OfRoberta Scorranese
Both the painter and the writer cultivated an elaborate memory of the Russian land, the homeland they were forced to leave. But in a profoundly different way
In the chapters of Speak, I remember, Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography first published in 1951, youth in Russia is described as if in so many perfect miniatures. Mom’s expensive fur muff, the snowflakes, the stained glass window from which to observe the kaleidoscope of colors of the summer outfit. People, things, anecdotes: everything comes to life in the details and it seems like navigating a realistic dream, one that we perceive as “realer than real life”. Like in a painting by Marc Chagallwhere flying animals, violinists on the roof and female figures that expand in the sky coexist in a fairytale setting, but always alive in “an interior elsewhere” recognizable and common to all, as Silvia Vegetti Finzi observed. For both, for the writer and the painter, there is only one magnifying glass: distance. The distance from the Russian land, left in his youth and continually evoked, albeit in different ways: through the clear (and therefore lyrical) photography of Nabokov’s memories and through a cultural transfiguration – inherited from Jewish roots – in Chagall’s paintings.
Yet, the two protagonists of this story have lived such different stories as to be almost opposing: Vladimir Nabokov was born in Petersburg in 1899 to an aristocratic family who was forced to leave Russia after the October Revolution. Marc Chagall, however, was born under the name Moishe Segal in a village near Vitebsk, in Belarus (then part of the Russian Empire), from an observant Jewish family. His father was a herring merchant and tried to keep the family safe from the pogroms unleashed by the Tsar. Like what actually happened on 7 July 1877, the day of the birth of the future painterso much so that Chagall wrote in his autobiography: «I was born dead».
What they have in common, paradoxically, will be the “passport”, i.e. the Nansen passport, the one that the League of Nations began issuing to stateless refugees and refugees in the early 1940s. But it is curious to observe a detail: in 1917, while Nabokov’s family abandoned St. Petersburg (or rather, Petrograd) and, after a period in Crimea, reached Great Britain following the defeat of the White Army, in the same year Chagall – who had already returned to Russia from France – moved to the capital because he was inflamed by the October Revolution. And again in 1917 he created one of his most famous, but also most visionary and poignant paintings, The walkwhere his wife Bella Rosenfeld hovers in the air held only by the strong and loving grip of Marc’s hand.
The 1917, however, will also be a watershed, because from then on in a certain sense the paths of the two began to converge in their distance from Russia. Physics that of Nabokov, who studied at Cambridge and then moved to Berlin and Paris before definitively abandoning Europe for the United States in 1941. Morality that of Chagall, who despite holding official positions in the revolutionary government, he felt very far from the aesthetic impositions of the Russian avant-garde. The culmination came when, returning from a business trip, he found that the academy he had founded with the idea of a free experimental laboratory had been transformed without his knowledge into a “supremacist academy”. In 1922, before leaving Moscow for France, Chagall wrote: «The only thing I want is to make paintings and a few more things. Neither Imperial Russia nor Soviet Russia needs me. I am incomprehensible to them, a stranger. […] And perhaps Europe will love me, and together with her, my Russia will love me.” The painter will take leave of his country with a painting, The cattle dealer (now at the Center Pompidou in Paris) which it’s already memory, nostalgiaof a rural world completely transformed by the first decades of the twentieth century.
While Chagall left Russia for Paris, Nabokov completed his studies at Trinity College. And perhaps it is precisely in this period, at the beginning of the twenties, that the two begin to process a different form of memory. Nabokov’s is clear, sharp and literary, Chagall’s is imaginative, transfigured and expanded in a dream. At the center there is always the Russian land, the “legendary” and pre-revolutionary one, which will resurface (now more clearly, now more concealed) in Nabokov’s literary works as well as in Chagall’s recurring characters. In Nabokov there will never be nostalgiabut rather a melee with memoryalso engraved in his famous Lessons on Russian Literature, where he allows himself to tear down Dostoevsky. But distance also allows Chagall to build a different, more complex and fascinating narrative, which passes through his Hasidic training.
This tradition, in fact, is strongly characterized by a daily mysticism made up of fairy tales, dreamlike visions, irony and paradoxes. The same redemption from sin passes through love and this explains the fact that Chagall went through two wars, a revolution, the distance from his homeland, the death of his beloved Bella and many other adversities while always remaining «a boy who jumps and dreams», as Giuliano Briganti defined him. «The city seems to split, like the strings of a violin, and all the inhabitants begin to walk above the earth», he writes in But come onhis autobiography. And this also explains the refusal to fully embrace surrealism: Chagall is not a surrealist because its dream dimension is that of childhood memory. It does not lend itself to cultural elaboration, as happened instead in Nabokov: in the writer, memory became narrative material. So much so that he once declared: «(to Russia) I will never go back, for the simple reason that all the Russia I need is always here with me: literature, language, my Russian childhood.”
And that’s how it explains it feeling of “cheerful holiness” that can be felt in all of Chagall’s works: from violinists to rabbis to lovers. In everything the sense of the sacred is tempered by a subtle and persistent joy, a mysterious happiness. These words of his are beautiful: «Despite all the problems of our world, in my heart I have never given up on the love in which I was raised nor on the hope in love. In life, just like in an artist’s palette, there is only one color that gives meaning to life and art: the color of love”
April 26, 2024
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