(Author: Paul Trewhela, Vol. 78, #3, Winter 2023)
Already as a young woman, Tanya Litvinov found herself at the harsh juncture between literature, art and the totalitarian society of the Soviet Union, where her parents were members of the precarious political elite. When Stalin sacked her father Maxim Litvinov as People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, considering a Jew unsuitable to propose his non-aggression Pact to Hitler, and ordered Molotov to “purge the ministry of Jews”, Tanya was sacked from art school – the Moscow State Academy Art Institute – by its rector, Igor Grabar: painter, scholar, and subsequently winner of the Lenin Prize.
Before 1939, however – the year of her father’s dismissal and her own dismissal by Grabar – Tanya had already as a teenager independently sought out the former Constructivist artist, Vladimir Tatlin, and been taught life-drawing by him, outside of academe. She told me he had asked her also to model for him, and regretted having modestly declined.
Returned to Britain decades later in 1976, after the death of her sculptor husband, Ilya Slonim, and returned to painting, Tanya gave barely any indication of her extraordinary previous life to artist friends in Brighton, where she settled after coming to look after her mother Ivy, who had returned before her. Nor did she do so in London, where she taught and exhibited. Her British painter colleagues, who loved and admired her, knew almost nothing of her life in Soviet Russia, and asked little.
This was indeed “another country”.
In her last decades, with her studio at the seafront on England’s south coast at Hove, near Brighton, life drawing had again become a passion in her. She died in Brighton in December 2011, aged 93.
Tanya Litvinov was born Tatyana Maximovna Litvinova in Hampstead, London, in 1918. Her mother Ivy Low was the daughter of an English Jewish father and the author of two novels before she and Maxim Litvinov met. She had been on the periphery of pre-First World War Bloomsbury, was a friend of DH Lawrence and had known Katherine Mansfield.
In 1937 – the worst year of the Terror – with her father Maxim still Foreign Commissar, the 18 year-old Tanya insisted on bringing an English family friend, Rose Cohen, to see her mother after Cohen’s husband Max Petrovsky was arrested (and soon after executed). Following Petrovsky’s arrest, Litvinov told Ivy: “I hope you’re not going to rush off and see Rose. It would be a terrible thing for you to do.” Much later, Ivy wrote: “Then Tanya rushed into the breach and said, ‘I don’t matter'”, before bringing Rose to see her. Prior to that, not a single friend had been to see Rose. “She was utterly lonely and trembling,” Ivy recalled.
Not long afterwards Rose Cohen was arrested and shot, and her child dispatched to an orphanage.
Recalling the long-standing friendship of the Soviet author Isaac Babel with the Slonim family Gregory Freidin, emeritus professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at Stanford, gives acknowledgement in his editing of Isaac Babel’s Selected Writings (Norton Critical Edition. W.W. Norton, 2009) to Ilya Slonim’s and Tanya’s memories of Babel (who was arrested in May 1939 and shot in January 1940). He thanks them for “sharing with me their memories of Babel and his circle: their recollections breathed life into more than one scholarly annotation.” In his collection of essays, The Enigma of Isaac Babel: Biography, History, Contexts (Stanford, 2009), he writes of Ilya as “Babel’s dear old friend”.
Freidin was married when young to Tanya’s and Slonim’s daughter, Masha Slonim, who previously lived and worked in Moscow as a highly respected journalist (and later was researcher for an acclaimed television series on BBC Two in Britain, Putin, Russia and the West).
Something of Tanya’s place in the Russian culture of her day is suggested in Freidin’s introductory words to an earlier study, A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self-Presentation (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1987), dedicated to his parents and to the memory of Ivy Litvinov. Mandelstam, he wrote, was “the focal point of a complex cultural phenomenon – perhaps a cult – in which art extends effortlessly into biography, history, politics, and above all the sphere of communal values held sacred by the poet’s readers.”
This was Tanya’s cultural milieu too, so different from the English experience of her lifetime, especially after her return to Britain.
Following Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in July 1941, when her father was recalled by Stalin as ambassador to Washington, Tanya and Slonim were evacuated to the wartime capital, Kuibyshev, east of Moscow (formerly and now again, Samara). There Slonim sculpted a bust of Dmitry Shostakovich, then living with his family in the same apartment building at the time of the premiere of his Leningrad Symphony in March 1942. The symphony was then performed in Moscow, and the score smuggled into Leningrad through the Nazi encirclement. It was played in its native city with the music reverberating from loudspeakers through the German lines. Through a microfilm of the score sent via Persia, it was played in London and New York, with numerous performances in the United States, Ivy Litvinov appearing beside conductor Arturo Toscanini at a performance in California.
Through Shostakovich’s intervention, Slonim was exempted from military call-up on the grounds he was sculpting the composer. His bust did not please. “What we need”, stated the chairman of the Soviet Committee for the Arts, “is an optimistic Shostakovich.” Half a century later, Tanya remembered how “Shostakovich was fond of repeating this phrase.”
In an interview given to an American magazine in 1943, Slonim recalled that Shostakovich had initially sat very stiffly while being sculpted. Tanya had “tried to keep him happy by putting on records for him, and this was a very great help. He was delighted when he discovered that we had records of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony and he enjoyed our Haydn numbers. At last he became used to us, and he talked freely, and I don’t think I have met a more interesting talker.
“His appreciation of literature is subtle and profound,” Slonim continued. “He can quote page after page, whole chapters sometimes, by heart – the classics, like Gogol and Tchekhov, and a lot of light stuff too.”
Slonim remembered the first public performance of the symphony as “a terrible ordeal” for Shostakovich.
“He was in and out of our apartment (we were next-door neighbours) all day, never staying longer than ten minutes, looking even paler than usual and, almost stammering, imploring us not to go to the concert, hoping all his friends would stay away.”
During the performance, Shostakovich “seemed to suffer agonies.” Called to the platform, he “stood up on the platform, rigid and unsmiling. And when, after it was over, there were enthusiastic clamours for the composer, the grim young man once more climbed up to the platform, looking as if he were going to be hanged.”
A photograph of Slonim’s portrait bust of Shostakovich, together with an English translation of a portion of an essay by Tanya, “Shostakovich in Kuibyshev” (written originally in Russian), together with more extended reminiscences from Tanya’s sister-in-law, Flora (married to her brother, Misha), appear in Elizabeth Wilson’s essential collection of documentary sources, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (Faber and Faber, London, 2006. First edition, 1994).
It was during the war years that the Litvinov family – Tanya included – was represented by movie actors in a romanticized wartime Hollywood propaganda film, Mission to Moscow.
Tanya’s parents returned to their flat in the House on the Embankment in 1943. And then, the war over, the Terror returned for the Soviet Union’s Jewish cultural, political and professional elite in the pogrom of Stalin’s last years, culminating in the notorious “Doctors’ Plot”. Ill for several years, Maxim Litvinov died on the last day of 1951, Ivy exclaiming, almost exultantly: “They didn’t get him!”
In her own last decade half a century later, Tanya recalled for me the night when, three years before her father’s death in Moscow, a ferocious racket broke out in the flat above them, occupied by the early Bolshevik, secretary general of the Red International of Trade Unions, Central Committee member, deputy Foreign Commissar and leader of the wartime Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Solomon Lozovsky.
“What’s that noise?” Litvinov asked, as he lay in bed. “Oh, Lozovsky must be having a dance,” his family told him, hoping to keep him calm. “Doesn’t sound like a dance to me,” responded the old man. He had slept with a pistol under his pillow for years, preferring suicide to the NKVD and the show trial.
Aged 70, Lozovsky in the flat upstairs had been arrested by the NKVD and his flat was being searched. He was brutally tortured, and eight months after Litvinov’s death was shot in the Lubyanka, together with 13 other members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee – among them the Yiddish poet, Itzik Fefer – in an episode known as the Night of the Murdered Poets.
Just before dying, Litvinov had gasped out to Ivy: “Englishwoman, go home.” Ten years earlier, even prior to his dismissal as Foreign Commissar, Stalin’s secret police chief, Beria, had tried but failed to trap Anna Larina, widow of the executed Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin, into incriminating him.
For decades, dictatorship put a barrier to Tanya’s life as an artist. Her husband Ilya refused on principle to join the Communist Party and could not get paying commissions. Tanya gave up painting and took up translating – the Russian classics into English, English fiction into Russian – as the means of feeding her family, working side by side with her mother. Together she and Ivy translated works by Pushkin, Turgenev and Alexei Tolstoy into English, while Tanya on her own translated George Meredith and Defoe, as well as the stories of John Cheever, who became a close personal friend until his death in 1982.
When Joseph Brodsky was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972, following his sentence (for “parasitism”) to five years’ labour on a collective farm in frozen Archangelsk in 1964, he gave Tanya his typewriter with its Cyrillic keyboard.
The revered Russian man of letters, writer of children’s stories, translator and memoirist, Kornei Chukovsky – whose encounters with Akhmatova extended to almost half a century, who is buried with his wife alongside Pasternak at the writers’ colony Peredelkino, and whose son-in-law was executed by Stalin’s goons in what Chukovsky could then only refer to in his diary as his daughter “Lidia’s tragedy”[I] – had for a long time been a friend of Ivy. From the early 1960s, when he was in his eighties, however, it is Tanya who – as the following extracts show – appears again and again in Chukovsky’s diary as one of its most luminous personal leitmotivs:
28 October 1960, in preparation of his will: “Tatyana Maximovna Litvinovna (i.e., Tanya) shall be given such of my English books as she shall desire.”
17 February 1963: Tanya had “made a clean copy” of a letter by Konstantin Paustovsky – considered one of the finest Russian stylists of the last century – written to premier Nikita Khrushchev about the destruction of wooden churches, incorporating minor changes by Chukovsky.
23 October 1964: A visit by John Cheever, accompanied by Tanya. “Her translation of his ‘Swimmer’ is wonderful.”
5 March 1966: Following the death of Akhmatova on 17 January, “There wasn’t a word about the funeral in any paper. As a result, only a small chance group gathered at the Writers’ Union: Yevtushenko, Voznesensky, Ardov, Marina, Tanya, Tarkovsky, and a few others. Tarkovsky said: ‘Life for her has ended; now comes immortality’.”
14 March 1967: “Tanya has a kind of faded look, as if she’d been sprinkled with ashes. …She read me the transcript of a trial in which a young man who had made a frank declaration of his beliefs was sentenced to three years’ hard labour even after his lawyer had proved him innocent in a brilliant peroration.”
29 December 1967: “The BBC has broadcast a protest written by Pavel Litvinov [Tanya’s nephew] against an article written in Vecherniaia gazeta calling Bukovsky a hooligan. [Vladimir Bukovsky, political dissident, was in the Gulag from 1967 until traded to the West for the Chilean Communist Party leader, Luis Corvalan, in 1976]. …Tanya tells me that the moment that the BBC broadcast the item about Pavel Litvinov our Soviet geniuses decided to vent their spleen on the late Maxim Litvinov. … [After reading an article commemorating an event in Soviet diplomacy] Tanya made some inquiries, and yes, there had been an order to pass over Litvinov’s name in silence, thereby making him responsible for the sins of his grandson twenty-five years after his death.”
For the first time since she’d brought the doomed Rose Cohen to her mother, life for Tanya had now become a direct challenge to the regime. As recorded by Chukovsky, she gave evidence for the defense in Bukovsky’s trial:
11 January 1968: “Tanya is back. She has written a scathing letter to Izvestiia about the trial of the four [Yuri Galanskov, Alexander Ginzburg, Vera Lashkova and Alexander Dobrovolsky, charged with writing and publishing seditious materials, Galanskov later dying in the gulag] and made another attempt to force her way into the courtroom with her nephew Pavel. I see it as a pre-Decembrist movement [a reference to the anti-tsarist movement in the officer corps of December 1825, suppressed with hangings and exile], the first in a series of heroic deeds and sacrifices on the part of the Russian intelligentsia…. This is only the beginning, a trickle.”
Pavel Litvinov is the son of Tanya’s older brother Misha and his wife Flora. On 5 August 1968 Pavel and seven colleagues (including Larissa Bogoraz, whose husband Yuli Daniel was already in the gulag, the poet Natalia Gorbanevskaya and Maya Kopelev, the woman who became Pavel’s wife) carried out one of the bravest and most honorable acts of protest of that greatly ambiguous year of “revolutions”, when they staged a sit-down protest in Red Square in Moscow against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. For this he was sentenced to five years exile in the intense cold of Siberia, where he worked in a fluorspar mine, and where his and Maya’s daughter, Larisa – named after Larisa Bogoraz – was born.
Tanya’s life at this time became an integral part of that of the “Shestidesyatniki” [Sixties activists], out of which the subsequent Soviet human rights movement developed. As David Remnick recalls in his Pulitzer Prize-winning history, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, this could have landed Pavel, Misha, Flora and Tanya “in jail or in front of a firing squad.”
Maya’s father, philologist and historian Lev Kopelev was himself a survivor of Stalin’s gulags. It was on him that Alexander Solzhenitsyn based the character Rubin in his novel, The First Circle.
Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, the biographers of Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB at the time of Red Square protest and subsequent head of the Soviet state, describe the protest in Red Square as “the beginning of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union.”
Having left the Soviet Union with Maya and Larisa in 1974 following his release from Siberia, Pavel taught physics in New York for 30 years until his retirement in 2006. His letter written with colleagues in 1967 and published in The Times in London is regarded as a founding moment of the Index on Censorship, celebrated in a talk at the London School of Economics in March 2012.
Pavel Litvinov is the son of Tanya’s older brother Misha and his wife Flora. On 5 August 1968 Pavel and sevencolleagues (including Larissa Bogoraz, whose husband Yuli Daniel was already in the gulag, the poet Natalia Gorbanevskaya and Maya Kopelev, the woman who became Pavel’s wife) carried out one of the bravest and most honorable acts of protest of that greatly ambiguous year of “revolutions”, when they staged a sit-down protest in Red Square in Moscow against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. For this he was sentenced to five years exile in the intense cold of Siberia, where he worked in a fluorspar mine, and where his and Maya’s daughter, Larisa – named after Larisa Bogoraz – was born.
Tanya’s life at this time became an integral part of that of the “Shestidesyatniki” [Sixties activists], out of which the subsequent Soviet human rights movement developed. As David Remnick recalls in his Pulitzer Prize-winning history, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, this could have landed Pavel, Misha, Flora and Tanya “in jail or in front of a firing squad.”
Maya’s father, philologist and historian Lev Kopelev was himself a survivor of Stalin’s gulags. It was on him that Alexander Solzhenitsyn based the character Rubin in his novel, The First Circle.
Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, the biographers of Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB at the time of Red Square protest and subsequent head of the Soviet state, describe the protest in Red Square as “the beginning of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union.”
Having left the Soviet Union with Maya and Larisa in 1974 following his release from Siberia, Pavel taught physics in New York for 30 years until his retirement in 2006. His letter written with colleagues in 1967 and published in The Times in London is regarded as a founding moment of the Index on Censorship, celebrated in a talk at the London School of Economics in March 2012.
After she returned to live in Britain, however, it was a period Tanya did not talk about.
Kornei Chukovsky, 6 April 1968, reviewing the dispositions of his will: apart from money set aside for his daughter, Lidia, and two others, a sum left “for Tatyana Maximovna Litvinova.”
27 May 1968: “A very tired Tanya came to see me. She’s not through with Meredith yet, but the end is in sight. Her brilliant translation of Cheever’s ‘Geometry of Love’ is out in the latest issue of Inostrannaia literatura.”
13 October 1968: “Tanya came this evening, with fiery eyes, grief-stricken, possessed. All she can talk about is the trial against Pavlik [Pavel], [Vadim] Delaunay, Bogoraz and the rest of them. She can’t get over how brave they were, and gave a detailed report of the proceedings, which were far from legal. There was despair in her every word, her every gesture.”
Chukovsky had already sensed the coming of the end of the Soviet regime. Six years previously, on 24 November 1962, he had written: “Stalin’s police thugs have come a cropper, and it’s all Akhmatova’s doing. … [Tens] of thousands of oprichniki [Ivan the Terrible’s henchmen] armed with every imaginable weapon, every imaginable torture, attacking a defenceless woman, and she proves stronger, she conquers them all. …The poet’s word is always stronger than the police’s thugs. It can’t be hidden, stamped out, or murdered. I know it from my own experience.”
After Ilya Slonim’s death in 1973, it was with this belief in the authority of art that Tanya arrived in Brighton in March 1976, summoned by her mother with the words: “I need you.” Her elder daughter Masha was already in Britain, while her younger daughter Vera had been visiting the United States with her then husband Valery Chalidze – a founder of samizdat publication in the Soviet Union together with Andrei Sakharov – when Chalidze was summarily deprived of his passport by Soviet embassy officials in November 1972, forbidden to return.
With serious intensity, Tanya resumed painting in Britain after Ivy’s death in 1977. She felt her greatest affinity with the approach of two former students of the British painter David Bomberg (1890-1957).
The first of these was Dennis Creffield, celebrated for powerful, inflected charcoal drawings of the cathedrals of England and Wales, who was then teaching at Brighton Polytechnic (now University of Brighton). After working in Brighton with Creffield, Tanya moved to classes at Morley College in London, where Miles Richmond – who had painted in Spain with Bomberg during the older man’s last years – was head of painting. From these she intuited a common aesthetic-philosophic conscience with her own, derived from Bomberg’s conception of “the spirit in the mass”.
When Richmond resigned to paint and teach in North Yorkshire, Tanya took his place at Morley College as head of painting, only to be required to resign when the authorities discovered she was older than permitted by the regulations. In October 2005, when she was 87, she took the train to North Yorkshire to join the last reunion of Bomberg’s pupils, held at Richmond’s studio in the village of East Rounton.
Six months after Tanya’s death, the first permanent collection of work by Bomberg, Creffield, Richmond and three close colleagues went on view in June 2012 at the Borough Road Gallery, a new exhibition centre at London South Bank University, where Bomberg taught part-time after World War II when it was the Borough Polytechnic.
Tanya had a solo exhibition of her work in Moscow in 1992, with the title Brighton-Moscow-Brighton, and showed in Brighton in June 2005 in an exhibition of life drawings with three colleagues. A solo exhibition of her paintings and drawings was held at the Russian club “Shed” in London in June 2006.
Of her painting, “The Book”, which she showed in London, she said: “The Book represents my interest in art and literature, something I got from my mother. It was a kind of crucifixion in a way.” A child-sized figure in the shape of a cross stands in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting, looking up to an angelic, much larger figure, holding a huge volume in her hands.
She knew she was Right, a collection of Ivy’s short stories, some first appearing in the New Yorker – its title a gender transfer from Trollope’s novel – was first published by Gollancz in 1971, then in an expanded edition as a Virago Modern Classic in 1988. A biography, The Exile: A Life of Ivy Litvinov, by John Carswell (a family friend), was published by Faber in 1983.
Tanya’s creed in art, after a fearsome century, was in homage to the imagination: “Evoke, do not describe.”
Paul Trewhela is a journalist, author and former anti-apartheid activists now living in Aylesbury, UK. From 1964-1967, he was imprisoned for his political activities, which included editing the underground journal of Umkhonto we Sizwe, Freedom Fighter, during the Rivonia Trial. He has since written extensively on the lives of fellow Jewish political activists and other aspects of the liberation movement. He is the author of Inside Quatro: Uncovering the Exile History of the ANC and SWAPO (Jacana Media, 2009).
NOTES
[I] Lidia Chukovskaya’s novel, Sofia Petrovna, was described in the Times Literary Supplement as “a classic of the purges”.
