The Russia Bunin re-creates in his stories is a dreamland. In 'The Mowers' (1923) and 'Unhurried Spring' (1924) he conjures up a vision of the old rural Russia that had never been - a sunny happy land of virgin forests and boundless steppes where the peasants were hardworking and happy in their work, in harmony with nature and their fellow farmers - the nobility. There could not have been a starker contrast with Bunin's dark portrayal of provincial rot in The Village, the novel that had first brought him to fame in 1910, nor a more ironic one. For Bunin was now escaping to precisely the sort of rural fantasy which he himself had done so much to puncture in his earlier work. In exile, his literary mission was to contrast the idyll he imagined in the Russian countryside with the evil of the cities where Bolshevism had corrupted the good old Russian ways. But the land he portrayed was, in his own admission, 'an Elysium of the Past', a shift 'into a kind of dream',36 and not an actual place to which the exiles could return. Retreating into a legendary past is perhaps a natural response of the artist who is dislocated from his native land. Nabokov even took artistic
inspiration from the experience of exile. But for Bunin it must have been particularly difficult to write when he was cut off from his own country. How could a realist write about a Russia that no longer was?
Emigration tends to breed conservatives in art. Retrospection and nostalgia are its moods. Even Stravinsky found himself moving away from the ultra-modernism of The Rite of Spring, the last major work of his 'Russian period', to the neoclassicism of the Bach-like works of his Parisian exile. Others became stuck in the style they had developed in their native land - unable to move on in the new world. This was true of Rachmaninov. Like Bunin's writing, his music remained trapped in the late Romantic mode of the nineteenth century.
Sergei Rachmaninov had learned composition at the Moscow Conservatory at a time when Tchaikovsky was its musical hero, and it was Tchaikovsky who had made the deepest impact on his life and art. In exile in New York after 1917, Rachmaninov remained untouched by the avant-garde - the last of the Romantics in the modern age. In a revealing interview in 1939, which the composer forbade to be published in his own lifetime, he explained to Leonard Liebling of The Musical Courier his feelings of estrangement from the world of modernism. His musical philosophy was rooted in the Russian spiritual tradition, where the role of the artist was to create beauty and to speak the truth from the depths of his heart.
I felt like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien. I cannot cast out the old way of writing, and I cannot acquire the new. I have made intense efforts to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me… I always feel that my own music and my reactions to all music remain spiritually the same, unendingly obedient in trying to create beauty… The new kind of music seems to come not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt - they mediate, protest, analyse, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt.'7
In his last major interview, in 1941, Rachmaninov revealed the spiritual connection between this outpouring of emotion and his Russianness.
I am a Russian composer, and the land of my birth has influenced my temperament and outlook. My music is a product of the temperament, and so it is
Russian music. I never consciously attempt to write Russian music, or any other kind of music. What I try to do when writing down my music is to say simply and directly what is in my heart.38
The 'Russianness' of Rachmaninov's music, a kind of lyrical nostalgia, became the emotional source of his musical conservatism in exile.
Being out of step had always been a part of his persona. Born in 1873 to an ancient noble family from Novgorod province, Rachmaninov had been an unhappy child. His father had walked out on the family and left his mother penniless when he was only six. Two years later the young boy was sent to study music in St Petersburg. He invested his emotions in his music. He came to view himself as an outsider, and that Romantic sense of alienation became fused with his identity as an artist and later as an emigre. Exile and isolation as a theme figured in his music from an early stage. It was even there in his graduation piece from the Conservatory, a one-act opera called Aleko (1892), based on Pushkin's 'Gypsies', in which the Russian hero of the poem is rejected by the gypsies and banished to the life of a lonely fugitive. Rachmaninov's best-known music before 1917 was already marked by a precocious nostalgia for his native land: the Vespers (1915), with their conscious imitation of the ancient church plainchants; The Bells (1912), which allowed him to explore that Russian sound; and above all the piano concertos. The haunting opening theme of the Third Piano Concerto (1909) is liturgical in manner and very similar to the Orthodox chant from the vesper service used at the Pechersk monastery in Kiev, although Rachmaninov himself denied that it had any religious source. Rachmaninov had never been a regular churchgoer and after his marriage to his first cousin, Natalia Satina, a marriage forbidden by the Russian Church, he ceased to go at all. Yet he felt a deep attachment to the rituals and the music of the Church, especially the sound of Russian bells, which reminded him of his childhood in Moscow. This became a source of his nostalgia after 1917.
The other source of Rachmaninov's nostalgia was his longing for the Russian land. He yearned for one patch of land in particular: his wife's estate at Ivanovka, five hundred kilometres south-east of Moscow, where he had spent his summers from the age of eight, when the Rachmaninovs were forced to sell their own estate. Ivanovka
contained his childhood and romantic memories. In 1910, the estate became his own through marriage and he moved there with Natalia. Ivanovka was the place where he composed nearly all his works before 1917. 'It had no special wonders - no mountains, ravines or ocean views', Rachmaninov remembered in 1931. 'It was on the steppe, and instead of the boundless ocean there were endless fields of wheat and rye stretching to the horizon.'39 This is the landscape whose spirit is expressed in Rachmaninov's music. 'The Russians', he explained to an American magazine (and he was clearly thinking mainly of himself), 'feel a stronger tie to the soil than any other nationality. It comes from an instinctive inclination towards quietude, tranquillity, admiration of nature, and perhaps a quest for solitude. It seems to me that every Russian is something of a hermit.'40 In 1917 the Ivanovka peasants forced Rachmaninov to abandon his home. 'They often got drunk and ran round the estate with flaming torches,' recalled one of the villagers. 'They stole the cattle and broke into the stores.' After his departure -first for Sweden and then for the USA - the house was looted and burned down.41 For Rachmaninov, the loss of Ivanovka was equated with the loss of his homeland, and the intense pain of exile which he always felt was mingled with its memory.