Stravinsky and His World

by Levitz, Tamara

  Stravinsky inherited his passion for books from his father, Fyodor Ignatyevich, an outstanding Russian bass singer at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg and a friend of Tchaikovsky’s and Dostoevsky’s. Fyodor Stravinsky considered book collecting a second calling: he attended meetings for bibliophiles, befriended renowned booksellers, studied rare editions, and, in the last twenty years of his life, built up a unique collection that came to be considered among the best in Russia. His library included thousands of volumes on Russian literature and history, philosophy, religion, law, politics, economics, European history, folklore studies, music, and the fine arts. It also contained bibliographies, encyclopedias, periodicals, scores (including about two hundred operas), and rare first editions.3 If, as Pyotr Suvchinsky has suggested, the secret of Stravinsky’s genius lay in the “mysterious unexpectedness and the marvel of his appearance in the music of Russia and the world,” then his father’s library probably had a lot to do with that.4

  Figure 1. Fyodor Stravinsky in his library.

  Yet Fyodor’s library suffered a tragic fate.5 After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet authorities recognized the library as part of their national heritage, and, thanks to the intervention of Arthur Lourié, allowed Fyodor’s widow, Anna Kirillovna, to keep it in the family apartment under her supervision.6 When she emigrated from Russia in 1922, her oldest son Yury (Stravinsky’s older brother) took over its supervision. Forced to live with his family in one room of the “communal” apartment, Yury sold off parts of the library. He gave a large collection of about 1,400 engravings to the State Public Saltykov-Shchedrin Library (today the National Library of Russia), sold sheet music to the St. Petersburg State Conservatory Music Library, and offered some items to individual collectors. The Stravinsky family was evacuated from St. Petersburg (Leningrad) during the blockade, and when they returned in 1944 they found the apartment sacked and the library plundered.7

  Heirlooms

  Fyodor Stravinsky died in 1902. One of the greatest legacies he left to his son Igor was his collection of anthologies of Russian folklore. Luckily, Stravinsky saved a few of these anthologies before he knew the rest of his father’s library would be lost forever. These volumes, which Stravinsky probably brought to Switzerland in 1914, miraculously survived the Russian Revolution, two wars, and two changes in citizenship. They have fascinated scholars for some time because of the clues they provide to the folk sources he borrowed for his own music, and of the insight they bring to the composer’s broader ethnographic interests. They include Ivan Sakharov’s Pesni russkogo naroda (Songs of the Russian people), 1838–39, and Daniil Kashin’s Russkiye narodnïye pesni sobrannïye i izdannïye dlya peniya i fortepiano (Russian folksongs collected and edited for voice and piano), 1833–34, as well as Alexander Afanasyev’s Narodnïye russkïye skazki (Russian folktales), 1873, and Poėticheskiye vozzreniya slavyan na prirodu (The Slavs’ poetic outlook on nature), 1865–69.8

  Scholars first became interested in Sakharov’s works in the 1980s, when Irina Vershinina discovered that Stravinsky had borrowed the lyrics for his Podblyudnïe (Four Russian Peasant Songs) from Sakharov’s Skazaniya russkogo naroda (Legends of the Russian people).9 Trusting Vershinina’s conclusions, many scholars subsequently cited this source as a reference work important to Stravinsky.10 As Robert Craft noted in 1986, however, the book that Stravinsky actually owned was Sakharov’s Songs of the Russian People.11 This much rarer edition of five elegant miniature octavo volumes originally belonged to Stravinsky’s father, who had found them valuable enough to bind in expensive leather with press gilding and his initials “ӨC” (FS). These books accompanied Stravinsky throughout his life, and the handwritten annotations in them give evidence that he studied them carefully. Stravinsky added the name “Sakharov” to the initials “I. S.” at the end of the preface, corrected the incorrect pagination in the table of contents, and lightly underlined in pencil the song “Ladushka nasha milaya” (Our beloved sweet), which he used in the preliminary scenario of Act II (“At the Bride’s”) of Les Noces.12 He penciled in the letters “ABAC” next to another song that he used in Les Noces, “Ne klich', ne klich', lebedushka” (Don’t you cry, swan), hinting at the musical structure he would give the poem.13

  Stravinsky also placed thin, red silk bookmarks in between the songs “Shchuka” (The pike) and “Ovsen” in the volume 1 section of Sakharov’s collection on Podblyudnïe or dish-divination songs.14 He used these in his Four Russian Peasant Songs (1914–17). He places similar bookmarks in volumes 3 and 4 for the songs “To Mihayle pesenka” (Song for Mikhalya; likely for use in Les Noces) and the lullaby “Bayu bayushki bayu” (Lulla lulla lullaby), the fifth verse of which resembles the fourth of Stravinsky’s Berceuses du chat, “U kota kota” (“The cat has, he has”).15 These bookmarks and pencil markings leave no doubt that Stravinsky was working with this edition.

  Stravinsky left similar traces of his engagement with folksong in his copy of the 1833 edition of Daniil Kashin’s Russian Folk Songs. This volume contains lyrics and melodies arranged in the sentimental mode of the rossiyskaya pesnya, or urban Russian songs, with functional tonal harmony. Stravinsky definitely used Kashin’s edition when composing Mavra, as Richard Taruskin has demonstrated, but he may also have used it earlier.16 His annotations reveal his interest not only in the rossiyskaya pesnya but also in the lyrics of dance and wedding songs, an older folk genre. That so many of the same titles are marked in pencil in the table of contents of both Kashin’s and Sakharov’s books shows that Stravinsky compared the songs in them. Taruskin, drawing on Craft’s description of an inscription on the first page of this volume, assumes that Stravinsky may have admired it more than he did. That inscription reads: “A very rare book, one of the best collections of Russian songs.” Taruskin thought this phrase conveyed “some of the bravado of the Mavra period.” “As [Stravinsky] knew very well, it was a book his teacher, for one, would have called one of the worst collections, and for the very reasons that made it now so precious to the latter’s former pupil.”17 The modest handwritten note, however, neither conveys bravado nor was it likely in Stravinsky’s hand. After comparing it with Stravinsky’s sweeping autograph on the preceding page, I concluded that it was not Stravinsky, but rather Fyodor or somebody else, perhaps the bookseller, who wrote the note.18

  The jewels of Stravinsky’s folklore collection are Afanasyev’s The Slav’s Poetic Outlook on Nature and the second edition of his Russian Folktales—both bibliographic rarities.19 Taruskin stresses the historical importance for Stravinsky of the first, which Rimsky-Korsakov called “the pantheistic Bible of the Slavonic peoples.”20 As for the second edition of Russian Folktales, it became a coveted rarity after Afanasyev’s death on account of the new classification system he created for it. The binding for the four volumes of Folktales is similar to, though less lavish than, that of Sakharov’s Songs, including marbled paper, press gilding, and Stravinsky’s father’s initials “ӨC” (FS). Stravinsky appears to have begun using this book while still in Russia; inscriptions in it date back to the time of the Firebird. He left a check mark beside a colorful description of Baba-Yaga arriving in Usïnya-bogatïr, as well as the epic bïlinas (epic poems) “Ilya Muromets i Zmey” (Ilya Muromets and the dragon) and “Alyosha Popovich.”21 In volume 4 he marks with a slanted cross the commentaries in the table of contents for “Baba-Yaga,” “Koshchey Bessmertnïy” (Deathless Koshchey), “Ivanushka-durachok” (Ivanushka the fool), and “Ivan-durak” (Stupid Ivan).22 He also adds another conspicuous mark to this book by penciling in the word zaperdel (farted) in a line of “Lisa ispovednitsa” (The fox confessor). By filling in the ellipsis introduced by the censors, he transformed the original “Don’t you know that Yermak began … on an empty stomach?” into “Don’t you know that Yermak began farting on an empty stomach?”23 He retained zaperdel in his subsequent sketches for Renard, although in the published score it was replaced with zatreshchal (crackled).24

  Marginalia

 
Stravinsky’s marginalia reveal his likes and dislikes, allegiances and disloyalties, and provide a compelling record of his reading process, which was strongly dialogical. His marginalia in Boris Asafyev’s 1929 monograph Kniga o Stravinskom (A Book about Stravinsky, published under Asafyev’s pen name Igor Glebov), stand out for their abundance, and have for this reason received tremendous attention in the secondary literature.25 Yet in spite of this keen interest, no scholar has yet transcribed them accurately.26 These marginalia have led to confusion about whether Stravinsky approved of Asafyev’s monograph; they point toward the ambiguity that such a critical process of reading can bring. Clearly Stravinsky had not appreciated Asafyev’s earlier volumes on Rimsky-Korsakov (1923) and The Symphonic Etudes (1922)—both of which he owned (they are now in the Paul Sacher Stiftung). The Symphonic Etudes includes direct criticism of himself. “I read what [Asafyev] wrote on Rimsky and Tchaikovsky,” he wrote Ernest Ansermet in 1928, “and I was very surprised to discover that he belongs rather to the André Rimsky and Steinberg clan than to the one opposing that nest of old wasps.”27 Stravinsky made forty-nine comments in the margins of Kniga o Stravinskom, many of them harsh. Over half consist of corrections of musical examples, spelling, and titles of works, and about ten express disagreements with Asafyev over fundamental ideological and aesthetic issues. There are also six positive comments—Craft admits to only one and Varunts to two—that touch on such significant issues as the role of accents in music, the accompaniment in Mavra, and the plasticity of intonational gestures in instrumental music.28 Nevertheless, Stravinsky may have been partially flattered by Asafyev’s monograph, or at least influenced by the positive impressions it made on his closest friends.29 The Russian pianist and musicologist Mikhail Druskin remembered Stravinsky commenting in 1931 that Asafyev “feels my music well.” In 1934, Prokofiev reported happily to Asafyev that Stravinsky had answered “Glebov’s” when asked which book about himself he considered the best.30 And yet as an old man he opposed its publication in English—an attitude that led Suvchinsky to believe that he “hated” it, as Suvchinsky wrote in a letter to Maria Yudina.31

  Stravinsky’s marginalia in Modest Tchaikovsky’s three-volume biography of his brother Pyotr document Stravinsky’s engagement with Russian music, literature, and thought.32 Stravinsky famously adored Tchaikovsky; in his later years he kept the composer’s scores in a special cabinet reserved for his own and Webern’s music.33 He may have been familiar with Modest Tchaikovsky’s biography since he was a young man, but he seems to have acquired the copy kept in his library later in life. The book’s many previous owners had marked it up, rendering it difficult to determine which pencil marks and comments Stravinsky added himself. The witty remark, “what nonsense, c’est un lieu commun,”34 next to Tolstoy’s alleged comment to Tchaikovsky about the pitfalls of sacrificing one’s inner convictions to pleasing the public seems to come from Stravinsky, given its similarity to his comments and handwriting elsewhere.35 Other underlined words, vertical strokes next to passages, and the abbreviation NB (nota bene) also seem to originate with Stravinsky, given how closely the passages they highlight are in tune with his own biography and thought. He may have marked the chapter on Tchaikovsky’s legal studies, for example, given that his parents, like Tchaikovsky’s, had tried to persuade him to study law. Other marks likely made by Stravinsky include those highlighting the lines in which Modest describes Tchaikovsky as “hopeless at mathematics” or as an “incorrigible smoker.”36 Surely Stravinsky marked the passage about his own father, Fyodor, and the sections of the book dealing with Tchaikovsky’s religious experience.37 He also was probably the one who heavily underlined Tchaikovsky’s comment that Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann “composed their immortal works exactly as a shoemaker makes shoes; that is to say, day in, day out, and for most part to order”—the very lines he quotes in his Chroniques de ma vie with the added exclamation, rare for him, that “he is so right!”38 I suspect that even if he didn’t mark them all he would have liked passages that describe Tchaikovsky’s opinions on Wagner, musical craft, commissions, form, metaphysical inspiration, the creative process, and the quest for compositional solutions—opinions that mirror his own views as expressed through his (and Roland-Manuel and Pyotr Suvchinsky’s) Poétique musicale.39

  Ephemera

  Ephemera—newspapers tucked away in old books, invitations pressed between pages as temporary bookmarks, and countless other material traces—can offer information on the composer to complement the carefully worded, impeccably structured, ghostwritten essays and books he left to the world. They help solve dilemmas about dating, authorship, or compositional intentions, and offer glimpses into the composer’s intimate, human presence. Ephemera offer insight, for example, into Stravinsky’s relationship to the Russian poet he loved the most, Alexander Pushkin. Stravinsky had grown up with Pushkin; his father collected Pushkin rarities and knew Pyotr Yefremov, whose eighth edition of Pushkin’s works was part of Stravinsky’s library.40 Stravinsky may have inherited these volumes from his father’s collection, although it is clear that the marginalia in them belong to neither father nor son. These volumes include Pushkin’s “Tucha” (“The Storm Cloud”), upon which Stravinsky set his first song, the first version of “Favn i pastushka” (The Faun and the Shepherdess), and “Domik v Kolomnè” (“The Little House in Kolomna”), the short story upon which he based Mavra.41

  And yet it is not only this impressive edition that catches the eye in Stravinsky’s library but a small pamphlet by Stravinsky titled “Pushkin: Poetry and Music,” written in 1937 for the centennial of Pushkin’s death and reprinted in Eric White’s classic Stravinsky biography.42 The Paul Sacher Stiftung owns an unsigned typescript of a French original of this essay with handwritten corrections. But who wrote this article? The answer comes in a letter of 4 January 1937 from Stravinsky’s daughter Lyudmila (Mika) and her husband, Yury Mandelshtam. “Tomorrow morning,” Mika writes to Stravinsky, “Yura is going to visit Mama and Grandma. There he will meet Irina Terapiano, to whom he will dictate ‘his’ article, or rather ‘your’ article on Pushkin. He is sending [the article] with this letter. I think you’ll like it since Yura has struck just the right tone he needs when he claims to communicate your opinions.” On the left top corner of the letter Yury adds: “I’m sending you here the Pushkin text. The exact date of his death is 23 January in the old style and 10 February by the new calendar. I’ll be very happy if this all works. I apologize, Igor Fyodorovich, for the poor typescript. I dictated it to I. K. Terapiano and I didn’t have time to have it retyped. She misspelled a few words and even made mistakes, which I had to correct by hand. There was nothing else I could do: in order to send the letter with the Aquitania, I have had to send it telle quelle. It comforts me that this will serve for translation purposes only, and is not intended for immediate publication. Yu.”43 Busy touring the United States for the third time between December 1936 and April 1937, Stravinsky had leaned on his son-in-law, a professional writer and graduate student at the Sorbonne, to write a laudation for Pushkin. In spite of the fact that he didn’t write the essay himself, he must have cared about having his name on it and about celebrating Pushkin’s centenary.

  Stravinsky’s deceptive authorial strategies remained invisible to his contemporaries yet produced a paper trail that allows scholars today to clarify authorship. An omission in the Russian translation of Stravinsky’s ghostwritten Pushkin essay offers a lead to solving another mystery of Stravinsky scholarship.44 This translation was published in the early years of Perestroika, but was probably prepared in the Soviet era, which may explain why its editor, Viktor Varunts, omitted two passages that might have displeased Soviet authorities. The first is the line “Pushkin as the father of the Russian Revolution,” and the second is a passage on Marxist commentators of Pushkin that includes a reference to Stravinsky’s critique of sociological approaches to Beethoven in Chroniques de ma vie. Neither Svetlana Savenko nor Irina Vershinina ever
found the source for the piece of Soviet criticism Stravinsky so diligently critiqued in that work, and which was problematic enough to be omitted in the first Russian translation of the Chroniques in 1963.45

  Leafing through Stravinsky’s own copy of the second volume of his Chroniques (dated by the composer 15 December 1935), I came across a surprising discovery: a folded copy of Ivan Sollertinsky’s original article on Beethoven from the Soviet newspaper Izvestiya, quoted by the composer in the book.46 Stravinsky had clearly read this article, identifying it as “Izvestiya, 1 May 1935.” He also vigorously crossed out a line that he did not cite: “Beethoven is out of favor in the West now. Even the modern musical trendsetter Igor Stravinsky denies him the title of great composer.” This piece of random ephemera reveals that Stravinsky’s invective against Soviet music criticism may have originated in a personal, gut response to what he considered a public insult.

  Ephemera and marginalia not only allow scholars to answer unsolved biographical mysteries, but also offer fascinating insight into Stravinsky’s religious faith. A well-worn, pocket-size prayer book signed and dated “Nice, 1926” includes many notes and a piece of graph paper with the handwritten Russian Orthodox prayer one says before taking any action. The handwriting is that of Yekaterina Stravinsky, Igor’s first wife.47 Stravinsky underlined verses in the Book of Job in a Russian Bible acquired around the same time.48 Stravinsky’s confessor in Nice, Nikolay Podosenov, had compared him to Job, “who lost his children, glory and wealth in a flash.” Podosenov encouraged him to follow Job’s example in condolence letters he sent first after the death of Stravinsky’s daughter in December 1938, and of his wife in June 1939.49 A sheet of paper slipped between the pages of this Bible contains the handwritten Latin text to Stravinsky’s Threni in the composer’s own hand. Stravinsky also read theological and philosophical books including Viktor Nesmelov’s Nauka o cheloveke (The science of man), and wrote two notes—“Great!” and “Absolutely true,” in the sections on doubt in faith and the relationship between religion and scientific thought.50 Dedications in two books from Stravinsky’s library and a tiny note, preserved at Amherst College, attests to Stravinsky’s acquaintance with Archbishop Ioann Shakhovskoy—a prominent figure in the Russian Orthodox Church in America.51 Finally, though Robert Craft claims that Stravinsky stopped attending church in the mid-1950s, and though Vera’s and Igor’s diaries also stop mentioning communions, prayer services (moleben), and funeral services (panikhida) at this time, an Orthodox Calendar for 1967 in the Paul Sacher Stiftung with underlined holy days of certain saints, Lent, and Easter hints at Stravinsky’s continued Orthodox piety in old age.52