Playing with Fire : The Story of Maria Yudina, Pianist in Stalin's Russia by Elizabeth Wilson

Maria Yudina was no ordinary musician. An incredibly popular pianist, she lived on the fringes of Soviet society and had close friendships with such towering figures as Boris Pasternak, Pavel Florensky, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Legend has it that she was Stalin's favourite pianist.

Yudina was at the height of her fame during WWII, broadcasting almost daily on the radio, playing concerts for the wounded and troops in hospitals and on submarines, and performing for the inhabitants of besieged Leningrad. By the last years of her life, she had been dismissed for ideological reasons from the three institutions where she taught. And yet according to Shostakovich, Yudina remained a special case.

FIVE MINUTES WITH Elizabeth Wilson

INTERVIEW FOR PUSHKIN HOUSE BY ANDREW JACK (@AJACK)

What is your connection to Russia?

I’m a cellist by training, and had the good fortune at the age of 14 to meet the great Rostropovich at the Edinburgh Festival. Over the next two years he encouraged me and when I was just 17 he invited me to Moscow to study in his conservatoire class. I stayed for nearly 7 years. The Soviet Union had endorsed a cautious policy of cultural exchange, and despite the difficulties for a westerner I was able to live in the conservatoire hostel. My father later became British ambassador, but I went to Moscow four years before he did. Being British did lend me some “exotic” value in Soviet eyes, as well as the much-envied privilege of not having to attend political lectures.  From such auspicious beginnings my life became increasingly linked to the Russian and international music world. 

Why did you get interested in Yudina?

When I was in Moscow, I was aware of her, as my fellow students loved to recount the legends surrounding her personality. Unfortunately I never heard her play as in these last years of her life, she was in a period of disgrace and not allowed to perform public concerts. Many of the stories about her belonged to the realm of fantasy: she slept in her coffin or her bath, she wore if not shackles under her dress then a large cross over it. She reputedly made the sign of the cross when she performed – something that was impossible to imagine at the time. She certainly read verses by poets like Pasternak and Zabolotsky at her recitals instead of playing an encore, and concert organizers were terrified of losing their jobs, particularly if the poems were unpublished! Everything about her intrigued me, and yet many young Russians found her eccentricities to be ridiculous. When I bought her recordings I realised she was a great artist with an almost prophetic voice. 

How would you summarise her achievements?

As a person of immense cultural horizons, she was a phenomenon. She had incredible conviction as a performer, but equally she could depart from the letter of the score and be quite wilful.  She always liked playing contemporary music, and in the last 15 years of her life it became a mission although she would be banned from playing “avant-garde and decadent” Western music. By any standards, Yudina was way ahead of her times. In the early 1960s she could accept Boulez and Stockhausen on one hand, and Shostakovich on the other, although they stood poles apart in the cultural ideology of the time. Her correspondence with Stravinsky helped to persuade him to return to Russia in 1962 for the first time since 1914.  One could say that her artistic intuition was as much a feature of her greatness as her real-life experience.

How did you come to write your book?

I met the late David King, a fabulous collector of revolutionary graphic art, in the mid 1980s. He immediately said we had to do a book about Yudina. We went to Moscow and Leningrad, where I had the right contacts to meet people who knew her: her Russian biographer, her favourite pupil or “disciple”, her cousin and nephew. I discovered a new musical world with wonderful people who became lifelong friends. Yet the more I researched her, the less I felt capable of writing about her: I realised I would need to know far more about the history of religious persecution, about philosophical thought in the 1920s and the later repressions in the arts and sciences. I had to investigate such towering personalities as Mikhail Bakhtin, Pavel Florensky and Boris Pasternak, with whom Yudina developed close friendships. I simply wasn’t ready then.  I only returned to the idea a long time later, after I’d written my books on Shostakovich, du Pré, and Rostropovich. By then I had acquired a much deeper knowledge of Soviet cultural history. When I came back to Yudina in 2016 there was a plethora of published material about her in Russian but no chronological biography. I renewed contact with my “Yudina” friends in Moscow who were delighted I was back on board and helped me no end. I spent time in the archives in Moscow and St Petersburg and discovered a few things that even the Russians didn’t know.  

What were the greatest surprises?

The story by which Yudina is most well-known –portrayed at the start of Iannucci’s film Death of Stalin – was of her recording Mozart's Piano Concerto No 23 in the middle of one night after Stalin reputedly heard it on the radio and wanted a copy immediately. But it was a broadcast performance and there was no recording. According to the legend, Yudina and an orchestra were called into a studio and the record was edited, pressed and ready for delivery the next morning. Allegedly, Stalin was so delighted he sent her a large sum of money, and Yudina replied to inform him that she had given the money to the church and would ensure prayers were made for the forgiveness for his terrible sins. That always seemed a bit suspect to me. She was courageous but also knew when to be cautious. I discovered there had been no radio broadcasts in 1947 of this Mozart concerto in the weeks beforehand, and Yudina had nothing to do with the Church in those years. She had joined the dissenting Josephites, who in the 1920s accused the Church of collaborating with the Soviet state, and were mercilessly persecuted. Yudina only returned to the Orthodox Church in 1956. It seems that the only source for the story is Shostakovich. And I know that he loved telling tall stories!

What parallels do you draw with the situation today?

The war with Ukraine gave me a big shock: how was it possible to return to the kind of repressions of the worst Stalinist period? But looking at the methods used today, it really doesn’t surprise me. From 1918 the Soviet state used propaganda, deliberate falsification and the twisting of events to unscrupulously achieve its ends. Even today when we have so much information available, people put on blindfolds because it’s too distressing to really investigate the truth. But despite the repressions under Stalin, many brave and wonderful people somehow maintained the highest moral standards. That was of crucial importance and lends me hope for today. 

How did Yudina survive the repressions? 

She really understood the situation in the 1920s and while ostensibly ignoring politics, she wrote some radically critical letters about the disastrous path Russia was taking, wondering how anyone could still believe in “the phantom of the revolution”. Many of the intelligentsia came from backgrounds in which moral integrity was taken for granted.  Immediately after the 1917 revolution there was something of a religious revival because people became church-goers in order to distance themselves from those persecuting the Church.  

From the early 1930s the authorities demanded that Soviet Art reflected the dogma of socialist realism. Those that were seen to go against this ideology were attacked and risked being eliminated.  She was dismissed from three teaching Institutions, and in the late 1930s escaped by immersing herself in Mussorgsky or Schubert. Many people managed to create a worldview within the limitations set by Soviet cultural policy. Their continued creativity helped them survive. 

Do you have plans for another book?

Maybe. I’m having a bit of a wrestle. One project would only be possible if I could go to Russia to do research, so for the moment that is ruled out. I’d quite like to write about my own experiences in Russia, where I’ve met many very interesting people. I feel I myself belong nowhere, as my upbringing really happened outside Britain. My father served as ambassador in three communist countries: China, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. My mother was involved in things Russian even before her marriage. She spent time in 1937 in Leningrad working for the Mission for Displaced British citizens, and she had lots of adventures. Then as an ambassador’s wife, she taught a class at Moscow University, became involved in lexicography, and compiled a spoken English-Russian dictionary.  So it seemed natural for my own life in music and writing to have focused so much on things Russian.