In general Yudina disapproved of the idea of leaving her country. In this she shared Anna Akhmatova’s feelings as expressed in the lines: ‘But to me the exile is forever pitiful,/Like a prisoner, like someone ill,/Dark is your road, wanderer,/Like wormwood smells the bread of strangers.’20 Yudina, no less than Akhmatova, had no wish for the taste of foreign bread, even when there were considerable shortages of the native product at home. Whosoever experienced the chaotic years of civil war and Soviet repression became accustomed to hardships.
In compensation, Yudina was able to profit from Bolshevik progressive policies on women’s education. Women were now given equal access to universities, as well as the right to free civil union, divorce on demand, leglized abortion, and so-called socialization of housework. In the decades preceding the Revolution higher education for women had only been available privately – in Petersburg/Petrograd at the Bekhterev and Lesgaft Courses, and the prestigious, intellectually elitist Bestuzhev Institute, where, exceptionally, women could gain a university degree.
Thus in the 1919/20 academic year Yudina was of the first generation of women to attend Petrograd University. As an external student she frequented lectures at the faculty of classical philology (headed by the distinguished Professor Faddei Frantsevich Zelinsky), as well as Nikolai Lossky’s courses on Fichte’s philosophy and Zelinsky’s lectures on Hellenism. The poet Blok had praised Zelinsky as the university’s best professor, while Mikhail Bakhtin acknowledged him as the closest thing to a teacher he had ever had. Zelinsky’s influence on Bakhtin is evident in his views on popular culture as an invigorating and subversive force, and on dialogue as a philosophical means of expression.
Yudina vividly recalled how her Petrograd University professors were subjected to ideological stress. ‘Our maitre Zelinsky towered above us all. He had no intention of leaving Russia, although the University was emptying of teachers [. . .] He taught until the very last minute. The alternative was to wait for his subject to be abolished from the curriculum or be dismissed. Forcibly separated from the University, our professors had to look for other work to engage their wonderful minds. They also needed to earn their bread (however stale) to feed themselves and their families.’21
Despite Zelinsky’s enormous international reputation, his conflict with the authorities forced him to leave Petrograd in 1920 for his native Poland. His departure was symptomatic of the increasing suspicion with which the prestigious universities of Petrograd and Moscow were treated. In the face of mutual hostility, the Bolsheviks undermined their authority, while prioritizing the creation of new proletarian and provincial universities. The founding of Workers’ Faculties (Rabfacs) in 1922 coincided with a virulent purging (‘chistka’) of the ‘old class’ of professors and students. Those teachers who resisted the ‘proletarization’ of the student body on the grounds that this debased academic standards were branded disloyal to Soviet power.
The following academic year (1920/21) Yudina abandoned philosophy and philology to enrol in the history faculty of Petrograd University, renowned for the excellence of its Medieval Studies. It was headed by Ivan Grevs, the teacher of a whole generation of brilliant minds, including the historian Olga Dobiash-Rozhdestvenskaya, and the philosopher and historian Lev Karsavin – all of whom Yudina knew and revered. Her teacher of Hellenistic religion, Ivan Ivanovich Tolstoy, ‘represented the cognitive sciences in a riot of learning, despite his inherent qualities of restraint and aestheticism [. . .] Just a few of us attended his lessons – amongst them the brilliant Olga Freidenberg, who sat and stared fixedly at Ivan Ivanovich with her enormous smoky grey, crystal-clear eyes. She herself was a myth, a sibyl, and to boot, she was Boris Pasternak’s cousin.’22 At the time of writing, some fifteen years after Freidenberg’s death, Yudina lamented that ‘she remains misunderstood and unrecognized – this great philosopher and classical philologist’.23
Perhaps the most illustrious amongst the Petrograd history professors was Lev Karsavin, who combined interests in history, spiritual philosophy and metaphysics. Indeed, Karsavin started by studying philosophy, but switched to medieval history at the behest of Professor Grevs, concentrating on the transitional period between the late Romans and Middle Ages. Karsavin’s quiet magnetic personality exerted a special fascination on his students. Perhaps it was unsurprising that in 1916 he became passionately involved with a twenty-year-old student at the Bectuzhev Courses, Yelena Cheslavna Skrzhinskaya (known to friends simply by her patronymic, Cheslavna). The way he experienced and transformed the love affair into a literary phenomenon had a significant effect on his philosophical thinking and spiritual life. As Karsavin’s biographer Dominic Ruben wrote, ‘Cheslavna Skrzhinskaya was a pretty and gentle girl from an aristocratic family [. . .] A rising star in the history department – later she became one of Soviet Russia’s leading medievalists.’24 Gossip soon spread. Even before the affair had fully blossomed, Karsavin was seen ‘racing down the wide university corridor on a lady’s bike which, rumour had it, belonged to a certain female admirer and muse’.25 Indeed, Karsavin did not bother to hide the affair, even from his family.
Skrzhinskaya was to become Yudina’s closest Leningrad confidante and lifelong friend. They were drawn together as much through their love of music as their passion for history. Cheslavna had studied piano since childhood, and in 1925 Yudina accepted her as a piano student. Skrzhinskaya recalled first meeting Yudina in 1921 at one of Lev Karsavin’s seminars: ‘Maria Veniaminovna sat at the edge of the table by the wall, and listened with great attention, but did not participate in the discussion. Her wavy hair gave away her Jewish origins. I would see her at seminars and lectures, and once, while passing by Palace Embankment I greeted her – it felt as if we were already acquainted. I decided to pay an impromptu visit to her house – I nervously rang the doorbell, but she received me very well.’26
This view of Yudina as an ‘amateur’ too shy to open her mouth in classes or seminars was confirmed by other students, including Skrzhinskaya’s sister, Irina: ‘Marusya didn’t attend many of Lev Karsavin’s seminars. She was a new student, very timid [. . .] Karsavin was to play a tragic role in my sister’s life. They loved each other, but he was not ready to sacrifice his family, although they knew of his love affair.’27
Karsavin described his romance with a certain degree of self-irony in his book Noctes Petropolitanes, published in 1922, the year he was expelled from Russia. As Irina remarked, ‘Everything happened as described in the introduction, we were participants in the story. Here he parodies himself and everything that came in the following chapters.’28 The charismatic Karsavin left a deep impression on Yudina: ‘Whoever attended Karsavin’s lectures, participated in his seminars or talked with him is forever linked to him. The spirit of doubt was great in him, the spirit of sarcasm, the spirit of “interlocutor” of our age. But what, one wonders, lay behind this complex, angular, almost hermetic figure?’29 Even though Yudina only studied with Karsavin for a short time, through a series of coincidences she was to maintain ties with him and his family throughout her life.
Yudina returned to her Conservatoire piano studies in the autumn of 1920, with the intention of graduating the following summer. For the moment she continued with her university courses, although obviously her music studies took precedence. By the winter she found this double load untenable, as she acknowledged to Viktor Zhirmunsky, her Professor of Philology: ‘It is with great regret and shame that I inform you that because of extraordinary circumstances I can no longer attend your seminar [. . .] You will already have understood that as an amateur, my work can have no scientific interest [. . .] I simply did not calculate my strength; to work in two different fields with the same energy is evidently impossible.’30