz in 1939, they hosted several charity evenings, one of which was attended by a British admiral. Felsen happened to read about this in the society column of a newspaper and wrote to his friend Adamovich, who by then had volunteered for service in the French Foreign Legion. Odoevtseva explained that Felsen’s letter was delayed by several months and by the time Adamovich received it Biarritz had fallen under the German Occupied Zone: “Adamovich decided that I was receiving Nazi generals and, with his innate talent, wrote to all his friends that I was riding out on horseback with the Germans.”

  The damage to their reputation had been done. Former friends and acquaintances now turned their backs on the couple and would not receive them. Alexander Kerensky, the former leader of the Provisional Government and once friend, returned their letters unopened. Not only that, having enjoyed considerable luxury before the war, Odoevtseva and her husband found themselves virtually penniless by its end: the Soviet Union’s annexation of Latvia and its “nationalization” of Odoevtseva’s property there had cut off their principal source of income; the Germans confiscated much of their private property in 1943; and their villa at Biarritz was destroyed by Allied bombing in the latter stages of the war. When they returned to Paris, they found their apartment ransacked and their gold stolen. Dubbed personæ non gratæ among the diaspora, the couple sank into profound poverty. To earn money, Odoevtseva turned her hand to translating scripts into French with the help of her long-standing friend, the author Georges Bataille, and she and Ivanov would resort to hand-painting and inscribing editions of their own poetry in an attempt to make them more valuable to collectors. Their pitiful circumstances continued to deteriorate, and by 1955 Odoevtseva and her husband were forced to take up residence, despite their relative youth, in a government-funded retirement home for stateless individuals at Hyères, near Toulon. Alone, impoverished, bereft of the cultural and intellectual environment to which they had once been accustomed, their banishment was near complete.

  It was not until 1958 that tragedy offered a chance for reconciliation: Ivanov’s death in August allowed Odoevtseva to make peace with her fellow exiles. She took up residence in a home for the aged at Gagny, on the outskirts of Paris, and returned more actively to poetry, publishing several new volumes of verse, much of which was noted for its technical mastery. It was also there that she set about composing her memoirs; the first volume, On the Banks of the Neva, appeared in 1967 and, with a controversy that was by now characteristic, caused uproar among the exiled community.

  In 1963, she met her third husband, the minor novelist and literary critic Yakov Gorbov, who wrote in French under the name Jacques Gorboff. Though Gorbov came from a wealthy Muscovite family, as with so many of his compatriots he had found himself in dire straits in emigration and, like a certain other émigré author, supported his literary career by driving a taxi. Gorbov had long been a fan of Odoevtseva’s, even taking a copy of Isolde to the front with him in 1940, where both he and the book were wounded by a single bullet. (Odoevtseva would later have the tattered, bloodstained edition rebound and returned to Go
rbov with a charming inscription.) The pair married only in 1978, after the death of his first wife, whom he had married in 1918 and who had been confined to a mental asylum before Odoevtseva met him.

  Thereafter began the astonishing final chapter of Odoevtseva’s life. In the aftermath of Gorbov’s death in 1981, she found herself again in relative material comfort, bequeathed an apartment on rue Casablanca in Paris’s fifteenth arrondissement and in possession of a motor car that had been fittingly gifted her by Gorbov. However, loneliness, old age and ill health began to exact their melancholy toll—until, that is, an unexpected invitation arrived in 1987. Under the Soviet Union’s new era of glasnost, Odoevtseva received an offer to return to her beloved Petersburg (now Leningrad), which she wasted little time in accepting. When she stepped off the aeroplane at Pulkovo Airport, she was greeted with widespread adulation, and the ensuing press coverage and republication of her memoirs in the Soviet Union brought the nonagenarian writer a degree of celebrity that could scarcely have been hoped for at any other point in her career. As the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko recalled, Odoevtseva was “transported from one concert stage to another as a kind of talking relic”. She was venerated as a living link to the Silver Age of Russia’s pre-revolutionary past, to the poetry of Bely, Blok and Gumilyov, which for most Russians had vanished in 1966 with the death of Anna Akhmatova. More than that, Odoevtseva’s grand homecoming instigated a frenzy for the “lost” literature of the emigration, which had been banned in Russia since the 1920s. It was to this end that in the foreword to the Soviet edition of On the Banks of the Seine, Odoevtseva addressed her new readers:

  Now I turn to you to ask that you love the people about whom I write in this book. Each one of them needs more love, not only because the “bread is bitter and the stairs are steep in foreign lands”, but also because, more than bread, they wanted for the love of a reader, and they were stifled in the air of freedom offered by foreign countries… If you, my readers, fulfil my request and love those about whom I write, you will afford them temporary immortality, and me the knowledge that I have not lived in vain on this earth.