Rachmaninov`s Senar and Bunin`s Grasse: Russian Estate Life, Continued in Exile

Abstract

The idea that the Russian estate as a phenomenon lived a short life, which began in 1762 and abruptly ended in 1917 with the Russian Revolution and destruction of the institute of private landownership, dominated Russian historiography for quite a long period of time. However, in the last decades, this perspective changed significantly, and now researchers are more focused on studying what role estate life played in Russian culture after 1917. There were many forms of the existence of estate life: some estates transformed into museums of everyday life in the countryside or places where famous personalities lived and worked before their death, and so on. Others were restored or newly constructed in the Soviet times, especially during the wave of passeism, when writers reconsidered the estate world and the estate history as an essential component of cultural and historical memory, the “sanctuary of the soul.” Nevertheless, this myth-making also had a genuine basis – an attempt to reconstruct the estate history from abroad. The article, written in the genre of comparative case-study, is devoted to a comparative description of estate experiments, the actors of which were two famous Russian artists who found themselves in exile. The first case is the experience of I.A. Bunin, who settled in exile in the south of France and tried – under seemingly unfavorable conditions – to create some semblance of Russian estate life in a foreign land. The second case, a much more prosperous, at least in a material sense, is S.V. Rachmaninov’s project of building an estate on the shores of Lake Firvaldstät (Lucerne) to comfort his wife, who yearned for their Tambov family estate enormously. The article’s central question is what role such a resurrection of a piece of Russia abroad played in the exiled existence of Rachmaninov and Bunin, but also to what extent and how it was able to sublimate in their work.