They were nostalgic and bitter, clutching at any thread of their upended, pre-revolution lives. They gathered for weekly literary and poetry readings, transplanted Russian theatre and ballet to Paris and Berlin – all on a shoestring budget. Aristocrats and grandees who had been used to unlimited entitlement were now scraping by in humiliating poverty. As Vladimir Nabokov put it: ‘Hardly palpable people who imitated in foreign cities a dead civilization, the remote, almost legendary, almost Sumerian mirages of St Petersburg and Moscow.’4
To the exiles, the Bolshevik revolution still seemed like a gigantic, cosmic accident – ‘that trite deus ex machina’, in the words of Nabokov – that would soon be righted. During the civil war, from 1917–20, propaganda newspapers published in Europe by the monarchist forces all gave optimistic accounts of the desperation faced by the Red forces. Even after the Red victory proved them all wrong, and even after the formation of the USSR, most of the émigré community believed that the new regime would not last more than a few years. They continued eagerly to read news of starvation and bad harvests. Believing that their exile would only be a matter of months – or a year at most – many were even reluctant to buy furniture. Few bothered to learn a new language. And while there were no barriers to their travel to the Americas, north or south, it is curious that so few elected to go there; the vast majority preferred to stay in countries that bordered on, or were close to, Russia.
What is remarkable in the accounts of many émigrés is this fervent belief that they would be returning imminently. For example, when the Czech government helped set up a Russian law school in Prague, it was aimed at émigrés whose sole purpose in studying was to prepare for a career as a civil servant or lawyer in post-communist Russia. It attracted over 500 students before its doors closed in 1927.
For the exiles, any contact with the homeland was a near sacred experience. For Trubetskoy in 1922, getting a piece of mail from Moscow was like ‘getting a letter from the moon’, as he wrote back to his friend Fedor Petrovsky, who had tracked him down in Sofia. Petrovsky had been a classmate of Trubetskoy’s, a specialist in Latin, who had stayed behind in Moscow. Trubetskoy marvelled at the fact that the mail actually operated between Sofia and Moscow: ‘Here we go this way and that and then in the end all we have to do is stick a stamp on an envelope.’5
Trubetskoy’s life in Sofia was ‘none too flashy’, he wrote. The Bulgarian capital was clearly the ‘result of a struggle between Vienna and Tula [a Russian provincial town], in which the latter got the better. Intellectual, artistic and spiritual pursuits here basically do not exist. In this lies the main distinction from Tula. But the people are nice.’6
Trubetskoy’s disdain for his new home was typical of the Russian exiles in Europe. It was matched only by their breathless long-distance love affair with their homeland, a place that was alive in their memory, but to which it was for the most part impossible to return while the communists were in power. As Trubetskoy told Petrovsky:
You cannot imagine what happiness every stroke of the pen from our homeland brings to us, living among strangers. In general, all of my acquaintances abroad have more or less settled down and would all be happy, if there did not lie on each one of us a heavy stone of separation from Russia and from loved ones, and terrible concern over the fate of those close to us.7
Nowhere was the misguided optimism of the exiles more apparent than in politics. Everywhere, Russian émigrés were making preparations for the Bolsheviks’ imminent collapse and their own triumphant return. Political parties – monarchists, socialists, fascists, liberals – all recruited members, published journals and newspapers, held congresses, created governments in exile, raised funds and jostled to be crowned rulers of post-communist Russia. These included the two main monarchist parties: one organized in 1922 by Grand Duke Cyril, who proclaimed himself ‘emperor of all Russias’; the other formed by his cousin, Grand Duke Nikolay Nikolaevich. Non-monarchist parties of various stripes also sprang up like mushrooms. There were the Constitutional Democrats (the ‘Kadets’ for short), a liberal party established in tsarist Russia. And there was also the Socialist Revolutionary party (the SRs or ‘Esers’), formed of moderate socialists. Both had been in power under the provisional government after the end of the monarchy in 1917, but before the Bolshevik coup of that October. Both presented themselves as the only alternative for Russia that would suit the twentieth century.
Trubetskoy – the scion of one of Russia’s leading families, whose father had been rector of Moscow University, and who himself was a formidable public intellectual, despite his relative youth – could not remain aloof from the question of Russia’s future. About the time he first wrote to Jakobson from exile, Trubetskoy was already moving in émigré circles, finding like-minded intellectuals and publishing his first political writings. For the next decade he would divide his time between his scholarly pursuits in linguistics and his political organizing.
His politics were partly moulded by his friendships, but his political views were clearly an expression of the scholarship that he and Jakobson were pioneering. Indeed, many of the concepts he and Jakobson would use to revolutionize linguistics were explored first in Trubetskoy’s political writings. Like many Russian intellectuals before him, he pursued his conclusions to the farthest limit, turning a theory of linguistic meaning into a view of world history and grand political doctrine. The recurring theme in his political writings and in his scholarship was the primacy of culture. He saw culture through the lens of his linguistics studies – something essential, vibrant and real, rather than something ephemeral and decorative as the nineteenth century had held. The pre-war academic establishment had seen culture as something one could assign to various rungs on the ladder of human progress, some cultures more advanced than others. Trubetskoy saw all cultures as roughly equivalent, in the sense that their primary purpose was to communicate.
Culture in Trubetskoy’s view was also something opposite to history. The nineteenth century had sought the origins of all things, from geology to music and language. Trubetskoy and Jakobson, however, believed that culture evolved exclusively due to cultural variables obeying their own inner logic, and not the random cause and effect of wars, migrations and the like. The origins, in other words, were less important than finding the rules, symmetries and systems by which cultural change occurred. In culture, Trubetskoy would attempt to find a third way between two opposing ideologies – Western liberal capitalism and Soviet communism – both premised, consciously or unconsciously, on the unyielding dogma of universal history.
CHAPTER THREE
FAMILY TREES
It seems that nostalgia for his old life was at least part of the reason that Trubetskoy, tracked down by Jakobson to Sofia in 1920, was so eager to engage on the subject of his Prehistory and his forthcoming riposte to his deceased mentor Shakhmatov.
Perusing the contents of other letters that Trubetskoy wrote to various friends during the early 1920s, one finds his Prehistory frequently to be a promi-nent subject – an obsession, one might be tempted to say. As he told his friend Petrovsky in a 1922 letter: ‘I don’t know if I will ever be able to finish this work, The Prehistory of Slavic Languages. If I manage to finish it, this book is going to create a “Grosses Schkandal” in Moscow, as they say’ – the German used for dramatic emphasis. And in his next letter to Petrovsky: ‘I am working still on The Prehistory of Slavic Languages. This will create such a scandal in Moscow when it is published!’