What Have the Russians Ever Done for Us?

Name some great composers of the twentieth century. Chances are a few of them will be Russian: Prokofiev, Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, Shostakovich. For me, the last two are particular favourites.

Igor Stravinsky was twenty-four years older than Dmitry Shostakovich, but perhaps a bigger difference between them was that Stravinsky never lived in the Soviet Union, while Shostakovich spent his entire adult life there. By the time of the Revolution, Stravinsky was already famous and travelling the world. The two composers did not meet until 1962, when the totalitarianism of Stalin had begun to thaw under Khrushchev and the eighty-year-old Stravinsky at last felt it was safe to visit his homeland. A banquet was arranged at the Metropole Hotel in Moscow in honour of Stravinsky, with Shostakovich in attendance. Aram Khachaturian, another great Russian – well, Georgian – composer, witnessed their meeting:

They were placed next to each other and sat in complete silence. I sat opposite them. Finally Shostakovich plucked up the courage and opened the conversation:

‘What do you think of Puccini?’

‘I can’t stand him,’ Stravinsky replied.

‘Oh, and neither can I, neither can I,’ said Shostakovich.¹

I find it hard to disagree with them. However entertaining Puccini’s music is, it is only the climax of a West-European and specifically Italian style that had developed over the previous century. The Russian’s were doing something quite new.

And it wasn’t just in music. Name some great novelists – of any century. You’ll probably start off with quite a list of English or English-speaking writers, but after that it won’t be long before you get to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and not much longer to Bulgakov, Pasternak, Gogol and Nabokov (whom you might already have listed, since he wrote novels in both English and Russian). If you allow the constraints to expand a little you might also include Chekov as a playwright and Pushkin as a poet. And that’s just to list the household names (my household, anyway).

This blossoming of literary talent occurred over the shortest of periods. To go from Pushkin to Tolstoy is almost to go from Chaucer to Shakespeare. From one of the first to use his native language (as opposed, in both cases, to French) to the archetype of writing in that language. It was a transition that took Britain over two centuries, but took Russia scarcely three decades. And Britain has rarely been in the same league as Russia with regards to composers. As for artists, perhaps Britain does better overall, but just as our music has no Stravinsky, our art has no Kandinsky.

Like Shostakovich, Vasiliy Vasilievich Kandinsky was in Russia at the time of the Revolution, but was able to leave in 1921. He settled in Germany – until the Nazis closed the Bauhaus, where he taught. He moved to France, soon to find himself once again under Nazi rule when they invaded. He died just four months after Paris was liberated. Long before that, in 1910, he produced a painting which he appropriately titled First Abstract Watercolour. It was just that – the first truly abstract painting. Kandinsky went on to produce many others, and founded an entire art movement.

Kandinsky equated painting with music and tried to imitate music’s inherently abstract nature. He called many of his works compositions and experienced art and music synaesthetically. Early in his career he wrote:

Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul. ²

Stravinsky and Kandinsky knew each other in Paris in the 1930s, though unlike the artist, the composer left France for America before the German occupation. It was long after the Russian Revolution, and longer still after each man’s personal revolution in his own field of art. The 1910s were a decade that changed the world in many ways. Politically the impact of the First World War and the Russian Revolution cannot be underestimated, and we shouldn’t forget the Xinhai Revolution in China or the Easter Rising in Ireland. The sinking of RMS Titanic is still remembered today and marks the apogee, and therefore the endpoint, of mankind’s blind faith in technology. Kandinsky produced the first abstract painting in 1910, but it was in 1913 that Stravinsky’s revolution became violent.

Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) was first performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29^th May 1913. The fact that it caused the audience to riot is well-known, and not entirely overstated. But the production itself was revolutionary, both in terms of its music and its choreography. The première has been described as ‘the most important single moment in the history of twentieth century music’³. The whole of the production team was made up of Russian émigrés: Stravinsky, the composer; Vaslav Nijinsky, the choreographer; Nikolai Rerikh, the set designer; Sergei Diaigilev, the producer. None of them died in the country of his birth. It was in the Russian Empire that their talents first went unrecognized, but in the Soviet Union that they knew they would not be free to express themselves as artists.

But art did flourish in the Soviet Union, even under Stalin, though the lifestyle of those who produced it was precarious. The Soviet leader regarded himself as an expert on every aspect of Russian life – military, economic and cultural. In each field he was arbitrary. In 1929 Mihail Bulgakov found himself unable to make a living when the Soviet government banned the publication of his novels and the production of his plays. But at the same time Stalin intervened personally to protect Bulgakov from arrest. And yet when Bulgakov wrote to Stalin, asking for permission to leave the Soviet Union on the grounds that he was not able to practise his profession, the dictator refused. He died in 1940, but it was more than two decades before many of his major works were published. When they were it became clear why they had been regarded as so dangerous – although he was not always critical of the regime.

Music did not convey so obvious a message. As Kandinsky had observed, music is by its nature more abstract than literature – harder to identify with a political opinion. Dmitry Shostakovich’s work was at first found to be favourable by the authorities. His opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, was initially described as a work that ‘could have been written only by a Soviet composer brought up in the best tradition of Soviet culture.’⁴ But that was before Stalin had seen the opera. Soon after he did, articles criticizing it began to appear in Pravda, and Shostakovich’s earlier works began to be critically reappraised. The same year, 1936, Shostakovich completed his Fourth Symphony. As with Bulgakov’s works, the symphony wasn’t performed until decades later, in 1961 – but at least the composer was alive to witness it. He was luckier than many around him; this was the era of the Great Purge, when many were arrested and executed, including his brother-in-law.

But Shostakovich was no fool. He changed his compositional style and his Fifth Symphony was a huge success. An official review praised him for ‘not having given in to the seductive temptations of his previous erroneous ways.’⁵ During World War II he wrote his Seventh Symphony – titled Leningrad. One of its first performances was in the city after which it was named, at the time under siege by the Nazis, the scores smuggled in to be performed by the city’s starving orchestra. It is still regarded as a memorial to the 25 million Soviet citizens who died in the war.

But despite his success, Shostakovich was once again denounced in 1948, along with Prokofiev and Khachaturian. With Stalin’s death he gradually came back into favour. In 1960 he joined the Communist Party, but only so that he could become General Secretary of the Composers' Union.

It would be a preposterous exaggeration to claim that all of Russian culture can be compressed into a period of less than two centuries, but from the viewpoint of the West, it can seem like it. From – to choose a couple of arbitrary points – the birth of Aleksandr Pushkin in 1799 to the death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 2008 one could pick almost any decade and find a great work of art produced by some Russian or other. Most of it was produced by individuals whose lives were oppressed by a totalitarian regime, or who had fled such a regime for the freedom of the West. Russia now is in a strange place politically – more liberal than it has ever been, and yet still authoritarian by the standards of the rest of Europe. In the past it has been the birthplace of revolutions in every field of culture which have swept the world. It’s difficult to see much hope for the prospect of another, but Russia – that riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma – can always surprise.

1. E.Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered
2. Hajo Düchting, Wassily Kandinsky, 1866-1944: A Revolution in Painting
3. Thomas Forrest Kelly, First Nights – Five Musical Premiers
4. Dmitry Shostakovich (compiled by L. Grigoryev and Y. Platek), Shostakovich: About Himself and His Times
5. E.Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered

Tell Me More, Tell Me More

With the publication of The Last Rite – the final instalment of The Danilov Quintet – imminent, it’s time for me to make a confession: I didn’t make it all up. Admittedly the stuff about vampires and a curse on the blood of the Romanov emperors was all my idea, but as for the rest of it I pride myself on my attention to historical accuracy. It’s always pleasing to read reviews that say how well-researched the books are, and I’m often asked for recommendations of books which go into the history behind the quintet in more detail.

So I’ve gone back through my library and picked out a couple of history books for each period covered – those that I particularly remember from the many others that I trawled through to uncover the minutiae of Imperial Russian life.

Twelve – 1812

I first read Adam Zamoyski’s 1812 – Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow before the idea of writing Twelve ever occurred to me. It clearly left something of an impression, and the freezing winter nights of the French retreat came back to me as the ideal location for a vampire tale. I have his biography of Chopin lined up to read soon.

Once I’d plotted Twelve, I realized that if I was going to make it authentic I’d need an in-depth account of Napoleon’s occupation of the old Russian capital. I had to go back to 1964 to find something good enough: The Burning of Moscow 1812 by Daria Olivier. There’s a fascinating amount of detail in a book that covers just five vital days of European history.

Thirteen Years Later – 1825

In historical terms, Thirteen Years Later covers two closely related events: the death of Tsar Alexander I and the Decembrist Revolt – an uprising of army officers against his successor Nicholas I.

One of the joys of writing historical fiction is the freedom to choose which path to follow when historians themselves are unsure of the truth. Often my choice is the less likely – and therefore more fascinating – path. Since 1825 there has been a persistent rumour – even within the Romanov family – that Alexander did not die then, but faked his own death in order to be free of the burden of ruling Russia. The threads of the story are brought together wonderfully in Alexis S. Troubetzkoy’s Imperial Legend, although unlike me, Troubetzkoy does not suggest that the tsar’s disappearance was down to the fact that the blood of the vampire Dracula flowed in his veins.

The fame of the revolutions of 1917 has somewhat obscured the uprising of 1825, leaving it hard to find thorough histories of the subject. This time a detailed study came from 1937 with Anatole G. Mazour’s The First Russian Revolution, 1825. It’s fascinating to wonder just how different the world might have been if the uprising had succeeded.

The Third Section – 1854-1856

Although I read plenty on the Crimean War for research, it was other aspects of the period that caught my attention. The title of the novel comes from The Third Section (sometimes translated as Department) of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery, a rather long-winded name for Tsar Nicholas I’s secret police. The Third Department by P. S. Squire, written in 1968 provides a good understanding of the organization. It’s easy to see a thread that stretches on to the Ohrana, the Cheka, the NKVD and the KGB (and perhaps beyond).

I fear that my fascination for the next selection may not be shared by all, but the development of the railways, and particularly the building of the St Petersburg to Moscow railway, was essential to the modernization of Russia. Richard Mowbray Haywood’s Russia Enters the Railway Age, 1842-55 has detail invaluable for anyone writing about the period, and the storytelling still delivers a highly readable text.

The People’s Will – 1881

Another decade, another tsar and another failed revolution. The People’s Will was a terrorist organization that murdered Tsar Alexander II – although the ensuing revolution they had hoped for never came to pass.

I couldn’t find one single all-encompassing text on the events and had to piece things together from several sources. In Alexander II – The Last Great Tsar Edvard Radzinsky gives a highly readable account of the life and death of Russia’s most (perhaps only) liberal tsar, though betrays a little more partially than most historical biographers do.

Historical fiction relies on detail and this is often found not in the broad, sweeping brush of a generalist, but in the biography of the one of the bit players. Lee B. Croft’s print-to-order Nikolai Ivanovich Kibalchich – Terrorist Rocket Pioneer gives an account of the life of one of the leading members of The People’s Will – the man who designed the bombs that killed the tsar and also a prototype rocket intended to take travellers to the moon.

The Last Rite – 1917-1918

Not since I wrote Twelve had I researched a period that was so well covered in the history section of bookshops. In all of twentieth century history only the World Wars have been as well documented as the Russian Revolution, so my selections here are the best of many. The first is very well known, and its reputation is not overstated: A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 by Orlando Figes. It is both wide-ranging and detailed and takes full advantage of the benefits of hindsight.

Quite the reverse can be said of Ten Days That Shook the World, a first-hand account by American journalist John Reed of his experiences of the Bolshevik coup. Such a personal account, from a man who does not attempt to hide his admiration for Lenin and his comrades, must be treated carefully as a contribution to the historical record, but is unrivalled in its evocation of what it was like to be on the streets of Petrograd at that time.

One Book to Rule Them All, One Book to Find Them

There’s one last book I’d like to mention, one which attempts to cover the whole of Russian history, often eschewing the lives and deaths of the tsars and the battles they won. Again it is by Orlando Figes: Natasha’s Dance – A Cultural History of Russia. Aside from fictional sources such as Tolstoy’s War and Peace (from which Figes’ book takes its name), I found nothing that gives a better feeling for what Russia was actually like in the century leading up to the Revolution.

Fiends from the Past

I don't know how things are in the USA, but in the UK the seeds planted in the mind of many a small child on February 26^th 1977 are now bearing fruit in writers of every sort of alternative fiction. That was the day when the first issue (prog, as it was described) of 2000 AD first hit the streets. I was eight years old. Now I'm in my forties and letting the dark things that lurk somewhere in the recesses of my memory seep out into my work. There's nothing as straightforward as the wonderful cameo by Max Normal in Russell T. Davies' Doctor Who episode Gridlock, but there was one 2000 AD story that has to be acknowledged as an inspiration for my first novel Twelve. The connection may be surprising, since 2000 AD was a science fiction comic, and I don't (currently) write science fiction. But this particular comic strip wasn't SF – it was pure horror.

Fiends of the Eastern Front, by Gerry Finley-Day and Carlos Ezquerra, débuted in Prog 158. By then I was twelve. I'd never read it since then, but when the idea for a vampire story set during Napoleon's invasion of Russia came to me I immediately remembered what a powerful combination vampires and war make. Fiends was set on the eastern front in World War Two, with a mysterious squad of Romanian soldiers fighting alongside the Germans. It's the obvious location for such a story – the cold and the long nights providing the perfect environment for vampires to hunt. I quite deliberately didn't go back to look at the comic strip when I was writing Twelve, and it was in fact only last week – now that I'm three books into the quintet – that I got round to it. It's a reflection of modern life (and my indolence) that it was easier to order a bound single volume online than venture into the loft and pick out all the relevant editions from my hoarded comic collection.

I'd been fairly sure that I hadn't been ripping it off wholesale, and I was pleased to find no surprises on that front. The only idea that I knowingly took from Fiends, though it's a widespread piece of folklore, was that a vampire could be killed by decapitation. I could even recall the exact wording of the commentary: 'There are many ways to kill a vampire. Decapitation is one of them.' I think that's echoed in Aleksei's words in Twelve when he first kills one of the voordalaki by that means: 'Ever since Iuda had mentioned it, I had been itching to try decapitation as a method for despatching one of these creatures.'

As it happens, and I'd forgotten, the vampires in Fiends conform to just about every bit of folklore that there is: they don't like garlic or crosses; they can transform into bats and wolves; they can't cross fresh water; they can be killed by silver bullets. None of those characteristics applies to the voordalaki of my novels. One notable difference is that my vampires can be killed by fire, where those in Fiends cannot. Again, that was one of the few things I specifically remembered, and remembered almost exactly Captain Constanta's words when he revealed himself to have survived being incinerated by a flamethrower: 'Cringu told you I can grow from the smallest speck – even from ashes, you fool!' I made a definite decision that that was too unphysical for the world I was creating.

So I was well aware of the general connection between Twelve and Fiends of the Eastern Front – vampires fighting in a human war – and I knew a few specific characteristics that I'd chosen to use or ignore. However, there were two connections between the stories which I noticed on rereading Fiends that I had completely forgotten. Whether they come down to coincidence or subconscious recollection is hard to say.

The first is in the specificity of numbers. As the title suggests, Twelve is about twelve vampires, and much of the story involve the hero, Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov, picking them off one by one. In the opening of Fiends its hero, Hans Schmitt, is found dead and entombed and on the walls of the cellar he has drawn the silhouettes of ten vampires. He gets through them rather quicker than Aleksei, managing to kill seven of them in one assault. For me, the number came from the fact that I wanted to name my creatures after the apostles – so I suppose we should blame my childhood reading of the Bible, rather than of 2000AD, for that.

But the most surprising thing was the discovery that, like Twelve, Fiends was written in the first person. I'm often asked why I chose to write in the first person and I can't say anything other than it simply seemed right. The decision has a major impact on plotting, and in subsequent books I've not found it possible to put together an entire story from one viewpoint. You might think it difficult though for a comic strip – a medium in which the fourth wall is so evident – to be written in the first person. Fiends, however, is told mostly through the diary of Hans Schmidt, discovered with his body in the cellar in Berlin in the present day (as 1980 was described at the time). Thus every caption is, unlike most strips, part of a first person narrative. Again it could be coincidence, but I suspect that format may have influenced me.

So what next? Will one of my novels feature a character loosely based on Walter the Wobot, Judge Dredd's irritating sidekick? I doubt it, but it can't be denied that 2000 AD has been an inspiration to me as a writer. And I bet I'm not the only one.

Splundig Vur Thrigg.