Already the horses were pulling, and we picked up the silver sheen from the Emperor’s dundrearies. The crowd shouted their “Hurrah!” and “Long Live the Emperor!” At that instant a woman plunged forward, and a piece of paper fluttered into the carriage like a consternated bird. A petition! The woman was seized, the carriage stopped, and while plainclothes policemen took her by the shoulders, the Emperor smiled at her, as though to allay the pain the police was doing her. And everyone was convinced the Emperor didn’t know the woman would be locked away. Meanwhile she was taken to a police station, questioned, and released. Her petition would have its effect. The Emperor owed it to himself.
The carriage was gone. The even clopping of the hooves disappeared in the shouting of the crowd. The day had turned oppressively hot. A heavy summer’s day. The clock on the tower struck eight. The sky was a deep azure blue. The trams jingled. The sounds of the world awoke.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 6 March 1928
*Majesty: between 1867 and 1915, the Habsburgs were Emperors of Austria (the Holy Roman Empire) and Kings of Hungary—kaiserlich (imperial) and königlich (royal). This gave rise to the designation ‘Dual Monarchy’, the emblem of the double-headed eagle and the abbreviation “k. and k.”, sometimes jocularly — as by Robert Musil — termed “Kakania”.
IV. USSR
28. The Czarist Émigrés
Long before we thought of visiting the new Russia, the old one came to us. The émigrés brought with them the wild aroma of their homeland, of dispossession, of blood and poverty, of their singular romantic destiny. It suited our clichéd European notions of Russians that they had experienced such things, that they found themselves expelled from their warm hearths, were aimless wanderers through the world, were derailed. We were armed with the old literary formula reflexively applied for every transgression and excess: “the Russian soul”. Europe was familiar with music-hall Cossacks, the operatic excesses of Russian peasant weddings, Russian singers and their balalaikas. It never understood (not even after the Russians turned up on our doorstep) how French romanciers—the most conservative in the world — and sentimental Dostoyevsky readers had deformed the Russian to a kitschy figure compounded of divinity and bestiality, alcohol and philosophy, samovar cosiness and the barren steppes of Asia. As for the Russian woman! A kind of human animal endowed with remorse and adulterous passion, wasteful and rebellious, a writer’s wife and a bomb-maker. The longer the emigration went on, the more our Russians resembled the notion we had of them. They flattered us by assimilating themselves to it. Their feeling of playing a part maybe soothed their misery. They bore it more easily once it was appreciated as literature. The Russian count as Paris cabbie takes his fares straight into a storybook. His fate itself may be ghastly. But it is at least literary.
The anonymous life of the émigrés became a public production. And then they began to make an exhibition of themselves. Hundreds of them founded theatres, choirs, dance groups, balalaika orchestras. For two years they were all new, authentic, stupefying. After a while they became boring and redundant. They lost their connection to their native soil. They grew ever further away from Russia — and Russia from them. Europe had heard of Meyerhold — meanwhile they were still retailing Stanislavsky. The “blue birds” started to sing in French, English and German. Finally they flew to America and started to moult.
The émigrés saw themselves as the only rightful representatives of Russia. What grew to significance in Russia following the Revolution was decried as “un-Russian” or “Jewish” or “cosmopolitan”. Europe had long since got used to seeing Lenin as a representative of Russia. The émigrés were back with Nicholas II. They clung to the past with moving fealty, but they transgressed against history. And they took away from their own tragedy as well.
Oh, but they had to live. That’s why they appeared in staged Cossack gallops in the Paris Hippodrome with alien horses, dressed with crooked Turkish scimitars that they bought at the fair in Clignancourt, took empty bandoliers and blunt daggers out in Montmartre, stuffed catskin bearskins on their heads and inspired awe as Don chieftains outside the doors of tacky establishments, even if they had been born in Volhynia. Some erased their trails with stateless Nansen passports and became archdukes. No one cared anyway. They were all equally good at plucking their homesickness and their melancholy on their balalaikas, putting on red morocco leather boots with silver spurs and spinning round on one heel kicking up their legs. I saw a duchess performing a Russian wedding in a Parisian variété. She was the blushing bride; night-watchmen from the Rue Pigalle, dressed as boyars, stood either side, ranked like flowerpots; a cardboard cathedral sparkled in the background; from it emerged the priest with a candy-floss beard; glass jewels shone in the Russian sun, which emerged from a spotlight; and the band dribbled the song of the Volga into the hearts of the audience from pizzicato violins. The other noblewomen were played by waitresses in various bars, notepads hung from Tula silver chains on their aprons. Their heads sat proudly atop their necks, models of rigid émigré tragedy.
Others, broken, sat slumped on the benches of the Tuileries, the Jardins du Luxembourg, the Viennese Prater, the Berlin Tiergarten, the banks of the Danube in Budapest, and the cafés of Constantinople. They were in touch with the reactionaries of their respective host nations. They sat there and mourned their fallen sons and daughters, their missing wives — but also the gold watch, a present from Alexander III. Many had left Russia because they couldn’t stand “the wretchedness of the country” any more. I know Russian Jews expropriated only a few years before by Denikin and Petljura, who now hate nothing in the world so much as Trotsky, who hasn’t lifted a finger to hurt them. They want the return of their false baptismal certificate with which they once humbly, unworthily sneaked their way into the great forbidden Russian cities.
In the little hotel in the Quartier Latin where I stayed, lived one of the well-known Russian “counts”, along with his father, wife, children and a “bonne”. The old count was still the genuine article. He heated his soup on a spirit burner, and even though I knew him to be a leading anti-Semite and a figure in the exploitation of the peasantry, there was still something moving about him. He would crawl shivering through the damp evenings of autumn, a symbol, no longer a human being, a leaf, dissevered from the tree of life. But his son, brought up abroad, elegantly clad by Parisian tailors, kept by better-off noblemen — the difference! In the telephone exchange he conferred with former life guards, sent birthday greetings to genuine and fake Romanovs, and left kitschy pink billets-doux in the mailboxes of ladies staying in the hotel. He drove to czarist congresses, and he lived like a little émigré god in France. Soothsayers, priests, fortune tellers and theosophists beat a path to his door, all those who knew what the future held for Russia, namely the return of Catherine the Great and the troika, bear-hunts and katorga, Rasputin and the serf system.