Financial hardship forced Rachmaninov, at the age of forty-five, to start a new career as a piano virtuoso, touring Europe or the US every year. His peripatetic lifestyle left little time for composition. But he himself put his failure to compose down to his painful separation from the Russian soiclass="underline" 'When I left Russia, I left behind the desire to compose: losing my country, I lost myself also.'42
In America, where they bought their first home in 1921, and then in France and Switzerland from 1930, the Rachmaninovs tried to re-create the special Russian atmosphere of Ivanovka, holding house parties for their Russian friends: Bunin, Glazunov, Horowitz, Nabokov, Fokine and Heifetz - all were frequent guests. They spoke in Russian, employed Russian servants, Russian cooks, a Russian secretary, consulted Russian doctors and scrupulously observed all the Russian customs such as drinking tea from a samovar and attending midnight mass. Their country house in France, at Clairefontaine near Paris, was purchased because it bordered on a secluded pine wood like the one in which Rachmaninov had liked to walk at Ivanovka. The
Russian atmosphere the couple re-created there was described by their American friends, the Swans, who visited them in 1931:
The chateau-like house, Le Pavilion, protected from the street by a solid wrought fence, lent itself well to this Russian life on a large scale… The wide steps of the open veranda led into the park. The view was lovely: an unpretentious green in front of the house, a tennis court tucked away among shrubs, sandy avenues flanked with tall, old trees, leading into the depths of the park, where there was a large pond. The whole arrangement was very much like that of an old Russian estate… A small gate opened into the vast hunting grounds: pine woods with innumerable rabbits. Rachmaninov loved to sit under the pine trees and watch the pranks of the rabbits. In the morning the big table in the dining room was set for breakfast. As in the country in Russia, tea was served and with it cream, ham, cheese, hard-boiled eggs. Everybody strolled in leisurely. There were no rigid rules or schedules to disturb the morning sleep.43
Gradually, as the old routines of Ivanovka were resumed, Rachmaninov returned to composing music once again - full-blown nostalgic works like the Third Symphony (1936). Western critics were surprised by the conservatism of the symphony's harmonic language, comparing it to the romanticism of a bygone age. But this was to miss its Russianness. The Third Symphony was a retrospective work - a farewell to the Russian tradition - and its whole purpose was to dwell on the spirit of the past. At a rehearsal of the Three Russian Songs (1926) in the USA in the 1930s Rachmaninov implored the chorus to slow down. 'I beg you,' he told the singers, 'do not spoil it for a devout Russian Orthodox churchman. Please, sing more slowly.'44
3
'Our tragedy', wrote Nina Berberova of the younger exiled writers in the 1920s, was 'our inability to evolve in terms of style.'45 The renewal of style entailed a fundamental problem for the emigres. If their purpose as Russian artists was to preserve their national culture, how could they evolve Stylistically without adapting to their new environment and
hence, in some ways, abandoning Russia? The problem mainly affected the younger generation - writers like Nabokov who had 'emerged naked from the Revolution'.46 Older writers like Bunin brought with them to the West an established readership and written style from which they could not break. There was too much pressure on them to continue in the comforting traditions of the past - to churn out plays and stories about nests of Russian gentlefolk - and those who tried to break away were little prized or understood. Tsvetaeva's tragedy - to lose the readership that had sustained her as the rising star of the pre-revolutionary avant-garde - was yet another variant of this experience.
Scattered in bookshops, greyed by dust and time, Unseen, unsought, unopened, and unsold, My poems will be savoured as are rarest wines -When they are old.47
Even Miliukov, former statesman, historian and editor of the Parisian journal Poslednie novosti, said, 'I don't understand Tsvetaeva.'48 But for writers like Nabokov who had yet to find their feet there was little point or prospect in returning to the past. The old generation was dying out and the new becoming less Russian by the day as it assimilated into the mainstream of European culture. To create a new readership such writers had to break out of the mould.
Nabokov was the first major writer to complete this literary metamorphosis. According to Berberova, he was the only Russian-language writer of her generation with the genius to create not just a new style of writing but a new reader, too. 'Through him we learned to identify not with his fictional heroes' - as the nineteenth-century writers expected of their readers - 'but with the author, with Nabokov, and his existential themes became our theme as well.'49 Nabokov always claimed that his writings were not about Russia or the emigres. But exile was their central theme. And even if he saw that as a universal theme, a metaphor of the human condition, the appearance of Nabokov's writings in the Berlin of the 1920s was received by the Russian emigres as an affirmation of their own national identity. Nabokov's writings were proof that 'Russia' (as embodied in its culture) was still with them in the West. As Berberova put it, with the
publication of his first great novel, The Luzhin Defence, in 1930, 'a great Russian writer had been born, like a phoenix from the ashes of the Revolution and exile. Our existence acquired a new meaning. All my generation were justified. We were saved.'50
Exile was Nabokov's omnipresent theme, though he discovered the 'sorrows and delights of nostalgia' long before the Revolution had removed the scenery of his early years.51 Nabokov was born in 1899, the elder son of a highly cultured and prominently liberal aristocratic family from St Petersburg who fled Russia in 1919. His grandfather, Dmitry Nabokov, had been Minister of Justice in the final years of Alexander II's reign, when the Emperor had considered the adoption of a liberal constitution in the European mould. Until his dismissal in 1885, he had opposed the attempts by Alexander III to overturn the liberal judicial reforms of 1864. The writer's father, V. D. Nabokov, was a well-known liberal lawyer and an influential member of the Kadet (Constitutional Democratic) Party in the First Duma of 1906. He had drafted the abdication manifesto of the Grand Duke Mikhail, briefly invited to assume the throne in the February Revolution of 1917, which brought the monarchy to an official end. He had also been head of the Chancellery in the Provisional Government, a sort of executive secretary to the cabinet, and had played a leading role in formulating the electoral system of the Constituent Assembly. The Bolshevik seizure of power forced the Nabokovs to leave Russia, moving first to London and then to Berlin, where the writer's father was the editor of the newspaper Rul' until his assassination by a Russian monarchist in 1922. Throughout his career as a Russian writer in Europe Nabokov kept the pen name 'Sirin' (the name of a legendary bird of paradise in Russian mythology) to set himself apart from his famous father in the emigre community.
The Nabokov family was strongly Anglophile. Its mansion in St Petersburg was filled with 'the comfortable products of Anglo-Saxon civilization', Nabokov wrote in Speak, Memory: