Images of Myself

by Igor Stravinsky

I AM able to sleep alter dark only when a ray of light enters my room from a closet or adjoining chamber. This need must extend from my earliest infancy, though I can no longer recall the source of the original light. I fail to remember any night lamp in the corridor beyond the room I shared with my younger brother, and I am sure no oil wick was left burning beside any icon in our house &emdashp; a Russian tradition. Our only icon, in my mother’s room, was not hallowed by a flame. The light I still seek to be reminded of must have come either from the porcelain stove — incalescent at bedtime — in the corner of the room or from the street lamp outside my window on the krukov Canal, and as the air holes of the stove formed menacing faces, I think the street light must have been the reassuring one. Whatever it was and whatever bogeys it stood at bay, this umbilical cord of illumination still enables me to re-enter the world of safety I knew at seven or eight.

But the world of a child that age, at least in its outline, is still “safe in the morning. My world began regularly at seven o’clock, for though classes in the Saint Petersburg Second Gymnasium did not start until two hours later, the gymnasium was a long walk from our house. My nurse, Bertha, the “safest" person in all the world, awakened me, and in a voice that was the most loving I ever heard in my childhood. Often, but not every day, Bertha’s reveilles were mingled with the rattle and torrential tumble of bath water being drawn for me in the ancient zinc-plated bathtub (two steps up from the floor) at the end of the corridor. Morning culinary odors reached the bathroom, and they, too, indicated the presence of another “safety.”Caroline, our Finnish cook, a family fixture for thirty years.

Breakfast was served by the maids, or by Simon Ivanovich. (I do not remember the maids, because they were often changed and because as I grew older, my mother made certain they had grown older, too.) Simon Ivanovich was a small man with a small military-style mustache; he had been the subaltern of my uncle Vanya at one time. He was remarkable chiefly for a bald head that must have reminded other people besides myself of a bull’s. He lived in a tiny antechamber under the front stairs, or, rather, he shared this cubbyhole with piles of my father’s books.

I loved Simon Ivanovich with all my heart, and, in return, I think he supported my side in all questions of family allegiance. He probably saved me from disgrace on more than one occasion. but I have a clear recollection of being rescued by him on the event of my first intoxication. I had gone to a party with my elder brother and some of his fellow engineering classmates. We were all in our mid-teens and determined to exhibit our maturity by alcoholic copiousness — all except my brother, that is, for he had gone home early. At one point a fellow tippler asked me my sex, and then I realized we were all drunk. I kept saying: “I can’t go home. If my parents see me —” In fact, I did spend part of the night in the Kinsey pollster’s room, which is where Simon Ivanovich found me (with my brother’s help), and he somehow managed to bring me, undiscovered, to my room.

Simon Ivanovich lived with our family thirty years and died just before the Revolution, an old man. One more island of “safety” stood between him and school. This was Zackar, the doorman, a kindly old gentleman in an absurd Swiss beadle’s uniform. He also seems to have been there all my life.

School was much less “safe, of course, though even there people existed whom one could love. In the Second Gymnasium I was especially fond of two boys, both of them, though unrelated, with the name Smirnov: they were identihed simply as “Smirnov One" and “Smirnov Two.”The “safest" person in school, however, was the priest who pronounced the nuisance prayers with which the morning classes began and who taught a course in catechism and Biblical history called “God’s Law.” Father Rojdestvenskoy was very popular with the boys, but they cruelly baited him, and his class was a chaos of inattention. I do not think I showed more interest than anyone else, and Father Rojdestvenskoy knew that I knew nothing, but I was a favorite in his class.

Bible studies in czarist schools were as much concerned with language as with religion, however, as our Bible was in Slavic rather than Russian. The sound and study of Slavic delighted me and sustained me through these classes. Now, in retrospect, my schooltime seems to have been consumed largely by language studies, Latin and Greek from my eleventh to nineteenth years, and French, German, Russian, Slavic — which resembles modern Bulgar — from my very first days in school. Friends sometimes complain that my habit of comparing languages makes me sound like an etymologist. Actually, problems of language have beset me all my life — I composed a cantata, Babel, after all and even now, a half century since I left the Russian-speaking world,

I still think in Russian and speak other languages in translation. In spite of the “safety of Father Rojdestvenskoy and of a few comrades, I abominated the gymnasium and longed to be free of it and all schools forever.

Like most types of dirt, the school meal was inedible; student strikes were organized in protest, but without success. I was always hungry, therefore, and tea was served not in late afternoon in our house, but only after dinner; in fact, not until bedtime did Simon Ivanovich bring in the samovar with the tray of bread and confiture. The routine of the day was suspended only when my father sang at the Maryinsky. On performance days, too, the whole house trembled, for my lather was irritable when nervous, and performances always made him nervous, (I am the same, now, on my own concert days, and though my rancor at a particularly unwilling shirt stud or recalcitrant collar is always justified, no doubt it is also an example of pure “behaviorism.”) On performance days my father dined apart from the family, though sometimes we all ate together after his performance. I remember sitting on the stove in my room on these occasions and listening, hungrily, for the return of his carriage. After these late dinners Mama or Bertha came to see us in bed and to hear our prayers: “Our Father Who art in Heaven”

“Otchey nasch eezshey yehsee no nehbehsekh.” (This is Slavic; I do not know how to say it in Russian.) And yes, I remember now, the curtains were always parted to admit the light of the street lamp by the canal.

UNCLES are “safe,” too — ordinarily, that is, although I experienced my first deception in the arms of one of them, but, to be truthful, this “uncle” wasn’t quite a real one, which may have been the trouble. My “uncles” were my mother’s cousins, an artist and two generals. The artist, Dadya (Uncle) Mischa, was a Mephistophelean character, or so I suspect; I am certain, anyway, that he was too shrewd to be “safe. As a painter of the Perevishniky realist school, Uncle Mischa was violently opposed to the modern movement of Diaghilev, and later in life I was embarrassed by the contradictory points of view of uncle and friend, especially since Uncle Mischa’s scenes of Ukrainian wheatfields and cows on riverbanks covered the walls of our apartment. The two generals were Dadya Kolya, who was the commandant of Kronstadt, better known as the inventor of a new type of gun, and Dadya Vanya, a divisional general.

The deception occurred during a briet perambulation in Dadya Vanya’s unmotherly arms, when he promised me that I would see a bird and no bird appeared. (This ancient promise of the photographer is a serious evil, I think, that should be discouraged, for though our fall may not be Edenesque, we are shown our nakedness by it. and we do begin to doubt the absoluteness of our “safety.”) What I remember most vividly from that first photography session, however, is the smell of Dadya Vanya’s epaulets and the cold, metallic taste of the braids on his uniform, which I sucked like candy.

Dr. Dushinkin, our family physician, was another “safety.” An elderly man and a general in charge of a military hospital, he called at our house once a week. I seem to remember him in uniform only, and only in winter, as he came in from the street, his beard glistening with snow. Dr. Dushinkin made me stick out my tongue, expose my chest to his icy stethoscope, report on my matutinal movements, and swallow a little black pill if I had not had any movements to report. I recall our family dentist, too, though dentists are never “safe,” of course, and this one, to begin with, was a German. I do not recollect his name, but I am sure I could still find his office near the Issakievsky Cathedral.

The “safety” of friends is mixed, and probably only those old enough to be out of competition are able to qualify. One of my dearest old friends was Vladimir Vasilievich Stasov, the disciple of Glinka — indeed, he had played piano duets with Glinka, which made him a sacred cow — and the advocate and associate of the Russian “Five.” Stasov was a gigantic figure, with a long, white (when clean) Father Time beard, a tiny toque, and a dark, dirty surtout. His gestures were large and loud, and he was always shouting. If he had a confidence to tell you, he would cup a huge hand to your ear and shout it there; we called this “a Stasov secret.” He said only the good about everything, leaving the bad to take care of itself, and we used to say that Stasov wouldn’t speak ill even of the weather. Sometimes, with his energy and enthusiasm, he reminded me of a panting dog, a dog I wanted to pet but was afraid would knock me over in response. Stasov knew Tolstoy, and he had many delightful Tolstoy stories to tell. He said that once when Tolstoy was speaking to a group on nonviolence and nonresistance, someone asked him what to do if attacked by a tiger in a forest. Tolstoy answered, “Do the best you can; it happens rarely.”

I remember Stasov best at his funeral, however, and I am unable to recall his apartment without seeing a coffin in it and Stasov in the coffin. He seemed so unnatural in his coffin, because his arms were folded, and Stasov was the most open-armed man in the world. The room seemed grotesquely narrow, too, for such a huge man, though this was partly because of the rainy day; we were crowded by our coats and umbrellas. I remember that, as the coffin was carried through the door, the conductor Napravnik said, “They are taking out a piece of history.”

MEMORIES themselves are “safeties,” of course, Far safer than the originals, and growing more so all the time, and the wrong ones usually can be chased, when they turn up, and the right ones again rummaged for in the favorite memorial reliquaries. My most persistent memory images from the years before the Firebird return to me without chronology. Recently, for instance, I have often thought of the Maryinsky Theater with its front entrance draped in black at the time of Tchaikovsky’s death. I remember how the curtains billowed in the winter wind and how moved I was by the sight of them, for Tchaikovsky was the hero of my childhood. I have also remembered frequently of late the first music I ever heard, a bristling fife-and-drum corps marine band from the marine barracks which were near our house, at the juncture of the Krukov Canal and the Neva. This music, and that of the full band which accompanied the Horse Guards, penetrated my nursery every day, and the sound of it, especially of the tubas and the piccolos and drums, was the tickling pleasure of my cradlehood. I know, too, that the wish to imitate this music led to my first efforts at composition, for I tried to pick out its intervals at the piano as soon as I could reach the piano, but found in the process other intervals that I liked better, which made me a composer.

A curious return of memory has recently caused me to think about the appearances of Czar Nicholas II in the streets of Saint Petersburg when I was a child and about the political world in which I was born. The Czar was a colorless figure, but his horses were a beautiful sight — two ahead of the imperial sleigh, with a blue net behind them to catch the snow, and a third galloping at the side. Even at that time, wherever the Czar went, gray-coated policemen went with him and ordered all bystanders to “Circulate, circulate.” When the Czar’s private train passed one of the country homes of my wife, Vera, everyone in her family was obliged to remain indoors behind tightly shuttered windows, while armed guards were posted along the track. The Czar’s own railroad car was painted blue, but three cars in this train were the same color to complicate still further the task of a would-be assassin.

But other memories crowd upon me as I tell these: my first visit to the circus, the Cirque Ciniselli, as it was called, where ladies in pink corsets rode horseback standing up, as in a Seurat or Toulouse-Lautrec; and my first visit to Nizhni Novgorod, a city of green cupolas and white walls, a city full of Tatars and horses and the smell of leather, furs, and dung; and my first view of the sea, in my seventeenth year, which is surprising because I was born near the sea and lived close to it most of my life. I saw the sea for the first time from a hill in Hungerburg on the Gulf of Finland, and I remember my astonishment that this narrow ribbon between earth and sky was — as it would be from a hill — so “vertical.”

Many of my later memories of Saint Petersburg are associated with Diaghilev, and I recall especially the first time I saw his apartment on the Zamiatine Pereúlok and how disturbed I was by the large number of mirrors on his walls. I remember Diaghilev, too, as we would go together to visit Alexander Benois in his rooms in the Vasilievsky Ostrov, or take a boat to one of the island nightclubs — the Aquarium, the Villa Rose, the Arrow — in the Neva; and I can see Diaghilev now, entering the Leiner restaurant on the Nevsky Prospect (this is where Tchaikovsky caught cholera), bowing to people right and left, or as we would dine after a concert, in a little “sawdust” delicatessen, on marinated fish, caviar. Black Sea oysters, and the most delicious mushrooms in the world.

I remember also how I loved to watch the gulls, especially when the water rose in the rivers and canals, for when the city stood up to its nose in water, the fish swam closer to the surface and the birds gyrated lower. A child does not wonder why the sight of gulls should move him so deeply, but an old man knows that they are death reminders and were such even when he watched them by the Neva one November afternoon when he was seven or eight.

How does a man grow old? I don’t know, or why I am old. if I must be (I don’t want to be), or if “I” am “he.” All my life I have thought of myself as “the youngest one,” and now, suddenly, I read and hear about myself as “the oldest one.”And then I wonder at these distant images of myself. I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory, nevertheless, and not by truth. But through the crack of light in my bedroom door, time dissolves and I again see the images of my lost world. Mama has gone to her room, my brother is asleep in the other bed, and all is still in the house. The lamp from the street reflects in the room, and by it I recognize the simulacrum as myself.