This is the first full biography of the fearless life of Maria Yudina, the subversive and a legendary pianist who survived Stalin’s Russia and escaped camps that enveloped so many of her close friends. Maria Yudina was no ordinary musician who lived on the fringers of Soviet society and had close friendships with such towering figures like Boris Pasternak, Pavel Florensky, and Mikhail Bakhtin. A terrified radio presenter who has just finished broadcasting a performance of a Mozart piano concerto, brings back the departing soloist, orchestra and audience. Stalin has called to demand a recording of the concert, which had not been made. The piece played again, the vinyl disc given to an officer to take to the leader’s dacha, while Yudina slips a note into the sleeve, saying she wishes her love for Comrade Stalin to accompany her playing. The note turned out to be a passionate denunciation: reading it, Stalin laughs uproariously, suffers a stroke and later dies. After all, she was Stalin’s favourite as she rose to her fame during WWII, broadcasting almost daily on the radio, playing concerts or the wounded and troops in hospitals and submarines, and performing for the inhabitants of besieged Leningrad.
According to composer Dmitri Shostakovich, Stalin had asked the Radio Committee for a recording of the concerto, heard the evening before; the Committee had it recorded in a day and sent and Stalin sent Yudina 20, 000 roubles for her performance, for which she thanked him and went on – “ I will pray for you night and day and ask the Lord to forgive your great sins before the people and the country. The Lord is merciful and he’ll forgive you. I gave the money to the church that I attend.
Yudina, born on 1899, in the small north-west Russian town of Nevel, was a phenomenon in at least two senses, first as a pianist whose phrasing, vast repertoire spanning the 17th to the 20th centuries and appetite for learning new and her experimental works put her on top of the world performers. Yudina, born in a Jewish family, was stubbornly dissident through the worst Soviet repression, often embraced Russian Orthodox religion. She was often barred from performing but was never arrested nor imprisoned. She used her influence to have others’ sentences reduced, and what money she had to support their families.
In this engaging biography, Elizabeth Wilson sets Yudina’s extraordinary life within the context of her times, when her musical career is measured againt the intense intellectual and religious ferment of the post-revolutionary period and the ensuing years of Soviet repression.
Playing with Fire: The Story of Maria Yudina, pianist in Stalin’s Russia by Elizabeth Wilson, Yale £25, 352 pages.
