Elizabeth Wilson, Cumiana, Italy, 27 May 2021
1
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
NEVEL’, PETROGRAD
I only know one way to God: through Art.
Maria Yudina
For what I have experienced and understood in Art, I must answer with my life, in order that such experience and understanding should not be rendered ineffective.
Mikhail Bakhtin1
Maria Veniaminovna Yudina was born on 10 September 1899 (30 August in the old-style calendar), the fourth of five brothers and sisters in Nevel’, a small town in the Pale of Settlement, in the Vitebsk district.* Her family came from the educated intelligentsia; as Jews they adhered to the social ideals rather than the religious traditions of their forebears.
Indeed, Nevel’s population was predominantly Jewish, while a quarter of its inhabitants were registered as Russian Orthodox. A few remaining Catholics testified to former times, when the town had been under Polish-Lithuanian control. The town boasted at least eight synagogues, but at the time of Yudina’s birth the main town square was distinguished by an architectural ensemble of churches, the Uspensky Orthodox Cathedral, various churches of the Spasopreobrazhensky Monastery and a Catholic chapel, built by the Radziwill family.
Little remains of the Nevel’ of these times; it suffered massive destruction during the German occupation of 1941–4, when its Jewish population was virtually exterminated. A few churches survived the ravages of the Second World War, while the remnants of the town’s religious buildings were torn down during the early 1960s, in a last surge of ideological zeal. In Yudina’s words, ‘Nevel’ was a place where Sholom-Aleikem, Chekhov, Platonov, and Mikhoels could find their heroes.’2 And so, for that matter, could Marc Chagall, who started his career as a painter in nearby Vitebsk.
Maria’s mother, Raisa Yakovlevna Yudina, endeared herself to all and sundry as an unusually kind and gentle person. She was described by Maria’s much younger half-sister Vera, as ‘well-educated for those times and adored by her children’. In addition, there was a much-loved governess, Schvede, ‘an enormously stout woman, with an inexhaustible supply of games, shadow theatre, charades’.3
Veniamin Gavrilovich Yudin, Maria’s father, was a hard-working, upright man, totally dedicated to his work as senior doctor at the Nevel’ hospital. Like so many of the zemski doctors* of Chekhov’s stories or Bulgakov’s A Country Doctor’s Notebook, he was an agnostic who took his social duties seriously. Vera, his daughter by his second marriage, left the following description of him:
Born into a large and very poor Jewish family, Father had to become independent at a very early age. He attended the gymnasium in Vitebsk and from the 4th class onwards he gave lessons to earn his keep and support the family. Despite his desperate poverty he managed to get to Moscow to study medicine with the most famous figures of his day. He returned to Nevel’ to discover a grim picture – the small and dirty hospital for the poor and homeless. Epidemics of typhoid fever constantly broke out in the town. And Father started from nothing, and for 50 years selflessly and untiringly carried out the routine work of the hospital. Much has been written of the good work of the Zemski doctors – not only did Father treat town dwellers and peasants from surrounding areas, but constantly (and successfully) petitioned for extensions and improvements to the hospital, for an outpatients’ department, the digging of artesian wells, the opening of schools [. . .] His energy was extraordinary. Family legend has it that Father shouted at the Governor and threw some visiting dignitary down the stairs. That was in his style.4
The Yudin family lived in a two-storey wooden house on Monastyrskaya Street, by the banks of the river Emenka, near its outflow into the large Lake Nevel’. It boasted a large garden and vegetable patch, a summerhouse and bathing hut. Contemporaries recall Dr Yudin walking down the garden path in his fox fur coat to his bathing hut – he swam even in the cold winter months.5 From her father Maria inherited a decisive character, courage and impulsiveness, and an incredible capacity for hard work. Her musical gifts came from her mother’s side of the family: her cousin, the distinguished pianist and conductor Ilya Slatin, founded the Kharkov branch of the Russian Musical Society, as well as the Kharkov Symphony Orchestra and Musical School.
Maria, or Marusya or Marila as she was known in the family, started studying the piano aged seven and was soon accepted by Frieda Teitelbaum-Levinson, a one-time pupil of Anton Rubinstein and winner of the gold medal at the St Petersburg Conservatoire. Having abandoned her performing career when she married, Teitelbaum-Levinson became a teacher of note in Vitebsk. Gavriil Yudin, Maria’s cousin, remembered how ‘her mother brought Marila to Vitebsk 2 or 3 times a month. The 100-km journey took some 3 and ½ hours by the fast train. After her piano lesson, they returned to Nevel’ the following day.’
Gavriil recalled Maria’s striking appearance:
. . . with her enormous forehead and eyes expressing great depth of thought and a concentration most unusual for a ten-year-old. Even then, her playing showed striking individuality, with those inimitable characteristics of her maturity: grandeur of scale, profundity, tautness of pulse and rhythm, and above all a great aesthetic quality – a sort of Beethovenian ‘Es Muss Sein’. Of the pieces she played then, I can never forget her performance of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words, in B minor (Op. 30 no. 4) and in particular that in C minor (Op. 38 no. 2). No pianist I have heard since could convey such commitment and inner strength as this young girl, with her thick braid of hair down to her waist, stubbornly nodding her head at the piano, as if in agreement with her own playing.6
In the close family circle, Maria could be vivacious, and was the leader of the close-knit group of cousins in theatrical games, ‘inventing ingenious tricks and devising new subjects’.7
Yudina herself recalled her childhood as idyllic – the ‘paradise of the parental home’ with the subtle charm of the surrounding lush, water-studded countryside:
As a child I would sit on the spreading branches of the willow tree by the river in my parents’ garden and tried to write verse. I composed bad poems in German – in the manner of a traveller in the Steppes of Central Asia – eulogizing God’s world and the surrounding beauties. I described sunsets, stars, the splashing of waves, and the magic twilight hours. Later I realized that my poems were no good. I started reading real poetry, and dreamt of being able to study verse writing.8
Maria’s progress at the piano was so remarkable that at the age of thirteen she was taken to St Petersburg to play for the famous Anna Yesipova. An ‘international star’ of her day, Yesipova had been a favourite pupil (and one-time wife) of the great Polish pianist Theodor Leschetizky (Leszetycki).* Initially Yudina started her studies with Yesipova’s assistant, Olga Kalantarova, in the junior department of the St Petersburg Conservatoire, but she was soon promoted to Yesipova’s own class. The Conservatoire director, the composer Alexander Glazunov, sat on the examination commission and assessed the young Maria as follows: ‘Excellent dexterity. A gifted virtuoso, but with a tendency to rush. Technical exam and concert programme – passed with excellence.’9