New Haven, 1953/4-1957 & Cambridge in the Early Years
posted by John Francis, Philadelphia (john.m.francis@post.harvard.edu)
1953-1957
Fall, 1957, was surely the first point of inflexion in the history of the chorus. At that moment, as the law of small numbers would have it, of those active in what had recently, and without deliberation, come to be called the Yale Russian Chorus, just two, Denis and Kit, returned to the New Haven campus. All others had left but remained without exception within a few hours drive of each other, in New York or Cambridge.
Their story starts in 1953, when the bulk of them began Russian. This was the year Stalin died, the year that the USSR first detonated a hydrogen bomb, and the year of the first major uprising in the Soviet bloc. The year saw the publication of Merle Fainsod’s classic How Russia is Ruled, of the translation of Zenkovsky’s history of Russian philosophy, and of Samuel Kucherov’s account of courts, lawyers, and trials in late tsarist Russia. It was the last year in which Joseph McCarthy would trammel the rights of Americans unfettered. (His colleagues in the Senate would censure him only at the end of the following year.) Soviet troops were still in occupied Austria.
These events made little impression on the small group of students who started Russian in 1953. In comparison with our reactions of just a few years later these events sparked little interest. In particular, none evoked the apprehension or passion that Budapest 1956 would. Curiously, in retrospect, the handful of people beginning Russian in that year paid Joseph McCarthy little heed. None of us ever wondered whether in taking up Russian in the madness that saw conspiracy behind every door, we were not putting ourselves at risk. No such thought ever found a place in our imaginings or expression in our conversation. The possibility simply did not occur to us. Of the tiny group that formed my beginning Russian class, one would ultimately head the French department at SUNY Buffalo. A second would (correctly, I’d say) take the America academy to task for its fawning reception of Rozhdestvenskij and later head the Slavic department at George Washington. Another section included the future head of the Slavic department at Princeton.
Toward the end of 1953, John Brightly began urging me to join in singing Russian songs with a small group that had just begun meeting for that purpose in our college, at Saybrook. I was reluctant, as I imagined that what was afoot was a version of a campfire group gathered for exuberant and self-indulgent renditions of the Russian equivalents of Auprès de Ma Blonde or Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten. It was John’s persistent enthusiasm and his characterization of the “strange little fellow” that convinced me to drop in one evening. When John and I arrived, the rehearsal had just begun. Denis flashed his signature smile by way of greeting, asked me what part I sang, and in response nodded me to the bass section. That was that. I had sung bass parts in previous choral efforts, but I was no bass. Anything below G was a stretch.
The event was clearly a disciplined rehearsal, but the group was decidedly motley, consisting of a faculty member, music school students, local high school students, men and women, students of Russian from Yale College, and others. It later turned out that there was the expectation of a performance at some point in the future, but this was not immediately apparent to the newcomer. From this motley beginning the Yale Russian Chorus came to be; it was never founded nor was its designation by those three words ever a matter of decision. They came to designate the chorus as a matter of referential ease.
It is easy to imagine the effect Denis had. Beyond pitch and timely entrance, Denis wanted bright sounds and dark ones, brassy sounds and breathy ones, nasal sounds and throaty ones; Dionysian attacks, Apollonian hints, tension, release, and agogic stress. He wanted us to surprise, mystify, soothe, spook, amuse, or terrify. All ordered with the blend of allusion, mystical concentration, and calculation we know so well. Vo pole beryoza stoyala got particular attention. Denis had not yet managed to harness the talents and liabilities this particular collection of people offered. Roughly speaking, few of us could get the words and the notes at the same time. The Russians present who could combine words and notes seemed wedded to the words and notes they knew, as opposed to the arrangements Denis had prepared. At least one of the Russians was tone-deaf. There was, however, a strong sense of community and a will to get it right.
The group did not look like any Yale singing group. I cannot say with confidence who was or wasn’t present. I knew those of the group who were fellow students of Russian. In addition there were friends of Denis from his various communities. Don (Goodman) and Joe Fidele were students with him in the Music School. Don had come there with him from Bridgeport. The three of them could actually make a living from music. They did gigs at a nearby club on weekends. One had the feeling they knew what they were doing. Denis could, without extensive explanation, rely on them to get the effects he sought. In addition, Khramov, one of the instructors in the (Russian) department and director of a local Orthodox Church choir, brought obvious expertise but, he had his own vision of what the songs were to sound like. He seemed to embody barely contained energy that made close proximity worrisome. Still, one had the sense that one was in the presence of a pillar of strength. Either there that evening or soon to appear were other of Denis’s friends and acquaintances. Among these were two young Russian girls, high school students at Hill House, which I think stood where Morse and Stiles stand today. Instinctively, they sang the familiar songs the way Russians would sing them. During our rehearsals they would use only Russian, were shy, charming, and clearly added color in a vocal range out of the reach of most of us and an authenticity we welcomed instinctively. After rehearsals, right in the middle of campus, at Denis’s merest suggestion and without hesitation, they would break into a display of Russian folk dance, their bodies largely immobile, their feet moving furiously. But as Denis observed, Marika’s feet never touched the ground.
This rehearsal took place in early March. It was Denis’s birthday. At the end of this session, to our collective surprise, from somewhere within his gray gabardine overcoat, Denis produced a bottle of Smirnoff. He informed us it was his birthday and diffidently proposed something of a toast, the first chorus toast, I suspect. The bottle went round from hand to hand in a style that would eventually become a conventional preconcert ritual. There were no amendments.
There were other of Denis’s friends whose willingness to participate in our vocal efforts were put to the test from time to time. Foremost among these was Masha Vorobiova, less for her voice than because she was Masha. She and Denis knew each other from their days as stateless refugees in Austria after WWII. What struck me was the deeply warm and still slightly formal tone they always maintained. It puzzled me, for example, that Denis, while na vy with Masha, always addressed her with the diminutive “Mashenka.” Masha was from Lithuania, a Baltic neighbor of Denis’s Latvia, both of which had been incorporated into the USSR as Soviet Republics at the conclusion of WWII. She both reflected and captured the fluid and uncertain national identity of many. Her leitmotiv was a line from the Wasteland, the line that erupts in German in the middle of the opening stanza, one Masha quoted often to convey that uncertainty: Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Lituaen, echt deutsch.
No critic of Eliot ever coaxed from that line what Masha did. Its broken German syntax contradicts its own literal assertion thus hinting at the personal uncertainty that Masha so frequently flagged. As with much of what Masha said, she uttered the line wincingly, shyly, cryptically. It did not, of course, describe her literally; she was Russian, certainly not German, but she did hail from Lithuania. Still, the line suited her in a strange way and she communicated with it an elusive, wrenching impression that I would not entirely grasp for years, not until I knew her better and before I had gained a greater sense of the turmoil that unchosen displacement, loss of homeland, and forced uprooting can wring. In listening to Masha speak of her Lithuanian connection, it did not occur to me to ask how Lithuanian related historically to Slavic, nor could I have had any notion what an answer to that question might look like. Yet a decade later, I would be beginning work that would lead to a dissertation on that very question.
We needed voices but we also needed simple presence. Few provided a greater sense of presence that Denis’s friend Boris Pushkarev. Boris made no pretense of being able to sing. He was simply asked to “fake it.” But Boris conveyed a sense of gravitas and purpose that was unmatchable. He was a student in the department of architecture with a compelling interest in urban planning. He was the son of one of our Russian instructors, the venerable Sergei Germanovich, who himself dedicated what energy he had left after working with us to finishing his history of Russia. Boris was interested in values. He was the brains, the ideological linchpin of NTS, the counterrevolutionary émigré organization devoted to displacing the Soviet regime. When I first met him, he was writing a relatively brief ideological tract (thirty pages of so) that was to guide NTS’s work. I figured that he was plotting the explosion of freight trains inside the USSR and so didn’t inquire further into the precise nature of his activity. In class with Sergei Germanovich I often wondered what he thought of his son blowing up trains. He would survive these endeavors and in 1964 would receive the National Book Award for Science for his Man-Made America: Chaos or Control. While “faking it” his episodic presence added authenticity and a solidity that we valued. We sang better when he was there. Other than that he complained about our syntax. In particular, he objected to our use of Skazhi o chem zadumal in place of Skazhi o chem zadumals’a.
For the remaining months we continued to sing, typically twice a week. Toward the end of the spring semester, we offered the promised sample of Russian folk songs at a gathering sponsored by the Russian Club. George Litton, as the club’s president, introduced us; Denis introduced each of the songs. I believe it was George who had originally suggested such a presentation. The bulk of the songs we sang that evening, in one arrangement or another, has been preserved as part of the chorus’s current repertoire.
I can say nothing firsthand of what the chorus experience was during the academic 1954 55. I was in Berlin. I lived in a Russian home that I found through a local Orthodox Church and took courses at the Ost-Europa Institut of the Free University. This was before the Wall so I had easy access to East Berlin, where I spent a good deal of my time collecting a substantial Russian library cut rate. I had tried in advance of going to Berlin to get Yale to recognize my stay there as a junior year abroad. The university denied my request, I suppose because I was not participating in an established program abroad such as Yale Reid Hall in Paris. This was just as well as I enjoyed the year-long liberation and because it delayed my graduation by a year, giving me an extra year at Yale upon my return, two years that I count among the most absorbing years of my life. The chorus had everything to do with this.
No account of the early years of the chorus is complete without reference to our environment, to Denis’s mother and father, whose grace, elegance, and instinctive hospitality nourished our purposes, and to the instructors in the Russian department, who showed astonishing empathy with the needs of a fledgling bunch new to their language, and who watched what their brood was up to with a combination of pleasure, bemusement, and support.
Unlike other major language departments at Yale at the time, the Russian department was not staffed by graduate wannabes who would rather have been teaching Proust or Schiller. Our instructors were there to teach the language and that’s what they devoted themselves to. At any time of day, the top floor of Harkness was alive with Russian students and instructors who were happy to chat with whichever of us happened by. (Alex Schenker had set up the program in a way that assured that we knew all of them.) Happy to chat about the past, careers (“the train straight to Washington”), or to offer (me) advice (as to how I should dunk my newborn baby daughter in a tub of deep water within a week of her birth to ensure that she would learn to swim naturally, advice I think correct, but which I resisted). In class these instructors, mostly older chaps, under the guidance of Alex Schenker, managed day in, day out to create a spirit of fellowship, mirth, and purpose in our tiny classrooms. These folks attended all of our events, musical and otherwise.
Our textbook was also something of an anomaly in the textbook world. Looked down on by snootier departments, it presented Russian through a phonetic transcription of implausible appearance that reflected about as faithfully as possible, using only the Roman alphabet, the facts of Russian palatalization, the fate of vowels in different word position and levels of stress, and the fate of consonants at the end of words and in relation to other consonants. I understood none of this at the time; but the facts were there, encoded in the book’s transcription. There was nothing that couldn’t have been captured by rules, but this worked better. As I came to appreciate later, it also reflected the syntactic genius of Russian. The author of the textbook, at least it had his name on the cover, was William Cornyn, a Burmese specialist who happened to chair the Russian department for reasons I never fully explored
I should add a note about our “language lab.” It consisted of five or six stenographic devices known under the trade name of Sound Scriber. Think of them as a sort of DictaPhone, if that helps. They bore the same resemblance to the fancy tape-driven labs then on the horizon as the Model T bears to a modern Jaguar. With this difference: they were better. The design is important. The recording medium was a floppy vinyl disk about the size of early computer floppies, always green, that was read by a needle at the end of an arm much as with old victrolas. The disk sat on a turntable and the whole was contained in a boxy wooden housing. The motion of the turntable was easily controlled by a pedal. Depressing the pedal resulted in playback; releasing pressure paused the operation. Where the Sound Scriber excelled in comparison with its later, snazzier replacements, was in replay. Recall that with tape recorders, the usual maneuver required for replaying something, somewhat simplified these days, was to push the STOP button, then depress the REWIND button to reverse the direction of motion, push the STOP button a second time, and then push PLAY. Not only was this a huge waste of time, it was punishing for the machines. I’ve been through dozens. With the Sound Scriber all his was accomplished with a quick and easy flick of a second pedal. Without disrupting the forward motion of the device, this flick nudged the needle back over a groove or so (no rewinding the grooves) and immediately replayed the most recent bit of recorded material. These devices had been designed for stenographers who had frequent need to repeat material. The newer devices provided wonderful ease of duplication and editing, but made language study less efficient, and ultimately less effective.
Through the spring of 1954 at least, these devices were housed in the attic of Harkness. Before beginning work, one had to climb into the attic, grope in the dark for the light switch that illuminated accountant style lamps with green shades hanging on long wires from the roof. As the devices were freely movable from one table or armchair to another, we were free to organize ourselves as we wished. One simply selected the disks of choice and went to work. There was no lab technician to deal with, nothing to check out. It was the ultimate do-it-yourself learning environment.
All this, the team of instructors, this strange-looking textbook, and this primitive lab setting had grand results. We learned Russian. We learned it better than our counterparts at other universities. And we knew it.
This sentiment de supériorité, peut-être pas imaginaire had two consequences. It facilitated the adoption by chorus members of an aggressive posture of authority along with a sense of mission, particularly an educational mission with respect to our own Yale community and others (Vassar, Smith, Dartmouth, etc.) and, ultimately, a communicative mission with respect to citizens of the USSR.
In particular, we judged those in our own academic environment to be reliable sources of knowledge about things Russian just to the extent that they sounded right. And there were many academic experts in various fields at the time who lacked in our eyes this essential quality. We were rather categorical in this regard and cast a derisive eye on those who did not meet our standard. Excessively so, to be sure. Still, all in all I have found it not a bad guide in the years since, and later I would like to give an example or two.
When I returned from Berlin for the 1955-56 school year I found the group pretty much the way I had left it, somewhat more settled, a bit trimmer, with a more consistent set of active players. Denis greeted me enthusiastically with the news that our ranks had been fortified by the addition of a genuine political scientist. Jim Guyot, the first graduate student to sing regularly with the group, was pursuing a dissertation comparing the motivational structures of civil servants and entrepreneurs. The instrument for this exploration was the thematic apperception test (the TAT) that offered a mechanism for scoring the relative weights of power, achievement, and affiliation as motivating factors for different individuals. None of us was entirely innocent of political theory; we had courses with Wolfers and Dahl. McGowan alone was emphasizing it within the Russian studies program. He worked with Frederick Barghoorn, whom most of us avoided; he was an extremely pleasant man but he didn’t have the right accent. He seemed to have little command of Russian. Somehow it never occurred to us that our American instructors (those from the social sciences, I mean) were in pretty much the same boat that we were: forced to look at the Soviet Union through a telescope. The difference was that most of them had started as specialists in some field and only subsequently turned to Soviet studies as a narrower focus within that field. Our evolution, indeed, the area studies program as a whole, turned this order around. In my own case I would wander through literature, economics, and law before turning finally to Balto-Slavic linguistics.
Jim offered explicit categories for thinking about politics, and most significantly added an empirical dimension to our normally wooly explorations. This crispness was something we knew we lacked and felt immensely strengthened by Jim’s energetic participation and his bubbling, unorthodox take on most things. Jim brought as well a proletarian sense, something of John Henry, who popped up frequently in our discussions, along with songs of the Spanish Civil War.
We were uneasy with the word elite. This word, like “values,” had a suspect, johnny-come-lately ring then. (Denis had two ways of pronouncing values. To mock its sophomoric, pretentious, fashionable use, he would derisively pronounce it with a high nasal front vowel, his mouth skewed to the left and upwards. To impress on us the importance of attending to the creation and consideration of values, he intoned the word more normally, cocking his chin and raising his eyebrows.)
But have no doubt, Denis was engaged in educating an elite. It was not part of a strategy, there was no plan or plot. It was more in the nature of an assumption than an intention. On one occasion following an afternoon rehearsal, a lengthy discussion arose around some notion of Ortega, who figured commonly in our discussions. Casually Denis made reference to our future roles as arbiters of value, again by presupposition rather than direct assertion. I balked at the presupposition and queried it. Denis looked about, wide-eyed, blankly into some imaginary vacant space, and said, as if puzzled: If not you, who?
Denis’s question was not thrown out as a challenge. But the impact was seismic and unforgettable. This power came from its status as an observation, from its simple logic and from the irrefutable assumption that others were no different from us, that there was no one different from us to fill these roles in our stead. Not that others were excluded, but no alternative allocation of responsibility was more ready, likely, or plausible. It was this sense, a sense largely unacknowledged and unarticulated, that in those days was the source, in part at least, of the energy required by the range of tasks we took on.
By this time that we were referring to ourselves as “the chorus.” We used the word more as a common than a proper noun, though in retrospect, clearly in the process of elevation. It was a quick way to refer to a group of people and their multiple purposes. We established our headquarters at George & Harry’s. In the time elapsed since those days, this location on Wall Street next to the Music School, has undergone many transformations. In those days, it was a democratic sort of place where faculty (largely the German faculty), music students, and the hungry gathered. It was a place where even on crowded days a handful of people could rent a table for a morning for the cost of a cup of coffee. Toward noon even the most parsimonious of us would pay for the stew.
We lived there. On a daily basis we occupied one, sometimes two tables, throughout much of the day. Occasionally one of us would disappear to attend a class to reappear an hour later. Sometimes, the importance of a discussion made it unnecessary to attend the class. G&H’s was the scene of vivid planning, unfettered speculation, intense debate, and, always, sustained discourse. It is no exaggeration to say that much of my undergraduate education took place here. Typically, Denis would whip in, cloaked in his trademark light gray gabardine, folder in hand, smacking his lips, armed with a new arrangement. For a while, he brought blank sheet music for us to make copies of the new arrangement by hand. Photocopying was available although recent. Delivery of copy was typically delayed, available only for later pick-up. We always needed it that evening.
At George & Harry’s the chorus came to know many others and came to be known as well. Denis had the extraordinary knack of picking up extraordinary people. Just as often he found remarkable qualities in apparently unremarkable people. George and Harry’s was the place where Denis introduced them. We had long felt the need for an economist in the chorus. We knew that in economics lay buried information and technology we needed to make sense of the evolution of the USSR. These were the days when rates of Soviet growth rates were being reported at 15% and more per annum. As it turned out, this was not fanciful, but there were statistical problems involved. We knew we didn’t understand it all. So we were delighted when Denis announced he would be showing up with Oscar Pimantel, an advanced graduate student in economics Denis had met at a reception. We were impressed with Oscar before we met him. By Denis’s account, he was, first, articulate. This mattered. Ours was not only a culture of notes, it was also a culture of words. Second, he was an economist. This mattered almost as much. In addition, in one of Denis’s inimitable descriptive flashes, Oscar was an Indian Jew who had adopted Catholicism (or was it the other way round?). But what bound Oscar to us was his recitation at this very reception, in English and by heart, of Onegin’s letter to Tatiana. Oscar was our man.
But Oscar couldn’t sing. He was a shy man. He couldn’t even fake it. Oscar became a regular at G&H’s, but we were never able to move Oscar into the front line.
There were other of Denis’s friends and foundlings who inspired us at G&H’s. Denis was preparing his dissertation, that is, he was preparing his concert repertoire for performance at Sprague for the spring of 1957. This was still a long way off. Just when Denis actually managed to master the pieces he eventually presented isn’t clear. By his own account though, a half hour with his friend Georgine van Schuyver, timed to occur just before his lesson with his regular teacher, was worth ten hours of practice plus two hours with his regular instructor. Georgine was a student at the Music School and a regular at G&H’s. She played the harpsichord, she had built one, and worked summers with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Georgine’s special gift that she sought to convey to Denis was the technique of sounding a piano key by moving the hand, not toward the key in question, but rather, away from it. This motion was necessarily accompanied by appropriate breathing and concentration. We were always happy to share a table with Georgine. She was wry, wise, and aloof. Indeed, there was something regal about her that assured that whenever she joined us, the table magically ceased to be ours.
Georgine’s technique required, among other things, a downward cupping of the hand as its motion away from the key extracted its personal sound. You must imagine this motion. A reverent, deeply spiritual, ethereal, lax cupping, loosely directed toward the keyboard, the head bowed in total self-absorption as the arm moves away from the keyboard. One face of performance. Denis, in one of his many antinomies, invented a way to express the other face. Adding a bit of tension to the hand, along with a grin simultaneously obsequious and rapacious, by reversing the orientation of the cupped hand so that is faced upwards and extending it, ready to receive a coin or two, Denis captured the ingratiating appeal of the Gypsy and his sensitivity to audience. Georgine and the Gypsy, the two faces of performance.
The chorus understood something of this. We learned early that how we handled ourselves on stage had a clear impact on our audiences. Our rehearsals were disciplined; we sought to translate Denis’s peculiar, personal, and idiosyncratic images into sound, following his indications to concentrate or expand, to focus or discharge, to terrify or soothe. We also understood that our audiences wanted to know that we were enjoying ourselves in their presence, that in addition to control, there was freedom, passion, and uncertainty.
In addition to the usual suspects at G&H’s, Denis had an endless supply of acquaintances of whom he rarely spoke, but who would routinely just show up to puzzle, entertain, or challenge us. Of these, the most peculiar was the son of Sikorsky. Until the day young Sikorsky showed up, I had not know where his father was, much less that he had a helicopter plant near New Haven. Young Sikorsky was self-contained, mild-mannered, placid even, pale, of solid appearance; Clark-Kentish. We would not have thought him unusual in any way had it not been for another of Denis’s descriptive flashes that, vividly and with surgical precision, disclosed the invisible quality that makes one unique and unforgettable. Young Sikorsky was Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin. The face of evil held for him such horror, Denis told us, that he could not look in the mirror in the morning to shave. Just how does one prepare to spend the day with someone whose advance billing tells you he cannot bear to look in a mirror for fear of the evil he might see there?
In this culture of words that was ours, Don and I were commissioned on one occasion to produce a draft justifying some action or other. We were delighted to find we could cast the action we wanted to take as one that the world situation “permits and requires.” The invention of this formula was more than sufficient to justify an afternoon’s work. In this culture of words, there was, as I’ve said, a certain lack of empiricism. We seemed to believe none of us would have put it this way that we could arrive at truth through the careful sifting and sorting of words. Quite some years later, on a visit with Ken Dove in New York, I asked him whether there was some single fact that would cause him to alter his philosophical views. Without deliberation, equivocation, or hesitation, he said: No. Today I’m struck by the wisdom that poets do achieve, seemingly without experience, through such careful sifting and sorting. But we weren’t poets. This buried conviction in combination with our sentiment de supériorité made for an inquiring approach, an aggressive posture, and peppery dialogue, a style that George Steiner, with reference to one of us, once called, not entirely approvingly, a “rambunctious cosmology.” We exercised this rambunctious cosmology notably and foremost among ourselves, both in pairs and jointly, all together, but also publicly. Among ourselves, rather than Marx or Lenin or Stalin, our exchanges were likely to involve Nikon, Filaret, Berdyaev, Soloviev, or Danilevsky, names that figure prominently in kulturologiya, the course in humanities now required in many Russian universities, and that have replaced the synthetic precursors of Soviet socialism in textbooks and in public media.
It was this culture that gave rise to the amendment. The function of amending a toast, as the root meaning of the word asserts, was initially to improve its formulation, to correct its flaws, and through sifting and sorting to get the thought right and its expression right. Denis, of course, was the first to propose an amendment. The first such occasion, or at least the most memorable, came on a freezing night with six of us crammed into my clunky sedan. The vodka had been allocated into small, conical, stemmed cordial glasses and I had proposed a toast, as precisely and pointedly as I was able. After Denis’s lead-off, there followed a sequence of amendments that continued nearly two hours, our fingers growing increasingly numb and our chilled hands increasingly less reliable guardians of our glasses, until perforce, agreement was reached that no further truth could be won. We extracted ourselves from the car, shivering and crippled. Whether the amendment nourished clarity of thought and precision in expression is debatable. It undeniably promoted sobriety.
Typically, at George and Harry’s or after rehearsals, we planned lectures for ourselves and the Yale public. In retrospect, it looks like a series. But that was not the idea, not the original idea. We simply planned the lectures one at a time as need and opportunity suggested. McGowan gave the first, a two-hour account of the CP’s role in collectivization, as I recall, an account so long and detailed as to leave us as numb as the amendment in the car. We invited lecturers as a rule to address particular themes.
What drove this effort and guided our selection was the notion that most of us shared, at least implicitly, that all knowledge and all phenomena are integrable into an organic whole, wherein the parts command and presuppose each other. The Yale course catalog, through its promotion of the three area studies programs, was responsible in part for this conceit. We would, it promised, integrate literature, economics, politics, history, etc., etc. It was this prospect that drew me originally to Russian area studies. In choosing Russian area studies as a major, I was primarily choosing areas studies and Russian area studies only very secondarily (rather than Chinese or Middle Eastern). My interest and knowledge of anything related to Russia and the USSR (including the language) was slight at best. Interest came rapidly and overwhelmingly as a result of my experience in the chorus. What drew me and others to area studies was this promise of integration. That nobody in a position of genuine authority with any real sense at Yale really believed in this integration is evidenced by the fact that Yale offered no Ph.D. program in area studies, a tacit acknowledgement that there was at root no such discipline as area studies. Moreover, the area studies program itself turned out to be little more than a loose collection of courses without any command center. The chorus provided something of an antidote.
The responsibility lay not entirely with the catalog, of course. The notion of integral wholes infused much speculation at the time in social sciences and the humanities, fueled by writers from Marx to Berdyaev, from Hegel to Schumpeter, from Chernyshevsky to Toynbee. Strongly associated with this view was a second, namely that history is going somewhere, that there exists a dynamic gimmick that moves history in the direction of some predestined end. Marxists saw in Soviet communism, or at least claimed to see, the working of the historical dialectic (something Marx himself never mentioned), while Berdyaev saw in authoritarian Russia a manifestation of an eschatology at work. The latter view had an intuitive appeal for us. But as I’ve said, we were not raving empiricists at the time. Such issues were discussed at length. In particular, Don and I sat many hours on the steps of Sprague, just a stroll from headquarters. Don eventually dropped his studies at the music school and switched to Yale College to do Russian, a decision he made with a great deal more perspective than I had exercised and one he and I discussed at length on those same steps. The chorus certainly raised interest in Russian matters, but in no domain more deeply than in its own ranks.
There was a further and more important quality to our effort to make sense of Russian experience. I will call it anthropology at a distance. (Margaret Mead and Rhoda Métraux would later call it the study of culture at a distance.) What distinguished us from our counterparts in other departments (I can speak of the French and German departments first-hand, having studied in both, and having been an officer in both the Cercle français and the Deutscher Verein) was our drive to feel, touch, and smell an environment from which we were, at the time, deeply cut off. Our counterparts took their contact with France and Germany for granted. It’s not that they were in fact connected. Quite the contrary. Wandering through the French department in those years, one would never have guessed that Paris was aflame with what the French saw as the American provocation on the Korean peninsula (witness Picasso’s painting of American troops machine-gunning North Korean babies) or, suspected that a Paris, enraged at the 1953 execution of the Rosenbergs, had decked every column in the city with portraits of the fascist Eisenhower, grinning broadly with miniature electric chairs in place of teeth.(This was the same Eisenhower who ordered the landing on Normandy beach in June 1944.) Nor did they seem aware that the locus of one of the most important French intellectual debates (that between Sartre and Lévi-Strauss) had originated in New York and was only slowly finding its way to France. In the collective and explicit culture of the German department, it would have been difficult to detect that Germany was a divided country, or that there had been a holocaust. Nor did our counterparts see their instructors as exemplars of a culture, a way of life they sought to touch, but saw them rather as guides -- extraordinary guides, indeed, Peyre, Guicharnaud, Brombert to a life that was defined in pages.
For us, it was quite different. Our instructors were instances of what we were trying to touch, weak and decontextualized as they were, but instances nonetheless. The notion of anthropology at a distance is difficult to appreciate today and the scope and diversity of perspectives that enterprise required and encouraged have not been widely recognized. Moreover, with increased transparency, its moment has passed, at least in regard to Russia. It was reflected in Merle Fainsod’s effort, through meticulous scrutiny of archival material, obtained serendipitously, to account for the architecture of control and decision making in the early years of the USSR; in Alex Inkeles’s effort, by sorting interview protocols of, again, a serendipitous sample of former Soviet citizens, to make sense of the structure of communication and trust in the Soviet Union. It includes Avram Bergson’s decade-long effort to parse, from afar and with uncertain data, the growth of Soviet national income, a task complicated on a theoretical level, on the one hand, by the absence of a price structure that reflected actual scarcity values, and on the other, by genuine ambiguities in the very meaning of measuring growth in a context where scarcity values are associated with dramatic shifts in the weight of different sectors of the economy.
But anthropology at a distance required more innovative or creative perspectives: mundane counting of word tokens in Soviet publications; charting the shifts of who stood next to whom in the Kremlin line-up; analysis of Lenin and Stalin as heroes in modern byliny; picking apart stories and novels for what they could reveal of contemporary Soviet reality; attempts to elaborate a framework of inquiry for gaining access to the dynamics of Soviet social psychology through the study of films (notable among these was Erik Erikson’s discussion of the film treatment of Gorkii’s childhood); and various theories of Soviet behavior drawing on notions of sexuality current at the time and of the effects of child-rearing methods.
To cite these efforts is not to vouch for the success of any or all of them. Some of it was unrestrained speculation. For my taste, the prize for inventiveness went to Leopold Haimson for his attempt to tease an image of Soviet strategic behavior in general from an analysis of the games of the Russian chess masters and from the chess literature they produced, most prominently, Botvinnik. Most revealing, again for my taste, were the rich, again serendipitous collections of legal cases presented by John Hazard of Columbia Law School and Harold Berman at Harvard’s. As handbooks to the means and norms of everyday Soviet live these were matchless sources.
To cite these efforts is to picture our desperation. Inventive and rich, theoretically and practically, as these approaches were in some sense, to be restricted to such glancing means for connecting with another environment was seriously limiting. On the positive side of the balance, however, the effect was to promote in us a powerful framework of inquiry, a rich uncertainty. But even these perspectives were nowhere drawn together in a single setting to enable a general review of Soviet reality within any contained and accessible academic framework, not at Yale, not at Columbia, not at Harvard, then the three major centers for Russian/Soviet studies. In that era the chorus was our best hope.
It was in this uncertain terrain that we operated. None of the techniques just mentioned would be barred in any analytic setting. But here the fact was that we were limited to such restricted means, limited to looking at the object of our interest through a telescope. What even the best of the means of anthropology at a distance failed to provide was the sense of intimacy with Russian reality that we were truly seeking.
Russian song helped. Folk songs, initially. For us, and here again words mattered, song provided history, myth, and literature from the inside in a way that no classroom experience could equal. In one evening of rehearsal, we could encounter Igor’s host; Boyan the Wise; 17th century rebellions against the realms of Tsar Alexei and 18th century ones against those of Catherine; Persian princesses and flaxen heroes; ravens, falcons, drakes, and eagles; apple trees, pear trees, and raspberries; streams, dark woods, tear-laden crags, and birch; the assonances of a Pushkin poem and the strange images of one by Mandel’shtam. And perhaps most indelible of all, the negative simile: ‘Tis not the wind…, ‘Tis not the grove.
Of course, it was Denis who connected us with all this. But he connected us with much else. There was the cast of new characters that Denis continued to pull out of his sleeve. More about that in a bit. I envy the many students that Denis has had over the decades since the early days. Still, I think we had the better of the deal. Every classroom has didactic requirements. The instructor must assert. Our environment was largely free of assertion. It was rather through off-hand remarks and subordinate clauses that Denis led us to Nabokov, to Gumilev and Mandel’shtam, to Isak Dineson before Meryl Streep made her famous, to Ortega y Gasset, to Sorokin, who had founded the Harvard department of sociology decades earlier, and to the wit of Nina Berberova decades before the New York Times took note.
Of still greater impact was the transfusion of the culture that had come with mother’s milk. With Denis, as with many Russians of a certain era, particular situations inevitably summon a line from Pushkin. Of course, it went beyond Pushkin. When something in John Brightly’s manner -- perhaps it was the long, gray wool coat with its long sleeves that John lived in, or perhaps it was his generous but apparently indecisive way -- led Denis to assimilate him to Oblomov, it simultaneously connected us more fully with Goncharov’s masterful characterization – and with our own comrade whom Denis, as customary, had instantly brought us to see in a new, more discerning and defining way. With a simple question: Which Karamazov? With this quick query about the children’s cheer for Karamazov that comes at the very end of the novel, Denis forced us to reconsider the whole work. With a casual aside projecting Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov as Lucifer and Ariman, isolation and destruction, the two faces of evil, each of which ultimately entails the other, Denis gave us a new framework for Crime and Punishment. Or again, one day following a concert in Poughkeepsie, I remember how pointing out a nearby mountain ash (the Russian ryabina, that small tree with white flowers and orange berries) moved Denis to unleash a flood of lines from Tolstoi whose centerpiece was that very species. I sense too that somehow, as in The Devils, Denis led us to our sense of solidarity not through our shared purposes alone, but also through an ever so faint hint of transgression.
All of which – the anthropology at a distance, the sense of distinctiveness we wanted to share, and the battle of words we wanted to pursue – provoked and sustained our efforts to bring to the campus thoughtful and original speakers. In general these events were successful and well attended. Unlike such events in the French and German departments, where speakers were typically drawn from within their respective departments and treated their appearances as duty at worst and as benevolence at best, many of our speakers were strangers to the campus and often strangers to organized Russian/Soviet studies as well and pleased at the opportunity to appear.
Our success in attracting audiences that were both eclectic and serious had a second, possibly more important explanation. Boris taught us to use the printing press at the Art School. The press was located, appropriately underground, near the overpass. By this time I had decided that quite possibly Boris wasn’t actually blowing up freight cars, but was satisfied instead to have NTS paint pitchforks on the sides of the cars as they left Helsinki for Leningrad. The press was a huge affair, with a huge plate, and long huge levers. We produced large posters in very large numbers on light-weight paper. Boris had taught us how to compile the clunky type and to use two colors of ink. We used a sans-serif design with red and black ink in lower case. The combination was striking. Typically, Jim, Don, John, Kit, and I took turns, mostly working in pairs, late at night when the press was free, and distributed the posters liberally around the campus in the early morning hours. For whatever reason, our lectures typically drew new faces, in substantial numbers, from diverse backgrounds.
Among our earliest speakers was Richard Sewall from the English department who had a general interest in tragedy and a particular one in Dostoevsky. Marc Blaug, in the Economics department at the time, talked on Marxism. John Hazard came up from Columbia to discuss the efforts at legal reform under consideration in the Soviet Union in 1955-56. Of our speakers the most controversial was Nikolai Khokhlov, known to some as the Butcher of the Ukraine, where he had been Stalin’s henchman in the suppression of Ukrainian nationalist efforts. Khokhlov had defected. Defectors tended to fare badly. One day on awakening, he ran his hand through his hair and then noticed that large tufts had come loose and remained between his fingers. At an émigré conference in Paris, it emerged, in an upgrade of the methods used against Trotsky, that Khokhlov had been slipped a drink of water lightly laced with plutonium. The US wanted Khokhlov alive, so he spent two years in successful treatment at an army hospital in Germany. (Maybe the old methods were better after all.) There were rumors quite possibly unreliable, I no longer recall the source that the émigré Russian community of New Haven would not take the appearance of the Butcher lightly. We had no desire to distress or antagonize a group we considered good neighbors and supporters by giving the Butcher a public forum. Nor did we want to provoke a demonstration that might pointlessly embarrass Yale. No principle was at stake. On this one occasion I turned to the Yale administration for guidance. With the exception of routine reservation of space for rehearsals and events, this was the only occasion in my time at Yale that the chorus consulted the administration. On this occasion, a dean, I forget which, having heard my case, replied predictably, and in retrospect, in a predictably avuncular tone: John, you have to use your own judgment. The event went through with interested participation from the community and without incident. Khokhlov, it turned out, was a small man with soft, pudgy features who looked more like a violinist that a butcher. That too, perhaps, was predictable.
Richard Niebuhr, a theologian at the Divinity School, a more solid but less flashy scholar than his more famous brother Reinhold, had a particular interest in Tolstoi and had written briefly and engagingly about him. We invited him and he agreed. As we didn’t normally check out the competition when we planned our events, it had escaped our attention that for the very evening of the planned presentation half the Yale community had already bought tickets to hear the only Yale performance of the David Oistrakh. The visit of this great Soviet violinist was the fruit of a thaw in US/USSR relations that matured in 1955 56 – Soviet troops withdrew from Austria in 1955. Oistrakh was an early salvo in the cultural exchanges to come.
After a round of embarrassing moves we went ahead with our plan. We had a small, attentive group and closed out early to catch the end of the concert ourselves. We were eager on our own behalf to thank Oistrakh for his visit and to make our existence as a chorus known to him. I rehearsed my lines with Denis, in Russian – the point being to clarify the exact phrase to use to convey our appreciation. At the appropriate moment I queued up while my colleagues watched. I thanked Oistrakh, who looked more like a butcher than a violinist, and having completed my mission, returned. Denis exploded: IDIOT. It is no secret that Denis can express sharp disapproval quickly. But he never surpassed his wrath of this occasion. WHAT Russian chorus?? he hammered. I got the point. I had omitted the phrase “Yale-skogo universiteta,” from the tail of my expression of appreciation (the information regarding our institutional affiliation comes at the end in Russian rather than at the beginning, as in English). I had rendered the whole enterprise pointless.
My point is not that the great Oistrakh returned to the USSR ignorant of the existence of the Yale Russian Chorus. It is rather that Denis was the perfect “one-minute manager.” Within seconds I was back in his good graces. Denis had made his point and it was history. Let any who doubt the efficacy of one-minute management study here. In this capacity lay much of our success as a chorus and as an effectively functioning group. Denis never delayed reproof or waited to correct poor performance. Nor did he ever let the sting of reproof linger without the reconfirming balm of a smile. Denis could have written the book on “one-minute management.”
At some point in the fall of 1955 I was set up as president of the Russian Club. At one of the rare meetings of the Russian Club, Denis suggested me as president. The random collection of people present, including Alex Schenker, Petrov, and Vasiliev from the department, simply raised their hands. The routineness prompted Petrov to crack:
Kak v Moskve (Just like Moscow). Had Denis proposed Donald Duck, Donald Duck would have become president. The exercise was actually pointless. At this point the club had no activity apart from the chorus, no members, no program; in fact no life.
By the end of the first semester of 1955-56, our repertoire included early versions of many of the Russian folk songs in the current one:
Ekh Dorogi,
Soldatushki,
V Tyomnom Lese,
Oi Na Gore,
Vo Kuznitse,
Kalinka and
Vdol’ da po Rechke (Kit sang the leads),
Vyotsya,
Venuli Vetry,
Mnogaya Leta,
Dvenadtsat’ Razboinikov,
Borodino,
To Ne Veter,
Metelitsa, Lermontov’s poems
Nochevala Tuchka Zolotaya and
Nelyudimo Nashe More, and Pushkin’s
Burya Mgloyu. In 1956-57, our repertoire became more ambitious. In addition to Denis’s setting of Mandel’shtam’s poem, we added new ecclesiastical pieces to the Easter works we had prepared for our earliest public appearances. In December 1955, in particular (and without my participation) we added
Khvalite Imya Gospodne in anticipation of what would be the Chorus’s first public performance of that piece, at my wedding, on a very wintry January 14, 1956.
From a more global perspective, 1956 opened with Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalinist crimes in February and closed with Soviet tanks in Budapest in November. The first event surprised but did not stun us; the second stunned but did not surprise us. It seemed to follow a Grand Narrative: Soviet hegemony was based on brute force and brute force would be applied to preserve it. If so, the leaders in the Kremlin seemed unaware of it. The so-called Malin notes show utter confusion in the Kremlin, ideological, strategic, and tactical, from the moment Hungarians started calling for political and economic reform and for the withdrawal of Soviet troops, as had recently occurred in Austria. (V. N. Malin was a high-level Kremlin operative charged with executive follow-up whose notes of the deliberations regarding the Hungarian uprising came to light in 1993). Almost daily, Khrushchev and his associates traded positions on whether to withdraw, the ideological basis for intervention and nonintervention (some even suggesting that the USSR could not interfere with the will of the workers in a fellow-socialist state). Three points are striking: first, the Kremlin took little note of events surrounding the Suez canal (where French and British troops had just landed); second, they paid scant attention to the possibility of US intervention in Hungary; and third, they knew precisely that the uprising had the broad support of the workers in Hungary. The last point confounded their efforts to find a name for the event; an uprising supported by the totality of workers could not, by definition, be called a counterrevolution. So what to call it? This knowledge did not prevent subsequent apologists from laying the events at the door of right-wing Horthyist counterrevolutionaries.
If things were confused in Moscow, they were very clear in New Haven. The campus was ablaze, literally. At least that portion in the courtyard outside the freshman dining hall and Woolsey. Huge bonfires had been lighted and top-quality amplifiers and loudspeakers had been mobilized to project passionate, polished speeches.
It is not surprising that none of this was the doing of the chorus. First, it was not our style. Much as we disapproved of communist rule, we never engaged in bashing the USSR. Our concern was to promote what we would come to call real versus apparent exchange. As important, was the rumor that the US had provoked the uprising by promises of help aired over Radio Free Europe. Our rage, thick and palpable, was directed, however unreasonably, at our own government for its failure to come to the support of the Hungarians. We were in a fury at John Foster Dulles’s speech in Texas, where he announced that the US would exercise forbearance in Hungary.
(The role of Radio Free Europe is a vexed issue. The most provocative action it took may have been to broadcast Khrushchev’s February speech in the languages of the Soviet bloc countries. Be that as it may, the causes of the October uprising in Hungary were multiple, deep, and of long standing.)
Our sole organized action as a group was a musical one. Denis immediately produced a version of the Rákóczi March, a hymn of Hungarian independence celebrating one of the earliest heroes of the long struggle against the Habsburg empire. Other than Denis, I don’t think any of us had ever heard its rousing call. However, in early November, its strains instantly took over the campus.
Throughout 1956 we continued to seek out and attract new collaborators. To say that so-and-so joined the chorus at such-and-such a time obscures the nature of a process which in those years was much more one of exposure and assimilation than attachment. A good number of students tried us out and for one or another reason the marriage didn’t work out. There was within the chorus much talk of “purges,” but the only true filter was the ability and willingness of new potential partners to accept the multiplicity of purposes, the intense sociability associated with their pursuit, and to devote the time necessary to accomplish the necessary tasks. We worked people to exhaustion, sang them to exhaustion, and talked them to exhaustion. We relied largely on chance meetings and word of mouth to bring in new colleagues. From time to time, we visited classrooms to discuss the chorus and recruit.
One such effort attracted Barry Rubin. Barry was a genuine bass. We all knew that Barry was funny, but, as always, Denis was the first to take explicit note Barry’s special wit, rising as it did from a blend of suspicion and affection. Twenty years later, it would be Barry, together with Masha, who would introduce me to Joseph Brodsky, then still in the Soviet Union, and help me appreciate his greatness, more than fifteen years before he would gather the Nobel Prize for literature. At that moment, though, Barry was joining Jimmy Guyot in the bass section. His accession was timely as Ed was class of ’56 and would soon graduate. I moved to second tenor with Brightly (who would graduate with Ed), a part equally uncongenial for me, as anything above F was a stretch. Kit continued as first tenor, with occasional backstopping by Denis, who during performances would shift from directing us to a position at the end of the line next to Kit from where he would sing, while continuing to conduct. Barry’s inclusion and the resulting shifts allowed Denis greater flexibility and thus began a new round of arrangements.
In the fall of 1956, Masha, in her elliptical way, put me onto Nabokov’s Vesna v Fialte, (Spring in Fialta). Masha’s ellipses were always irresistible. By the end of the semester I had completed all my course requirements. I had only to finish my thesis on Konstantin Leontiev, work that I had initiated the previous year in a graduate history course with George Vernadsky and was completing under the guidance of Dick Burgi in the Russian department. I spent the spring semester living just outside New York and visited the campus three times a month more or less.
By May, I had finished my thesis and Denis had finished his “dissertation.” We had often shared the stage with Denis. But here, for the first time, we saw Denis on stage, alone, in tails, seated before a concert grand at Sprague, in front of an elegant audience. For two hours we watched while Denis did dazzling things we didn’t know he could do. Of course, we had seen him diddle at the keyboard at rehearsals. We were more familiar with his guitar improvisations using that idiosyncratic tuning he said a Gypsy had taught him and which I imitated, because it made sense to me. I think many of us felt that this was our graduation, too. This was what graduation should look like. Certainly it was a far grander, fitting finish to years in New Haven than anything that happened on the Old Campus a few weeks later.
By our graduation, I am referring to Denis, Don Goodman, Barry Rubin, and myself. John Brightly and Ed McGowan had graduated the previous year. We all spoke Russian, three of us not as well, perhaps, as some of our counterparts in the French department spoke French, testimony to the more taxing character of Russian, but quite serviceably nonetheless. Along with Kit, who would finish his undergraduate degree in statistics, Denis would remain in New Haven to do graduate work in comparative literature. In New York, Don would take up philosophy at Fordham and Barry would begin graduate work in Slavic at Columbia. I would go Cambridge to pursue Soviet studies at Harvard, where Ed had already been for a year.
What we had not done was to take into account the fact that by this time our small cohort belonged predominantly to the Class of 1957, that the chorus would suddenly find itself with the great majority of its members off-campus. In the fall of 1957, this would require us to make the first organized and formal recruiting effort in our short history. We hardly knew how. But that fall, we would converge in New Haven for that very purpose. A new chapter in chorus history would open.
Let me make a few general points by way of drawing things together.
In the first place, I would like to invite members to look beyond the terminological shortcut we have all adopted as a way of characterizing a portion of the chorus’s active contingent, namely, the use of the word “alumni.” The chorus did not come to be a collection of scattered interests and talents. It was that way from the beginning. The shortcut here may be of little significance except insofar as it obscures the actual historical dynamic that guided the chorus’s early evolution, gave it its unique character, and provided much of its energy. The word suggests participation by a contingent with ties, either to the chorus or to Yale, that were severed at some point. It is certainly true that the chorus today includes many who graduated from Yale College. It disguises the fact that from the earliest years the chorus included many who hadn’t or never would: three women with no ties whatsoever with Yale College, three whose tie to Yale was not through the college but through the Music School, several whose tie was via a professional school or graduate department (Jim Guyot, one of the most active, had done his undergraduate work at the University of Michigan). This inclusive character strengthened in the years immediately following 1957. Chuck Neff, a graduate of Pamona, and Dub Alston, a graduate of MIT, joined the chorus as graduate students. Others, like Don Miller, although Yale College graduates, did not join until after their graduation.
Still others joined who had no academic connection with Yale at all. Some, like Jim Hobson and Don Price had relatively short tenures. Vadim, with his distinctive sound, would lift the chorus steadily over the years without the benefit of any Yale education. Hugh Olmsted and Larry Newman, both of Harvard have been connected since shortly after 1957. Larry married Mary Stewart, who as Mary Newman designed what started, I believe, as a lithograph, that enduring black and white icon with the chorus exploding in the form of a megaphone from Denis’s fingertips. It disguises, too, the sustained connection of numerous others who, although Yale graduates, continued to act as chorus members while students or faculty members at other universities.
More significant for an understanding of chorus dynamics is the fraction of those living on-campus compared to that living off-campus. By 1958/59, the number of active chorus members living off-campus was very roughly equal to those living in New Haven. By the beginning of the next decade, the former dominated. In 1958, of the first group to visit the USSR, roughly a quarter had never been part of Yale College.
Second, as the first cohort we were not only without predecessors within the chorus, we had no predecessors at Yale in Russian studies, none like ourselves who had been through the course requirements, at least none that came to our attention. Normally, students majoring in whatever field, say mathematics or economics, know older, slightly more advanced students through whose eyes they view their own work, the field, the people in it, and their own futures.. They may have been there, but, if so, we never found each other. On its face, this claim is so implausible as to require some substantiation. The department adjusted courses for us to take account of the fact that we had outgrown the established offerings. Dick Burgi and Robert Jackson generously improvised programs under cover of established course numbers. More advanced students were nowhere to be seen. As a junior I took a graduate seminar in Russian history alongside graduate students in history as likely to be interested in Renaissance Italy as in the English Revolution. They did not know Russian and were not specializing in Russian history. I was anomalous. My graduate seminar with René Wellek on Dostoevsy and Tolstoy was the same story. It included graduate students from various literature departments, eager to hear from one of the founders of structuralism, but none knew Russian. This would change, of course, but not in our time. Beyond encouraging a useful but possibly excessive self-confidence, this anomalous configuration had two effects. The absence of a cohort of senior peers with whom we could identify and through whose eyes we could look at the Soviet world left us to face more starkly the estranged reality we sought to grasp, and enhanced that sense of engagement in anthropology at a distance. A further effect linked us together with each other more tightly than would have been the case had looser vertical bonds been at hand. We were a small group that communicated easily, could plan quickly, and take action efficiently.
Third, the Cold War was instrumental in shaping the outlook of that first cohort not by virtue of the hostile climate associated with it but rather by virtue of the estrangement, the isolation, the distancing of what we were trying to make sense of and for the peculiar anthropology that effort required. For the first cohort, the first (1958) visit to the USSR had a meaning that was different from what it could be for those who joined after 1957. For us it meant a resolution of uncertainties that had accumulated over three, four, five years of anthropology at a distance. The age of anthropology at a distance was over.
The administration of Jim’s TATs in Red Square was a metaphor for this shift. The TATs were ambiguous drawings of people sitting or standing around, not doing much of anything in particular, along with a few simple questions in Russian: Who’s this? What are they doing? What are they talking about? Etc. We had prepared these Russian versions in Cambridge (Jim was now in Cambridge) in advance of the trip. After a round of song, a small group of us invited some 35 or so listeners, individually, to fill out the protocols. We had no idea in advance whether people would retreat out of suspicion or cooperate. On the face of it (and in fact) there was nothing counterrevolutionary or anti-Soviet about what we were doing. Still, it was a rather strange game for foreigners to play on Red Square in 1958.
To our surprise and joy, they cooperated, virtually without exception. We had made our first steps in the new way, the new world. We had gathered first-hand data for the first time. The TATs are just a metaphor. The whole trip was a new day, a new world. Nonetheless, we took the precious protocols back with us to Cambridge, Masha translated them, and we scored them, for the sheer exhilaration of it, following the usual methods to distinguish achievement, affiliation, and power motivation. We did not take the results seriously; this was no random sample. Still, we were intrigued to find unusually heavy weight for affiliation, no great surprise given the conditions under which we had carried out the project. My subsequent experience in the USSR throughout the 1960s suggests, though, that there may have been more to our observations than sample bias.
Fourth, by 1955-56, it will surprise no one that as a choral group, the YRC looked and sounded little like singing groups at Yale. It may surprise some just how different we were. As a group we shared many purposes that intermeshed both notionally and practically that our choral activity both reflected and served. Sitting in headquarters copying music for the evening’s rehearsal, we discussed the negative simile, the superfluous man, the Third Rome, Berdiaev, Georgine and the Gypsy, Arnold Wolfers’ lectures rehashing Spykman’s geopolitics, and the back pages of the New York Times -- several of us (not me) took Rudin’s course, which was predicated on the idea that the back pages of today’s NYT contain tomorrow’s headlines. We were remarkably tuned in to each other’s courses. The same crew that sat discussing Tolstoi and pacifism with Richard Niebuhr, when done, trekked over to Woolsey to declare itself to David Oistrakh. After or before rehearsals, though usually at other moments, we discussed the language of a poster or the phrasing of an announcement. Rarely did our toasts have anything explicitly to do with either Russia or song.
Our small size made this integration possible. We gave concerts at Vassar or Mt. Holyoke or in New Haven with as few voices as could fit in a single car. No one was superfluous. Our size had handicaps; a small group cannot sing as quietly or spook as a large one can. As a singing group we had not even one fine voice. Yet the combination of our music, Denis’s arrangements, and his direction allowed us to move audiences in ways that other groups could not. The arrangements exploited fully what we could do and reduced the liabilities associated with what we couldn’t do. Denis could poke, prod, and beguile us to produce the many sounds he wanted, sounds we didn’t imagine or know we could make.
Denis was a fierce competitor. At wrestling, ping-pong, and soccer, he was better than most of us. Yet his first move was always for psychological intimidation, to convince that he was better than he was, that no resource would be spared, that the match was to the death. In choral work, as well, Denis was a fierce competitor. And although we had other cats to skin, we were determined to gain recognition for a new kind of music. We knew our version of Ay lučka lučka, the Czech folk song, had more muscle than the competition’s. We felt chivalrous that we never sang it on campus.
The fall 1957 recruitment efforts in New Haven were of the usual sort. We posted notices that the chorus was looking for voices. Over the next year or so the chorus added many members with fine voices and diverse talents. The future there was secure. Any narrow account of those years must come from others. Here I would like to make a few brief comments that reflect the character of the community of chorus members who found themselves in Cambridge and add at the end a few anecdotal accounts of my later collaboration with individual chorus members in endeavors at best only loosely related to the chorus itself.
I arrived in Cambridge in the fall of 1957 to take up work toward a master’s degree in Soviet studies at Harvard. Ed McGowan had gotten there the previous year for the same purpose. Jim and Masha would join us almost immediately. We met Vadim, who was in the doctoral program in Harvard’s Slavic department and who was soon making the trek to New Haven with us for concerts. Larry Newman, similarly situated would do likewise. Jim Sloan would finish his work in New Haven and come to Cambridge to work in computer science at MIT. Dub Alston, having finished his Ph. D. at Yale, would return to the Cambridge area to teach physics at Boston University.
We were a loosely knit group with multiple, strong dyadic relationships. We saw ourselves as part of the larger chorus community, so it never occurred to us to perform on our own as became the custom subsequently in other centers. I think we simply could not entertain the notion that we might sing under any direction other than Denis’s. We were joined, again loosely, by others in the Soviet studies program, Jim Hobson, Don Price, Henry Aaron, Ned Keenan. We gathered with some frequency but no regularity, typically at my home. Andy Blane from the Divinity School joined us. He would later pursue Russian history as a career. Denis would visit from time to time and was well known. Three or four took part in subsequent chorus trips to the Soviet Union.
At least part of the reason for the looseness of our associations lay in the fact that Harvard offered those with interests in the Soviet world a much richer set of options than Yale had. Our focus at Yale had been almost exclusively Russian. True, Ed had studied Polish with Alex and Olga Virski and Barry had at least had a look at the central Asian republics, but all in all we had largely ignored the nationality issues of the Soviet Union and paid scant attention to the Soviet bloc, Yugoslavia, and Albania. The culture at Harvard was quite different and was reflected in the presence of Richard Pipes, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Adam Ulam, Alfred Lord, and Horace Lunt, and others. Lord had done the definitive study of the Serb Kosovo myth that loomed so large in the recent trauma there and Horace Lunt had worked in Macedonia and written a grammar of the language of that conflicted country. Ed took advantage of this diversity, working extensively with the first two of those just mentioned on issues relating to Soviet nationalities and central Europe. Vadim worked with Lord and Lunt as well as with Jakobson. I took still a different route, working largely in Soviet economics with Avram Bergson, and in Soviet/Russian law with Harold Berman. Moreover, many of our new colleagues had already well-defined interests in other Slavic culture, particularly south Slavic as represented primarily by the dances of Serbia and Macedonia. Jim Sloan would soon take up Georgian.
Shortly after settling in Cambridge, Masha introduced me to Father Georges Florovsky. Father Georges taught at the Harvard Divinity School and was the acknowledged authority on the history of Orthodox theology. Father Georges was an immensely erudite man who could chuckle at Dostoevsky from a Freudian point of view. His home was warm, lively, always open. Masha, Andy, and I visited him frequently. Andy and Masha, along with others, would take on the task (never completed) of translating his Ways of Russian Theology (Puti Russkogo Bogosloviya), plates of which had been destroyed in the bombing of Belgrade.
Father Georges would be of immense help to me in an unexpected capacity. I was the only non-lawyer in Harold Berman’s group of students working in Soviet law at Harvard Law School. I’m sure I must have annoyed him on more than one occasion and probably no more than when I arrived in his office and suggested that what I really should do was explore the pre-1917 roots of the Soviet procuracy. This was a course on Soviet law and I wanted to take it back to Peter I, back to the beginning of the eighteenth century! Kucherov had hinted at this connection with the modern procuracy and it seemed that the evolution of an institution like the procuracy over the course of modern Russian history would be a useful prism for looking at issues of continuity and change. He readily acknowledged that his specialty was Soviet law, that he’d be of help only once I’d made some headway with the initial background research, and that I’d have to get started on my own. Harvard had an extraordinary legal collection from pre-1917 Russia, but where to start?
I sought out Father Georges. Off the top of his head he named eight or ten sources: legal treatises, discussions of reforms, and above all, memoirs, and several volumes of the judicial presentations and memoirs of A. F. Koni. The following Saturday, I spent a morning in the stacks and recovered most of Father Georges’ recommended readings. As I leave the stacks, I run into Father Georges himself, in his long black cassock, the only garment I ever saw him wear in the ten years I knew him. Father Georges was a tall, gaunt man with a long white beard that only half concealed a ruddy face that radiated wry wisdom and good humor. He spots the books that rise in my arms from my belt to my chin. One by one he picks them off, and with long, hungry fingers, lovingly turns the pages, as though he is greeting old friends. He looks up from the books at me, and with a nostalgic grin says: We read these as kids.
This was the first of many such experiences. But it was the first time I realized explicitly that we hadn’t been all wrong in trusting accent as an index of competence. Hal Berman was pleased.
It took me five years to finish a two-year master’s degree. This was due at least in part to frequent and prolonged visits to the Soviet Union. Most germane from a chorus perspective were the months spent working on various exhibits (art, plastics, transportation, etc.) in different Soviet cities in association with Barry; Curt Kamman, a baritone with the chorus who had recently graduated and was working for the State Department; and Ellen Propper, who would be Ellen Mickiewicz. Curt was an important intermediary between exhibit staff, people who had signed on as a way to engage in real cultural exchange, and State officials, who had little practical understanding of how things worked on the ground but were terrified of possible scandals that might result from close contact with the people. Barry and I treated these exhibits as extensions of earlier chorus trips. It was like Red Square without the singing. Six to ten hours a day before crowds of people with constantly changing faces, with questions whose answers they were seeking, genuinely and intently, and long evenings with provocative and original minds. Ellen, Curt, and I arrived in a city called Stalingrad; the city we left a month later was Volgograd. We spent six days in a city without a name. Beset by anxious citizens, we responded to troubled questions about the meaning of de Stalinization, the cult of personality (in the family as well as the state), the humiliation of a great city with a bloody, heroic past.
On a lighter note, Barry had come by an elephant’s foot. This was not just any old elephant’s foot; this was a very important elephant’s foot, inscribed with the name of Nikolai Nikolaevich Miklukho-Maklai. Other people came by poetry, plays, essays, ties, wrist watches, and cameras. Only Barry came by an elephant’s foot. We kept this foot in a very large gym bag that, for a month, twenty-four hours a day, one of us had to keep at hand. How we came by this elephant’s foot and why this vigilance was so necessary is another story, Barry’s story.
At the very end of one of the exhibits, late one night a group of us happened to spot Fred Barghoorn, Ed’s old political science teacher from Yale, in front of our hotel. We had chatted with him earlier. He was as pleased to be in the Soviet Union as we were. On this occasion Barghoorn was standing with a group of young Russian men. He was obviously enjoying the new freedom and the fellowship. By this time we had acquired considerable street smarts and one glance told us that the guys who had picked him up were bad news. Shortly thereafter (back at Harvard) we got the news through the New York Times, front page, that Barghoorn had been arrested as a spy for attempting to transmit state secrets.
Our view of Barghoorn had mellowed since 1957. The charge that he was a spy struck us as implausible. President Kennedy agreed. He declared publicly: Professor Barghoorn is not a spy. I had some rapid communication with chorus members in Cambridge and in New Haven and then trudged over to see Merle Fainsod, then head of the Harvard Soviet Regional Studies program. Before getting into Soviet studies Merle had been a student of American regulation. He had a huge office and a huge desk, stripped clean, with a compact tower of books to one side that gave the desk the appearance of an aircraft carrier. He sat behind his desk, speaking in hushed, conspiratorial tones, as we discussed the Barghoorn affair. No one, it seemed, should hear this conversation. At the time, the US had recently arrested a Soviet spy, so there was some talk in the media of a possible trade. At its conclusion, Fainsod leaned across the carrier deck and whispered, barely audibly and with frightening gravity: John, I think we’ll see a trade. Not reassured, I walked directly over to the Law School to see Hal Berman. Hal, ever agreeable, greeted me warmly, and lounged behind his cluttered desk. I raised the Barghoorn issue with him and after we had discussed it a bit, recounted what Fainsod had said. Berman, a bear of a man who resembled a linebacker more than a Harvard law professor, erupted. He ignited, jumped up from his desk, threw both arms in the air, strode excitedly about his office shouting: A diplomatic monstrosity!! The President has said publicly that Barghoorn is not a spy. That’s not possible.
Hal was right, of course. Several days later, Khrushchev, in a gesture of good will to the new president, released Barghoorn with no conditions. The author of
How Russia is Ruled and the student of American public administration had managed to misread both the Russians and the Americans.
Jim Guyot and I had several occasions to work together. In the 1970s we collaborated in a project to evaluate the use of federal funds at the City University of New York intended to support the institution’s adjustment to the broader admissions policy that the city had adopted. In the second half of the 1980s, at his suggestion, for several years we co-taught a course in research design as part of the graduate program in public administration at CUNY. None of these corresponded to any specifically chorus themes. From a general point of view, perhaps, the most interesting thing we did was to give our final exam half-way through the course so that our students would have time to exploit the feedback. What we brought to this experience from our chorus days together was trust in each other’s dispassion, good will, and zeal and the shared impulse to give our students a useful, informed, and original trip. In the same spirit, several years later in the1990s, at Dotty Guyot’s instigation, we would undertake an ultimately unsuccessful effort to create a college for American and Japanese students that would create the same opportunities for real exchange that the chorus has always sought with the Russian people.
Dub Alston was known to us for his passion for Faulkner and Nabokov. Most of us have been moved by his
Akh, Ty Serdtse or felt the power of his
Yekhal Ya na Pobyvku. Many have relished his eggs benedict, homard l’amoricaine, his sweetbreads, his canard à l’orange. A few have had occasion to witness the strange motions in the kitchen that produced these extravagances: the stiff-legged reach for a chef’s knife; the jerky but precise grasp of the duck’s leg; the stiff, jointless but proficient motion of mincing garlic. Few indeed, I’m sure, have witnessed these same motions – jointless, stiff, jerky yet proficient, decisive, and sure – in Dub’s native habitat, the laboratory. Dub did not consider himself a theoretician; he was proud to be an experimentalist.
I am surely one of the few privileged. In 1972 I encouraged Dub to join me at the Maret School in Washington DC, where I was headmaster, in order to build a science program. I could write endlessly about how Dub teased many tens of thousands of dollars of sophisticated equipment from corporate research departments, how he turned the traditional science curriculum on its head to create one of the strongest secondary school science programs in the country, and how he promoted genuine physical intuition in his students (“The car doesn’t throw me to the side as it swerves around a corner. It gets in my way.”) Most memorable, though, is rather how much the Dub in the lab -- building equipment, wiring cameras and strobe lights, setting up cloud chambers -- looked like the Dub I knew from our kitchen in Cambridge. Without looking at the instruments, an observer would be unable to know if he were watching Dub in the kitchen or in the lab. Dub knew how to spice an event as well as a duck. At our school fair, a popular annual event in Washington, Dub built a system of mirrors, whirling disks, and flashing lights that toward dusk illuminated the school’s extraordinarily beautiful acreage. To do what? For the pleasure of offering the day’s guests the opportunity to witness the measuring of the speed of light. I suspect that this constant has never, on any other occasion, been measured in our nation’s capital.
This has little to do with chorus themes. But our collaboration inherited from our chorus experience the absolute confidence we had in each other that each would do whatever the task at hand required and do it right. For those of us who knew him well, it is painful to think today that he speaks to us now only in memory.
My account has been a personal one, perhaps the only sort really possible. Long as it is, even as my own story, it is by no means complete. I know that there are other stories and we should hear them. I know too that there are many who were once part of the chorus whose lives were changed by that experience in important ways but who for one reason or another drifted away. Those stories we will never know.
Amendments anyone?
