Homeland in the mind

Raymond Carr BREAD OF EXILE by Dimitri Obolensky Harvill, £20, pp. 245 This book divides into two parts. The first contains the hitherto unpublished rec- ollections of Sir Dimitri's family, mainly concerning Russia before the Bolshevik revolution, and the second contains his own account of his life in exile.

The Russian aristocracy no doubt includ- ed boors and court reactionaries, but its more cultured, cosmopolitan, sophisticated and liberal-minded members compare favourably with the vulgarians and nou- veaux riches of Edward VII's Marlborough House set. Sir Dimitri's family included some of the grandest and richest of that aristocracy. His great-great-grandfather built the 150-room seaside palace where Churchill stayed for his Yalta meetings with Stalin and Roosevelt. His maternal grandmother, Countess Sandra Shuvalov, and her sister, Princess Demidov, were the daughters of Count Ilarion Vorontzov, a close friend of the Tsarist family. As children the sisters were greeted by Alexander III as 'little Vorontzovs'. They became close friends and playmates of the future Nicholas II; he joined them and their friends skating on the lake of the Anichov Palace, observed by the Tsar. A main concern of their memoirs is the bril- liant surface of St Petersburg society in the last days of the ancien regime; court balls with 3,000 sitting down to table made Buckingham Palace receptions look tawdry and mean in comparison. Politics are seen in terms of the palace cabals: the rift between Count Ilarion and the Grand Duke Sergei; Sandra's husband, Count Shuvalov, resisted the Grand Duke's plans for infiltrating factories with government spies and resigned. The Grand Duke was assassinated in 1905 and Count Shuvalov was restored to favour as governor of Moscow, only to be assassinated shortly afterwards. Princess Demidov's husband, Elim, was an independent-minded diplo- mat. Old Etonian and good shot, he was invited to Sandringham, and the Princess claims that it was his intimacy with Edward VII that brought to the attention of the future foreign minister, IsvolsIcy, the king's eagerness for a Russian alliance.

Enlightened and sophisticated though these privileged aristocrats were, as Hugh Trevor Roper in his pellucid introduction to this book remarks, they were 'semi- detached from the nation'. Did the sisters have any notion of the avalanche that was to overwhelm them? Could the catastrophe have been avoided? They can hardly be blamed for not foreseeing that Lenin and his gang of professional revolutionaries would come out on top in October 1917. Autocracy collapsed, they argue, because the last autocrat, their childhood playmate, Nicholas II, charming, intelligent and hon- ourable as they describe him, inherited from his Danish mother a fatal streak of weakness. If only Alexander III had escaped assassination, if Count Ilarion's advice had been taken, things would not have been allowed to drift.

Incontestably the best written and most evocative of these family memoirs is that of Sir Dimitri's father. His genuine love of nature comes out in his descriptions of summers spent on the family estates. A concerned landlord as a marshal of the nobility, he was an active member in the zemstvos, the local councils responsible for hospitals, schools and roads. Many of his fellow landowners felt `there's no point in it, you can't get anything done' — in Anna Karenina, Levin feels the same.

As all exiles do, he imagines an alterna- tive past. If only his hero, the reforming statesman Stolypin, had not been assassi- nated all would have been different. This is the nostalgia of liberal reformers who saw their hopes for democracy destroyed by Lenin:

Yet it still seems to me that our Russian understanding of democracy is quite differ- ent from that of Europe and America and that those western governments who try to implant their conception of democracy in other European and in Eastern countries are making an enormous mistake.

Sir Dimitri's account of his own life is moving, modest and eminently readable. His family fled from Bolshevik Moscow to end up in the Crimea where General Wrangel was making his last stand against Trotsky's armies, the campaign described in his diary by Sir Dimitri's stepfather, Count Andre Tolstoy. With defeat, the family started on their travels, arriving in Nice, for long the Riviera resort of the Russian rich — Alexander II's heir had died there in 1865. Hard up, the family moved to Paris, where 4,000 Russian emi- gres struggled to survive. Dimitri's father became a purser on the Ile de France and a dealer in rabbit skins, his uncle a taxi- driver, a prestigious profession for Parisian exiles. For its leaders the duty of this émi- gré community was to preserve the culture and traditions of the Russia they had left. For Dimitri, who comes out of this book as a deeply religious man, this tradition was embodied in the Orthodox Church; he served as an altar boy in the Paris church belonging to the Russian YMCA.

Many Russian aristocrats were commit-

ted Anglophiles brought up by British nan- nies. This now paid off. An old tutor of the Tolstoy family, a Merton man, offered Dimitri a place in his prep school. Subject- ed to the full rigours of private education, including a daily plunge into an unheated swimming pool, he learnt Latin sufficiently well to shine in his Paris lycdes, whence he won a scholarship to Trinity, Cambridge. There he made the disastrous decision of opting for philosophy. Bred in the French metaphysical mould, he encountered John Wisdom and British linguistic nit-picking. After Wisdom's first lecture he despaired.

I can bear it no longer [he told his tutor]. This morning I went to a lecture by Mr Wis- dom. All he did was to pace up and down with an agonised expression (in imitation, I later suspected, of Wittgenstein, who had a naturally agonised expression) discussing one single proposition: 'What do I mean when I say there is a blackboard there?'

He later repeated this story to Freddie Ayer to be told, `But I have kept audiences riveted to my words for an hour, saying precisely that.'

He switched, with relief, to Russian and French, starting on the road that was to make him a scholar of world-wide reputa- tion in Byzantine civilisation and its rela- tionship with Eastern Europe. In 1948 he became Reader, later Professor, of Russian and Balkan mediaeval history at Oxford.

It was from Oxford that he visited Rus- sia, for him an unknown country. In 1960 he was invited to a meeting of British and Soviet historians in Moscow. Sir Dimitri himself attacked a revered professor's paper on the conversion of Russia to Chris- tianity. Disassociating himself from its `Marxist intonations', he stressed the reli- gious and spiritual aspects of the subject. All hell broke loose. But worse was to come. In a paper on the diplomacy of the second world war the Soviet historians trot- ted out the standard stuff: Munich, the Sec- ond Front etc. The formidable and enraged Sir Charles Webster as the head of the British delegation would have none of this.

'Yes, we concluded the Munich Agreement; and a regrettable thing it was, as our histori- ans have admitted. But you,' he added, point- ing an accusing finger at the Soviet audience, 'did something even worse: you concluded a pact with Hitler.'

Sir Dimitri confesses,

I have often found it difficult to decide exact- ly what was — and is — my relationship with the Russia I left behind in 1919. A measure of ambiguity has always attended my thoughts on this matter.

On the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 he felt

unable, or unwilling, to hope for either a Soviet or a Nazi victory. Stalin, I was con- vinced, was as bad as Hitler; and I could not identify, at least without strong reservations, with the enthusiasm (understandably widespread in Britain) for the resistance of the Russian troops to the invader.

In his early visits to Russia he felt, 'This is not my country.' Yet he was conscious of his family's role in the history of Russia. A lady introduced to him by his title of 'Prince' remarked, 'I suppose you are descended from one of the lovers of Catherine the Great.' My ancestors,' this normally modest man retorted, `ruled Rus- sia in the ninth century.' His love of Rus- sian poetry and music was a permanent link with the people who spoke Russian. At 18 he attended the centenary celebrations in Paris of Pushlcin's death. Its message was that 'Russian literature is our final home- land, all that Russia is and will be'. It was in that literature and in the services of the Orthodox Church that he recovered his homeland.

The Vorontsov palace at Alupka on the Crimean coast, from where Dimitri Obolensky fled at the age of one' in 1919.