Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  Soulima, though, needed not so much to capitalize on his father’s eminence as to break free of it, and this he still had not managed. It happened that he was booked the very next month to play the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments under Scherchen at the so-called Musico-Dramatic Work Days in Strasbourg. Two or three days before the concert on the 24th of October, Igor was surprised by a letter from Soulima complaining bitterly about Scherchen’s conducting: “Scherchen is terrible,” the young man wrote, “and everything he does is disgusting.”10 But while the musician in Igor instinctively defended Scherchen, unable to believe that he could be as bad as Soulima claimed, his loyalties would have been more severely tested had he known Scherchen’s opinion of his work and Soulima’s playing of it. The concerto, the conductor told his wife, “remains what it always was: an inadequate piece … [which] doesn’t sound, and Igor’s son plays it boringly—he strikes one as the anxious child of a bad, hard-hearted father … a poor, empty young man, who never once braves the revolt he craves.”11 Obviously there had been some kind of incident at rehearsal. Scherchen had a notoriously evil temper, and he would have been quite capable of turning on Soulima and dressing him down on some pretext or other in front of the whole orchestra. So when he wrote again after the performance praising both music and pianist, Stravinsky filed the correspondence in an envelope marked “H. Scherchen, his hypocrisy, my answer, and the performance of my concerto by Nini [Soulima] under Scherchen’s direction.”12 Yet Scherchen’s change of heart was genuine, however much fueled by vanity. “The concert was magnificent,” he confided to his wife, “[but] my big success is the son, whom I’ve released into himself from the ground up, so that his playing is unrecognizable as that of the same person.”13

  Now, with Igor off in America, Soulima was having his own private European tour. A January recital in Amsterdam only seemed to confirm his dependence on his father’s prestige. The audience was poor and the response cold. But once he got away from the standard circuit, to the Yugoslav cities of Belgrade, Novi Sad, and Zagreb, and as far afield as the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, he found himself basking in praise and admiration intended purely for him. It helped that he was surrounded in Belgrade by Yelachich cousins: Zhenya and Gavriyil (the two youngest Pavlovka brothers) lived in the Serb capital, and their cousin Alexey—the cause of so much trouble at Pechisky long ago—came up specially from Skopje.14 So warm was the atmosphere, in fact, that Soulima fell in love with a Serbian girl and could barely be enticed back to Paris in time for his debut recital in the Salle Gaveau at the end of March 1935.

  Igor was kept abreast of all these events by Katya’s letters. She wrote twice a week: newsy, homely missives that might strike a casual reader as otiose and wearisome, but that met a specific need, even demand, of her autocratic husband. That he himself replied rather less often (and was chided for it) is not particularly significant. He wrote as seldom to Vera—to judge by her no less frequent grumbles. Busy and constantly on the move, distracted by social pressures, not to mention—as Vera only half-jokingly suggested15—the odd flirtation, he had neither time nor inclination to correspond at length and in duplicate across thousands of miles of land and ocean. Katya and Vera could (and did) share such communications as they received. He, nevertheless, expected to be kept informed about his wife’s and children’s doings. It was all part of his need to feel that his family hearth was intact and secure: the profound desire of the exile for stability and rootedness, the artist’s need to preserve a safe haven for his work, but not least his overpowering urge, as the son of his father, to know and to regulate.

  Soon after he set sail for New York, there was a significant development in the business, and hence domestic, lives of his Belyankin in-laws. After years of litigation, they were at last to receive some part of the restitution on their Ustilug estate, and Grigory went straight to Warsaw in January to settle the matter. He came back with two hundred thousand francs from his wife’s land, twenty thousand for the Stravinskys from the Rovno distillery, a new suit and overcoat for himself, and his long beard freshly trimmed. This was good but not overwhelming news for the Belyankins’ numerous creditors, some of whom would get paid while others would be kept firmly in the dark about the whole outcome. Some of the money was going to prop up Grisha’s latest Parisian catering venture, an ur-Russian establishment called the Café de la Paix, but there was enough left over to pay for a larger apartment in their block just behind the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, which was big enough to serve their domestic needs as well as for Ira to run her dressmaking business in reasonable comfort.16 Vera, who to her occasional irritation had become a universal aunt to the distressed Russian gentry of Paris, helped them move in at the beginning of February, enduring their squabbling and shouting partly for Ira’s sake, partly for Igor’s, partly out of a congenital inability to refuse help to anyone, friend or foe.17

  Everyone went to Vera, for advice or to cry on her shoulder, or to grumble about the cold or about wives or husbands. She specialized in neurotic women friends with suicidal tendencies. Georgette (the princesse Mestchersky) was deserted by her husband, became hysterical, and had to be given valerian drops. But when Vera upbraided her husband on the phone, he simply remarked, “You are the only woman who knows how to talk to me.” Vera’s niece Kirsta would get drunk at parties and pester the men, regardless of their age or sexual persuasion. Then there was Ansermet’s mistress Elena Hurtado, a singer who had been taking lessons from Milène’s teacher, Alberti. One night at dinner at Vera’s she got drunk and lay on the sofa laughing hysterically, to the intense disapproval of Valechka Nouvel, a fastidious homosexual who loathed ostentatious displays of femininity. But Hurtado’s nervousness was understandable. A few days earlier, hearing that the singer was visiting her husband, Marguérite Ansermet had tried to gas herself and been taken to a hospital in Geneva screaming, “Ernest, please come, I adore you!” The saintly Katya declared herself baffled at Hurtado’s presence in Geneva at such a moment. But to the more worldly Vera, all was clear.18

  Vera was also cast in the role of adviser to the Stravinsky children, who occasionally found their mother’s precepts restrictive, however lovingly expressed. The boys would go and play bridge at Vera’s rue du Ranelagh flat; or Mika would come with Milène, or alone. Though she said nothing to Igor, Vera may have been the first person Mika told that she had fallen in love with a Russian poet she had met at the club with Aunt Irina. Under any circumstances, such a development might have perturbed her possessive and watchful father. But it was complicated by the fact that the poet in question, Yury Mandelstam, was a Jew. Katya had quickly grasped the situation. A week or so after the meeting at the Russian society, the Terapianos, Mandelstam, and another young writer spent an evening at the Faubourg. Katya was down with flu and kept to her bed, but she heard all about it afterwards from the other children. One of the writers was Jewish, she informed Igor in Los Angeles, “and, they say, a very sympathetic and good person, and Irina said that at heart he’s really a Christian.”19 A week later, Mika herself wrote:

  Don’t suppose that I’m immediately going to tell you I’m in love, though it seems to me I’m not far off that condition. But the main change is that I’ve acquired my own circle of friends, two of whom I get on with particularly well … I’ve suddenly found myself in a world that’s utterly new to me—a literary world mostly of young writers, poets and critics. The young ones are very fresh in spirit, not backward-looking but, on the contrary, very advanced. At first I was afraid of feeling rather dépaysée in this environment, but to my surprise I met such sympathetic people that I immediately felt at home with them … And I think that these two whom I already know better are trying very hard to get to know me better and see me more often.

  I don’t know what you’ll think of all this, but you can’t imagine how happy it makes me. I feel as if I were entering a new phase of my life.…20

  What Stravinsky thought when he read Mika’s letter we do not know. But his subseq
uent behavior sheds revealing light on the relationship between what might be termed “automatic” White Russian anti-Semitism and the flesh-and-blood reality of love and friendship. Katya was absolutely clear that what counted was personal goodness and proper spiritual direction, both of which she found in Yury from the moment she herself first met him in May. But this emphatically did not mean that race ceased to be an issue, since the bedrock of Russian attitudes remained the instinctive feeling that Jewishness in some way precluded those virtues, so that for the Jew an exceptional moral and spiritual discipline was called for. Yury, she found,

  is as I imagined really a hundred percent Jewish in face, expression, and gesture … I had at once sensed in him not just a good but an utterly good person, to whom we could without fear and with complete confidence entrust our Mikushka. And what I felt before I set eyes on him has been strengthened and confirmed now that I’ve got to know him. It’s obvious that he’s intelligent and kind and loves Mika in a good way, with true feeling, and Mikusha says that he’s tremendously fond of his parents, which also speaks well for him. In general, their relationship and the way they behave toward each other made the very best impression on me.21

  Igor had by that time already met Yury and reacted in the same way. “I was glad to hear,” Katya had written, “that Y[ury] Vl[adimirovich] made rather a good impression on you. That’s already a good start. And as for the sense of his race, I think that will all disappear of its own accord and in any case will feel different when you get used to the man himself and get to know his good qualities, of which it seems to me he has a lot.”22 Mika, she now added, “is so infinitely grateful to you for your attitude and that you are so nice to her Yury.”23 Not all their relations were able to grasp the distinction. Ira Belline would make a visible effort to be polite, but avoided conversation, while Katya’s Nosenko cousin Vera refused to have anything to do with him and told Katya frankly that she hoped it would all fall through. “I can’t be angry with her, though,” Katya said, “and only feel sorry for her that she harbors such opinions, attitudes and feelings toward Jews.”24

  Yury Mandelstam was not just a personable and serious-minded young man, however, but already, at the age of twenty-six, a published poet with two collections to his name, and a third about to appear when he met Mika. He was also a critic and essayist whose work was becoming known in émigré circles, and who had published in French-language journals such as the Revue de France. Stravinsky’s attitude to the emigration had long been equivocal. He was on good enough terms with Irina Terapiano and her husband, Yury, himself a poet of some note, with Pierre Souvtchinsky and others, but he kept his distance from Russian artistic cliques like the Zelyonaya Lampa and Krug, or the émigré cafés in Montparnasse, which were a focus of Mandelstam’s existence. But if he knew Mandelstam’s work (and we can certainly assume that he made sure he got to know it), he must have recognized some kinship of view with his own music of the twenties and thirties. Mika’s new friends all ran with the so-called Perekryostok (Crossroads) group of neoclassicists, for whom aesthetic values such as clarity and simplicity were paramount, and whose great hero was Pushkin. The composer of Mavra and the Octet could scarcely have hoped for an artistically more congenial son-in-law.25

  But there was another possible objection to Mika’s marriage, one which had nothing to do with Mandelstam and everything to do with her. Like her mother and to a lesser extent her younger brother, Mika was tubercular, and the disease had chosen that winter of 1935 to break out with renewed force. Perhaps Paris was partly to blame. It was their first winter in the north since 1920, and moreover there was a flu epidemic raging, to which first Theodore, then Katya succumbed, while Mika and Soulima both nursed disagreeable coughs. Katya’s letters of these January and February weeks begin to recall Igor’s childhood letters to his parents, with their relentless chronicling of every ailment, every symptom, every medication. But beneath the stupefying clinical data, sinister undercurrents flow. Katya’s flu lingered and lingered, and as February turned to March she took to her bed once again with severe tracheitis and an inflammation of the pleura brought on by coughing. For a time she tried to conceal the true situation from her husband; but by mid-March it was clear that her tuberculosis had been reactivated and, worse still, that Mika was showing an alarming tendency in the same direction. On the 21st Katya took the train to Le Fayet, under the northwestern slope of Mont Blanc, and for the first but by no means last time drove by taxi up the winding road to Plateau d’Assy and the sanatorium of Sancellemoz, where Soulima had already spent the early part of the previous year. Her sister, Lyudmila Belyankin, accompanied her.

  It was a disagreeable reminder of their time at Leysin in 1914, and Katya could not forget that the immediate cause of that earlier relapse had been the birth of Milène. If Mika were now to get married and become pregnant, would she not run at least as great a risk? Yet to marry and not attempt to have children would be a grotesque aberration for the Orthodox Stravinskys, and especially so for Katya, whose devoutness and piety had intensified in recent years. On the other hand it was plain that any significant delay to the wedding would equally distress Mika and just as surely aggravate her illness. That August she wrote to her father from Sancellemoz, where she in her turn had been sent two months before by the Paris doctors to join her mother. She and Yury were bubbling over with their plans for his baptism in the coming weeks, their wedding in October, and their subsequent life together in a Paris flat living on his somewhat uncertain income from writing and editing.

  Dear, darling Papochka! You’ll understand our impatience.… I can’t begin to describe to you what’s going on in our hearts. But I confess that it will be very sad and difficult if we have to wait till next year, since November is the Christmas fast and during the fast you can’t marry. Help us. Everything hangs on your consent; please talk it over with Yury. As for me, I’ve got another three boring weeks without him, and the month I spent with him here was so wonderful and good!26

  They did not wait. On the day Katya and Mika returned from Sancellemoz, 12 September 1935, Yury was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church, and six weeks later the couple were married in the little upstairs Russian church in the rue d’Odessa, Montparnasse.27

  * * *

  STRAVINSKY HAD ARRIVED from New York at Le Havre on the 19th of April and been met by Vera with the latest domestic news. Of Katya’s move to Sancellemoz he already knew from his sister-in-law. But anything specific about Yury Mandelstam had been kept from him, and he had not been told that his eldest son was also courting: the Mademoiselle Guerzoni he had been painting, a twenty-year-old Genevoise called Denise, herself the daughter of a Swiss painter by the name of Stéfanie Guerzoni. From Paris Igor went straight to Sancellemoz for a long talk with Katya about their children. On such occasions, her concern was always to calm him so that his work would not be disturbed by family anxieties. But he could not be detached about the present circumstances. Neither he nor Katya knew Denise, and Igor had never been instinctively relaxed about their sons’ elective affinities. As for Mandelstam, whom equally neither of them had yet met, the composer would have been less than human if he had not been perturbed at the apparent suddenness of Mika’s choice. Leaving aside his own feelings, he knew that his mother would have to be told and could not be expected to approve. Returning to Paris, he made up his mind to try and talk Mika out of Yury. There was a tense interview in his study at the Faubourg. But Mika was made of the same stuff as her father, and she returned his recriminations in kind. “Don’t bully me!” she shouted, so loudly that her voice could be clearly heard in the hallway outside. “What about you and Vera?” That, in Stravinsky’s opinion, was quite a different matter. But he could not make headway with his elder daughter from so morally weak a position. She would not listen to him, would not have her feelings overruled in this way, and she gradually wore him down.28 Perhaps he was even half-pleased to be defeated for once. When he met Yury a day or two later he liked him. And Den
ise, too, charmed both him and Katya. “How good she is,” Katya exclaimed, “so pure and simple in every way.”29 Soon Mika was telling her mother that, despite being horribly busy, Igor was “in a good mood and being very nice,” while Lyudmila Belyankin and Irina Terapiano both noticed that he was “somehow completely changed, so even-tempered, placid and kind.” They variously put this down to an improved liver and to a healthier spirit; but it may just have been a sense of relief.30

  Four weeks before his return, the first volume of Chroniques de ma vie had come out in Paris, and he was now hard at work with Valechka on the second. Volume 1, which the London publisher Victor Gollancz had told Stravinsky was too serious and too short for British tastes, took the reader to 1920 and the move from Morges to Carantec.31 Volume 2, up to Persephone, would be swiftly completed and in the shops in time for Christmas 1935. Many Parisians who hurried out to buy the first installment that March will have hoped for a colorful account of life in prerevolutionary Russia, or sensational revelations about Diaghilev and his ballet company, or fresh anecdotes about Debussy or Ravel; others may have looked for some insight into the personal, emotional—perhaps even sexual—life of the great composer; yet others, for some clear explanation of his artistic goals and baffling changes of style. Simpler souls merely hoped to learn what manner of man was the creator of The Rite of Spring. Would he explode off the page like his music? Or would he remain an enigma, like Petrushka, thumbing his nose at his readers before vanishing in a puff of ambiguous harmony?