This July the 125th birthday of Marc Chagall will be celebrated. Now the name of this artist belongs to the world, but in those days only Lord knew that a great painter was born in the land of Belarus. “My mother said that on the hour of my birth a huge fire broke out in a small house at the road behind the prison. The city was in flames and especially the quarter of poor Jews… Yet the house near the road in Peskovatiki survived the fire and soon after that my father sold it,” recollected Chagall in My Life.
The artist forever left Vitebsk in 1920. At first he lived in Moscow where he collaborated with the Jewish Chamber Theatre and then he was teaching in a school for orphans in Malakhovka and two years later he moved to Berlin and then in 1923 to Paris. Yet he did not leave the city which he tenderly loved all his life, but rather the Soviet reality.
“You don’t see tears in my eyes, for, however strange this might seem, my soul remained in my homeland and the land of my ancestors. My heart has always been here…” Chagall uttered these words in 1973 at the State Tretyakov Gallery.
He was personally invited to Moscow by Ekaterina Furtseva, then Minister of Culture in the USSR. Young employee at the Ministry of Culture Stella Kolovatova (now madam Despujol who has lived in Paris 35 years already) was commissioned with accompanying Marc and his wife Valentina Brodskaya (whom her husband and everybody else called “Vava”). Stella is an amazing person – a sea of charm and energy, an easy laugher and a very generous person. As a professional, Stella was in demand in Paris as well. She worked for the French Ministry of Culture and met most interesting personalities.
Madam Despujol recollects: “One day I was called by HR department head Nikolai Tselikov and he told me that I should accompany Chagall. I was bewildered: he did not need a translator and I was to work at the Second International Ballet Competition with famous ballet master Roland Petit. But I was not in the position to argue with my boss, especially since my appointment was ordered by Furtseva herself. From the very first minute of my acquaintance with Chagall I realized that our meeting was a gift of destiny. I’d say that Chagall was a man of happiness. He had amazingly young and piercing blue eyes radiating kindness. He rejected everything that inspired pessimism and looked for color in everything. It is because of the lack of colors that Chagall abandoned his homeland, as he himself ironically confessed. Marc said he could not work in a drab, though he initially believed in a better lot. In 1918 the Soviet government appointed Marc Chagall an authorized art representative in Vitebsk and on the eve of the first anniversary of the revolution he was in charge of organizing public processions. As a result workers were marching down the streets with huge posters featuring Chagall’s sketches.”
“On October 25 multicolored animals were rocking all over the city while workers were singing “International.” Seeing their smiles, I was confident that they understood me. However, the Communist bosses seemed less content. Why is the cow green and why is the horse flying over the sky, why? How does it relate to Marx and Lenin?” (from My Life).
– Stella, did Chagall make any frank remarks about the socialist system and communists?
– No, he did not touch those subjects. Even when for some reason his high-ranked curators refused to bring him to a Soviet collective farm. Here is the background. The Soviet government assigned a Chaika car to Marc and every time we needed a car I called the Ministry and the Chaika immediately arrived to the hotel entrance. On that day the car was to be provided at 9 a.m. but there was none at the entrance. I called and asked about the reason for the delay and was told that something went wrong with the car and it would take about an hour to fix it. I called an hour later and got the same answer. The car never arrived on that day. Marc understood everything, but he was a tactful person and did not grudge or comment on that situation; there was only a sad smile on his face.
– I am curious to know whether the Soviet government ensured a grand-style reception for the artist?
– You bet! Chagall and his wife were accommodated in the luxury suite of Hotel Rossiya. I remember Chagall examining his apartments, touching the walls with his hands and saying with irony: “Just look! Mr Brezhnev did not grudge such a luxury for a poor Jew!” Marc and Vava were unpretentious in their eating habits, ordered the plainest food and were content with everything. In Moscow Chagall was frequently recognized by foreign tourists. One day an American man asked him to sign his sheet. Chagall declined, saying: “You may later spit on this sheet and say that Chagall did that.” Yet this was said with a smile, in jest, and so nobody took offense.
Ekaterina Furtseva arranged a reception and excursion for Marc and Vava in the Kremlin. It was the first visit of Marc to the Kremlin cathedrals and he was stunned by what he saw. He was examining the frescos and exclaiming emotionally: “Here is the genuine art; this is where we should have learned!” Then he meditated for several minutes and said: “I left Russia because there were no colors, no paints…”
– Stella, where else did Chagall go and what did he wish to see?
– Leningrad, to be sure: at the age of 86 Chagall did not know fatigue. In the morning Marc and Vava visited the Hermitage. He was amazed at such a rich collection of Impressionists. Many of them he personally met since the days, when he had lived and worked at the “Hive” workshops in Montparnasse. These are such people as Modigliani, Picasso, Leger, and Braque. At the Russian Museum Chagall carefully examined each work and literally froze near one small landscape by Levitan. Then he turned to the museum director and said: “I’ll give you everything I’ve daubed during my lifetime for this one painting.” The director did not know what to say and then Chagall broke the pause and told him: “You don’t want to swap? Rightly so!” In Leningrad he also saw Moliere at Tovstonogov’s Theatre with Yursky starring.
And in Moscow Chagall was invited to Khachaturyan’s ballet Spartacus. After the ballet he met the composer. At the Tretyakov Picture Gallery he was moved to the quick, when they took out from the storehouse his decorations for The Bedbug by Mayakovsky that was staged in Moscow’s Jewish Theatre at the turn of the XX century. Marc could not believe his eyes and kept mumbling: “My goodness! I thought this stuff was destroyed long ago…”
Specifically for the Chagalls a marvelous concert with the involvement of Leonid Kogan’s children was organized. Marc also met Sergey Mikhalkov at his dacha in Peredelkino, where poet Voznesensky whom the Chagalls highly appreciated joined their company.
True, Vava wanted to visit the Novodevichy Cemetery but Marc refused to go there, saying: “What’s the use of looking at stones?”
– By the way, why didn’t Chagall visit Vitebsk?
– Marc was proposed a tour of his home city, but he refused because he was afraid of too strong emotions.
“A lot of time has passed since I saw or heard you for the last time, my beloved city; since I leaned upon your fences or watched your clouds. As a sad wanderer, I’ve been bearing your breath on my paintings all these long years. And in this way I was talking to you and saw you as though in a dream… I was far away, but there wasn’t a single painting of mine that would not be imbibed with your spirit and would not reflect you.”
In 1978 there was another meeting of Stella with Chagall. A year before that Stella had moved to France where her new life began. “Be sure to come to our place if you happen to be in France.” Remembering this invitation from the Chagalls, Stella set out for the south of France to St-Paul-de-Vence. She also had the intention to visit the recently opened museum “The Biblical Message of Marc Chagall.”
– Marc and Vava game me a very warm reception. At that time they also had another guest – that Messieur was very pleasant to talk to. When I said that I’d be delighted to visit the museum, it turned out that the museum was closed on holidays. I was discouraged, since I could not stay in the south of France longer than 3 days. And then I was told that my new friend was director of that very museum and the next morning I was already in Nice and examined the exposition accompanied by the museum’s security guard. Later we called each other many times and Chagall offered me to work for him. The proposal was very tempting, but the capital city seemed more promising to a young person like me as far as the choice of the life career was concerned.
Elena Bazan
Source: Russkiy Ochevidets
