100 Years Later
Re-examining the Russian Community in Dornach
[We are here today because of one man: Dr. Rudolf Steiner. These buildings, this community, this world wide phenomenon, the Russians who came here, some of whom left while others remained and returned, are all a tribute to his vision, his ability to identify and articulate the spiritual science that for so many did and continues to provide answers at the very core of our existence, and his personal magnetism that attracted people of talent, yes geniuses, to him and his teachings. With all due respect and an admission that many here know and can speak of Anthroposophy and Rudolf Steiner in a more informed fashion, I venture merely to shine a light on the Russian community that in some small way contributed then in 1914 and whose legacy has enriched this place and the memory of Dr. Steiner.]
It all began one might say with two letters, a case of mistaken identity. The Russian letter А., the initial of Anna Alekseevna Bugaeva-Turgeneva,[1] was found in a number of books that had long been in the possession of Swetlana Mikhailovna Geier, the acclaimed translator of Dostoevsky into German, subject of a wonderful documentary film, Die Frau mit den 5 Elefanten,[2] but also the translator of Andrei Bely's Memoirs both of Alexandr Blok and Rudolf Steiner.[3] One of the books[4] bore a similar but not identical handwritten indication of ownership: N. Turgeneva (Н. Тургенева), where the difference between Russian А and Н (looking like the Roman letter H), was not to me at least immediately apparent. This was not Asya, but her older sister, Natalia (Natasha) Pozzo-Turgeneva (see the photoarchive at http://bdn-steiner.ru/modules.php?name=Coppermine&file=thumbnails&album=70). But more of her later.
Perhaps it all began in February of 1914 when Andrei Bely and Asya Turgeneva came to Dornach to be a part of this new Anthroposophical community and participate in the construction of the BAU.[5] But that too had antecedents. On May 6, 1912 Bely had sent a letter requesting a meeting with Dr. Steiner to Marie von Sivers, fluent in Russian and the Doktor’s constant companion and later second wife. A meeting between Rudolf Steiner, Bely and Asya would take place the next day. I had become fascinated in this encounter when I translated Bely's letter to his friend (sometimes foe) Aleksandr Blok in which Bely described the curious circumstances surrounding the letter.[6] I would ultimately, with the kind assistance of Dr. Walter Kugler, publish in Russian and English this letter that had resided at the Rudolf Steiner Nachlass.[7]
A word about coincidence and the study of Andrei Bely and Rudolf Steiner. I was once told by Frederic Kozlik,[8] author of a largely ignored, misaligned, but still unmatched study of the influence of Anthroposophy in Bely's works, that one need not look simply or too closely for purely rational explanations of events. Rather there were occurrences of events at a given time, coincidences, Zufälle, совпадения, for that date, May 6 is my own birthday, as well as Sigmund Freud's, and my wife's maiden name is Dorothea Elisabeth Steiner.
I had first visited Dornach in the summer of 1974, having defended a dissertation on Bely that spring, but received little encouragement or sense of Russianness in Dornach. Most who had come in 1914 and subsequently had passed on. There was a certain reluctance to discuss Bely, who according to émigré scholars had abandoned Anthroposophy and the teachings of Steiner. An article by Asya in defense and explanation of Bely and his relationship to Steiner had appeared in a little read émigré journal, Мосты. Asya herself had a very complicated relationship to Bely, in particular after 1916 when he was summoned back to Russia for military service, although he would never serve.[9]
All in all it would be years before I returned. But Swetlana Geier, who labored mostly unnoticed and largely unappreciated by her colleagues at the University of Freiburg was already working on Zeichen der Mörgenrote, a German translation of Bely's Memoirs of Blok. Swetlana’s penchant for altering titles has been problematic. While signaling the essence of a work it often obscured the Russian original. So her translation of Bely's Memoirs of Steiner, Verwandeln des Lebens (The Transformation or Metamorphosis of a Life) remained largely unnoticed by Western and Russian literary scholars, the latter still hesitant to write about Bely and this spiritual aspect of his life.
These Memoirs of Steiner in German translation ultimately resulted in a new appreciation of Bely inside Anthroposophical circles. As one of the most brilliant and vibrant first hand witness accounts of Dr. Steiner and the fledgling Dornach community, it was also what attracted me to Swetlana Geier. Our exchange of letters, from my younger, more daring, immodest self, lead to our first encounter in her home in Freiburg. That visit would be repeated over the next thirty years whenever I was in need of help on my own translations of Bely's The Christened Chinaman (1991) and Glossolalia (2003).
That relationship and the fact that I had stayed with her and worked on the books and manuscript of Bely's memoirs lead Swetlana’s family via Taja Gut to think of me when it came time to pass on the so-called Belyj Reisebibliothek. The title here (Bely’s Traveling Library) refers to what was in part supposedly books by Bely left in Dornach with Asya when he returned to Russia in the fall of 1916. This set of some 100 books and documents was given to me after Swetlana's passing through the graces of Taja Gut, with whom I had collaborated in the trilingual edition of Glossolalie. I was placed in contact with Swetlana's granddaughter, Sophia (Sonja) Geier and her aunt, Michaela Götte (Swetlana’s daughter), in Freiburg. I met with them both and was given two cartons of dusty books that I transported to Middlebury in September of 2011.
The task seemed simple: to find a home for the books that had been kept separate from the larger library and archives of Frau Geier that now are housed at the Library of the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg. As a scholar and not a librarian I have always viewed archives as having a two-fold function: first, to preserve the documents of the past; but second, to provide access to contemporary scholars and future generations for examination and study. I was keenly aware of the geographical isolation of Middlebury, this tiny Vermont village, notwithstanding its globally oriented College. Thus I set out first to establish a digital archive of the collection. Together with my student, Vanda Gaidamovic, I established an online presence for the books. This project is ongoing but essentially completed ( http://sites.middlebury.edu/belyj/). Here each book is indexed and accompanied by a photo of the cover, inside publication data, and other points of interest when present.
As I examined the volumes closely, each book seemed to reveal another mystery, another treasure, another pathway. Those with the name of Asya, either dedicated to her or with her name written inside, were easy to identify.[10] But the large majority had no such indication. There was a book with a handwritten dedication to Alexandr Pozzo, husband of Natalia Turgeneva who was Asya’s sister.[11] Another was dedicated to Margarita Sabashnikova-Voloshina from the translator, Vladimir Nilender.[12] One, as mentioned above, bears the name of N. Turgeneva inside. A special find was a copy of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in Russian with the ex libris stamp of Bely's father, Professor of Mathematics Nikolai Bugaev.[13] (Bely was the penname adopted by the son, Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev to avoid confusion with and embarrassment to his more famous father.) The book now has been returned to the Andrei Bely Memorial Apartment-Museum in Moscow, where it had once resided a century ago.[14]
But there were others that had little or nothing to do with Andrei Bely or his fellow Russians in Dornach. Several books bore the name of Elsa Mahler, who upon some research was identified as the first Professor of Russian at the University of Basel.[15] (cf. http://sites.middlebury.edu/belyj/elsamahle/). Another set of books bore the imprint of Bibliothek Altenheim Dornstadt.[16]
So what combined to bring these books together, where had they come from and equally important where was the rightful home for these volumes?
The answers to date would be gleamed by trips to Freiburg and the helpful guidance of Dr. Franz Leithold, himself a former student of Swetlana Geier. At the University of Basel where they had just held a special exhibit and set of activities to commemorate Frau Doktor Elsa Mahler, I met with Prof. Dr. Thomas Grob. Others pointed me in the direction and Dr. Felix Ingold. I also spoke with Valentina Rykova and my colleagues at the Andrei Bely Museum in Moscow who had received from books of Asya from her. Finally there were volumes bearing the seal of the Bibliothek des Goetheanums. And it was those that brought me here, first, mistakenly as it turned out to the Rudolf Steiner Nachlass, but then fortuitously to this Library, to the Dokumentation am Goetheanum and to Johannes Nilo.
Here what was originally seen as a fifteen-minute discussion led to an entire afternoon in which I barely had time to get an overview of what treasures might be here. I was headed to Berlin where I had done work for the preceding twenty-five years on the Russian-Berlin, the years 1921-1923 when Bely along with many others had made that city the literary capital of Russian writers and publishers. Having been shown, however, the apartment of Asya that only in the past few years has become a place of interest and accessible, I returned to Dornach later in June of 2012.
Here for several days I explored the library holdings and what appeared to be minimal archival materials connected to Asya.[17] There was a single carton that contained some documents, the most important being a typescript differing from the actual printed article in Mosty.[18] This was Asya’s first defense in Russian of her husband and reply to an earlier article by Fedor Stepun. The omitted passages contain a brief few page history of Steiner, valuable because Asya like Bely was one of the first and closest collaborators with the Doktor. There is also a curious omission in the article about Bely and Steiner. Following the line “Лично для меня он был как родной отец…годы в Дорнахе…вторым университетом.» The omitted phrase of Bely’s is “И видел и близко знал (в доме отца) таких великих людей, как Владимир Соловьев и Лев Толстой, но никогда в жизни не встречал человека, который по своему величию, по силе и глубине творчества был бы равен ему.»[19]
But there were other cartons. One contained materials of Margarita Voloshina-Sabashnikova, the artist and author, who was a witness to those times and who like Asya and Natasha and Aleksandr Pozzo remained committed to Anthroposophy and the community her life long. There was also a simple carton of Natasha’s papers, fascinating and still to be studied that might help us place this equally remarkable woman in perspective. But the final two cartons containing ostensibly the papers of Aleksandr Pozzo, Natasha’s husband, yielded the important documents that have brought us here this week. There was an extensive correspondence—mostly one way from Bely to Natasha and one touching, sensible, lovely lady-like response by Natasha to Bely. There was also a set of letters from Emil Medtner to Natasha, shedding additional light on that relationship.
I will not describe in any detail these letters, but simply note that they have been transcribed, as best as could be, into Russian and translations of them into German are being prepared for publication by Christoph Hellmundt. Their fate in Russian and perhaps English is still to be determined.
Why should we care? Russians have their saying: Бог любит тройцу: God loves a threesome. There were several triangles, Steiner-Bely-Asya, Steiner-Bely-Medtner, Bely-Medtner-Natasha; Bely-Natasha-Asya, Asya-Natasha-Marie von Sivers, and undoubtedly others. But what is important about these documents is that they provide additional insight into Bely during his turbulent years of 1914-1915-1916. They do so by also offering an unfiltered, richer picture of Bely's brief but stormy infatuation with Natasha. This period and Natasha have largely been overlooked, perhaps intentionally, by Bely in his later published three volumes of memoirs. In fact except for a work not intended for publication, Материал к биографии (интимный), in German as Geheime Aufzeichnungen, the central role of Natasha in these years needs re-evaluation as to how she might figure in Bely’s poetry and prose. Both were used almost as a replacement for the Freudian and Jungian psychology to which his one time friend and mentor, Emil Medtner, ultimately turned. What did or do we know of Bely and Natasha? How did this impact (perhaps with the additional motivation of jealousy) on Bely’s Рудольф Штейнер и Гете в мировозрении современности,[20] his caustic reply to Medtner?
One theme has brought us together. The centrality of the Russian community here in Dornach and what has been its contribution to the subsequent legacy of Rudolf Steiner. If nothing else, the Swetlana Geier gift has re-awakened an interest in that Russian colony some 100 years ago. It has lead to a re-evaluation of the valuable collection of Russian books here in the library, and the return of others to their rightful home. It has resulted in the first to my knowledge discovery and serious examination of archival materials related to those Russians who were here. They join what might be still unexplored documents in the Rudolf Steiner Nachlass. There is also the renewed interest in Asya and the now uttered aloud wonderment as to why there has to date been no book devoted to her art, her life, her contributions and influence on art in Anthroposophy, not just in this building with its windows, but in her designs for cover art of many books.