Yudina and other members of Bakhtin’s Circle sustained the circles Volfila and Voskreseniye. The former was founded early in 1919 at the initiative of the Social-Revolutionary Ivanov-Razumnik and the writer Andrei Bely. Volfila’s aim was to discuss philosophical questions of cultural activity and heritage; religious belief was not a requisite for joining. Its meetings were attended by a wide range of illustrious men: the poet Blok, the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, the philosophers Lossky and Meier, the historian Karsavin and the artist Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Non-members, including the writers Mikhail Zoshchenko and Yevgeni Zamyatin, were invited to lecture. Yudina actively participated in the unconstrained discourse encouraged at these meetings. Smaller ‘circles’ were created from Volfila’s sub-divisions for specific discussion.
By the time Volfila was closed in 1923, its members had almost all joined Voskreseniye, founded in 1917 at the initiative of Meier and his common-law wife, the artist and architect Kseniya Polovtseva – both to become lifelong friends of Yudina’s. Voskreseniye (with its double significance of ‘Sunday’ and ‘Resurrection’) was specifically defined as a religious philosophical society. Likhachov recalled that although its members originally met on Tuesdays, the meetings were then transferred to Sundays – giving sense to the dual meaning of its title. The circle fostered a synthesis of Christianity and Socialism, where the concept of ‘resurrection’ as intellectual rebirth was appropriate. Meier and Polovtseva proclaimed the need to link communism and Christ, reflecting Blok’s vision in his poem The Twelve (1918). For other members Voskreseniye provided a less extreme forum for the discussion of Christian ideas. Many members expressed sympathy with the aims, if not methods, of the Bolsheviks. As the philosopher Georgi Fedotov declared in the group’s initial charter, ‘We acknowledge the truth and justice of socialism, but seek some spiritual basis for it.’
Yudina was introduced to Voskreseniye in 1918 by her godmother, Yevgeniya Tilicheyeva. Other members of the circle became Yudina’s loyal friends: the historian and expert on St Petersburg, Nikolai Antsiferov, the Orientalist Nina Pigulevskaya (originally from Nevel’), as well as the students of medieval history Vsevolod Bakhtin (no relation of Mikhail Bakhtin) and his wife Yevgeniya. Yudina’s teachers Grevs and Dobiash-Rozhdestvenskaya were also active members of the circle.
Yudina was already an admirer of the charismatic Meier, and vastly impressed by his erudition. After Likhachov’s arrest, he got to know Meier in the spring of 1929: ‘Meier appeared in the Solovki camp together with his wife Polovtseva. He had initially been sentenced to execution by firing squad, but was granted “grace” and condemned to a 10-year sentence – the longest term of punishment in those years. He was a very unusual man, he never tired of thinking, whatever the conditions, and he tried to make sense of everything philosophically.’38 Likhachov identified him as a new mentor: ‘The conversations I had with Meier and the Solovetskaya intelligentsia were for me a second university – and first in terms of significance.’39
Voskreseniye’s meetings were initially held in the premises of Volfila, and were widely attended, with up to 150 people present. But soon the circle was only able to operate privately in domestic premises, usually the flats of individual members. From 1924 it was decided for caution’s sake not to meet as one unit, but to divide up into smaller groups. Thus Voskreseniye became an umbrella for a variety of circles, divided by theme and meeting on different days of the week. Yudina and Pumpyansky attended the ‘Tuesday Circle’ led by Georgi Fedotov as a study group for the ‘Reappraisal of Values’. If the existence of a circle of free-thinking people was still possible in the mid-1920s, it was merely a question of time before Voskreseniye would be forcibly closed. It so happened that because of a minor disagreement Yudina ceased her membership of the circle at the end of 1928, just a few weeks before it was disbanded, and within days of the first arrests of its members. More surprising was how long Voskreseniye managed to keep going, given its open association with religious matters at a time when religion was increasingly under assault.
With Bakhtin’s return to Leningrad in 1924, his circle was reconstituted. Its meetings were usually held at Yudina’s apartment on 10th January Embankment – always known by its former name, Palace Embankment (Dvortsovaya Naberezhnaya). The first-floor apartment was ideal as it boasted an enormous room and balcony. From Yudina’s surviving invitation notes to friends, it is evident the talks and lectures were of an impromptu, last-minute nature and the guests were hand-picked, a necessary precaution. Here is a typical letter dating from July 1924, to the musicologist Andrei Rimsky-Korsakov, son of the famous Nikolai, and husband of Yudina’s friend Yulia Veysberg: ‘Highly respected Andrei Nikolayevich, If you are free and if it is of interest to you, at 8 o’clock this evening at my home Dvortsovaya Naberezhnaya 30, flat 79, the PHILOSOPHER BAKHTIN, recently arrived in Petrograd, will give a lecture on the theme “Problems of Content, Material and Form in Artistic Creation”, as a philosophical reflection on Formalist methods.’40 Bakhtin’s next lecture at her flat would instead be for ‘a very intimate circle of people’. These events were well attended, and they aimed to raise funds for charitable purposes. Pumpyansky recalled the theme of Bakhtin’s first cycle of Petrograd lectures as ‘The Hero and the Author in Artistic Creation’. Here Bakhtin would refute Formalist methods from a philosophical standpoint. He was in general very disdainful of the superficiality of Formalist philosophical thinking, but wanted to explore its theories in linguistics and the autonomous function of literary devices.
Over the next two years, Yudina issued similar invitations to lectures by Bakhtin and Pumpyansky on a variety of philosophical and literary themes. Evenings were also devoted to a particular writer. Here for instance she writes to her friend, the philologist Yevlaliya Kazanovich, apologizing for a last-minute invitation to honour the memory of the poet Valery Bryusov: ‘I myself only discovered about it yesterday, since the meeting was transferred from a different venue to my place. Bakhtin and Pumpyansky will make speeches, and perhaps others too.’41
Another literary figure thus honoured was Vyacheslav Ivanov, about whom Bakhtin’s brilliant lecture covered ‘the whole of culture’, as one admiring member of the audience put it.42 In November and December 1926 respectively Yudina hosted two evenings dedicated to living poets, the first to Konstantin Vaginov, and the second to the ‘village’ or ‘archaic’ poet, Nikolai Klyuev. The aim of the second meeting was to collect money for the impoverished writer, who had no means of earning an income. Yudina’s short missives indicate the themes that Bakhtin was working on at the time – Dostoevsky, discourse and dialogue, the polyphony of ideas, as well as his ambiguous relationship with the Formalists. Most of these subjects were connected to his principal work of those years, The Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, published in 1929.