Bakhtin’s Circle also acquired new members, including the biologist Ivan Kanayev and the petro-geologist Boris Zalesky, both of whom would become lifelong friends of Yudina and Bakhtin. The circle never had a fixed programme, and it functioned as a hermetic group of friends, dominated by Bakhtin’s quiet, charismatic personality. It reopened with eight lectures on Kant’s Critique of Judgement given by Bakhtin himself – once again his brilliance and erudition overwhelmed his listeners. The circle also addressed contemporary concerns, including the study of psychoanalysis – Freud and Otto Rank in particular – promoted by the philologist Valentin Voloshinov, a founding member of the group, who specialized in the social aspects of Marxist theory. In the later part of the 1920s, Voloshinov published Freudianism – A Marxist Critique, possibly co-authored or even written in its entirety by Bakhtin.
In 1926, Pumpyansky wrote to the Nevel’ philosopher Matvei Kagan, now living in Moscow:
You are much missed here throughout these years, but particularly this year – when we are doggedly studying theology. The circle of our present friends remains the same: MV Yudina, Mikh Mikh Bakhtin, Mikh. Izr Tubyansky and myself – Believe me, we have more than once exclaimed, ‘What a pity that Matvei Isayevich is not here, he would help us unravel the matter!’ [. . .] After night-time discussions, we relive our reminiscences of those wonderful Nevel’ times – ‘Dear Ladies, Dear Gentlemen. Dear Mikhail Mikhailovich’ – a phrase which Maria Veniaminovna loves to recall.43
Despite Pumpyansky’s warm references to Yudina, they had recently quarrelled bitterly. She expressed her indignation in a letter to her friend Kazanovich: ‘I ask you never to mention his name again in my presence. I despise this subject to the extreme!’44 Pumpyansky had never been popular with her friends; Skrzhinskaya in particular had taken against him already in the early 1920s and nicknamed him ‘Pumpa’. Towards the end of the 1920s, like Voloshinov, Pumpyansky took up with Marxism. This probably ensured his survival and allowed him to teach at the Leningrad Conservatoire in the early 1930s, but it will hardly have endeared him to Yudina or others of the Bakhtin Circle. His brilliant pupil from Vitebsk, Ivan Sollertinsky, likewise learned how to use – or manipulate – Marxist ideology in his writings and discourses, and thereby flourished in his various careers in Leningrad.
Pumpyansky was indeed an improbable and colourful figure. Bakhtin’s biographers, Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, describe ‘his, cast-off, ill-fitting uniform coat which gave him the appearance of an early-blooming Sergeant Pepper.’45 He was the model for Teptelkin, the main character of the 1927 novel The Satyr’s Song* by Konstantin Vaginov, a member of the Leningrad absurdist group, OBERIU.** Here Vaginov satirizes a group of St Petersburg pre-revolutionary intellectuals unable to adapt to the new Soviet society. Living in their ideological ivory tower, they become ineffectual and isolated. Teptelkin is described as a mysterious creature surrounded by satyrs and nymphs, often observed carrying a kettle of boiling water from the communal dining room. Back in his room, ‘he absorbs himself in the most senseless occupation, needed by nobody – writing a thesis about an unknown poet to be read to a Circle of yawning ladies and exalted youths’.46 The novel also paints gentle, ironic vignettes of Bakhtin, Yudina and other group members; yet its underlying message emphasizes that such lively, enquiring minds were doomed within the new Soviet system.
The process of stamping out independent thought had started as far back as 1922, when the Bolshevik state turned its attention from civil strife to eliminating opposition. Lenin believed that the free-thinking intelligentsia constituted a threat as potential opponents, and he personally drew up a list of 220 ‘undesirable elements’ for expulsion from the country. Prior to this, the first show trials had been directed at the clergy and the Social Revolutionaries – Lenin’s former allies, whom he now ruthlessly quashed. In the autumn of 1922 some fifty of Russia’s most prominent thinkers were arrested and deported with their families on the so-called ‘Philosophy Steamer’ (actually there were two boatloads of deportees). Prominent philosophers and academics of the calibre of Nikolai Berdyaev, Semyon Frank, Nikolai Lossky and Lev Karsavin were amongst those banished from Petrograd to enforced exile. In 1917 in a flash of premonition, Franck talked of being destined to live in a vacuum ‘[. . .] there is no longer a Motherland. The West does not need us – nor does Russia, because she no longer exists.’47
The situation of the Orthodox Church was even more dramatic. In April 1922 Patriarch Tikhon was placed under house arrest at Moscow’s Donskoi Monastery. The Party authorities recommended a show trial or expedient execution, but they feared an international outcry. As the first Orthodox bishop to work in North America during the early 1900s, Tikhon actually held honorary American citizenship. Although the authorities released him in June 1923, he lived nominally under house arrest. Tikhon was deprived of Patriarchal powers in favour of a Soviet-controlled organization known as the ‘Living Church’, originally founded by the Renovationist movement. It was now appropriated as a slogan for a bogus institution at the service of the Bolsheviks; its carefully orchestrated infiltration by the Cheka was cynically designed to undermine the Renovationists’ genuine wish for reform.
While Tikhon’s arrest was largely symbolic, the notorious Petrogradsky Trial of the summer of 1922 saw an unparalleled travesty of justice. The Metropolitan of Petrograd, Veniamin Kazansky, had been arrested on 1 June and tried – along with eighty-five other defendants – for ostensibly resisting confiscation of church valuables in the state campaign to alleviate famine. In contrast to Patriarch Tikhon, Veniamin had permitted the donation of church artefacts to this cause. Now he stood accused by the Prosecutor, Pyotr Krasnikov, of conducting ‘counter-revolutionary politics’ under cover of the Church. The ensuing trial by a quirk of fate took place in the Hall of the Petrograd Philharmonic where only ten months earlier Yudina had given the opening concert. Along with many churchgoers, she followed the trial over its six weeks’ duration, and was duly impressed by the Metropolitan’s quiet dignity. On 5 July, together with nine other defendants, he was declared guilty and sentenced to death. Yudina expressed her shock in a letter to her friend, the composer Yuri Shaporin: ‘I started to come to only yesterday, when the sentence was pronounced. Then all the tension of expectation was transformed to despair. And one of the worst things was the complete indifference of society – it’s deeply deplorable.’48
The prosecutor secured commutation of six of the ten death sentences. Metropolitan Veniamin and three others were executed by firing squad. Amongst them was the Dean of Kazan Cathedral, Archpriest Nikolai Chukov, a figure well known to Yudina as a chorister in the cathedral choir. After these events, from the autumn of 1922, she transferred attendance and her choral activity to the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood, soon to be associated with the schismatic ‘Josephite’ branch of the Church.
In the same letter to Shaporin, Yudina responded to his request to help him receive rations – he had recently returned to Petrograd from Petrozavodsk and had no work or money:
I spoke with Professor Adrianov, the husband of the singer Zoya Lody – he thinks it will be difficult to slip you onto the list for rations – there are new commission members who do not know you. I myself know nobody, except the chief of the Petrograd Philharmonic administration, who is a fan of my performances. But how can I, at this particular moment, have any conversation with the authorities? [. . .] In general I love to help others and I am happy to do what I can. But I cannot approach Adrianov again, for my sharp tongue is a match for yours. On leaving the Tribunal I came across his wife, Zoya Petrovna, and incensed by her indifference, I let slip some barbed criticisms, which she did not deserve, even if historically and morally I am right.49