How he came to be in Sarajevo on Vidovdan, a Serbian national and religious holiday memorializing “Saint Prince Lazar and the Serbian holy martyrs” of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, remains a bit of a mystery. The invitation to observe military maneuvers may have come directly from General Oskar Potiorek, Governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Whatever the decision-making process, it proved disastrous. On the morning of 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were driven through the streets of the city towards the Town Hall for an official reception. The route that the couple would take in a 1910 Gräf & Stift Double Phaeton limousine was published in the newspapers so that spectators could line the route and watch royalty pass by. Unfortunately for the royal couple, the spectators would include members of a group known as Young Bosnia, who, with the aid of the fabulously named terror group Black Hand, had hatched a plan to bomb the vehicle.
The plan failed thanks to the actions of Leopold Loyka, the driver of the vehicle, who noticed an object being thrown at the entourage while it was in the air and punched the accelerator, causing the bomb to detonate behind the car. The Archduke, in the first of several displays of compassion that he would come to regret, ordered the vehicle stopped until the onlookers who had been injured in the blast were attended to. The procession to the Town Hall continued and the reception, bizarrely, went forward as if nothing had happened. The Archduke demanded that the day’s remaining events be cancelled so that he could go to the hospital and check on the status of those injured earlier in the day. This discussion appears to have taken place outside of the earshot of Loyka, who drove the vehicle towards the National Museum, the next stop on the now-defunct itinerary. When informed that the plan had been changed and that he had made a wrong turn, Loyka attempted a virtually impossible task in the days of crank starters and carburetors: he tried to turn the vehicle around.
At the same time, 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip, still smarting from the failure on the part of his Young Bosnia co-conspirators, had a sandwich for lunch. As he walked out of the delicatessen, he came upon Loyka trying to maneuver the car back from whence it came. Princip, surely gobsmacked at the outrageous coincidence, nevertheless acted quickly, pulled out his pistol, and shot the Archduke and Sophie, both of whom died that day. Precisely one month later, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. By 1 August 1914, Germany declared war on Russia and thus began the War to End All Wars.
Igor Stravinsky had returned to Switzerland in 1914 with his family after his wife was diagnosed with tuberculosis and confined to one of the country’s famed sanatoriums. Thomas Mann, fresh from the publication of Death in Venice, had brought his wife to a sanatorium in Davos for treatment two years prior, an act which served as the inspiration for his next great novel, The Magic Mountain. As the tension throughout Europe transitioned from a simmer to a rolling boil, Stravinsky decided that famously neutral Switzerland was likely as good a place as any for he and his family to sit tight for a while, especially considering the fact that they had spent parts of the previous four years there. Perhaps sensing that all out chaos was brewing, Stravinsky had traveled to his estate in Ustyluh in July 1914 to retrieve some personal effects. By the time of his return trip to Switzerland later that month, the rolling boil was an exploded pressure cooker and Stravinsky “felt certain that we were on the eve of serious events.” Exempted from military service on health grounds, “there was no need for me to return to Russia, which, though I had no inkling of it, I was never to see again as I had known it.” As fate would have it, the seeds of the destruction of Stravinsky’s Russia were being sown right in his adopted backyard.
Switzerland at the beginning of the 20th century was a cultural melting pot par excellence. Alfred Erich Senn, in his work The Russian Revolution In Switzerland, 1914 – 1917, notes that “[a]ccording to the 1910 Census, 147 of every 1,000 residents of Switzerland were citizens of another country. This was to be compared with 2 of every 1,000 residents in Spain, 4 in Russia, 11 in Holland, 17 in Germany, 27 in France, and 31 in Belgium.” Switzerland had long maintained a tradition of being a safe haven for refugees and exiles from all over the continent, and the universities of Switzerland were filled with foreign students. The meeting spaces and lecture halls, on the other hand, were filled with revolutionaries. That same 1910 census indicated that “there were 4,607 residents of Switzerland whose native language was Russian…[t]he largest settlements included 2,155 persons in Zurich, 2,107 in Geneva, 865 in Lausanne, 720 in Bern, and 545 in Basel.” Among these native Russian residents were several prominent Marxists and Socialists, including Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov, one of the founders of Russia’s social-democratic movement, Julius Martov, the leader of one such movement, the Mensheviks, a man who Leon Trotsky described as the “Hamlet of the Democratic Socialists,” and Martov’s opponent after a dispute at the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party resulted in a split within the broader Russian movement, a Communist revolutionary, political theorist, and leader of the Bolsheviks named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by the name he adopted after his arrival in Switzerland in 1900, Lenin.
The outbreak of the war in August 1914 essentially blockaded the many Russian revolutionary figures in Switzerland from knowing anything about the goings on at home. With the conflict likewise restricting freedom of movement, many of the most important episodes in the final years of the Socialist and Communist schemes against Tsar Nicholas II took place within Swiss borders. Divisions between movements were consolidated and countless articles were published. Senn notes that “[d]efensist and internationalist socialists debated the war in much sharper form in Switzerland. Although the Swiss government was concerned about possible violations of its neutrality…the Russian emigres still found a considerable freedom of expression.” Russians weren’t alone in fomenting revolution. Socialist and Labour organizations from all over Europe were deeply embedded in Switzerland. There were numerous significant gatherings of the Second International, the left-wing alliance with representatives from twenty nations who brought us International Worker’s Day, International Women’s Day, and the eight-hour workday.
With so many notable figures of international Socialism ensconced in Switzerland at the outset of the conflict, it is perhaps surprising to learn that few emigres were more important to the Russian expatriate community generally and the revolutionary movements specifically than Nikolai Rubakin, a man who truly earned the moniker “man of letters.” Rubakin moved to Switzerland in 1907 after being arrested for illegal activities in a student organization at Saint Petersburg University, leaving behind a library of over 100,000 volumes (which was lost soon after he emigrated). Slowly and steadily, Rubakin amassed an entirely new library in Clarens, and subsequently Lausanne, dedicated to Russian works, and between 1911 and 1915, he authored a gargantuan annotated bibliography called Among Books, an “attempt to review Russian book treasures in connection with the history of scientific-philosophical and literary-social ideas.” Lenin, in a review published in the Bolshevik magazine Prosveshcheniye (“Enlightenment”) described Rubakin’s effort as a “bulky tome of 930 large pages of very small type, printed partly in double columns.” Rubakin’s library was known throughout the entire Russian community living in Switzerland, and virtually every revolutionary figure of significance utilized the library.
Rubakin kept meticulous records and had strict rules. Books were to be treated with care and woe be upon he who failed to do so. On at least one occasion, Plekhanov was notified that he had damaged a book and his protestations that the damage had been done prior to his checking it out did not stop him from paying to have the repairs done so as to maintain his relationship with Rubakin. Anatoly Lunacharsky, who would go on to be the first Soviet People's Commissar for Ministry and Education, was notorious for marking up borrowed books and was not infrequently the subject of Rubakin’s ire. Nothing irritated Rubakin more than “the Russian habit of licking a finger to turn a page.”
There are no records of Igor Stravinsky running afoul of the great librarian. He patronized the library multiple times, checking out books on Russian history, German history, and Shakespeare. Rubakin’s records do not include anything to suggest that Stravinsky read any revolutionary writings. Stravinsky appears to have been ambivalent about the revolution itself. Writing to his mother and brother in the aftermath of the February 1917 revolution, Stravinsky seemed elated: “All my thoughts are with you in these unforgettable days of happiness that are sweeping across our dear, liberated Russia.” Conversely, a postcard sent to Diaghilev at the Plaza Hotel in New York in early 1916 makes clear that he wanted no part of being associated with any group considered potentially unsavory to possible audiences. Invoking a contemptuous slang term for a German, Stravinsky stated emphatically, in a sentiment that registers as exceptionally ugly today: “I am revolted to read in C. Von Vechten’s rag about our ballets…that I am Jewish. I implore you to deny that I am a boche, or a Jew, or a Social Democrat.”
Unpacking Stravinsky’s Anti-Semitism is an entire graduate degree in Russian Studies unto itself, and the topic has been explored at great length by some of his biographers, most notably Richard Taruskin. Needless, and sad, to say, anti-Semitism in Russia was appallingly common, particularly within the Orthodox Church and the nationalist movements throughout Europe in the second half of the 19th century. Stravinsky’s pupil and biographer Robert Craft disputes the notion that Stravinsky was anti-Semitic in anything other than a commercial sense, writing in reference to a strikingly similar letter written to his Russian publisher in the early days of the Nazi regime, “Stravinsky’s statement is shocking, however, because a cultured cosmopolitan of artistic genius is simplistically identifying Jews with Bolsheviks, and, at the same time, revealing his willingness to conduct anywhere for money.” On balance, Stravinsky’s words and actions regarding Jews over the course of his life constitute pervasive negative stereotyping and craven self-interest that crosses the line into self-parody, the early 20th century equivalent of Michael Jordan saying that “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” Such was the position of many working artists, and a depressingly large segment of the general population, in those days, Russian and otherwise. And Stravinsky was a working artist, in all the great and terrible aspects of the job. His correspondence is filled with all manner of negotiations, figures, performance schedules, and the like, especially during his time in Switzerland.
When he wasn’t reading about the war’s combatants or brushing up his Shakespeare, he was trying like hell to figure out where to go from what he didn’t know at the time would be the peak of both his career and western music in the 20th century. Among the personal effects that Stravinsky brought with him from his July trip to Ustyluh was a collection of folklore compiled by Alexander Afanasyev, Russia’s answer to the Brothers Grimm. Over the course of his career, Afanasyev compiled nearly 600 Russian folk tales into several volumes which were published during his lifetime and eventually translated into numerous languages. Afanasyev’s claim to fame, beyond his enormous influence on Russian culture, is the scene in John Wick: Chapter 3 where Keanu Reeves uses one of the volumes to beat the ever-loving shit out of a massively tall assailant in the New York Public Library, exactly as Afanasyev surely imagined it.
The influence on Stravinsky’s music of Afanasyev’s folk tale collections lie in an unexpected place. “What fascinated me in this verse was not so much the stories, which were often crude, or the pictures and metaphors, always so deliciously unexpected, as the sequence of words and syllables, and the cadence they create, which produces an effect on one’s sensibilities very closely akin to that of music.” Utilizing the wealth of materials included in these volumes, Stravinsky began embracing a new compositional style that was the near polar opposite of his previous successes. Gone were the massive orchestral forces from the three great ballets, in their stead music for small ensembles that, given their size, character, and duration, can only fairly be described as miniatures. These miniatures would serve a much greater purpose, however: they were the breeding ground for the techniques Stravinsky would use to compose his next series of masterpieces.
Stravinsky began work on a cycle of four songs based on texts from Afanasyev in June and completed the work in September. Pribaoutki is a collection lasting about three minutes in total for low voice with a small instrumental group consisting of one each of the woodwinds and strings. The name itself is not exactly translatable, though “Song Games” or “Nonsense Games” seems to be somewhat agreed upon by the internet. Trying to decipher the texts in English is ultimately a fruitless endeavor, but the lyrics to the songs are not the point, the rhythm of the language is. A useful point of comparison is the hip-hop group Das Racist, whose lyrics are frequently absurd but whose purpose is to ultimately serve the rhythm and rhyme scheme. An example from “You Oughta Know” off the 2010 mixtape Shut Up, Dude can easily be found on YouTube:
I get around like a vinyl
All sales final
Lionel
Richie
I'm so gangsta, prissy
Chicks don't wanna fuck with me
Yet me people seem to let me
Get away with wildin'
Like I won an Emmy
Grammy
Tony
Oscar
Rasta impostors, mangos
Trinidad, attorneys, burning
S.N.S. Herning
Learning
Cultures, culture vultures, sculptures,
Nature, nurture
Public freakouts
If you got a problem, find me, speak out…
By the time Stravinsky completed Pribaoutki, he and his family had moved from the mountains of the canton of Valais to Clarens, in Vaud, a half hour or so east of Lausanne on Lake Geneva. Stravinsky told his friend Leon Bakst that he had become “involved in householdery and [had] rented a villa, La Pervenche,” which was leased from Ernest Ansermet. It wasn’t long, however, before Katya’s lungs led the Stravinskys back to the mountains, this time to Château-d'Œx. While residing there, the Gregorian calendar flipped to 1915 and Stravinsky began work on another piece based on tales found in his Afanasyev volumes. This work would be the first of Stravinsky’s four small-scale masterworks to emerge from his time in Switzerland, each of which would transcend the ballet genre into something else entirely.
Renard (the French word for fox) was originally to be called “Tale about the Cock, the Fox, the Cat, and the Ram.” The story was created by Stravinsky himself, amalgamating tales from Afanasyev’s collections, tales of the deceitful Fox who receives comeuppance. Cultures around the world have tales of the Fox, including some who deify the Fox as a God, but the European tradition almost exclusively characterizes the Fox as cunning, sly, and (ugh, of course) female. If you’re wondering about the sadly obvious, yes, this traditional fable was exploited for anti-Semitic purposes in 1937. In Stravinsky’s story, the Fox tricks and captures the Cock twice, with the Cock being rescued by the Cat and the Goat both times. After the second rescue, the Fox is choked to death and the three others sing a Mocking Song and dance around the stage. This seems like as good a time as any to note that, in 1940, negotiations took place between Stravinsky and The Walt Disney Company to create an instrumental version of the music for an “animal film.” Give it up for the 1930s, everybody. No wonder people think children are coddled nowadays.
A key point in the gestation of Renard was an evening Stravinsky spent at Maxim’s Bar in Geneva with Ernest Ansermet, where Stravinsky was introduced to a man named Aladar Racz. Racz was performing in Maxim’s on an instrument called the cimbalom, the Central and Eastern European equivalent of the hammered dulcimer, which may be familiar as it is sometimes used in Celtic and Appalachian music. The cimbalom is a stringed instrument created when someone crammed the guts of a piano into a trapezoidal box. The instrument is played by striking the strings with special hammers that look a bit like the microphone Bob Barker used on The Price is Right. The sound of the cimbalom seems to have reminded Stravinsky of the gusli, the closest Russian equivalent (plucked with the fingers like a zither as opposed to struck). He was completely captivated and bought one for himself, using it to compose instead of a piano for a while.
All the while, Stravinsky’s previous works continued to be performed in the countries that were not yet consumed with war. Ansermet conducted a performance of Petrushka in Geneva in January, a concert whose success surprised Leon Bakst, who wrote to Stravinsky that he “would not have believed that such a success was possible in this hole, Geneva…I hope to see you in Rome. Tell that fat spider Diaghilev.” That fat spider and Stravinsky had arranged to meet in Rome, where the composer Alfredo Casella was also conducting Petrushka. Shortly before he left for Rome, Stravinsky and his family had relocated to Morges, a town of 5,000 or so eight miles west of Lausanne, where they would stay for the remainder of their time in Switzerland. Once there, Stravinsky completed a little piece called Cat’s Cradle Songs and continued to make progress on Renard. On an autumn afternoon in 1915, Stravinsky and Ansermet boarded a train in Montreux bound for Epesses, where “only the most local of trains deigned to stop.” They were there to meet Ansermet’s friend, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, a writer with whom Ansermet had been friends for nearly a decade. From the train “alighted first a tall fellow with a handsome dark beard whom I recognized, then a shorter, beardless man, opposite the vineyard’s abrupt slope and its terraced walls.” Stravinsky and Ramuz seemed to take to one another quite nicely. “We ate, we drank; we were brought a second and third jug of wine. And time flew by.” It was over bread and wine that the foundation was laid for Stravinsky’s third masterpiece in Switzerland, provided world events did not swallow humanity whole.