The decision to convert to Russian Orthodoxy was made gradually, and it was influenced by two friends in particular, Yevgeniya Tilicheyeva and Pumpyansky, who would become her godparents. Maria knew her conversion would go against her father’s wishes, for Veniamin Yudin was an outspoken atheist, although guided by a strong moral conscience. In contrast, at the age of eighteen Maria was an idealist, striving for a synthesis of Hellenistic culture, Russian symbolism and German-based philosophy, and still unsure as to whether to join the Church.
In Petrograd, Yudina found solace in devotional reading, and specifically in Solovyov’s The Spiritual Foundations of Life: ‘The chapter on prayer is a sacred book!’ She battled with St Augustine, ‘so difficult to read, mostly because of the language. But I want to and I can do it. I will persist and achieve illumination of the spirit! Achieve it? Oh, what pride on my part to think I can do so!’34 Back in Nevel’ by mid-October, Yudina started studying aesthetics, the Greeks, Homer and Hesiod. She learned to distinguish Xenophon’s historic Socrates from the Platonic. Almost simultaneously she discovered the extraordinary figure of Father Pavel Florensky.* A linguist, philosopher, religious thinker, art historian, physicist and mathematician, he had turned his back on a brilliant academic career to study theology and enter the priesthood. Yudina became acquainted with Florensky through reading his seminal work The Pillar and Ground of Truth, published in 1914. A treatise and speculative investigation into the theme of Christian love, it is written in the form of twelve letters to a brother – a symbolic friend in Christ. Yudina soon laid the book aside. For she had neither the time nor energy to comprehend its complexities. But she took note of Florensky’s fundamental belief that only in Orthodoxy can True Life be found. If other religions required testified proof of the nature of Divine Truth, then in Orthodoxy the manifestation of Truth is self-evident and self-perpetuating, a being in existence, and as such divine in character. Florensky summed it up best: ‘Truth is discursive intuition.’
Discussion with Pumpyansky on such themes provided stimulation, even as their relationship continued to be undermined by uncertainty. Yudina was tormented by conflict, her inability to confess her love, her longing to fulfil her passion, and her desperate feeling of being unworthy. Here she was already setting a pattern for the future, when she would write passionate letters to the current – and usually unattainable – object of her love, letters which often were never sent. Things were no longer as simple as they had seemed to start with: ‘The more I love him, the more I understand how large the distance is between us.’35
In early December a mutual confession of love took place. ‘Who said it first?’ Yudina asked. ‘We both did [. . .] All night I couldn’t sleep and wept quietly. Oh, Lord, I am lost in such unknown, enormous happiness.’36 But this happiness was in conflict with the desire for chastity – although like St Augustine she didn’t quite want it now. ‘Well, what of it. I will be stronger, but not now, when he is here, and I am dying from love [. . .] I’ll immerse myself in my Art and perhaps “at my sad sunset” faith and prayer will shine with a smile of farewell.’ Maria found solace in paraphrasing Pushkin; reading poetry calmed her, whereas music only made her ‘burn in an ecstasy of devotion’ and diminished her creativity.
In early January 1918, Yudina travelled with Pumpyansky to ‘Piter’ (Petrograd), where they decided not to see each other: ‘I need solitude, repose and peace. Only then can I be creative,’ she mused. She was now focused on conducting and her studies with her ‘idol’, Nikolai Cherepnin. ‘I have one aim in front of me. Conducting! This will cure me, and help me find my way back to reality. In the meantime I go around with a deep, festering wound. I must live through it and overcome.’ She confessed to her diary that ‘Today (24 January) my teacher [Cherepnin] was dissatisfied – that is hardly surprising. How can one work in this condition. No, enough of weeping and groaning!’37 Cherepnin’s concerts devoted to Bach provided a welcome distraction: ‘Today’s was the best, a real celebration, which is what counts most in Art! Nikolai Nikolayevich was on top form in his volitional force and drive, although his gestures lack beauty.’38
Creativity – or lack of it – was a frequently voiced theme in Yudina’s diary. She had already adopted Berdyaev’s idea of the artist being a co-creator with God, and shared his belief in the religious nature of creative genius, ‘for it involves resistance to the world by man’s whole spirit; it implies a universal assumption of another world and a universal impulse towards it’.39 Berdyaev’s words, ‘the creative way of genius demands sacrifice – no less than the sacrifice demanded by sainthood’,40 resonated with Yudina. If she had the potential for this form of ‘genius’, she would willingly embrace any sacrifices it might entail.
Yudina’s diary came to an abrupt halt in early February 1918. Learning of the rapid deterioration in her mother’s health, she rushed home. Raisa Yakovlevna Yudina was still relatively young when she died from apparent heart failure on 24 March. According to Maria’s childhood friend, Raisa Shapiro, Raisa Yudina had recently put on so much weight and grown so stout that she needed two chairs to sit down on. Many people – Shapiro amongst them – felt bereft after her death. Raisa Yudina was exceptionally good-natured, and loved not only her own children but all children. ‘Soon after, Marusya gave a concert at the local club of the Noblemen’s Assembly in Nevel’, where she dressed all in black, wearing her mother’s dress. I was overwhelmed by her playing.’41
Maria had already adopted an almost monastic simplicity of attire, which she never abandoned. It was all the more noticeable at a time when young women were beginning to wear short skirts and crop their hair. As Elga Linetskaya, another childhood friend, recalled, ‘(Maria) wore her hems down to the ground. She herself had extraordinarily upright posture, and looked straight ahead of her, never glancing to the side.’42
Yudina decided to stay on in Nevel’ to help the family. She was particularly concerned about her younger brother Boris, a talented violinist with an unstable character, whose upbringing was being neglected in a house dominated by young women. She resolved to undertake responsibility for him, not just now but for the rest of his life. It was a thankless task, for Boris’s mental health was shaky, with intermittent periods of manic behaviour, making it difficult for him to stick to any one line of study or work.
In the early spring Yudina found distraction from her grief in the arrival of the young philosopher and theoretician of European culture and semantics, the twenty-three-year-old Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. A man of magnetism and natural authority, Bakhtin would dedicate his life to literary theory, and become best known for his studies of Dostoevsky and Rabelais. He had studied history and philosophy at the Novorossiisky University in Odessa from 1913, before enrolling at Petrograd University early in 1918. When in the wake of revolution educational institutions came to a near standstill, Bakhtin’s close friend Pumpyansky happened to come to Petrograd. As Bakhtin recalled, ‘there was nothing to eat in Petrograd, so Pumpyansky convinced me to join him in Nevel’ – There I could earn money, and in addition there was plenty of food.’43
At the time of his arrival in Nevel’, Bakhtin had yet to publish any of his writings. The two years he spent there were fundamental as the time when he worked out his philosophical precepts orally, through lectures and in discussion, using a small circle of like-minded people as a sounding board to formulate his ideas. Initially, his interests focused on ethics and aesthetics, but from the mid-1920s and particularly after his encounter with the Russian Formalists, he developed his literary theories of dialogism and polyphonism, formulating diverse models of language within specific literary contexts.