There was something about the horrors of living in Soviet Russia that nurtured a particular kind of artistic genius, ardently spiritual, determined to rise above the moral compromises and endless struggles for existence that marked most people’s lives. Like many artists of the preceding “Silver Age”, they lived in a self-contained world of pure art that was so intense, it was close to a religion – and, for some, art actually was a manifestation of a burning faith, so it becomes hard to disentangle their religion from their art. One thinks of poets such as Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, the film director Andrei Tarkovsky, the painter Vasily Kandinsky. Among musicians there are composers such as Galina Ustvolskaya and Sofia Gubaidulina, and the pianists Sviatoslav Richter (who liked to perform in semi-darkness, with only a bedside lamp on the piano) and Emil Gilels.
Maria Yudina was one of these pure souls. If her name isn’t so familiar to us as theirs, it’s only an accident of history, because in her fervent idealism and sheer native talent, she was on their level. In some ways she outdoes them in otherworldliness, her utter refusal to compromise – which in the end was her undoing.
In the 1920s and 1930s, she gained a huge reputation for her towering performances of Bach, Mozart, Brahms and, above all, contemporary music. In the following decades, right up to the late 1960s, she gave concerts that are spoken of with awe by those who witnessed them, and made many wonderful recordings. But she was worn down by ill health and endless persecution by the Soviet authorities, who could not tolerate her stubborn attachment to her Orthodox faith, or her passion for contemporary music, which for them was tainted by “bourgeois formalism”. By the time she died in 1970, she had become a marginal figure.
Elizabeth Wilson is well placed to tell her story. A cellist and biographer of several musicians, including Dmitri Shostakovich (an important figure in her new book), Wilson was a student of the great Mstislav Rostropovich at the Moscow Conservatoire during the late 1960s. She never met Yudina herself, who at that time was undergoing one of her periods of official ostracism and was rarely seen in public. But she met and spoke to many of the key figures around her, and has been tireless in tracking down many others since her time in the Soviet Union.
Wilson’s new book is not always ideally clear in its narrative, but it certainly has the tang of authenticity. One striking thing that emerges from the book is how quickly Yudina’s essential personality emerged. When she was only 10 years old, her playing struck her cousin with its “grandeur of scale, profundity, tautness of scale and rhythm and above all a great aesthetic quality – a sort of Beethovenian ‘Es Muss Sein’” (‘it must be’) – exactly the kind of description applied to her playing decades later. In converting to Orthodox Christianity, she had to brave the wrath of her father, a doctor who forswore his Jewish heritage and became a passionate atheist, quite capable of throwing annoying religious types down the stairs. She was passionately interested in philosophy and history, devoured Kant and Hegel in the original German, and developed intense relationships with writers, including the great theorist of the carnivalesque in literature, Mikhail Bakhtin.
By her early 20s, she had become what she would remain to her dying day: an eccentric figure in a black smock and patched shoes, desperately short of money, moving from one damp apartment to another, sounding off about the necessity of the spiritual life at precisely the wrong moments, when officialdom was likely to overhear. “In many aspects I agree with the Russian communist party, but cannot accept it because of my idealistic and religious views,” she declared.
Her passionate nature spilt over into a desperate yearning for romantic attachment, often directed at some brilliant new writer. Despite her lack of conventional good looks, she fascinated men, but one gets a sense she only really liked the unattainable ones. Her hopeless crush on Boris Pasternak prompted sniggers about her gazing at him “as if he were an icon… like an eternal schoolgirl”. For a while, it seemed she might actually marry one of her gifted students, Kirill Saltykov. When he was killed in a skiing accident, she consoled herself by becoming a model “daughter-in-law” to his mother, looking after her in her final illness.
Wilson scotches the rumours that Yudina slept in a coffin, that she was actually a nun (though she was mockingly referred to as “the nun” by some of her students), and that she recorded a Mozart piano concerto for Stalin in a single night (a story portrayed in The Death of Stalin). This is no disappointment, because, as this fascinating book shows, the real story of Yudina is more moving and extraordinary than any of the myths.
Playing with Fire is published by Yale at £25. To order your copy for £19.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop
