88. Mrakobesï: obscurantist (literally “demon of darkness”)—a popular derogatory term used in the Soviet Union to disparage political reactionaries and religious fanatics, here applied to the reactionary Soviet leadership.
89. Stravinsky does not mention here and may not have known that Yudina performed his Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments for the first time with Roman Matsov conducting the Estonian Radio Symphony Orchestra on 27 October 1961.
90. Stravinsky had known Dr. Maurice Gilbert in Geneva since visiting his son Théodore there in 1952, and Dr. Gilbert treated him when he suffered a stroke while on tour in Switzerland and Germany in 1957.
91. Catherine Gayer (b. 1937) is a U.S. coloratura soprano who sang at the Deutsche Oper Berlin after 1961. She performed Mozart, Donizetti, Strauss, jazz, and cabaret, as well as contemporary music.
92. A Schoenberg festival took place at the Domaine musical on 6 December 1961.
93. Mikhail Alpatov (1902–1986) was a Soviet art historian and member of the USSR Academy of Arts after 1954, and Yudina’s close friend.
94. Yudina sent the program of her concert on 29 September 1961.
95. Aleksey Remizov (1877–1957) was a Russian writer who emigrated to Paris in 1921. See Tatiana Baranova, “Stravinsky’s Russian Library,” in this volume.
96. Maxim Gorky (1868–1936). Suvchinsky traveled with Sviatopolk-Mirsky to visit Gorky in Sorrento, Italy, over Christmas 1927. Dmitry Sviatopolk-Mirsky (1890–1939) was a Russian political and literary historian, and founding member of the Eurasianist movement. He lived in England after 1917 but returned to the Soviet Union in 1932. The NKVD arrested him in 1937 and he died in a gulag near Magadan in 1939.
97. This piece was not performed in the concert.
98. Yudina’s recording of Stravinsky’s Sonata and Serenade were released on the Soviet label Melodiya Blue Torch in 1962, and reissued by harmonia mundi in 1986.
99. This program, with some changes, took place on 10 January 1962 at the Leningrad House of Composers. Yudina repeated it on 6 October 1962 in the presence of Stravinsky, but played only the Septet on the latter concert.
100. The second International Tchaikovsky Competition took place in Moscow in spring 1962.
101. Boris Pasternak, “Marburg,” 1916; rev. 1928. The line actually reads: “Someone whistling loudly fashioned a crossbow/and someone planned silently for Trinity Fair.”
102. The ballet company of the Leningrad State Academic Maly Opera Theater performed Konstantin Boyarsky’s choreography of Stravinsky’s Orpheus on 26 March 1962. Yudina discusses the choice of Orpheus in a letter to Suvchinsky, 5 November 1961, VIR, 702–706.
103. Kasyan Yaroslavich Goleizovsky (1892–1970) was a Russian avant-garde choreographer who staged dances for The Bat (Chauve-Souris) after 1916. He also established an important dance studio in the Soviet Union in the 1920s.
104. Yudina consistently refers to Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments as his “First Concerto.” This was one of her favorite pieces of his. See Yudina to Suvchinsky, 10 November 1959, VIR, 171–74. Suvchinsky once told her amusingly about his experience of the premiere of this work in Paris in 1924, when he had the unenviable task of “hiding” Stravinsky from Maximilian Steinberg, whom he did not like and did not want to see. See Suvchisnky to Yudina, 17 January 1961, ibid., 455–57.
105. Yudina recorded Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments with Gennady Rozhdestvensky conducting the State TV and Radio Committee Grand Symphony Orchestra on 5 August 1962.
106. Dieu vous garde! translates as “God bless you!” and “T[out] àV[ous]–Votre Rossinante” translates as “All the best, your Rocinante.” Rocinante was Don Quixote’s horse.
107. Stravinsky responds here to Khrennikov’s second invitation of 11 September 1961.
108. Stravinsky may not have wanted to travel to the Soviet Union for his eightieth birthday for the same reason that he did not want to meet President Kennedy on that day—as he wrote Nicolas Nabokov on 3 January, he wanted to celebrate with family and friends. It appears he may have been wary of his birthday being used by either side to political ends. See Walsh, Stravinsky: A Second Exile, 447, 449.
109. See Craft, Dialogues and a Diary, 199–200. See also Jay Mulvaney and Paul De Angelis, Dear Mrs. Kennedy: The World Shares Its Grief, Letters November 1963 (New York: Macmillan, 2010): 134–35; and Walsh, Stravinsky: A Second Exile, 448, 551.
110. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Journals: 1952–2000 (London: Penguin, 2007), 146.
111. Stravinsky is referring here to Arthur Schlesinger, who had also helped to arrange Stravinsky’s visit to the White House through the intermediary of his close friend Nicolas Nabokov.
112. Here Stravinsky uses the noun mrakobesie (obscurantism) rather than the name for persons mrakobesï (obscurantists). This postcard is unsigned.
113. Nathalie Sarraute (1900–1999), Michel Butor (b. 1926), and Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922–2008) were representatives of the 1950s literary trend of the nouveau roman.
114. Stravinsky sent this card to thank Yudina for sending a copy of Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovskiy, Fyodor Stravinskiy (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1951).
115. Pierre Souvtchinsky, “Le Miracle du Sacre du printemps (Tradition et inspiration),” unpublished text in French taken from the draft of Un Siècle de musique russe, and read on the “Stravinsky-Zyklus” on Radio Cologne, 2 February 1962. This text was published in part in Jean-Pierre Wilhelm’s German translation as “Das Wunder des Sacre du printemps: Tradition und Inspiration,” in Igor Stravinsky: Eine Sendereihe des W.D.R. zum 80. Geburtstag, ed. Otto Tomek (Cologne: Westdeutscher Rundfunk, 1963).
116. Stravinsky traveled to Israel from 29 August to 7 September 1962.
117. In contrast to Stravinsky’s minimizing of Yudina’s influence on his decision to travel to the Soviet Union (he sees her as less important than the officials he will anger), Suvchinsky wrote Yudina on 26 March 1962 that Stravinsky had decided to travel to Moscow precisely because she had made him realize the significance of his trip. See DD, 72.
118. This letter is included in DD, 177–84. Svetlana Savenko believes it is misdated 30 April 1962.
119. Stravinsky writes this sentence in French: “‘Les échanges culturels’ avec les marxistes occidentaux ‘qui se dressent contre l’art décadent formaliste et inhumain du monde bourgeois.’”
120. Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890–1960).
121. Suvchinsky is referring to how Stravinsky is described in the index of E. L. Frid’s Miliy Alekseyevich Balakirev: Issledovaniya i stat'i (Leningrad: Gos. Muzïkal'noye izd-vo, 1961), 443, in reference to where his name appears in the book in Abram Gozenpud’s article “Neosushchestvlyonnïy opernïy zamïsel.”
122. Suvchinsky uses the derogatory term stilyaga, which refers to fashion-conscious people (stilyaga comes from stil, style), wore flared jeans and colored vests, and listened to jazz. Suvchinsky uses the term figuratively to describe young, Western-oriented Soviet composers for whom Stravinsky was an obsolete figure.
123. Suvchinsky is referring to the Leningrad State Academic Maly Opera Theater’s production of Stravinsky’s Orpheus on 26 March 1962.
124. Here Suvchinsky repeats the very questions he asked Yudina about the Union of Soviet Composers at the end of his letter of 12 March 1962 (letter 19).
125. Stravinsky travelled to South Africa on 18 May 1962 as a guest of the South African Broadcasting Corporation. “Le Cape” refers to Capetown.
126. Suvchinsky uses the French word tournées.
127. At the end of this letter, Suvchinsky discusses the importance of Lawrence Morton’s article on Stravinsky in Encyclopédie de la musique (Paris: Fasquelle, 1959–61).
128. Yudina was using her own resources and finances to create “Stravinskyana,” an exhibit of photographs documenting Stravinsky’s life and works at the Leningrad House of Composers. She requested materials for the exhibit from Suvchinsky in a telegram dated 12 May 1962. DD, 198–99.
> 129. Zagorsk, today called Sergiyev Posad, is a town on the outskirts of Moscow and home of the Russian monastery Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius.
130. Xenia Stravinsky says in French, “I am the niece of Mr. Stravinsky,” and Maria Yudina says in German, “I am Yudina.” Jacob Epstein was an American-born British sculptor, and dobro pozhalovat means “welcome” in Russian. See Robert Craft, Dialogues and a Diary, 225–26.
131. “‘Ya bïl rozhden dlya muzïki’: Beseda S. Savenko s K. S. Khachaturyanom,” 222.
132. Craft, Dialogues and a Diary, 262–65, also published as Robert Craft, “Stravinsky talks with Khrushchev,” Vogue 142/8 (1 November 1963): 134–35, 184–85, 187–89.
133. Schmelz, Such Freedom, If Only Musical, 60–61.
134. Craft, Dialogues and a Diary, 257–58. For Khrennikov’s account of Stravinsky’s visit, see “‘On umer drugom svoyey rodiny.’” For an official Soviet view of these events, see Izrail' Nest'yev, “Vechera Igorya Stavinskogo,” Sovetskaya muzïka 12 (December 1962): 92–95.
135. Stravinsky had underlined the word homeland twice in a letter he received from Yudina back on 29 April 1960. A bit later in the letter, after the word visit, he had written in the margin: “How strange—‘visiting’ the ‘Homeland.’ That is our tragedy, that we can only be invited to visit this ‘Homeland.’” Yudina, VIR, 297. Stravinsky had shared this comment with Suvchinsky, who had found it so remarkable that he had repeated it in somewhat modified form in a letter to Yudina, 12 May 1960, VIR, 309.
136. “‘Ya bïl rozhdyon dlya muzïki': Beseda S. Savenko s K. S. Khachaturyanom,” 222. Stravinsky had commented similarily to the press months before his visit to Russia that “nostalgia has no part in my proposed visit to Russia. My wish to go there is due primarily to the evidence I have received of a genuine desire or need for me by the younger generation of Russian musicians. No artist’s name has been more abused in the Soviet Union than mine, but one cannot achieve the future we must achieve with the Russians by nursing a grudge.” “Stravinsky at 80,” Newsweek, 21 May 1962, 54. Stravinsky appeared on the cover of this issue.
137. Lina Prokofiev (1897–1989), maiden name Kodina, also used the artist name Lina L'yubera. She was Prokofiev’s first wife.
138. Craft, Dialogues and a Diary, 234. Stravinsky could not return to Ustilug because it was closed to foreigners.
139. Ibid., 230.
140. “Caviar et merde,” quoted in ibid., 224.
141. Karen Khachaturian in conversation with Elizabeth Wilson, quoted in Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, 375; and in Walsh, Stravinsky: A Second Exile, 467.
142. Craft, Dialogues and a Diary, 246.
143. See Khachaturian’s remarks in Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, 375–76.
144. Craft, Dialogues and a Diary, 262. Craft’s judgmental portrayal of Shostakovich mirrors that of the U.S. reporters in 1949.
145. Shostakovich in a letter dated 9 September 1971, quoted in Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, 377.
146. The National is a famous hotel in Moscow, built in 1903.
147. Yudina is referring to the Leningrad State Academic Maly Opera Theater’s staging of Petrushka, Orpheus, and Firebird in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses on 25 September 1962. Stravinsky was not pleased with the performance, and the next morning told his niece Xenia, “You have no idea how unhappy I was yesterday!” Quoted in Kseniya Stravinskaya, O I. F. Stravinskom i ego blizkikh (Leningrad: Muzïka, 1978), 116. See also Walsh, Stravinsky: A Second Exile, 464.
148. The Andrey Rublev Museum of Ancient Russian Art is housed in the Andronikov Monastery in Moscow.
149. “Human”; perhaps a reference to Nietzsche’s Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (1878).
150. Symphonies d’instruments à vent.
151. Igor Markevich was a Ukranian composer and conductor, and old acquaintance of Stravinsky’s and Suvchinsky’s from the Ballets Russes days. He conducted works by Stravinsky in the USSR numerous times after 1959.
152. In English, “me personally.”
153. Latin: “The spirit blows where it will.”
154. Latin: “Where, where.”
155. Peterhof is a residence/imperial palace about 30 kilometers outside of Petersburg. Stravinsky was born in Oranienbaum, on the outskirts of the city. The composer went on excursions to both places while in Russia.
156. German: “as if made to order.”
157. Arakcheyevshchina, named after Aleksey Arakcheyev, is a derogatory term to describe a military state or oppressive regime.
158. Grigory Kepinov (1886–1966) was an Armenian sculptor.
159. A quote from Pushkin’s “Flowers of Autumn” (1825). The original reads: “Just as the pain of separation is stronger than the sweet of date.”
160. Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) was a Russian philosopher and literary critic who had been active in the Soviet Union since the 1920s but became widely known after the 1960s.
161. “As always.”
162. Lyubov Shaporina (1879–1967) translated Stravinsky’s Autobiography into Russian as Khronika moyey zhizni (Leningrad: Gozmuzizdat, 1963).
163. Stravinsky had two adult sons, Soulima and Théodore, and one living daughter, Milena.
164. See Pedagogues of the Khabarovsk Music School to Izvestiya, 7 March 1963, in DD, 442–46. See also Peter Schmelz, Such Freedom, If Only Musical, 89n63, 90n67.
165. Ampenova worked at Boosey and Hawkes.
166. Yudina writes “Craft-chislo.” Chislo is the Russian word for numeral or integer, and is a synonym for tsifra, which shares the same root as “cipher.” This word conveys Yudina’s impression of Craft as “an absolutely abstract person” in her letter to Yelena and Mikhail Bakhtin (no. 29).
167. Igor, Vera, and Robert Craft.
168. Yudina sent Stravinsky Viktor Lazarev’s Andrey Rublev: Al'bom reproduktsiy (Moscow: Sovetskiy khudozhnik, 1960).
169. Xenia Yuryevna Stravinsky.
170. See Xenia Stravinsky to Yudina, 8 June 1963, in DD, 527–28.
171. Over the Barriers is a 1917 collection of poetry by Pasternak.
172. Aufbinden, in the sense of forcing something onto someone.
173. Yudina quotes this line from Konstantin Balmont’s poem “Wordlessness” (1900). The line actually reads “Your heart did forgive / but your heart became lifeless.”
174. See Ralph Parker, “Stravinsky in Russia,” The New Statesman, 2 November 1962.
175. In a letter to Marianna and Pyotr Suvchinsky from 24–29 September 1963, Yudina explained further that Stravinsky had sensed her lack of official position and stayed far away from her in Russia, and that she didn’t want to complain about him but her “heart has cooled” and she no longer wanted to write either him, the “wilted” Vera, or the “cipher-Craft.” See DD, 597–600.
“The Precision of Poetry and the Exactness of Pure Science”: Nabokov, Stravinsky, and the Reader as Listener
LEON BOTSTEIN
Parallel Lives
In his meticulously prepared compendium of interviews, Strong Opinions, Vladimir Nabokov reprinted a 1970 response to a question posed by Alfred Appel about whether he knew Igor Stravinsky, “another outspoken émigré.” Nabokov replied, “I know Mr. Stravinsky very slightly and have never seen any genuine sample of his outspokenness in print.”1 Nabokov’s response to Appel, one of the first and most respected of Nabokov scholars, revealed an uncanny but not unexpected doubt about Stravinsky’s role in the authorship of the (by then) extensive accumulation of Stravinsky-Craft volumes of conversations. The questions about Robert Craft’s role and who was responsible for what appeared in print as Stravinsky’s words remain matters of controversy.2 Craft’s contribution was, if not decisive, then certainly substantial. He confessed to Stephen Walsh, with pride, that one reviewer of the 1959 Conversations expressed the opinion that “the two finest writers of English prose” were Russians: Nabokov and Stravinsky.3
The idea that Stravinsky was considered a “fine writer” sure
ly irritated Nabokov. Such a notion revealed a familiar philistinism and stupidity, not entirely unrelated to the evils of poshlost', Nabokov’s term for the fake suggestion of genuine art, refinement, and judgment so rampant in so-called civilized society.4 Nabokov’s subtly worded skepticism about the authorship of the volumes anticipated what has remained for scholars a source of ambiguity with respect to understanding Stravinsky, particularly in his American years. It seems that everything Stravinsky published, from his Autobiography of 1935 and 1936 to the 1939 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures and the volumes with Craft was, if not ghostwritten, then the work of close collaboration.5 This does not disqualify the utility of what was published under Stravinsky’s name as sources for understanding Stravinsky. But there are no grounds for elevating the composer to the stature of Nabokov as a writer.6
Nabokov’s aside about Stravinsky also needs to be read within the context of the writer’s persistent comments about his own weak relationship to music. Even if we accept Nabokov’s humorous descriptions of his imperviousness to music, the contact between these two prominent émigrés during the American exile they shared was unexpectedly minimal, as many have noted.7 They appear to have barely known each other. Stravinsky seems not to have read Nabokov, neither during the 1930s in Russian, nor in English in the 1950s and 1960s. After 1940 Nabokov took pains to protest his lack of musicality, even though he took ironic pride in being a descendant of Carl Heinrich Graun, a minor but well-regarded eighteenth-century composer, and took genuine pleasure that his only son, Dimitri, became an opera singer. “I have no ear for music—a shortcoming I deplore bitterly,” he confessed in a 1964 Playboy interview.8 Nabokov admitted to retaining a memory of unwanted attendance at operas during his childhood and having once translated Schubert song texts into Russian, but officially the art of music was foreign to him. “Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds,” he wrote in Speak, Memory. In underscoring his distance from most modern poetry in 1969, he quipped: “I know as little about today’s poetry as about new music.”9 Nonetheless, Alfred Appel suggested in 1967 that Nabokov was perhaps protesting too much about his lack of connection to music, an idea now increasingly supported in the critical literature.10 Appel argued that Nabokov’s obsessions with memory, consciousness, time, and the structure of the novel all took on explicitly musical metaphors and analogies; perhaps Nabokov, by dismissing his connection to music, was following a time-honored tradition of intentionally throwing off his would-be interpreters.
Stravinsky and His World Page 46