Preface by gerald s. smith

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the author of the letters to marguerite Caetani published below eventually set down two book-length accounts of her life – in english, the third language in which she made her mark as a writer1. Consequently, much more first-person non-fictional information is available about her than about most other literary Russians of her generation. these eloquent autobiographies, confidently charting the attainment of a faith-based world view and a personal life conducted in accordance with that view, have apparently discouraged approaches using a more detached standpoint. elena aleksandrovna izvol′skaia, to use the original form of her name, came from a family situated within the uppermost echelons of the professional service class of the Russian empire when they were at the summit of their wealth and status. since she was a woman, she would not have been expected to train for a professional career, let alone earn her own living; instead, she would have inherited a duty to make a suitable marriage and raise a family. in her case this was not to be. she had just become an adult when political developments in her own country swept away the social structures she had grown up among and would have inherited. she was destined to spend the remaining two thirds of her life in emigration, supporting herself, serving rather than being served. elena was born on her maternal grandmother’s estate in Bavaria on 12 July 1896. Her education was in the hands of a cosmopolitan series of private tutors, as was normal for a person of her background; the process culminated with her being presented at Court as a debutante in 1914, a member of the last ever such cohort. Her father was the internationally prominent diplomat and statesman aleksandr petrovich izvol′skii (1856-1919), who served in Rome, in Copenhagen, and eventually in Japan. in 1906 he was appointed

1 Helen iswolsky, Light before Dusk: A Russian Catholic in France, 1923-1941, new yorktoronto, longmans, green & Co, 1942; Helene [sic] iswolsky, No Time to Grieve…: An Autobiographical Journey, philadelphia, the winchell Company, 1985.

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Foreign minister, and occupied this office until 1910, a period of particular international tension; this was the only continuous period when the family lived in Russia. He then moved to the key post of ambassador to France, and he was the last person to act in this capacity before the revolutions of 1917. His wife, elena’s mother, was margarita karlovna, née Countess toll (18??-1942), a Danish aristocrat like two contemporary empresses, the sisters maria Fedorovna of Russia and alexandra of great Britain; her father was the head of the Russian legation in Copenhagen. she moved in Court circles in st petersburg. Her command of Russian was rudimentary; she normally communicated with her daughter in French. one small passage may exemplify the vividly observed retrospective portrayal elena izvol′skaia offers of the kind of material world she grew up in, and what happened to it: Cartier, of course, had a display of tempting jewelry which made our Fabergé settings look hopelessly passé. only court circles patronized him. who would have guessed that some thirty years later, the least of Fabergé’s trinkets would have become collectors’ items? Father never cared for them, but still had a few left after the Revolution. we could sell them at a good price when our finances ran low. such are life’s little ironies2 .

Hélène iswolsky, as the ambassador’s daughter soon became known to the non-Russian reading public, spent the years 1914-41 in France. During world war i she worked as a nurse at the Russian Hospital near paris, which was organised and run by her mother. she started studying law at the university of paris, then in 1918 she took an external baccalauréat at the sorbonne. immediately afterwards she set out on a dedicated writing career that lasted intensively and uninterruptedly for over fifty years3. Before world

2 No Time to Grieve…, pp. 89-90. iswolsky hints in No Time to Grieve… that her father was deeply in debt when he died, and that her mother’s inherited income went largely on supporting other refugee relatives. neither of the autobiographies reveals any specific information concerning iswolsky’s earnings from writing. whatever may have been the case, even if residence in central paris was beyond the reach of elena and her mother after 1919, there always seems to have been enough money for a live-in cook and country retreats in the summer. 3 there appears to be no complete integrated bibliography of iswolsky’s publications; the deficiency is especially marked with regard to her writings in Russian. For the writings in French, see the meticulously detailed leonid livak, Russian Emigrés in the Intellectual and Literary Life of Interwar France. A Bibliographical Essay, montreal-kingston-londonithaca, mcgill-Queens university press, 2010, pp. 160-165, which even includes reviews of iswolsky’s works in the French press. For the writings in english after 1941, see ‘a selected Bibliography of the writings of Helen iswolsky’, compiled and edited by thomas e. Bird,

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war ii, she published more in French than in Russian, producing a stream of books, essays and reviews. During this period her main significance was as an intermediary between the Russian and French cultural spheres, providing accounts of one in the language of the other4. French preceded Russian; iswolsky’s access to the parisian literary and artistic elite was facilitated by the contacts she made through her father’s professional activities. the name of the most important of them, prince argutinskii-Dolgorukii, is planted here in the first letter, and the connection would hardly have gone unnoticed by marguerite Caetani. in her second autobiography, iswolsky identifies her father’s friend Joseph Reinach as a key facilitator5 . in neither of her autobiographies, though, does she mention Raymond Recouly, whose name also occurs in the first of the letters to Caetani, though he too was manifestly a vital and enduring contact. one of iswolsky’s initial contributions to the Russian émigré periodical press, perhaps indeed her debut in this sphere, was an account of marguerite Caetani’s Commerce, almost certainly the earliest response to the journal to have been published in Russian6 . this review, dealing with the first four issues, is appended below, in the original Russian and in translation, in part to provide an example of iswolsky’s published writing from about the same time as the three letters to marguerite Caetani. it has to be admitted that at this early stage, iswolsky’s manner is somewhat jejune. what she has to say is

in The Third Hour: In Memory of Helen Iswolsky, new york, the third Hour Foundation, 1975, pp. 133-142. maria pia pagani, ‘elena aleksandrovna izvol′skaja’, in Russi in Italia, accessible at http://www.russinitalia.it/dettaglio.php?id=802 (accessed 22 september 2014), provides some otherwise obscure information. an effort has been made in the notes below to prioritise publications concerned with Russian literature. an asterisk preceding the reference indicates that the item is absent from the listings just mentioned. 4 a pioneering contextualised general discussion of iswolsky’s literary life and work was the brief passage by elizabeth klosty Beaujour, ‘Hélène iswolsky (elena aleksandrovna izvol′skaia)’, in her Alien Tongues. Bilingual Russian Writers of the “First” Emigration, ithaca and london, Cornell up, 1989, pp. 152-153. very valuable on iswolsky’s relations with French thinkers is Catherine Baird, ‘the “third way”: Russia’s Religious philosophers in the west, 1917-1996’, ph.D. thesis, mcgill university, 1997, on iswolsky see especially pp. 319-322, 351-366, 391-396, 476-481, 486. in leonid livak, How It Was Done in Paris: Russian Émigré Literature and French Modernism, madison, wisconsin, university of wisconsin press, 2003, iswolsky unavoidably makes a marginal appearance. in his subsequent work livak has provided an exceptionally well documented account of iswolsky’s contribution to Franco-Russian cultural relations. see his Russian Emigrés…, per index. 5 No Time to Grieve…, pp. 122-123. 6 *elena izvol′skaia, ‘Commerce’, Zveno, 123, 8 June 1925, p. 2, 3. see Helen iswolsky, ‘on Commerce’, below, pp. 101-103.

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by no means without interest, though. For example, as her concluding point of reference she singles out for extended quotation a passage from valéry’s ‘lettre de madame emilie teste’ which would be guaranteed to raise the hackles of anyone at all sensitive to gender issues, but she then leaves the text to speak for itself rather than stating her own attitude to it. the reader in search of an understanding of Helen iswolsky as a person craves even the most modest indication of where she might have stood on this issue, especially in view of the commitment to dutiful and devout female service to which her subsequent life and writings bear witness. in the case of ‘teste’, though, the service is to a man; in the case of iswolsky, it was to a cause7 . iswolsky’s first contribution to Commerce itself was a set of translations into French, of two poems by pasternak and one by mandel′shtam, which appeared in the sixth issue of Commerce8 . this was a pioneering publication; the leading expert on pasternak’s life and work believes it to have marked pasternak’s debut as a poet in languages other than Russian9 . the same may well be true in the case of mandel′shtam. Boris pasternak had left Russia for germany after the revolution, and then gone back in 1923. His reputation had been established with the publication, simultaneously in Berlin and petrograd, of Sestra moia zhizn′ (My Sister Life) in 1922, the same year and places of publication, and with the same effect, as mandel′shtam’s collection Tristia. the first of the poems translated by iswolsky comes from Sestra, as is acknowledged at the foot of the translation (‘poème extrait du recueil intitulé «ma sœur la vie»’). the source of the other texts is more remarkable: pasternak’s ‘otplyt′e’ and mandel′shtam’s ‘1 ianvaria 1924’ first appeared in the same issue of a periodical published in petrograd in 1924, under the aegis of maksim gorky and an editorial board of younger writers committed, as was that of Commerce in a very much less fraught environment, to literary rather than political values10 . this was certainly the source

7 D.s. mirsky also draws attention to what he calls this ‘astonishing’ work in his article on Commerce; see introduction to mirsky letters above. He makes no further elaboration of the reasons for his opinion. 8 Boris pasternak, ‘nuit accamblante’, ‘Départ’, ossipe mandelstam, ‘1-er janvier 1924’, Commerce vi, Hiver 1925, pp. 187-192, 193-199 resp. the Russian originals are ‘Душная ночь’ and ‘Отплытье’, and ‘1 января 1924’ respectively. 9 lazar’ Fleishman, ‘iz pasternakovskoi perepiski’, Slavica Hierosolymitana, vols. 5-6, 1981, [pp. 535-541], pp. 539-540. 10 Russkii sovremennik, 2, leningrad-moscow, 1924, p. 7, 8 (pasternak, ‘Отплытье’), pp. 97-100 (mandel′shtam). the title page states: ‘published with the closest participation of m. gorky, evg. zamiatin, a.n. tikhonov, k. Chukovsky, abr. efros’. work by writers

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of iswolsky’s texts for the two poems concerned; there was no other source for them available at the time. these texts belong to the most innovatory Russian poetry of the day, and with their densely metaphorical, allusive language they would present a formidable challenge to any translator at any time, let alone the relative novice that iswolsky was when she tackled them11 . in her first autobiography, written less than twenty years after the events concerned but treating them only as an interlude, even a diversion, in her ‘journey’, iswolsky gives only the briefest account of her contribution to Commerce; the key sentence is ‘i contributed a number of translations of Russian modern poets, and had the rare opportunity of meeting most of France’s famous writers at the Bassiano home’12 . in iswolsky’s second autobiography the account of her relations with Commerce and its ambience is much more extensive and detailed13 . at one stage in the early 1920s iswolsky roomed in paris with a Belgian woman called marguerite Quersaint. she was a friend of Rainer maria Rilke, and during one of his visits, speaking Russian, iswolsky discussed Russian poetry with him. During his time in Russia, Rilke had known leonid pasternak, the eminent painter, father of Boris, ‘whose work had just appeared. at that time i was, myself, interested in this poetry and discussed it with our guest’. substantial supporting evidence for iswolsky’s statement about her interest in current Russian poetry is to be found in her earliest essays in the French periodical press, but pasternak is absent from them14 . in her second autobiography iswolsky continues, again without mentioning any specific dates:

resident outside Russia (vladimir veidle, vladislav khodasevich) is included alongside work by those resident inside. 11 she had written some poetry in her youth, during her first serious love affair, with a man she only identifies as ‘Dimitri’. He has many points in common with D.s. mirsky, but, iswolsky tells us, he was killed at the catastrophic battle of tannenberg (No Time to Grieve…, pp. 56-59). ‘He remains for me the first man i loved, and lost, and the symbol of a society that planned for a great future, and was doomed’. mirsky was present at tannenberg, and was one of the few Russian officers who survived. 12 Light before Dusk, p. 43. the writers iswolsky mentions meeting in this context are, in the order in which they appear: Claudel, valéry, ‘the surrealist poets’, larbaud, Fargue, the Baruzzi brothers, mirsky, paulhan, Colette, macleish, Rilke; the musicians and artists are stravinsky, prokofiev, Ravel, poulenc, auric, milhaud, Derain, de segonzac, picasso, Dufy (p. 44). 13 No Time to Grieve…, pp. 165-170. 14 Cf *Helene iswolsky, ‘Bolshevist poet-mystics’, The Living Age, June 11, 1921, pp. 638-644, accessible at http://www.unz.org/pub/livingage-1921jun11-00638 (accessed 22 september 2014), translated from ‘la littérature mystique au pays du bolchevisme’, La Revue

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During those years i had kept up my interest in soviet literature, which i followed as closely as possible. we received but little material from the u.s.s.R., but some of it was exciting. there were these poems of Boris pasternak, hailed by expert Russian literary critics. another poet whose work was of great classic beauty was ossip mandelstam. […] i tried my hand at translating some of these poems into French. if i succeeded, i consider this as something as a tour de force which i could never repeat again. it required all the enthusiasm and also the boldness of youth15 . this account exhibits suspicious anachronism, not helped by the floating ‘During those years’. the expression ‘soviet literature’ was not commonly used until much later. Chronology becomes even more suspect when iswolsky continues: ‘in the fall of 1926, my contribution in this field was requested by the editors of a new literary review which bore the rather ambiguous name of Commerce’. as we have seen, iswolsky’s translations from pasternak and mandel′shtam in fact appeared in the winter, 1925 issue of the review. Her account continues with vignettes of the editors of Commerce, and then she gives a concise description of marguerite Caetani’s background and entourage, among whom, she says, there was little interest in current Russian literature. one man, however, was fully aware of what was happening on the soviet literary front. He was professor Dimitrii sviatopolk-mirsky of the university of london, who had been my former partner at the debutante balls in petersburg. […] He often came to paris and was marguerite Bassiano’s adviser for Russian literature. mirsky saw my translations of a poem by Boris pasternak and of another by ossip

de France, vol. 1, no. 3, april 15 1921, pp. 637-650. the english version of this essay contains impressive translations from Blok, esenin, Bely, and kliuev, some of them metrical and rhymed, by whom is unstated. it reflects the situation of Russian poetry immediately before the impact made by the publications by pasternak, mandel′shtam, and tsvetaeva in 1922. in 1920 or 1921 iswolsky also translated some poems by esenin into French and states that ‘they were later published in an anthology […] edited by yvan goll’ (No Time to Grieve…, pp. 140-141). this is sergei essénine, ‘Russie et inonie (fragment)’, *Les Cinq Continents. Anthologie mondiale de poésie contemporaine, par ivan goll, paris, la Renaissance du livre, 1922, pp. 202-205; it is followed by iswolsky’s translation of a[ndrei] Bjély, ‘le Christ est ressuscité (fragment)’, pp. 207-213. see also Helene isvolsky, ‘la Crise bolcheviste et la poésie russe’, Revue de France, vol. 2, no. 6, 15 march 1924, pp. 417-424 (which contains translations from Blok, voloshin, akhmatova, gumilev, viacheslav ivanov, sologub, and kuzmin) and ibid., vol. 3, no. 9, 1 may 1924, pp. 419-428 (mayakovsky, esenin, tsvetaeva, mandel′shtam). 15 iswolsky, No Time to Grieve…, p. 165. elsewhere, iswolsky states that she was able to keep up with current publications from Russia by visiting the bookshop founded by Jacob povolotsky, who had worked as a male nurse in the Russian hospital during world war i (ibid., p. 141).

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mandelstam. He approved them, though he was a severe, and often inexorable, critic. princess Bassiano was looking for Russian material, and mirsky recommended me. my translation was accepted and published in one of her 1925 issues. the princess paid for my contribution generously. Best of all, she invited me to be a regular guest at the sunday luncheons in the Bassiano residence at versailles’16 .

Here, the date is correct, raising the question of what iswolsky has in mind with her earlier reference to the year 1926. it goes without saying that we have no record of what might have passed in conversation between the two women at Caetani’s sunday gatherings; the three letters that survive probably represent at best a fragment of what information and opinion was exchanged. according to the passage just cited, then, iswolsky translated the poems and showed them to mirsky, and the initiative for submitting them to Commerce was his. about the quality of these translations, the few opinions that have been recorded are varied. iswolsky says that pasternak found out about her work in the following way: ‘shortly before his death in switzerland in march 1926, Rilke wrote to his friend, the painter leonid pasternak, father of Boris pasternak, who lived in munich at that time: «the very fine paris revue Commerce, edited by the great poet paul valéry, has published very impressive poems by Boris in a French translation by Helene isvolsky, whom i have also seen in paris»’17 . it is likely, then, that when pasternak expressed his opinion of the translations, he was prompted by Rilke. How he got hold of Commerce with his work is a mystery. sending a copy of the issue of Russkii sovremennik with one of the originals to marina tsvetaeva in prague, he made a private note about iswolsky’s translation – positive, but with a particular reservation. ‘if you know izvol′skaia, convey my gratitude to her. in places it’s very good, in general everything’s fine. But «Разбегаясь со стенаньем» seems to have been made very complicated in translation: lancée sur la voie de gémissement’18 . the line pasternak comments on here is the second in the second stanza of ‘otplyt′e’. iswolsky’s translation of the first two stanzas is given below vis-à-vis the original Russian:

16 ibid., p. 166. 17 ibid., p. 167. no source is given for this letter by Rilke. 18 undated inscription on a copy of Russkii sovremennik dispatched to tsvetaeva in late 1925 or early 1926. ‘Если знаешь Извольскую, передай ей мою благодарность. Местами очень хорошо, вообще все прекрасно. Но «Разбегаясь со стенаньем» кажется очень усложнено в передаче: lancée sur la voie de gemissement’ (недатированная надпись на журнале «Русский современник», отправленном Цветаевой вместе с одним из писем в конце 1925 – начале 1926 г.).

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ОТПЛЫТЬЕ

DÉpaRt

Слышен лепет соли каплющей, murmure du sel qui s’égoutte, Гул колес едва показан. Bruit de roues à peine marqué, Тихо взявши гавань за плечи, tournant doucement le dos au port Мы отходим за пакгаузы. nous dépassons les entrepôts. Плеск, и плеск, и плеск без отзыва…

Jaillissement, jaillissement, jaillissement sans échos. Разбегаясь со стенаньем, lancée sur la voie de gémissement Вспыхивает бледнорозовая la mer pâle et rose flamboie Моря ширь берестяная19 . Comme l’écorce des bouleaux.

the difficulties of translation here are formidable. to begin with verse form, the perpetual bugbear of translators of Russian syllabo-tonic poetry. this poem, very unusually for a short lyric, is polymetric; it changes metre half way through, from binary to ternary. the first four stanzas are composed in trochaic tetrameter in quatrains with alternating rhyme. this is the most common stanza pattern in all of Russian lyric poetry irrespective of line type, but pasternak gives it a tweak that makes it extraordinary. instead of the alternating feminine and masculine endings (abab) that were already hackneyed in pushkin’s time, he uses alternating dactylic and feminine endings (a′Ba′B). longer clausulae bring with them diminished phonetic exactitude, and these particular rhymes are so flagrantly inexact that even a couple of years earlier they would not have been considered admissible in professionally composed poetry. they depend on consonants: káPLiushCHei/zá PLeCHi; bez ótZyVa/blednoróZoVaia. and there is persistent enrichment to the left of the rhyme vowel: PoKázan/PaKgáuzy; STeNán′em/bereSTiaNáia. How a translator into French, where strict-form verse was already becoming non-viable, and rhyme being used less and less in serious poetry, could set about conveying the impact of these features, is well nigh unimaginable.

19 translating as literally as possible: ‘setting sail. audible lisp of salt, dripping,/Roar of wheels barely indicated./Having quietly gripped the harbour by the shoulders,/we’re moving out beyond the warehouses.//splash, and splash, and splash with no response…/groaning as it does its run-up, it’s bursting into flame, the pale pink/Broad birchbark expanse of the sea’.//). incidentally, nearly half a century later iswolsky wrote to the New York Review of Books on the subject of contracted nominal forms of the type that occurs in the title of pasternak’s poem: ‘… mr. michael J. valenti [letter, may 20] seems unaware that certain Russian words ending in nie have a shorter form ‘e, preserving the meaning, though sometimes, but not

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iswolsky makes no attempt to find an equivalent for the form of the original: she uses flaccid unrhymed free verse, and nothing remains of the rich sound texture of pasternak’s Russian. the use of the polysyllabic abstract noun jaillissement for the Russian monosyllabic and onomatopoeic plesk, particularly with the retention of the triple repetition, is indisputably misjudged. in semantic terms, there is wholesale simplification. the pasternak-signature metaphor of the ship ‘taking the harbour by the shoulders’ is filtered out. the vitally expansive concept shir′ in line 8 is dropped. in the light of all this, pasternak’s finding one line ‘too complicated’ seems if anything rather arbitrary. as we shall see in due course, however, pasternak also wrote to tsvetaeva more positively about this translation, and tsvetaeva did indeed convey pasternak’s gratitude to iswolsky. the poem by mandel′shtam that iswolsky translated for Commerce is both considerably longer and considerably more complex, with its obsessively repeated and recontextualized images, than either of the two by pasternak. Formally, it is less experimental; it uses iambic lines of inconsistently varying length, in eight-line stanzas consisting of two quatrains with conventional alternating rhyme abab, almost all exact. to take the passage in the poem that aroused the indignation of the more belligerent soviet critics of the time:

А переулочки коптили керосинкой, et les ruelles, enfumées de

pétrole

Глотали снег, малину, лед,

avalent neige, framboise et glace, Все шелушится им советской сонатинкой, pour elles tout évoque la sonatine

soviétique

Двадцатый вспоминая год.

et rappelle l’année dix-neuf cent vingt. Ужели я предам позорному злословью– livrerai-je à la médisance

effrontée

necessarily, having a different meaning. the long form Voskresenie and the short ending Voskresen’e both mean Resurrection, but the latter, of a more common usage, also means sunday, for in the Russian-orthodox tradition, which mr. valenti probably does not know, every sunday is a commemoration of the Resurrection. as to the choice of the one or the other of the two forms, it is optional. thus, for instance, pushkin in his poem Ya pomnyu tchudnoye mgnovenye chose the short form which suited his syllabic verse, where a number of similar short forms occur, but you will also find in dictionaries the same words with long endings; these changes also happen in other Russian endings: marya and mar’a both, of course, mean mary; the short ending is merely a more popular form’. (nyRB, 2 september 1971).

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Вновь пахнет яблоком мороз– (De nouveau la gelée sent la pomme) Присягу чудную четвертому сословью les serments magnifiques au qua-

trième état,

И клятвы крупные до слез?20

et les promesses grosses jusqu’aux larmes?

again, the translation ignores the metre and rhyme of the original, and tends towards the literal. the first four lines of this stanza present serious difficulty in terms of plain meaning. in terms of their allusiveness, later commentators have deployed considerable ingenuity in tracking down possible references to the immediate historical context, but there is no real consensus21 . nobody, for instance, has been able to explain satisfactorily what exactly is meant by the peculiar diminutive sonatinka in line 3. in terms of particular points of translation, the onomatopoeic shelushitsia is not conveyed, probably because of the obscurity a literal translation would produce; the force of predam is not really captured by ‘livrerai-je’. most tellingly, and perhaps giving away her remoteness from current Russian reality, iswolsky loses the primus stove of the first line; this object has sometimes been held to epitomise the years of reeking, reduced domestic life in the immediately post-revolutionary years. the main problem in translating mandel′shtam, though, resides not in the way individual words and phrases are rendered, but in securing the inter-relationships between the repetitions and near-repetitions in the Russian text, and in this respect the translation undoubtedly works well enough, if only because the nouns are translated on the whole literally, without any attempt being made to gloss them.

Following the translations from pasternak and mandel′shtam, iswolsky made only one further appearance in Commerce, in issue vii (printemps 1926), with her translation of part of pushkin’s story Arap Petra Velikogo (The Negro of Peter the Great). this project involved some serious editorial intervention, as the first of the three letters below attests. iswolsky then ran

20 ‘and the sidestreets smoked like a paraffin stove,/they swallowed snow, raspberries, ice,/everything keeps being peeled away for them [?] like a soviet sonatina,/as it recalls the year ’20./and will i really betray to shameful calumny–/once more the frost smells of apples–/my wondrous oath to the fourth estate/and vows so huge they make me weep?’ 21 see especially sergei stratanovsky, ‘Chto takoe “shchuchii sud”? o stikhotvorenii mandel′shtama “1 ianvaria 1924g.”’, Zvezda, 12 (2008), pp. 181-199, which includes references to the relevant preceding literature, and particularly to studies by omry Ronen and e.g. etkind.

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into difficulties with another attempt at translating pushkin, the target text this time being his long poem Mednyi vsadnik (The Bronze Horseman), and no publication ensued. Despite the manifest cordiality of iswolsky’s letters to marguerite Caetani, the working relationship between the two women lasted only a couple of years; the third and last letter to Caetani was written in the autumn of 1928. as the second and third letters show, iswolsky tried to interest Caetani in the work of a few contemporary Russian authors as possible material for Commerce, but there were no positive outcomes. in view of the reservations iswolsky herself expresses about the works she mentions, this is hardly surprising. as an example of these authors, the case of Rozanov is especially notable. His name was evidently raised by Caetani herself, in the communication to which iswolsky is replying in her letter 3 below. Rozanov was certainly ‘in the air’ at the time. Caetani would certainly have been aware of the translations that were appearing in england, promoted primarily by s.s. koteliansky. Having previously approached leonard and virginia woolf with a proposal to translate and publish Rozanov, in 1925 ‘kot’ turned to t.s. eliot with a view to the publication of The Apocalypse of Our Time in The Criterion. when turning it down, writing to koteliansky on 23 July 1926, eliot was formally polite: ‘i am returning herewith the Rosanov which does not seem to me quite suitable for The New Criterion…’22 . eliot’s informal opinion was harsh; writing to ezra pound on 31 December 1926, he states: ‘Have seen the Rosanov stuff in The Calendar and have seen more that koteliansky showed me a year ago. i thought it was rubbish. all about suffering christs and that sort of thing’23 . the periodical publication to which eliot refers is edgell Rickword’s The Calendar of Modern Letters. in his discussion of its interest in non-english writing, Bernard Bergonzi observes: one of the odder reflections of these Russian interests was a certain preoccupation with the Dostoevskyan mystagogue vasilii Rosanov, presumably under koteliansky’s influence. the Calendar published his translations of extracts from Rosanov’s collection of aphorisms, Solitaria, and a long critical and biographical study of Rosanov. in 1927 [D.H.] lawrence reviewed Solitaria in the Calendar; if Rosanov’s name is known today it is probably because of lawrence’s review, later collected in Phoenix24 .

22 The Letters of T.S. Eliot, vol. 3: 1926-27, ed. valerie eliot and John Haffenden, london, Faber & Faber, 2013, p. 215. 23 ibid., p. 353. 24 Bernard Bergonzi, ‘the Calendar of modern letters’, Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 16, 1986, [pp. 150-163], p. 152. He refers to D.H. lawrence, ‘on Dostoievsky and Rozanov’;

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koteliansky soon produced a book based on these publications25 . at about the same time, D.s. mirsky had been championing Rozanov in various books and essays in english; and in 1927, the Russian text of The Apocalypse was republished as an appendix to the second issue of mirsky’s annual Versty. with regard to marguerite Caetani and Commerce, mirsky’s positive opinion evidently vanquished iswolsky’s negative opinion: two years after iswolsky voted against, excerpts from The Apocalypse duly appeared26 . there is no trace of this work in mirsky’s letters to Caetani; once again we must assume that face-to-face discussion was all that was needed. this signal reverse, coupled with the rejection of her Bronze Horseman, may perhaps have soured iswolsky’s attitude towards Commerce. However, there were many other factors driving her in other directions. as we have seen, D.s. mirsky emerged unambiguously as the principal Russian consultant for Caetani’s journal; and iswolsky was launched on what became a busy and sustained journalistic and philanthropic career whose principal medium was French. For herself, iswolsky states with laconic exaggeration: ‘For a while, Commerce brought out a few more of my contributions, but then the Bassiano’s [sic] went back to italy and the magazine was discontinued’27 .

see Russian Literature and Modern English Fiction. A Collection of Critical Essays, edited and with an Introduction by Donald Davie, Chicago, university of Chicago press, 1965, pp. 99-103. one of the most percipient reviews of mirsky’s History was published in The Calendar: alec Brown, ‘Contemporary Russian Literature, 1881-1925, by D.S. Mirsky,’ The Calendar of Modern Literature, vol. 3, april 1926-January 1927, pp. 258-264. 25 vasilii Rozanov, Solitaria. With an Abridged Account of the Author’s Life, by E. Gollerbach. Other Bibliographical Material and Matter from “The Apocalypse of Our Times”. Translated by S.S. Koteliansky, london, wishart, 1927. mirsky’s review of this book is characteristic: ‘it is high time that the english reader should be introduced to one of the greatest Russian writers of the late 19th century. the book, which is well translated, has however failed as yet to convert the english to a belief in the greatness of Rozanov. Rather violent articles have even appeared in the weekly press decrying him as the worst of the «puny progeny of Dostoyevsky». english criticism seems to be still too obsessed by Dostoyevskianism to realise that nothing is less Dostoyevskian that the style, manner, or ideas of Rosanov. it is all the more gratifying to note that the Russian writer has been understood in a much more adequate way by so eminent an english writer as mr. D.H. lawrence (review of Solitaria in The Calendar, July, 1927)’. D.s.m., composite review, The Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 7, no. 20, 1929, pp. 457-458. 26 v. Rozanov, ‘l’apocalypse de notre temps: fragments (traduits du russe par v. pozner et B. de schloezer)’, Commerce XX, Été 1929, pp. 151-213. iswolsky later wrote a qualified but nevertheless very positive assessment of Rozanov’s significance; see Helen iswolsky, ‘the twilight years of Russian Culture’, The Review of Politics, vol. 5, no. 3, July 1943, pp. 356-376, esp. pp. 361-364. 27 No Time to Grieve…, p. 170.

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at about the same time as her first translations for Commerce, iswolsky published several reviews in Russian of contemporary French fiction. two of them appeared in Versty. the first is a perfunctory account of two novels by marcel Jouhandeau28 . the second states a view of the current scene that foreshadows iswolsky’s move away from literature and into what she saw as more serious matters: ‘in our time, when literature is too often based on form, on stylistic tricks, or on purely intellectual devices, Julien green’s novels may be greeted as an exceptionally valuable and significant phenomenon’29 . she also reviewed a novel by Jean giraudoux for the leading paris newspaper of the Russian emigration30. But as time went on she wrote increasingly for French periodicals on social and religious issues, eventually becoming a contributor to emmanuel mounier’s Esprit31 . iswolsky’s first original book-length works were written in co-authorship. with the prolific journalist and novelist Joseph kessel she published Les Rois Aveugles in 1925, which was translated into english and published in london in 1926 as Blinded Kings; it was something of a succès de scandale because of the material it contains about the role played by Rasputin in the run-up to 191732 . then came two novels co-written with anna aleksandrovna kashina-evreinova, the wife of the famous theatre director: La jeunesse rouge d’Inna (1928), and Je veux concevoir (1930). iswolsky went

28 *elena izvol′skaia, “les pincegrain” – “monsieur godeau intime”. par marcel Jouhandeau. ed. de la nouvelle Revue Française. 1924-1926’, Versty, 2, paris, 1927, pp. 265-267. 29 *id., ‘“mont-Cinère”. adrienne mesurat, par gulien [sic] green (plon editeur)’, Versty, 3, paris, 1928, pp. 160-163. ‘В наши дни, когда литература слишком часто строится на форме, на стилистических фокусах, чисто интеллектуальных приемах, романы Жюльяна Грина могут быть встречены, как исключительно ценное и значительное

явление’. iswolsky was later to work with green at the voice of america in new york; see No Time to Grieve…, pp. 246-247. 30 *id., ‘sud i pravosudie: “Bella” zhana zhirodu’, Poslednie novosti, 1800, 25 February 1926, p. 3. as time went on she would write mainly on non-literary subjects concerning France for the Russian press; see, for example, *‘Frantsuzskaia molodezh′ i problemy sovremennosti’, Novyi grad, 12, 1937, pp. 122-131, discussing the significance of the thought of younger French writers and their groupings; they include l’ordre nouveau, esprit, and Bergery’s Front sociale and their journal La Flêche, concentrating particularly on their ideas concerning contemporary Russia and stalinism, and advocating personalism. online see http://www.odinblago.ru/noviy_grad/12/8 (accessed 27 may 2013). 31 For a detailed listing of these publications, see livak (note 3 above). 32 kessel (1898-1979) was born to a lithuanian father and Russian mother, and spent time in Russia as a child, moving with his family to France in 1908. His works include several items on Russian subjects. He is mentioned by mirsky as a potential translator from Russian in his letter to marguerite Caetani of 21 February 1928.

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on to write, as sole author, several substantial works of non-fiction: La vie de Bakounine (paris, 1930), L’Homme 1936 en Russie soviétique (paris, 1936), and Femmes soviétiques (paris, 1937). all of them were translated into various european languages. among other book-length publications, she also brought out in French a collection of documents relating to her father’s activities as a diplomat33 . in addition to all this, iswolsky was intensely active during these years as a literary translator; besides the works discussed below in the context of the three letters to Caetani, she translated goncharov’s Oblomov into French34 . there was a co-translated anthology which was subsequently reprinted several times35 . also into French she translated aleksandr Blok’s officiallysponsored account of the last days of the old regime in Russia36 . notwithstanding all this toil at the writing desk, the central concern in iswolsky’s life seems soon to have become religion. in 1923, after a debilitating illness that seems from her account to have been as much psychological as physical, she moved away from the Russian orthodoxy of her upbringing (though her mother was a protestant) and became a Catholic of the Byzantine rite. as a result she began moving in French neo-Catholic intellectual circles. later, she began attending Berdiaev’s renowned meetings37 . the oecumenical orientation of this famous gathering provided a keynote that was to continue with increasing intensity to the end of iswolsky’s life and bring her into contact with most of the significant contemporary european thinkers of this persuasion, chief among them being Jacques maritain and emmanuel mounier.

33 aleksandr petrovich iswolsky, Au Service de la Russie. I: Correspondence diplomatique, 1906-1911. Recueillie par Hélène iswolsky, paris, les editeurs internationales, 2 vols., 1937, 1939. 34 For further details see livak (note 3 above). 35 *De Pouchkine a Tolstoï. Contes et Nouvelles. Traductions de Hélène Iswolsky, Henri Mongault et Boris de Schloezer, argenteuil-paris, éditions de la pléiade J. schiffrin, 1930. 36 Les derniers jours du régime impérial. Rédigé d’aprés des documents inédits par A. Block. Traduit par Hélène Iswolsky, paris, 1931. 37 on iswolsky’s relations with Berdiaev, see ‘the House in Clamart’, Chapter vii of Light before Dusk, pp. 88-103. iswolsky says here: ‘i often worked with him and translated into French a number of his essays and articles and his book on the Russian thinker, Constantine leontieff’ (p. 101). the book concerned is: nicolas Berdiaeff, Constantin Léontieff. Un penseur religieux russe du dix-neuvième siècle, traduit par H. iswolsky, paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1925; republished by Berg international, 1993. on the cultural context, see Catherine Baird (note 4 above), and matthew lee miller, The American YMCA and Russian Culture: The Preservation and Expansion of Orthodox Christianity, 1900-1940, plymouth, lexington Books, 2012.

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as the foregoing suggests, iswolsky’s concern with current Russian literature had become secondary by the late 1920s38 . there was one major exception: her friendship with marina tsvetaeva, which began when the poet moved to paris from prague in December 1925, and continued until she went back to Russia in 1939. iswolsky eventually published three separate accounts of their relationship. in Russian there are two essays: ‘ten′ na stenakh’ (‘a shadow on the walls’39, and ‘poet obrechennosti’ (‘the Doomed poet’)40. Finally, there was a substantial passage in the second autobiography41 . these are among the most insightful accounts of tsvetaeva’s personality and behaviour by any of the numerous people who encountered her in life and recorded their impressions. iswolsky maintains a profound respect for the poet’s extraordinary literary talent and artistic stature, which in the last analysis is held to excuse all her exasperating traits. Here is a supremely gifted and dedicated woman who has chosen to live a life of domestic servitude and whose loyalties have led to horrendous ostracism on the part of people with power and influence. of particular interest in the present context, adding as they do further detail to the references presented above, are the passages where iswolsky touches on Commerce. Here she describes the eurasianist-sponsored gathering in late 1925 at which she first met tsvetaeva: at the party, as i remember, marina directed at me the gaze of her greenish, lacklustre, shortsighted, and astonishingly percipient eyes. the first thing she talked to me about was pasternak. this was just at the time i had translated pasternak’s ‘Dushnaia noch′’. my translation was published in the literary journal Commerce, edited by paul valéry. somehow pasternak had been able to become acquainted with my work, and as marina conveyed to me, had been content with it. tsvetaeva herself loved this poem very much, one of his ‘most ineffable ones’ as she writes. thus, marina and i got to know each other under the aegis of pasternak42 .

38 in Light before Dusk, iswolsky mentions translating zinaida gippius’ poems dedicated to st theresa of lisieux, and publishing them in *Etudes Carmélitaines (p. 155). this would have been at some time in the late 1930s. 39 elena izvol′skaia, ‘ten′ na stenakh (o m. tsvetaevoi)’, Opyty, 3, 1954, pp. 152-159, reprinted in Marina Tsvetaeva v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov. Gody emigratsii, pp. 219-226. 40 id., ‘poet obrechennosti: iz vospominanii o m. tsvetaevoi’, Vozdushnye puti, 3, 1962, pp. 150-160. 41 No Time to Grieve…, pp. 196-203. these three items are collected in Marina Tsvetaeva v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov. Gody emigratsii, ed. l. mnukhin and l. turchinskii, moscow, agraf, 2002, pp. 219-241, with the passage from No Time to Grieve translated into Russian. 42 ‘На вечеринке, помнится, Марина направила на меня взгляд своих зеленоватых, мутных, близоруких, и удивительно прозорливых глаз. И заговорила со мной

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iswolsky was writing here nearly half a century after the events she describes, and all due caution is therefore called for in considering what she says. some details are remarkable, all the same. she only mentions one of the poems by pasternak, and not the one that was more innovatory at the time. and she says unambiguously that tsvetaeva wrote her opinion of the poem, but gives no source for this information.

Before iswolsky said this about tsvetaeva, though, tsvetaeva had said something about iswolsky. the essay concerned was written in april and may of 1931, but was by all accounts rejected for publication at the time because of the scathing denunciation it contains of georgii ivanov as a memoirist. ‘the History of a Dedication’ (‘istoriia odnogo posviashcheniia’) only appeared long after the author’s death43 . its own dedication is ‘to my dear friend e.a.i., a belated wedding gift. m.ts.’44 in the frame story, tsvetaeva helps this friend, who is said to be leaving for a long journey overseas to get married45 , to sort out her voluminous archive. most of it is consigned to the flames. the items that go into the stove include some literary manuscripts that had been submitted to ‘e.a.i.’ with a request that she get them published; perhaps they also included the letters iswolsky had received from Caetani. what tsvetaeva says about the love life of ‘e.a.i’ is deliberately unspecific.

Further on in the essay, tsvetaeva explains that her friend did in fact go abroad, but soon returned because the venture had turned out to be unsuccessful. the only specific information about what transpired has been published as a result of the collaboration iswolsky was engaged on in the late 1920s with her friend Charles Du Bos in translating into French

о Пастернаке. В то время я как раз перевела на французский язык стихотворение Пастернака «Душная ночь». Перевод мой был напечатан в литературном журнале «Коммерс» под редакцией Поль Валери. Каким-то образом, Пастернак имел возможность познакомиться с моей работой и, по сообщению Марины Цветаевой, остался доволен. Цветаева сама очень любила это стихотворение, одно из «несказаннейших», как пишет она. Итак, под знаком Пастернака, мы с Мариной

познакомились’. ‘ten′ na stenakh’, p. 153; Marina Tsvetaeva v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, p. 221. 43 ‘the History of a Dedication’: marina tsvetaeva’s Reminiscences of osip mandelstam’, Oxford Slavonic Papers, vol. Xi, 1964, pp. 112-136. For a highly competent translation, unfortunately without notes or commentary, see marina tsvetaeva, ‘the History of a Dedication’, translated by stephen lottridge and stephen tapscot, The Georgia Review, vol. 36, no. 4, winter 1982, pp. 855-890. 44 ‘Дорогому другу Е.А.И. – запоздалый свадебный подарок. М.Ц.’

45 in his introductory note to the original publication, which draws on his close and sustained personal knowledge of tsvetaeva, mark slonim says that ‘miss i. was about to leave europe to join her fiancé in Japan…’ (p. 112).

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the celebrated Correspondence from Two Corners by viacheslav ivanov and mikhail gershenzon46 . the matter is referred to in a letter by Du Bos to ivanov, written on 8 July 1931: peut-être aurez-vous appris le mariage de notre amie et collaboratrice Hélène iswolsky: elle a épousé un baron de sternberg-ungern [sic] qui est professeur à l’université de nagasaki47: sa lettre témoignait d’un profond bonheur, mais elle a dû partir précipitamment pour le Japon sans que nous ayons pu nous revoir. lui est protestant, mais elle a été encouragée et soutenue dans son projet par de saintes amies carmélites qui ne doutent pas de tout le bien que sa ferveur catholique pourra faire là-bas48 . in a subsequent letter, dated 23 December 1931, Du Bos reported that he had heard from madame ungern-sternberg, and that ivanov could put aside his anxiety about her happiness. she had been married in the cathedral of notre-Dame de la Découverte in nagasaki; and she had come across evidence of the survival of Catholicism from Francis Xavier’s mission, ‘sans le secours d’aucun prêtre blanc et étant dans l’obligation de cacher leur religion aux yeux du monde païen qui les environnait’49. However, in a let-

46 v. ivanov, m.o. gerschenson, Correspondance d’un coin à l’autre, paris, Corrêa, 1931, précédée d’une introduction de g. marcel et suivie d’une letter de v. ivanov à Ch. Du Bos. For iswolsky’s own discussion of this project, see No Time to Grieve, pp. 177-178. For bibliographical history see pamela Davidson, Viacheslav Ivanov: A Reference Guide, new york, g.k. Hall, 1996, per index; and for the historical context of the translation, see Robert Bird, ‘istoriko-literaturnyi kommentarii’, in Perepiska iz dvukh uglov. Podgotovka teksta, primechaniia, istoriko-literaturnyi kommentarii i issledovanie Roberta Bërda, moscow, vodolei publishers, 2006, pp. 90-171. 47 this is not the flamboyant Civil war soldier Baron ungern-sternberg, who was killed in 1921, but Rolf Rudol′fovich ungern-shternberg (1880-1943), who served with the Russian diplomatic corps in Constantinople, and in 1913 was appointed 2nd secretary to aleksandr izvol′skii at the paris embassy. in 1917 he became 1st secretary in portugal, and was one of only two Russian heads of mission who co-operated with the Bolsheviks. after 1918 he lived first in lisbon, then in germany, and moved to Japan in 1926, becoming a professor of French and Russian in commercial colleges in tokyo and nagasaki. 48 Julia zarankin, michael wachtel, ‘the Correspondence of viacheslav ivanov and Charles du Bos’, Archivio italo-russo [also cited as Русско-итальянский архив], vol. 3, salerno, 2001, [pp. 497-540], p. 518. (the introduction and notes to this publication discuss matters very pertinent to iswolsky’s Catholicism in the context of contemporary european thought; a supplement, pp. 538-540, presents a revealing letter of 26 January 1931 from iswolsky to ivanov). Replying to du Bos on 12 July, ivanov mentioned his unease: ‘une bonne nouvelle est aussi celle de la félicité de mlle Hélène iswolsky, actuellement mme de sternberg-ungern, bien que je doive avouer qu’un vague sentiment de douleur, de compassion, de crainte même me serre le cœur chaque fois que j’apprends le mariage de certaines jeunes personnes très pures et hantées par un nostalgie spirituelle’ (p. 520). 49 ibid., p. 525.

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ter of 31 october 1932 iswolsky wrote again to Du Bos, saying that she had returned to europe, that her marriage had been far from happy, and that monseigneur Hayasaka had granted her permission to separate from her husband and leave Japan. Her mother, she said, had been a great consolation during this trial. she should now be known as madame Hélène iswolsky50 . neither of iswolsky’s autobiographies breathes a word about her marriage and adventure in Japan51; this silence contrasts with her relative frankness about her youthful love affairs in No Time to Grieve. Back in paris, she resumed her friendship with tsvetaeva. as she recalls in her final memoir, iswolsky vainly attempted to help out the destitute poet by arranging a reading of her own translation into French, ‘le gars’, of her long poem ‘molodets’, at natalie Barney’s salon; the reception was ‘cool’52 . iswolsky probably never knew anything about the most enduring outcome of her introduction: tsvetaeva’s quite extraordinary examination of lesbianism and creativity, ‘lettre à l’amazone’, written in 1932 and revised in 193453 . in 1941 Hélène iswolsky left France for the usa, mobilising her connections in the worlds of diplomacy and international aid54 . the centre of gravity of Russian émigré intellectual life shifted from paris to new york at about this time, and iswolsky was a founding contributor to the new publications that reflected this shift. she made her debut in the very first issue

50 ibid., p. 527. 51 Discussing pope pius Xi’s Quadragesimo Anno of may 1931, iswolsky says: ‘i was away at the time, but when i returned to France in 1932 i was surprised at the intense activity […] the encyclical had stimulated in the social field’. Light before Dusk, p. 121. the three letters from mark slonim in the iswolsky papers at scranton university are evidently replies to letters by her asking slonim to refer to her only by initials in connection with tsvetaeva’s essay. However, she published three articles drawing on her trip: *Hélène iswolsky, ‘everyday Japan’, The Living Age, september 1932, pp. 36-40 (under the general title ‘will Japan Crash?’), translated from ‘au seuil du Japon’, Le Correspondant, cccxxviii, no. 1, 10 July 1932, pp. 82-99; see http://www.unz.org/pub/livingage-1932sep-00036 (accessed 22 september 2014). the livak bibliography (see above, note 3), p. 162 also lists ‘mandchourie, Changhaï’, Revue de France, vol. 11, no. 8, 15 april 1932, pp. 735-747, and ‘un grand college féminin au Japon’, Intransigeant, 19398, 5 December 1932, pp. 82-99. 52 No Time to Grieve…, pp. 199-200. on mirsky’s involvement with ‘le gars’ see above, p. 18, 48. 53 First published as marina zvétaeva, Mon frère féminin: lettre à l’amazone, paris, mercure de France, 1979. see Diana lewis Burgin, ‘mother nature versus the amazons. marina tsvetaeva and Female same-sex love’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 6, no. 1, July 1995, pp. 62-88. 54 iswolsky’s brother grigorii (grisha, 1892-1951), who was a close friend of D.s. mirsky, moved to the usa in 1921 and became a us citizen; the story of his failure to follow in his father’s footsteps and subsequent wayward life is told in No Time to Grieve.

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of the principal american academic journal of Russian studies, The Russian Review, with a well-informed survey of soviet literature55 . of even greater interest in the present context is her contribution to the next issue of this journal, with its conclusion setting out the author’s personalist philosophy: Dehumanization, disintegration, depersonalization, are the signs of our age, when the human being is submerged by collective emotions or suppressed by a narrow and selfish individualism. nor do we see in Russia herself a re-establishment of personal human values. if the young Russian writers abroad have not discovered the deeper sources, neither have the soviet writers found them, though they, no doubt, stand nearer to them than the lonely vagrants symbolized by poplavsky. today, we do not behold in Russian literature the author worthy of continuing the great Russian humanist tradition56 . the essay as a whole is accurate, authoritative, and highly informative. it contains some touching passages about tsvetaeva and khodasevich, and what must be one of the earliest acclamations in english of nabokov’s Russian novels and short stories: nabokov’s apparent frivolity is that of an acrobat or tightrope dancer, dressed up in a gay attire, but who is in dead earnest, because he is accomplishing a difficult and perilous feat. He may indeed become a great writer. He is already one of the outstanding Russian novelists of our day57 . the downbeat conclusion of this piece was considerably modified in a survey of post-war émigré literature, which seems to speak to iswolsky’s personal position after her transition from France to america: if, before the war, young Russian émigré writers had lost that humanist strain which so deeply marked Russian culture before their time, they have finally discovered it and been inspired by it. it may now have a different name, it has been put through the ordeal of scepticism, revolution, war, and infinite suffering, both physical and spiritual. yet we can still recognize it, and we behold a new Russian intelligentsia abroad, turning more and more to national cultural sources, and at the same time participating in universal culture58 .

55 Helen iswolsky, ‘latest trends in soviet literature’, The Russian Review, vol. 1, no. 1, november, 1941, pp. 74-80. 56 Helen iswolsky, ‘twenty-Five years of Russian Émigré literature’, The Russian Review, vol. 1, no. 2, 1942, [pp. 61-73], p. 73. the poet Boris poplavsky (1903-35) is often held to epitomise the doomed dilemma of the ‘lost generation’ of Russian writers in emigration. 57 ibid., (note 27), p. 72. 58 Helen iswolsky, ‘Russian Émigré literature in world war ii’, The Russian Review, vol. 6, no. 1, autumn, 1946, [pp. 69-76], p. 76. soon afterwards, in another essay iswolsky presented her view of the Russian philosopher soloviev as the pioneering theoretician of

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iswolsky’s most sustained contributions to the american periodical press consisted in a series of articles and reviews on contemporary Russian subjects for the lay Catholic journal Commonweal, beginning in July 1941 and continuing until 1960. in one of them, she returns to the subject of pasternak59 . soon after her arrival in the usa iswolsky turned to her own memoirs. the earliest example of such writing appeared in Russian, in the second issue of what was to become the most enduring Russian journal of the post-war emigration, concerning the last days before the fall of France60 . soon after this, as we have seen, iswolsky published her first autobiography. No Time to Grieve, iswolsky’s second and more substantial autobiographical work, with its touching account of her relationship with tsvetaeva, was published only posthumously61 . in 1946, when she was based in new york, iswolsky helped to set up an oecumenical association called ‘the third Hour Foundation’, with a journal that first appeared the same year, in three languages. one important participant was v.s. yanovsky, whom iswolsky had known in paris as a fellow attendee of the Berdiaev seminar, and who was now a practicing doctor in new york62 . another was w.H. auden. the final, tenth issue of The Third Hour appeared in 1975 after iswolsky’s death and was dedicated to her63 . she also contributed regularly to Catholic Worker, and articles to

this ‘universal culture’; see Helene iswolsky, ‘vladimir soloviev and the western world’, The Russian Review, vol. 7, no. 1, autumn 1947, pp. 16-23. 59 Helene iswolsky, ‘the voice of Boris pasternak’, Commonweal, 14 november 1958, pp. 168-169. with her friend anne Fremantle, iswolsky published a translation of one of pasternak’s most renowned later poems: ‘to be Famous’, Third Hour, vol. vii, no. 3, 1957, p. 3. 60 elena izvol′skaia, ‘posle razgroma: iz vospominanii o Frantsii’, Novyi zhurnal, no. 2, 1941, pp. 360-367. see also ‘u khrista na elke’, Opyty, 6, 1956, pp. 72-76. 61 at least two extracts were pre-published: Helene iswolsky, ‘the Russian Revolution seen from paris’, The Russian Review, vol. 26, no. 2, april 1967, pp. 153-163; id., ‘the Fateful years: 1906-1911’, The Russian Review, vol. 28, no. 2, april 1969, pp. 191-206. 62 see Helene iswolsky, ‘v.s. yanovsky: some thoughts and Reminiscences’, in Russian Literature and Culture in the West: 1922-1972, ed. simon karlinsky and alfred appel, Jr, 2 vols., evanston, illinois, 1973 (TriQuarterly, 27-28), vol. 2, pp. 490-492 (listed in Bird’s bibliography under ‘unpublished writings’). 63 see ‘Helen iswolsky (1896-1975), at http://stmichaelruscath.org/spiritual/iswolsky/ (accessed on 22 september 2014), especially the ‘testimonial’ by v.s. yanovsky. the site includes two articles by iswolsky from The Third Hour, ‘soloviev and the eirenic movement’, and ‘From Commitment to oblation’. For an account of iswolsky’s life from the point of view of the Russian orthodox Church, see evgenii gerf, ‘elena aleksandrovna izvol′skaia’, Istina i zhizn′ , 9, 1993, online at http://rgcc.narod.ru/izvol.htm (accessed on 22 september 2014).

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the Catholic Encyclopedia. Her books included American Saints and Martyrs (new york, 1959), and Christ in Russia (milwaukee, 1960).

From 1949 to 1956 iswolsky occupied the post of lecturer and instructor in Russian studies at Fordham university, a Jesuit institution. she continued to contribute to the émigré Russian press. in particular, extracts from her memoirs appeared in the major post-war literary almanacs published in america, as we have seen with one of the essays on tsvetaeva. she was a contributor to the venerable new york newspaper Novoe russkoe slovo. Her work as a translator continued; she contributed several new versions of difficult texts to the standard and widely admired anthology A Treasury of Russian Spirituality, edited by g.p. Fedotov (1948). she was the earliest translator of any of the books of mikhail Bakhtin into english, with Rabelais and His World (first published in 1968); it is here that her words have probably been read and cited more often in recent years than in any of her original writings. after she left Fordham university, iswolsky was for a while professor and Chairman of the Russian Department at seton Hill, a Catholic college in greensburg, pennsylvania. the last two years of her life were spent as a nun in the Benedictine monastery of our lady of the Resurrection in Cold spring, new york state. she died there on 24 December 1975. the early article reviewing Commerce demonstrates both the merits and the limitations of iswolsky’s abilities as a literary critic. she writes clearly and competently, but without any evidence of strong literary insight, relying on paraphrase and summary rather than analysis and aesthetic evaluation. in one of his letters to his friend p.p. suvchinskii, D.s. mirsky mercilessly characterised iswolsky as ‘not stupid, but tragically ungifted’64, and this review exhibits the characteristics he would have had in mind. the deferential tone of iswolsky’s letters to Caetani seems to exceed what would be appropriate in addressing a patron; it seems to betray a lack of self-confidence. if one takes a wider view of iswolsky’s abilities and achievements, though, mirsky’s phrase seems unfair and premature, and her essay on Commerce unrepresentative. as her subsequent writings in three languages continually demonstrate, she was highly effective when assessing and writing non-fiction, and in terms of memoir writing she was well above average, giving evidence of a genuine gift for expressing sympathetic understanding, even when dealing with people who did not share the religious and philosophical standpoint she eventually came to espouse. the early propensity for summary developed into high proficiency in the difficult

64 ‘Е.Изв. – не глупа, но трагически бездарна’, see g.s. smith, The Letters of D.S. Mirsky to P.P. Suvchinskii, 1922-1931, Birmingham, Birmingham slavonic monographs, 1995 (Birmingham slavonic monographs 26), p. 49.

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art of précis. and her ability as a translator is considerable throughout; she could translate difficult texts into and out of three languages interchangeably. iswolsky’s life trajectory makes a striking and instructive contrast with that of D.s. mirsky. the two came from very similar backgrounds and, as we have seen, had known each other during their youth in st petersburg high society. Both of them manifestly inherited the ethos of dedicated service that their fathers embodied, as outstandingly successful representatives of their social class. Contrary to received ideas about people with this background, they both possessed an unremitting work ethic that was coupled to somewhat earnest seriousness and contempt for frivolity. Both of them lost their considerable inheritances and privileges in 1917. the main difference between them, of course, was one of gender. as a man, mirsky was able to take a path through elite schools into university and then service as an army officer that was not open to iswolsky. tellingly, when he was a staff officer on active service, she was a volunteer nurse. abroad, he slipped easily into an academic post when he needed one, primarily through his father’s connections; for her this opening came much later and was earned by her dedication to writing, however eased it might have been by the social connections she inherited. neither mirsky nor iswolsky seemed to possess an inclination towards family life and the consolidation or accumulation of wealth and property as a worthy and adequate fulfilment of their birthright. in emigration, they made common cause for a while, and maintained the cordial relationship they had enjoyed since childhood. Both of them attempted to construct a way forward out of what they saw as the sterile bankruptcy of the values that had resulted from world war i and revolution in Russia. But their intellectual solutions, and with them their life choices, went in what would conventionally be considered opposite directions. Both these solutions, however, pretend to a universalist, providential, and millenarian teleology; both were paths to certainty. He became a dialectical materialist, committed himself to marxism-leninism in its stalinist apotheosis, went back to Russia, and paid with his life. she espoused Catholicism, dedicated herself more and more to social work in the cause of oecumenical Christianity, moved to the united states, and survived long enough to make several trips back to post-stalin Russia as a visitor. Both these Russians made exceptional use of the cosmopolitan advantages they inherited, chiefly in the ways they deployed their linguistic competence. above all, though, they both remained committed to an idea of Russia and her special mission, though the ways they conceptualised this mission were incompatibly different.

Gerald s. smith