Alas, it is too late for me to correct the typos in the Stravinsky. I hope that they will not distort Igor Fyodorovich’s works too much. Given his high standards, strictness, and accuracy, it isn’t entirely clear to me how he could allow these errors and why the publishers would “overlook” them. …
Igor Fyodorovich will probably never understand our fates—— And you, dear friends, all understand them, of course. I implore and beg you to come together with him. I implore and beg you to start working on the visa. Valerian Mikhailovich Bogdanov-Berezovsky, author of the book about Ig. Fyod-ch’s father and the vice chairman of the Leningrad Union of Composers, an excellent gentleman, asks the same. And many other people, musicians, scientists, and, of course, M. V. Alpatov. (I was at their place yesterday.) You are not only NOT!! “not needed by anyone”!! (nonsense, I am sorry!), but needed by all of us both on your own and as the best friends and companions of Igor Fyodorovich. Only with you will this trip truly be on its proper tracks. You are inimitable and irreplaceable, and I don’t see anyone here who could comment on everything and explain it to him truthfully. I am likely insufficient in this sense and do not belong, as you know, to our “notables”—— Vera Arturovna has also been out of Russia for “a hundred years” and will “float” outside of earthly life etc. and cannot be compared to you, obviously. Make this sacrifice, if it is a sacrifice, in the name of what is really important, Stravinsky’s visit. And why would it be a “sacrifice”?—— You will see and experience, without doubt, many wonderful things—— The Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius (now Zagorsk),129 Leningrad, our very own Moscow, the beauty of our autumn, a multitude of kind people, and much, much more both for you and Mariannochka Lvovna—new and interesting, and it is possible that many things here will make you ecstatic! … To be here—with Stravinsky—it is your mission, forgive me! …
Yours,
M. V. Yudina …
26. Pyotr Suvchinsky to Maria Yudina
[Paris]
4 July 1962
… Dear, kind Maria Veniaminovna,—thank you, M. V. Alpatov, and V. M. Bogdanov-Berezovsky for your invitation, but at this time my (our) visit is out of the question. I already wrote you: this is a very complicated matter for me.
Of course, Igor Fyodorovich does not understand many things about today’s Soviet Russia, but he, always and in everything, makes up for it with unusual experience and gumption. Don’t worry—everything will turn out well. …
Yours truly, P. S.
Stravinsky arrived in Moscow on a flight aboard a Soviet TU-104 from Paris on 21 September 1962, accompanied by Robert Craft and Vera Stravinsky. In his widely read account of the event (first published in Encounter), Craft describes the welcome they received at the airport and the pride he felt in his ability to understand the linguistic Babylon he, Stravinsky, and Vera faced there. Craft also incessantly objectifies women in his account of the event, and expresses a deep sense of alienation and condescension toward the appearance and attitudes of his Soviet contemporaries. He recognized the “familiar faces” of Tikhon Khrennikov and Kara Karayev. He also recognized people “familiar-by-resemblance: a woman with the slant eyes Picasso saw in I. S., singing to me in a high voice ‘Je suis la nièce de Monsieur Stravinsky.’ Another short and stout woman, whom I mistake for Jacob Epstein, says ‘Ich bin Yudina,’ and plants a wet kiss. Someone else hands me a birch bark basket containing moss, a twig, a blade of wheat, an acorn, a leaf, telling me (in English) she is the daughter of the poet Konstantin Balmont. Inside the terminal we shake scores of hands and hear dobro pozhalovat over and over, from large, round, smiling faces.”130 The party arrives at the National Hotel, where they drink vodka and sweet champagne, and marvel at the miracle of Stravinsky’s arrival. When Stravinsky reads Shostakovich’s telegram (letter 27, below) aloud for the group, “national sentiment flows with the national champagne, and gets even thicker.”
27. Dmitry Shostakovich to Igor Stravinsky
Leningrad
21 September 1962
The 100-year anniversary celebration of the Conservatory has kept me in Leningrad. I regret very much that I could not meet you. I am sending you my very best wishes.
Dmitry Shostakovich
The Stravinskys remained in the Soviet Union from 21 September to 11 October. The visit pushed to the extreme the lifelong tension Stravinsky felt between his private life and public persona. On the one hand, he shone in his role as an icon of twentieth-century music and prodigal son. He gave concerts on 26 September (described in Jonathan Cross’s essay in this volume, “Stravinsky in Exile”), 28 September, 2 and 8 October, in which he conducted his old Russian favorites with a smattering of neoclassicism: Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, Feu d’artifice, Capriccio, Ode, Symphony in Three Movements, Orpheus, and The Firebird Suite. He also dutifully attended an endless stream of official meetings, receptions, and events. On 25 September, Stravinsky and his entourage paid an official visit to Yekaterina Furtseva, the Minister of Culture. There the question of his public bad-mouthing of the Soviet Union came back to haunt him again. “After the greetings and honors,” Karen Khachaturian, the famous composer’s nephew and a composer in his own right, wrote in his diary, Furtseva “suddenly said, ‘Well, there were times in your life when you really disapproved of us.’ She read him a whole reprimand. I almost fainted. Stravinsky got up and said: ‘I am a Russian, I left Russia before all the events because I was busy with work in Europe. I felt very oppressed by the atmosphere in Russia.’ And he took out a small set of keys: ‘But now you tell me: I had an estate, a family estate, and my things were there, among them a small box of my father’s that I treasured very much. Musorgsky’s letters to my father were in it. All that disappeared, where is all that—are you going to tell me? Yes, I look critically at certain things that I don’t like in Russia, but this is my homeland and I have the right to criticize it, just like my wife. But if a stranger admonishes her I will beat him. So don’t you admonish me, my relationship is not with you but with my homeland.’”131 After this confrontation the visits continued unabated, culminating in a private meeting with Khrushchev on 11 October.132
The Union of Soviet Composers dominated Stravinsky’s itinerary; visits and activities with them were organized almost every day of his trip. He discussed twelve-tone technique with composers there on 5 and 7 October; listened to works by Georgy Sviridov, Vadim Salmanov, Galina Ustvolskaya, and Edvard Mirzoyan, and met Boris Tishchenko and Sergey Slonimsky, who remembers him as more interested in talking about himself than examining the scores of Soviet composers.133 During a discussion with young composers on serialism after a rehearsal on 8 October, he apparently quipped to Khrennikov, to everybody’s general amusement, “You too, Tikhon Nikolayevich, will be trying it soon.”134 The mood became more serious when the composers asked why Stravinsky wanted to “visit his homeland.”135 “I decided to come because it seemed to me that my arrival will help revitalize your music, which is—although perhaps already to a lesser degree now—oriented toward the nineteenth century. That’s horrible, it’s reactionary—after all, in the first half of the century Russian art rushed out to the forefront. The Russian people have an enormous hidden potential that was artificially restrained and hindered—— My arrival is supposed to help musicians get past this impasse with greater determination. I am not a politician, I did not come to my homeland to give political speeches. I am a musician, and through my music I want to help you, so that your music will be turned not toward the past but the future. In that I see my mission, my duty.”136
Behind the façade of public pronouncements and official obligations, Stravinsky experienced his visit as a profoundly private and emotional event, the intensity of his feeling magnified by the pain of his almost fifty-year absence: he visited his old haunts, relished newfound attachments to all things Russian, and reminisced nostalgically about the past. His niece Xenia (the daughter of his older brother Yury, who had died in 1941) restored a lost sense of family connection; the two shared s
tories of their family history during a visit to her apartment on the Kryukov Canal. Stravinsky was also surrounded by old acquaintances: Lina Prokofiev137 came to vist, among many others. Rozhdestvensky gave Stravinsky the gift of a score he had bought—a copy of Debussy’s Préludes with Debussy’s dedication to Stravinsky on the cover—thereby indirectly informing him for the first time that his library at Ustilug had indeed been plundered and his books sold.138 By all accounts, Stravinsky and Vera were profoundly moved by these personal encounters, and by the reacquaintance with their home. Craft reports how they were already feeling pro-Soviet after one day there, and how they started to discuss false images of the Soviet Union propagated in the United States. “They are at home,” he realizes. “The schizophrenic U.S./U.S.S.R situation does not bother them at all, and forty-eight years abroad have not brainwashed them in the least. Their abiding emotion is an intense pride in everything Russian.”139
Yet the Russia Stravinsky characterized in French to Robert Craft as their plane was descending over Moscow as “caviar and shit” aroused in him immensely ambivalent feelings.140 This ambivalence crystalized around the figure of Shostakovich, whom he was now eager to meet. Karen Khachaturian remembered how he kept asking from the moment he arrived, “Where is Shostakovich?”141 The two composers had an opportunity to play out their differences when they sat next to each other at an elaborate reception hosted by Minister of Culture Furtseva on 1 October. Shostakovich “chews not merely his nails but his fingers,” Craft wrote condescendingly, “twitches his pouty mouth and chin, chain-smokes, wiggles his nose in constant adjustment of his spectacles, looks querulous one moment and ready to cry the rest.” Although Craft did not speak Russian and experienced the event through his translator Alexandra Alexandrovna Afonina, he remembered Stravinsky standing up and declaring, “A man has one birthplace, one fatherland, one country—he can have only one country—and the place of his birth is the most important factor in his life. I regret that circumstances separated me from my fatherland, that I did not bring my works to birth there and, above all, that I was not there to help the new Soviet Union create its new music. But I did not leave Russia only by my own will, even though I admit that I disliked much in my Russia and in Russia generally—but the right to criticize Russia is mine, because Russia is mine and because I love it. I do not give any foreigner that right.”142 Karen Khachaturian described the same dinner far less dramatically, and could recall only that Stravinsky and Shostakovich tried in vain to strike up a conversation about Puccini.143 At a farewell dinner on 10 October, Shostakovich sat at Stravinsky’s side, “looking even more frightened and tortured than at the first conclave, probably because he thinks a speech is expected of him,” according to Robert Craft. Shostakovich apparently told Stravinsky he was “overwhelmed” by the Symphony of Psalms and had completed his own piano score, to which Stravinsky deviously responded that he shared Shostakovich’s high regard for Mahler. “Poor Shostakovich starts to melt,” Craft reports, “then quickly freezes again as I. S. continues with ‘But you should go beyond Mahler.’” Craft again: “Toward the end of the evening, and after drinking several zubrovkas, Shostakovich pathetically confessed that he would like to follow I. S.’s example, and conduct his own music, ‘But I don’t know how not to be afraid.’”144 Shostakovich, for his part, may not have been as frightened and starstruck as Craft claims. Later Shostakovich remarked “Stravinsky the composer, I worship. Stravinsky the thinker, I despise.”145
Maria Yudina fell through the cracks of Stravinsky’s high-profile visit. Neither Stravinsky’s close friend, nor a valued male competitor, nor an official representative of the state, and disrespected by Craft, she found herself excluded from Stravinsky’s social calendar. Craft noted that she didn’t “sit smoothly with the powers of the Composers’ Union.” When she “pops a book from under the table and attempts to make them listen to her read religious philosophy from it” during a luncheon at the Composers’ Union on 6 October after her performance of Stravinsky’s Septet and a student performance of the Octet, “strong expressions of dislike are exchanged on both sides.” Stravinsky acted oblivious to her suffering and cautious in his contact with her. He left the Soviet Union on 11 October 1962. Four days later, the Cuban Missile Crisis began.
28. Maria Yudina to Marianna and Pyotr Suvchinsky
Moscow
October 1962
Dear, dear Marianna L'vovna and Pyotr Petrovich!
I am returning to life as if after a typhoid fever, after an adventure on a stormy sea, after dreams of the most fantastical nature from which I couldn’t awake——
—Yes, this was Stravinsky, living and breathing, in the flesh, the great Master and at the same time—the sweetheart Igor Fyodorovich, the wit, the tender familiar friend, endlessly close—— But he was surrounded by a multi-person entourage the barbed wire of which was impossible to penetrate; add to this countless paparazzi, reporters, and also simply onlookers insolently barging in (to rehearsals), pseudo-artists, insolent musicians with stupid things to say, ladies of various ages with bouquets; the main thing is that I was in Leningrad almost the whole time preparing the exhibit, and when he was there himself—I was feverishly learning the Septet—— But I went back and forth 4 times during this period, I met him [upon his arrival], went to 3 rehearsals (in Moscow), his and Craft’s, and one in Leningrad, went to 1 (the main) program, saw him 2 times (briefly) at the “National,”146 at our completely ruined ballets,147 when he—alas—went to see them—— The entourage was composed of Craft’s translator, Tikhon and his wife, Karen Khachaturian (he is actually cute), Stravinsky’s niece Xenia Yuryevna, she’s nice—— Everything I planned didn’t work out—i.e. Zagorsk, the Rublev Museum—the most serene place in Moscow itself (the restored Andronikov Monastery, where Rublev is buried),148 a modest tea at my place with the Alpatovs and Lina Ivanovna with her sweetest youngest son Oleg, a visit to a spiritual person, a very educated individual—— etc. Even a visit to the Scriabin Museum, mainly for the sake of the new instrument. … Once in Leningrad, Igor Fyodorovich himself sent for me to eat lunch with him, but I did not succeed in steering the conversation onto more substantial tracks, the same thing as happened in Leningrad after the concert—— The whole time I had the impression it was going in one ear and out the other—— Craft was on the run the whole time too, and Vera Arturovna produced a strange effect, as if she was exhausted to the point of collapse, as she apparently was!! It’s likely, as she isn’t so young!!—— Only once did she say to me, “You are truly something out of a fairy tale!”—— I could not (and wouldn’t have wanted even if I could, as I am completely in debt, and there are poor, extremely poor people!) give them expensive presents, but I gave them all some of my best books (even that old one about Peter I’s cabinet of curiosities), that honey which I. F. loves, jam from the blackthorn in my garden—— But they were showered, it seems, with expensive and flashy gifts. They delighted in everything, as if they were big children, and that was charming. But all this is “menschliches”149—— When it comes to art, I. F. amazed everyone with his conducting, especially Firebird in Leningrad; this was the peak of his might, so to speak—— But in the end, Orpheus came alive during the 1st concert and was grandiose; in rehearsal it had been somewhat dead; I don’t dare ascribe anything to myself, but in the intermission I chatted with many of the musicians, with the concertmasters, showed them photographs of stagings (Balanchine, Munich, and others) and sparked their imagination; maybe this helped a little bit—— Don’t be angry with me for writing this, but ah, the musicians are so far from myth—— I even said this to them; about the Ode to Natalia Koussevitsky Igor Fyodorovich spoke (very well and clearly), but apparently thought that everyone knew everything about Orpheus already—— Or his genius hands (and not my modest words) awoke at least artistic pride in the musicians, [the inspiration] to play without fluttering their bows, by gliding across the instrument——
It’s a terrible shame that they did The Fairy�
�s Kiss in Leningrad, poor Craft got stuck in it, that composition does not flatter Stravinsky. For some reason, the symphony In Memoriam Debussy150 disappeared. … I was satisfied with Craft the conductor; I don’t need “temperament,” gestures, sparkle. … I thought he conducted the Sacre magnificently. But 90% of people prefer Markevich——151 I have to tell you, however, as a phenomenally close friend, that I think Robert committed a faux pas when after the Sacre and the first bows, he turned to the loge where I. F. and V. Art. were sitting and blew kisses in that direction—— Here, such tricks are [considered] unpleasant and primitive; it doesn’t go well with his abstractness; I became very embarrassed for him, but did not tell him that, naturally; I pushed through all the admiring rabble to him with 2 bouquets of genuine small roses from one of the local greenhouses and a crystal goblet full of truffles for Robert; and the next day—again to Leningrad, and so on. … I was at the rehearsal in Leningrad; during intermission, in the Philharmonia’s Red Salon there was a wonderful lecture with the “scientific-student” community, there were about 50 young people, conductors, by the way—Gennady Rozhdestvensky tagged along behind Igor Fyodorovich—and older composers; they asked smart and stupid questions, but Igor Fyodorovich—as always, spoke grandiosely: simply, sharply, “incisively,” as he himself said about something else, when necessary—cagey, when necessary, “head-on” (Meyerhold’s expression). He praised Boulez, and partly praised Stockhausen, recommended the serial and dodecaphonic technique, its discipline, explained its role in music history (the changing eras). Everyone was shocked, stunned, happy; moi-même152—in particular; toward the end, when everyone was leaving, I greeted him with my favorite quote “spiritus flat ubi vult,”153 i.e. he has now told us what is most important, he broke into smiles and answered: “ubi, ubi154—in Leningrad!!”—Of course, I didn’t get to Oranienbaum and Peterhof!155 The exhibit was mounted half an hour before its opening; the fact that I. F. shortened his stay in Leningrad by 2 days was particularly torturous, especially for me, I was already sleeping only 2–3 hours a night, couldn’t be at the most simpatico reception of the Leningrad composers, where there were serious conversations, where there are outstanding people (and he himself [was] particularly pleased with the reception!); during my workday, I would suddenly fall asleep for 3 minutes and ask myself, “Where am I, Moscow or Leningrad?”—— It’s likely that they told delightful tales of Peterhof and Oranienbaum. The autumn was divine, almost without rain, wie gerufen!!156—It was lovely at the aerodrome upon his arrival, although the departure for some reason carried an Arakchevian157 (now outdated) character. I am still taken aback, how some have gone and some remain—— Well, we left quickly, me, Balmont’s daughter, Alpatov, the Radio editor, the old sculptor Kepinov,158 an old admirer of Vera Art[urovna]. Someone had heard Tikhon saying to someone else: “Pare people down!”—— And I cherished: “The hour of departure is more alive than the meeting itself”——159 God judged otherwise … —My quill won’t write— I’ll end this letter. I will write more soon. Write to me, I beg you. …
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