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Overview
" … Carlisle’s life emerges as stimulating, self-aware, and culturally rich. Many readers will hope for a sequel." - Kirkus Reviews
Olga Andreyev Carlisle has never lived in Russia, and yet throughout her life Russia has never been far. Far From Russia captures the enduring grip of Russia, and how the idea of that homeland shaped her world. We see her first as an aspiring painter in post-World War II Paris, savoring her independent life. There she falls in love with an American G.I., Henry Carlisle. With Henry, she comes to the United States, to Nantucket, where she is introduced to his family's more reserved ways. In New York City, Olga begins to piece together a community in a strange land of artists and writers including, Robert Lowell and Robert Motherwell. Carlisle makes vivid the influential and heady times of both postwar Paris and New York.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780312273699 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/10/2000 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Olga Andreyev Carlisle is the granddaughter of the writer Leonid Andreyev and of Victor Chernov, the revolutionary leader who inspired the central figure of her book The Idealists, co-written with her husband Henry Carlisle. A painter, she is also the editor of Poets on Street Corners and the author of Voices in the Snow, Island of Time, Solzhenitsyn and the Secret Circle, and Under a New Sky. With her husband Henry she is co-translator of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot and of Visions, a collection of Andreyev's stories. Born in Paris, she now lives in San Francisco.
Olga Andreyev Carlisle is the granddaughter of the writer Leonid Andreyev and of Victor Chernov, the revolutionary leader who inspired the central figure of her book The Idealists, co-written with her husband Henry Carlisle. A painter, she is also the editor of Poets on Street Corners and the author of Voices in the Snow, Island of Time, Solzhenitsyn and the Secret Circle, Under a New Sky, and the memoir Far from Russia. With her husband Henry she is co-translator of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot and of Visions, a collection of Andreyev's stories. Born in Paris, she now lives in San Francisco.
Read an Excerpt
Far from Russia
A Memoir
By Olga Andreyev Carlisle
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2000 Olga Andreyev CarlisleAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-312-27369-9
CHAPTER 1
The Sound of Poetry
My earliest memories are of adults reciting poetry in our apartment near Paris—my father, my aunts and uncles, and Marina Tsvetayeva. I would have been five or six, and I did not know that there were worlds beyond our family, the darkening dining room, the hot fragrant tea, and the waves of poetry that engulfed us.
Tsvetayeva had pale green eyes, her skin was swarthy, and her short hair was touched with silver. I liked her harshness—the brisk movements, the low, slightly raspy voice with the hard r 's of the well-born Muscovite.
Tsvetayeva wore heavy silver bracelets on her wrists; a leather belt was drawn tightly around her waist. I remember her sharp profile against the twilight, the clinking of her bracelets and the Russian verse delivered in a somewhat stylized manner, vibrant and yet even toned.
This was also how my father read poetry, and my aunt Ariane, who knew all of Eugene Omgin by heart. Some years later I would be told that, according to his contemporaries, Pushkin had recited poetry in this way.
I had been told that Pushkin had been Russia's greatest poet, that he was being celebrated just then in 1937, on the centenary of his death in a duel, secretly plotted by the Russian Czar. Pushkin's poems and Lermontov's, the other great poet killed in a duel, were often read at the table after dinner. The adults were divided: my aunt Natasha and my grandmother preferred Lermontov to Pushkin, but the others, including Tsvetayeva, favored Pushkin.
I too considered myself a Pushkinite, although it was Pasternak, yet another poet, who was in fact my favorite. Though he was hard to understand, it was he who spoke most beautifully about Russia, the faraway land of summer woods, of lilacs and swirling snowstorms. My father read his poems with special fervor, causing each line to resonate. Many years later, hearing Robert Lowell read his own verse and Yeats's, I had a sense of recognition. Here in another language was the incantatory monotone with which my childhood had reverberated.
In Paris in the thirties there was a small Russian literary milieu, and my family was part of it. My parents' friends were the poet Tsvetayeva, the philosopher Berdyaev, and whenever he visited his family in Paris, Isaac Babel. These writers, unknown in France outside a small circle of Russian readers, are now celebrated in Russia. But then, with the exception of Babel, their names were reviled in the Soviet Union, as were those of my two grandfathers, who both had been mortal enemies of Lenin.
There were many other Russian émigré communities in France in those years of different political or religious persuasions. Paris alone was said to be home to three hundred thousand refugees from the Bolshevik revolution. However, my family's loyalties were above all literary. And populist. The people, the well-being of people everywhere was a concern often discussed with the children. As were the history of Russia and her fate under Communism, about which little was known until the astounding drama of the Great Purges unfolded. By then I was seven.
I understood that we were neither Red nor White, that we "belonged to the people." Both my grandfathers had been grandsons of serfs in prerevolutionary Russia. Leonid Andreyev, my father's father, was from the Orel region in central Russia, and my mother's adoptive father, Victor Chernov, from Saratov, on the Volga River. Both men had loathed the czarist regime, both had been revolutionaries in very different ways. Divorced from my grandmother, Chernov, now living in Prague, had been a leader of the Socialist Revolutionaries, the ill-fated SR party destroyed by the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the October 1917 coup d'état. As for Andreyev, he had died in exile in Finland in 1919. He was a celebrated writer until the Bolsheviks erased his name from Russian literature.
Andreyev had been sympathetic to the SRs, and yet he was aware of the ambiguities of their political credo. Until 1908, they had condoned individual terrorist acts directed against highly placed officials. At that time the czarist regime was becoming ever more repressive. A secret "Combat Organization" within the party plotted the killings of leading czarist politicians, guilty in their eyes of intolerable crimes against the people.
But these high-minded, seemingly experienced revolutionaries had allowed themselves to be infiltrated by the Russian Secret Police, the Okhrana. Eventually czarist double agents were themselves staging some of the assassinations, settling personal vendettas and helping discredit the revolutionary movements. Arrests and executions multiplied. These inspired Leonid Andreyev's most powerful works, which explored the morality of using terror against autocracy: The Seven Who Were Hanged, The Governor, Darkness. ... His visionary novella The Red Laugh foretold the horrors of the oncoming wars.
In the mid-thirties my parents received a shipment of objects that had come from Leonid Andreyev's house in Finland. Among them was a set of bronze candlesticks and a massive Empire inkstand, which looked to me like a diminutive funerary monument. Small black steps lead to an urn that concealed a glass container of ink. Evidently writing in ink was the key to immortality. In my mind this inkstand was a sacred object, and I loved to draw it, trying to capture the bronze steps with a deliberate, ascending zigzag line.
The shipment from Finland, my father's legacy, included a vast collection of photographic glass plates. They were color transparencies. Each was mounted in double: they were meant to be viewed through a stereoscopic viewer. They had been packed in shiny flat cardboard boxes labeled in Leonid Andreyev's energetic, rounded handwriting. We had no viewer, but my father would show them to me by holding them up to the light. Their colors were lifelike, muted, and yet vivid. I was told that these images were obtained through the chemical use of potato flour. It seemed hard to believe. How could these butterfly wings glowing against the daylight come from potatoes?
Through these photographs my father's childhood became a part of mine. Sitting on the stairway, my father was the beautiful boy, with the sad, soft gray eyes—he had lost his mother when he was five. His small brother, Daniel, in a canvas summer hat, looked even sadder. Now they had a handsome, self-satisfied stepmother who tried vainly to look lovable in her pictures, clutching bouquets to her bosom. Leonid Andreyev was there too, enigmatic, sorrowful, wearing strange costumes. Close enough to touch were the visiting relatives, the Nordic landscape edged with clouds, the birch trees and the ponds shining softly. And the field flowers identical to those my mother gathered into bouquets for me to draw.
Several outsized charcoal drawings had also arrived from Finland. Among them was Leonid Andreyev's "Devils Trimming their Nails," inspired by Goya. For a while my father pinned this study in the hall of our small, sunny apartment in Le Plessis. The devils were repulsive; my mother and I hated them. Eventually they were rolled up and disappeared under the couch in my father's study, where paintings and drawings were customarily stored. I was not happy with this arrangement. In my opinion the devils, who looked both contrived and evil, should have been thrown out of our house altogether.
But in fact this picture was emblematic of what was going on in the larger world just then—the Spanish civil war, the rise of Stalin and that of Hitler. Andreyev's writings and especially his novellas remain alive today. His plays are performed in Russia after a seventy-year-long interlude. The problems Andreyev pondered are today's problems—war, violence, hunger.
How I wished there would have been photographs preserved also from my mother's childhood! She had grown up in Italy on the shores of the Mediterranean, among lemon trees and climbing roses. At fourteen in 1917, at the beginning of the revolution, she returned to Russia with her family. After the Bolshevik coup d'état she and her mother and sisters were arrested. A price was put on Chernov's head—he had gone into hiding. The women's situation was desperate. Then a friend, a former SR once married to Maxim Gorky, Ekaterina Peshkova, obtained a permit from Lenin himself for them to emigrate.
My family's adventures in revolutionary Russia had been fantastic, full of odd coincidences. They haunt me to this day. There were tales of Red Army men in pointed helmets riding through the sunflower fields of Saratov, led by their mythical chieftain, Chapayev. Tales of night searches by the Cheka, the Bolshevik Secret Police. Denunciations and arrests in snowbound Moscow, train rides through endless frozen steppes. And the story about my mother and her twin sister, Natasha, living alone in the woods for a whole summer.
The four women in our family—my grandmother and her three daughters—were brilliant storytellers. My grandmother was the most accomplished. Some years after glasnost came to Russia in the 1980s, leafing through a volume of recollections by SR women imprisoned by the Bolsheviks on their way to Siberia and annihilation, I came across a testimonial about my grandmother's powers as a storyteller. She had an ability to bring to life whatever she recounted; be they daily events, history, plots out of Dickens or Alexandre Dumas, or events from her happy childhood on an estate in the south of Russia. In a Pskov prison, according to one of her comrades, her tales had kept her cell mates distracted for hours from the grim realities before them. Though she was an excellent journalist and a superlative cook, storytelling was my grandmother's magic gift—she was the Scheherazade of our family.
Snatched out of that grim Pskov prison thanks to Peshkova's intervention, my grandmother was reunited with her daughters and sent out of Russia to France. My maternal family's years in Russia during the revolution—where my grandfather was called from his Italian exile to be Minister of Agriculture in the provisional government that replaced the czarist regime to become a fugitive in less than a year—made a breathtaking, intricate tapestry of tales. Against it our French life unfolded peacefully. I was in awe of these tales, yet to me the present was even more compelling.
CHAPTER 2An Émigré Childhood
In the early thirties, my family settled in a distant, pastoral Parisian suburb. To me then Paris, some ten miles away, was like a shimmering island just out of reach. Paris was-full of unnamed pleasures—I would have given my life to share in them. This was the era of Edith Piaf, the beloved French chanteuse. On spring nights her songs played on the radio, filling the air of the housing development where we lived. Piafs songs with their mixture of joy and anguish reminded me that Paris was close by and yet inaccessible.
Le Plessis Robinson, newly built and somewhat antiseptic, stood at the edge of a beautiful old park whose eighteenth century manor house served as a town hall for the new settlement. The park had been closed to the public for decades. However, everyone in our extended family—which included my grandmother, her three daughters with their husbands and children—knew how to climb over the crumbling stone walls that enclosed it. The park was our realm. No one ever disturbed us there, yet our intrusions were a clear violation of the established order. They marked us as rebels, as Russians.
As a family, we were different from anyone else in Le Plessis. We were younger—in those years even my grandmother was in my eyes a young woman. Our family was well educated and nonconforming—my parents called that being intelligentnii. Yet, as impoverished foreigners, we were outcasts rather than rulers in the world in which we lived. But within the park we were sole masters.
Every day in the good season we spent hours in the old park of Le Plessis. We picnicked there, and read poetry, and took walks along its overgrown alleys. There in the fall we looked for mushrooms and chestnuts. But even on spring days when the park was leafy and the ground covered with a thick carpet of diminutive blue hyacinths, I was never completely happy there. My thoughts were elsewhere. I was in love with Piafs companion, the dreaded apache, the outlaw of her songs, who was hiding somewhere in Paris. The apache was the soul of Paris, dangerous perhaps, but beautiful and free. He was a hero to the French movie-going public, a star, evil and yet seductive.
Walking along Le Plessis's wide, straight avenues one could see here and there glued to the walls life-size movie posters of the apache from the lower depths of Paris. He had arrogant black eyes and wore a striped sailor's shirt and acasquette, a snap brim cap. I longed to see him, but I went to Paris seldom, and always with my parents. The apache was invisible except on the half-torn posters, which would soon be taken down altogether.
Even though the apache remained out of sight, my rare excursions into Paris were memorable, especially those in my father's company. From the age of five or six he took me to poetry readings at the café la Coupole, where once a month the young Russian émigré poets of Paris gathered. There I was given vanilla ice cream in a tall silver dish. I listened to sonorous Russian poems recited by my father and his friends, young men with intense faces who conversed with me as if I were a grown-up.
Settled in a back room of the café, they read their own poems and those of their elders in Paris, like Marina Tsvetayeva and Georgi Ivanov. For the most part they themselves were very young. They revered the poets who had stayed in Russia—Anna Ahkmatova and Serguei Yessemn and my favorite, Boris Pasternak. His Russia was all about youth and love:
At dusk you appear, a school girl still, a school girl. The sunset a woodsman hacking in the forest of hours. I lie back to wait for dusk. At once we are hallowing; hack and forth we call. You ran across the street, winds billowing, a flying carpet— sleds, crystals headlong! For life inspired by the blizzard gusbed like blood into a crimson cloud.
When they spoke to me the young poets, my father's friends, used my name and patronymic, Olga Vadimovna. I was flattered, it made me feel grown up. Still my attention drifted. I was thinking about the stranger in a casquette lurking somewhere nearby, perhaps even looking for me. Seductive as Russia was, I wanted to go to Paris, I wanted to break away from my Russian world, to run toward the Seine, toward the bridges whose reflections turned the river into a many-ringed hand. Only the thought that, should I flee, I might never see my father again kept me sitting quietly in my corner. I loved my father even more than the apache. And so I settled back and tried to follow poems I did not understand, but which were full of hypnotic power whenever one allowed them to carry one away.
Years later, just before I met my husband, Henry, a stay in the United States left me again longing for Paris. It seemed to me that I was always being taken away from my native city—to the island of Oléron in the Atlantic during the Second World War and more recently to the United States, where my father had gone to work for the United Nations. There, before coming home to Paris—forever, I hoped—I had spent a year on a scholarship at Bard, a small college on a cliff above the Hudson River.
Bard had an arts department where I rediscovered my life's avocation. I would become a painter. From my earliest years in Le Plessis, I had drawn pictures. Some were suggested by my grandfather's inkwell, others by flowers, still others by the stories read to me and especially by the adventures of King Arthur's knights.
Drawing had been a way to stay in the present, escaping the past—my parents' past in Russia—as well as the future, which they hoped would take us back there. For me, it was a way to communicate with Moscow, with my uncle Daniel, Leonid Andreyev's second son—younger than my father by three years. On several occasions I had sent Daniel pictures of my heroes, King Arthur's knights, and they had reached him despite the fierce censorship imposed in those years by the Soviet authorities.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Far from Russia by Olga Andreyev Carlisle. Copyright © 2000 Olga Andreyev Carlisle. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,PART I: PARIS,
1. The Sound of Poetry,
2. An Émigré Childhood,
3. Americans in Paris,
4. Boissia,
5. Rue de Seine,
6. Parisian Tulips,
7. La Vie en Rose,
8. Farewell to Henry,
9. Collioure,
10. Paris in the Fall,
11. Wedding in Le Plessis,
PART II: IN HENRY'S COUNTRY,
12. The Attic,
13. Gramercy Park,
14. A Studio on Nantucket,
15. Summer Pleasures,
16. In Search of Clams,
17. Maria Mitchell,
18. The New York Art Scene,
19. Among the Masters,
20. Downtown,
PART III: RUSSIA,
21. Poetry and Politics,
22. Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
23. Far from Russia,
24. My Uncle Daniel Andreyev,
25. Homecoming,
What People are Saying About This
Olga Carlisle, the highly respected writer on all things Russian, now turns her fine painterly eye on a lifelong love affair with the dashing young G.I. who was to become her husband. A wonderful, touching, sweet memoir.
—(Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird)
Olga Andreyev Carlisle knows how to paint with words. The evocation of her formative years…create for the reader vivid yet nostalgic images…[G]iven her cultural background and her trajectory within the dramatic patterns of history and the twentieth century, the reader is moved to follow her wanderings and wonderings, her attachments and her sorrows.
—(Francoise Gilot, author of Life with Picasso)