Stalin's Vestal Virgins

When Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007, the centuries old tradition of keeping dancing beers was banned in the country. The Austrian Four Paws foundation purchased the animals from their keepers, and carried them to the bear park of Belitsa, where they have been gradually teaching them how to live, move about, copulate and obtain food as free bears do. Yet, when they see a man, these bears stand again on two feet, and start dancing. As if they were calling their former keeper to come back and take their control in his hand again. As if they were telling: “Let him beat me, let him treat me badly, but let him relieve me of this goddamned need to deal with my own life”, writes the Polish star journalist Witold Szabłowski in his 2014 book Tańczące niedźwiedzie (Dancing bears. True stories of people nostalgic for life under tyranny).

Szabłowski devotes the first chapter to his conversations with Gypsy bear keepers and animal rights activists. But, as the subtitle of the book indicates, he also uses the figure of the bears longing for their former life, captive but without responsibilities, as a metaphor. While traveling through Eastern Europe, from Estonia to Grece, he shows in a series of reports how nostalgic these peoples are of the past dictatorships as a period of security in all sorts of ways, and how this nostalgia becomes a fertile soil for new dictatorships.


Chapter Eighth is about Georgia, and one of its emblematic buildings, the Stalin Museum in Gori. This was founded in 1957 by Gori’s council next to the modest birthplace of the Leader, which was surrounded by a stunning Stalin Baroque protective building as a sarcophagus. The foundation was indirectly inspired by Khrushchev’s secret speech on the 20th party congress of 1956, in which he condemned the sins of Stalinism. Although Georgia suffered a great deal from Stalin’s and Beria’s terror, the Georgians considered the speech as the plundering of their national pride, and two weeks later, on March 5, the anniversary of Stalin’s death, they went to the streets to protect Stalin'ş memory, absurdly, against the Soviet government. The demonstration, which lasted for several days, was finally suppressed by the tanks of the Soviet army, leaving dozens – or hundreds – of dead after them. From the on, the Georgian party leadership kept distance from the Soviet one, and one of its first gestures was the founding of the Stalin Museum, the memorial place of “the real Stalin”, in Gori.

In the 1990s, the museum was closed down for a long time, but the exhibition was not suppressed. They planned to reorganize it so it would also display the sins of Stalinism, but nothing came of it. After the reopening in the 2000s, the exhibition remained the same, only a couple of tableaus were added to illustrate the Georgian historical background. And the spirit of the museum and of the museum workers has also remained the same. This spirit has been captured by Szabłowski in his conversations with the museum staff, from which he compiled the following chapter, entitled Stalin’s Vestal Virgins.


“He comes to me at night. He gazes at me, puffs on his pipe, and twirls his mustache. He smiles, and then heads for the door. Then I weep and cry for him to stay. But what guy would be bothered by a woman crying? Georgian men are like that: they have a drink, enter you, come quickly, and fall asleep. I hate men who drink. But here in Gori there’s no other kind. The other kind only exists in American movies.

“Stalin was a different matter. Highly civilized. He knew how to take care of a woman, how to pay her a compliment, how to smell nice. He lived modestly, but he wore smart clothes. And he didn’t drink too much. And if he did, it was only good, foreign alcohol. I hardly need mention the fact that he conquered fascism and Hitler. So I said to myself many years ago, ‘Tanya, why the hell should you have to squabble with drunks? Why the hell, when you can live with Stalin?’”


Anna Sreseli: He’s like family

“We’re standing outside the house where Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was born. His parents lived in poverty. His mother did laundry for the local priests. His father was a cobbler. As you can see, his house has had a structure in the classical style built around it, and the neighboring ones have been demolished. Yes, the entire district. No, I don’t think there’s anything odd about that. Would you be happier if there were hens crapping here, and children playing ball?

“My grandmother lived in one of the houses that was demolished. She was given an apartment in a block. To the end of her life she kept saying, ‘How happy I am to have been born next to Stalin’s house. And that I can still see it from my windows.’

“Grandmother could remember Stalin’s mother. He lived here for more than a decade. She lived here almost to the end of her life. For us, it was a big source of pride. The biggest. Because in our town there’s nothing else going on. If it weren’t for the museum, the town would have ceased to exist long ago.

“A few years ago we had a war. The Ossetia border isn’t far away. A hundred Russian tanks drove into Gori. We fled to Tbilisi. I wasn’t afraid they’d blow up my housing block and my apartment, only that they’d blow up the museum. But they didn’t damage anything. They’re still afraid of Stalin. They didn’t touch the smallest patch of grass. They just took photos of each other by his statue. And that’s how Stalin saved us from beyond the grave.

“When I was at school, some of the girls dreamed of working in a store, others longed to fly into outer space, but I wanted to tell people about our great compatriot. I steered my entire life toward making it come true. I chose to study history. And after college I ran straight to the museum to ask for a job.

“But by then the Soviet Union had collapsed. The museum was closed and had barely survived. They had only recently begun to employ people again. I was the first person to be accepted in the new intake. Meanwhile I’d started to teach history at the high school—so I work part time at the museum.

“When I was at college, we were still taught that Stalin was an outstanding statesman. But the system changed, the curriculum changed, and now I have to teach that he was a tyrant and a criminal. I don’t think that’s true. The resettlements? They were necessary for people to live in peace. The killings? He wasn’t responsible for them—it was Beria. The famine in Ukraine? That was a natural disaster. The Katyn massacre? I knew you’d ask. All the Poles ask about it. But there was a war on—in wartime that sort of action is a normal thing. And before you start ranting, please let me finish. Are you feeling calmer now? All right, I’ll tell you my personal opinion.

“I regard Stalin as a great man, but I can’t say that, either to my students or to the tourists, so I say, ‘Some regard him as a dictator, others as a tyrant, and others see him as a genius. What he really was, you can decide for yourselves.’”


Tatiana Mardzhanishvili: O Christ, take me to dear Stalin

“When I see what they’ve done to our beloved Stalin, my heart bleeds! How could they? How could they make such a good man into a monster, a cannibal, an ogre?

“Once upon a time, bus after bus came to our museum. People stood in lines several hundred yards long. I used to look at those people’s faces, and I could see the goodness emanating from them. But nowadays? One would bite the other. That’s capitalism for you.

“Now I don’t go there anymore. First, because of regret—for my youth, my job, and my friends. And second, because my legs are weak. I can’t even get down the stairs on my own. In March I’ll be eighty-two, and you can’t expect a person to be healthy all their life. In the morning I get up, cut a slice of bread, make the tea, sit down, and say to myself, ‘O Christ, why did you let me live to see times like these? Why do they badmouth our darling Stalin?’

“But later I think, ‘Just remember, Tanya, how much Stalin suffered for the people. It was for you too that he went without enough food and sleep. He fought against fascism so you could finish your education.’ And then I fetch the medal with Stalin’s face on it, which I was given when I retired. I stroke the darling man’s mustache, and somehow I feel better.

“I worked at the museum from 1975. As a nabliudatel, a person responsible for the order and safety of the exhibits. If anyone tried to touch them, we had to go and shout at them.

“It wasn’t easy. Old women used to come from the villages and throw themselves at our Stalin. They had to kiss each picture in the display, like icons in a church. And there are over a thousand of those pictures! If a whole busload of those old crones drove in, and they all wanted to kiss them, what was I to do? If the director was looking, I’d go up and shout. But if he wasn’t, I’d say, ‘Kiss away, ladies. May God grant you good health! But don’t touch the mask! Under no circumstances.’ The mask is the most sacred object in the entire museum, because it’s his death mask.

“Before, I worked at the National Museum in Tbilisi, but my second husband was from Gori, and I managed to arrange a transfer. It wasn’t easy. The Stalin museum wasn’t a place you could just walk into off the street and ask, ‘You don’t have a job opening, do you?’ Public opinion counted. I was a divorcée. My first husband drank and beat me—the less said about him the better. At the time, I was afraid the divorce would be a problem. Luckily, I had a very good reference from the museum in Tbilisi.

“The smartest people from all over the world used to come and admire Stalin’s house. From all over Russia, Asia, and America. Journalists, ambassadors, and artists. And I stood among the exhibits with a small card showing my name, as proud as could be. That job meant everything to me. The museum was like a home to me. “My husband didn’t understand. I had nothing to talk to him about. Although I only guarded the exhibits, I used to read books and got to know new people. But he drank too. He tried to beat me, but this time I wasn’t having it. Later on, he fell sick and went on welfare. He’d spend all day long sitting in the apartment, or at his mother’s. He used to say nasty things about Stalin, just to spite me.

“When the USSR collapsed, he stuck out his tongue at me. It gave him great satisfaction. And then he died.

“It’s a shame he didn’t live to the present times. Now I’d be sticking out my tongue at him. What do we need all this capitalism for, all these American cheeses, juices, and chocolate? You can’t even buy normal milk anymore—it has to be in a carton, because that’s how it is in America. I think, ‘O Christ, take me off to my dear Stalin. Take me away from this world, because I can’t bear it here any longer.’”


Nana Magavariani: Whenever I see him, a shiver goes down my spine

“My job title used to be ‘head of personnel.’ Nowadays it’s ‘manager.’

“The museum has a total of sixty-three employees. I am responsible for their recruitment and employment. There are ten tour guides, eleven custodians, and two cashiers. Since last year, we also have a pioneer—a girl in a uniform and a red scarf who sells postcards and poses for pictures. That was my idea, for which I received a personal commendation from the director. ‘A tourist has to have something to be photographed with, sir. Otherwise he won’t praise our museum, and as a result we’ll have bad PR.’ I know, because we’ve had special training on tourist activity within capitalism.

“In the past, people used to come mainly from the Soviet Union. Russian was enough for us, but we also had two ladies who knew English and French. Nowadays a Russian tourist is a rare occasion for celebration. If one turns up, half the personnel comes to look at him. And we give him the best possible tour. Let them see that politics is politics, but the Georgians are their friends.

“These days most of the tourists are from America and Poland. And that’s a problem, because not all the ladies know English well enough to provide for that sort of tourist—here each tourist has a personal guide. What can we do? It’s not as if I’m going to fire the ladies before their retirement, or teach them English. They can see that in the new times they’re not needed, and that they’re a sort of burden for the museum. But we never talk to one another about it. I know what it means to lose your job in your prime.

“I used to work at a clothing factory. In the personnel department too. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the factory collapsed with it. And everything was looted—even the glass was stolen out of the window frames. In Stalin’s day something like that wouldn’t have been possible. The culprits would have been punished. So these days when I hear the stories they tell about him, I say, ‘People, you’ve lost your minds. Remember the Soviet Union. Everyone had work. The children had a free education. From Tbilisi to Vladivostok.’ If it weren’t for Communism, I, for example, would still be living in the countryside. I would never have thought of occupying a managerial position, because only men had those jobs before then. No system has ever given women as much.

“Since its collapse, everything is worse. In the past, the doctors couldn’t refuse to help a poor person. Now the health service is private, and even if you break a leg you have to pay. It’s the same with education. A retired person used to have the phone for free, and paid less for electricity. But now? You get a pension of twenty dollars, and the prices are like in the West.

“And life gets worse and worse for women. In the USSR men had a good life. There were no wars. And if a man hit you, you could go and complain to the party committee. The committee informed the party cell at the factory, and the abuser could get into big trouble.

“These days the men have no work and they’re frustrated. And when one of them hits you, you’ve no one to defend you.

“But at our museum most of the staff are women. Even in the support services, which I haven’t encountered at any other workplace of this kind. Most of the space here is dedicated to Stalin as a son, a husband, and a father. Less to him as a soldier or as a strategist. Women are much better suited to this.

“I also think Stalin’s magic is at work here. Women were always mad about him. The wives of diplomats wrote in their diaries that he was very attractive.

“Something of his charm remains to this day. Sometimes when I stop at his death mask, I only have to glance at it, and it sends such a shiver down my spine that I have to go outside into the fresh air for a while.”


Larisa Gazashvili: I love his poetry

“My parents were the Romeo and Juliet of the Stalin era.

“My paternal grandfather was a Georgian prince. He rode a white horse, he had a large estate, and in his house he kept a padlocked chest of gold. When Communism came along, they called him a kulak,* they took away his land and his gold, and left him with nothing but the chest. I still have it to this day.

“My maternal grandfather was from a peasant family. Thanks to Stalin, he went to school. Thanks to Stalin, he worked on a collective farm, and later on—also thanks to Stalin—he became its manager.

“The worse life became for my paternal grandfather, the better it was for my maternal one. When my parents fell in love, neither of their fathers would hear of them getting married.

“My grandfather, the manager, shut my mother in the house under lock and key. Later on he sent her to college in Moscow. He sought out suitors for her among the sons of his friends.

“My other grandfather, the prince, sought a wife for my father from the former aristocracy. Later on he shouted at him. And even later he cursed him.

“But as we all know, when young people dig in their heels there’s no one more determined. My parents got married, with neither set of parents present at the wedding. They never went to visit each other, and pretended not to know each other. So it was to the end of their lives. “So when I got a job at the Stalin museum, my grandfather the manager kissed me heartily. And my grandfather the prince was mortally offended.

“At the museum I was responsible for propaganda. It was a very serious role. We used to publish a newspaper, Stalin’s poetry, and other literature. He wrote beautiful poems. Romantic, tugging at the heartstrings. If he hadn’t become a politician, who knows, maybe he’d have won the Nobel Prize?

“The newspaper was called Bulletin. Or rather at one time it was called Bulletin of the Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin Museum. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, it was reduced to Bulletin. To avoid hurting anyone’s feelings.

“When the USSR collapsed, we had awful confusion. First they closed our museum; then they opened it again. They changed the exhibition, then went back to the old one. Nobody had the money to replace the entire display. Nor did anyone have the courage to close the museum down entirely. Too many Georgians still love Stalin.

“Now, unfortunately, there’s no money to publish the Bulletin. And I’m a tour guide.

“I went to college in Kaliningrad. I had a good life there. I worked at a school, but when Mommy fell seriously ill I had to come back to Gori.

“Some people we knew said a woman at the Stalin museum had gone on maternity leave. So I went to the party committee to ask about the job. They said first I had to pass an exam.

“The exam was hard. I had to quote by heart from the history of the Communist Party, Stalin’s biography, and the history of the USSR. But I had studied history. I knew it all by heart. So I passed with flying colors.

“So many bad things are said about Communism, but in the past the director understood that on Sundays I had to have the day off because I’m a churchgoer. Yet now they’ve put me down for Sundays. Out of malice, I’m sure.”


Tatiana Gurgenidze: I’d have been good to him

“I was born in a bad system. Because I have the mentality of a socialist hero of labor. When something needs to be done for society, I go and do it. I’ve produced a wall newspaper for the employees and classes for single mothers bringing up children on their own.

“In the Communist era, everyone would have respected me. But now that we have capitalism, they look at me as if I’m an idiot.

“So when I really can’t manage anymore, I come to the museum to calm down. And I say, ‘Mr. Stalin, I know you’d appreciate it.’ And it helps. And when I dream about Stalin—as I told you, he looks at me, twirls his moustache, and leaves—it’s usually a few days after one of those relaxing museum visits.

“I’m not really in the right era when it comes to my attitude to men either. You see, there wasn’t any sex in the Soviet Union, at least not obviously. There was ‘intercourse between the genders.’ There wasn’t any of what the young people watch on television these days. All those music videos and naked butts, if you’ll pardon the expression. Instead of a kiss, someone just lightly stroked someone else’s arm, and that was enough. A woman had to be a good worker, dress and behave modestly. So whenever I’m shocked by the sight of today’s young girls, I go to the museum too. And I say, ‘Mr. Stalin, you wouldn’t like it either.’ And once again it helps.

“I don’t like drunks. Or drug addicts. Our president upsets me, because why does he have to antagonize Russia? It’s a known fact that you can even come to terms with a bear if you want to. But Saakashvili* is insistent—with Russia just across the border—on making a second America here. We’ve had a war because of him, and we’re sure to have another one too. When the war was on, they closed the museum, so I came to the park, to the statue, and I said, ‘Mr. Stalin, you’d have got a firm grip on it all, and there’d be peace.’

“And sometimes I go and say to him, ‘If you were alive, maybe we’d be together. You’d have a good time with me. I know how to cook, I’m a cheerful person, and I can sing well too.’ And I fantasize about how nice it would be to be Stalin’s wife. But later on I reject those thoughts, because I’m behaving like an idiot. Stalin is dead. Communism has collapsed. It’s over. It’s finished. Been and gone.

“If I dream about him when I’m feeling like that, I’m very cold and official toward him in my dream.”


Natia Joldbori: son, be like Stalin

“My momma told me, ‘Darling, don’t go for that job. Of course Stalin was a great man. But something like that looks bad on your résumé these days. One day you’ll want a different job, and they won’t give it to you. Besides, it’s embarrassing to work there.’

“But I have a small son, and I needed the money. In Gori, if you have any ambitions, there’s no choice. You can teach at a school or work in the local administration. Or at Stalinland—that’s what some people call our museum. Young people especially like to make fun of it. They call the women who work here the Stalinettes or the vestal virgins—because it’s as if they’re doing their best not to let the flame of Communism go out. I keep all that at arm’s length, though I can see that for most people in Gori the world ended when the USSR collapsed. I have one elderly colleague whose grandfathers were both killed in the Stalin era, but even so she’ll never stop defending him and loving him.

“I can hardly remember Communism. I was born when it was in its decline. I remember seeing the tanks in Vilnius on TV. When we regained independence, my dad and I went to the main town square with a Georgian flag. Those are fine memories.

“Dad soon understood the new times. He sent me to learn English when I was just seven years old. Thanks to my English, I got my job at the museum. There are only two of us here who can speak it. As a result, we have the most tour groups, while the ladies who are deeply in love with Stalin sit and make themselves cup after cup of coffee. Afterward, we get the same salary as them. But I’m not complaining. The main thing is that I have a job.

“My son doesn’t know a single word of Russian. He’s had English since preschool. It’ll be a totally different generation. Stalin? A completely abstract concept.

“What do I think about Stalin? Here, in Gori, it’s customary for parents or grandparents to take their kids to the museum and tell them about him. I brought my toddler here too. And I told him, just like it says in those American guides to success, ‘He was much worse off than you are. His father drank, his cottage was falling down, and the other kids were good-for-nothings. But he was hardworking, thanks to which years later he ruled the entire country. If you study, you can achieve a lot too.’”


Anna Tkabladze: we boycott the carve-up of Poland

“Here we have his favorite cigarettes. Here’s the watch he was given by his mother. He was a good son. An affectionate husband. A loving father. He cared for his staff as if they were his own children.

“Nowadays they say he was a bad man. But in the archive we have pictures of him planting apple trees in the summer. I think a bad man would have been beating someone up or killing them, not planting trees. You have your views. That he murdered millions. But there’s no proof of that. All the documents were faked by Beria. Stalin only made one mistake—he was too good. He put too much trust in others.

“I can’t say all that to the tourists. The management writes scripts for the guided tours. What’s in them? Just like I said: he was a good son and an affectionate husband. We can also mention that he defeated fascism. But not much more. Murders? I’ve just about had enough of you. Here we have a sort of unwritten agreement that if a tourist really gets under our skin, we can go outside the museum to argue with him. But right now we are inside the museum, and I have to stick to the script.

“They’ve even posted a sign about the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. Of course, it was wrong from the start. Because for Poland it certainly wasn’t a good pact at all. But it gave the USSR a few years to arm itself, thanks to which fascism was defeated. But we’re supposed to give the impression that the carve-up of Poland was a myth. So we leave that sign out of our tours. It’s our silent boycott.

“I’ll tell you frankly, I don’t know what to think about the Poles. On the one hand, when we had the war with Russia here, you people helped us a lot. Trucks full of clothes and food kept arriving every day.

“But nobody harps on us as much as you people. Everyone else comes through here and listens with interest, but the Poles shout at me as if I were Stalin himself and had carved up Poland in person. And now they’re saying Poland is going to help rebuild the Stalin Museum as the Museum of the Fight against Communism. If that’s true, all Gori will come to a standstill. Because we have nothing here except for our Stalin.”

The introductory motto of the exhibition is: “Man does not live forever. I also die. What will be the judgment of the people and of history about me? There were a lot of mistakes, but were there were no achievements as well? The mistakes will of course be attributed to me. A large pile of garbage will be collected on my tomb, but the day will come, when the wind of history will implacably blow it away.”

Dark eyes

A beautiful song from the Golden Age of Argentine Tango with a storied past from the Golden Age of Russian Romance… A tango classic recorded in Buenos Aires by the prolific Francisco Canaro in 1935 is revealed to be a Spanish-German remix of a Russian song arranged by a Dane for a Romani choir, setting a verse of a Ukrainian poet to a Polish-Lithuanian waltz which successfully masqueraded as French. In other words, a vintage Rio Wang material.

Manuel Salina y Florian Rey 1934 Ojos negros que fascinan ojos negros que dominan ojos negros, dulces ojos son tan crueles y tan piadosos Ojos negros que arrebatan ojos negros que me matan ojos negros, dulces ojos, triste vida de mi corazón Voy pasando por mi vida atormentada bajo el fuego abrasador de tu mirada, voy cruzando por la vida como una pobre sombra perdida. En el fondo de mi alma ya no brilla más que el fuego abrasador de tu pupila en el fondo de mi alma, donde siempre tu amor vivirá.

Translation by Alejandro Sasha Vicente-Grabovetsky, creator of Tango Translation Database Dark eyes that enchant Dark eyes that dominate; dark eyes, sweet eyes; they are so cruel and so kind. Dark eyes that captivate; dark eyes that kill me; dark eyes, sweet eyes; sad life of my heart. I pass through my tormented life under the scorching fire of your gaze, I walk across life like a poor, lost shadow. In the bottom of my soul now shines but the scorching fire of your pupil in the bottom of my soul where your love will always live

I spent years trying to solve the riddles and mysteries surrounding Dark Eyes, a song about fatal love and perdition which almost prophetically touched most of the talents who ever touched it, making them vanish from history. The project is nearly complete. Let’s unravel this convoluted story thread, starting from near its end, from 1935. We’ll end up time-traveling a full century back in time before it’s over.

Odeon’s 1935 disk 4939-B describes Canaro’s “tango con estribillo” (tango with a short vocal section) as Ojos negros que fascinan, authored by Manuel Salina and Florian Rey. But peculiarly, no such song can be found in the SADAIC database. As it turns out, the song was first recorded a year earlier, under a completely different title. It was called simply Romanza rusa (Ojos negros), sobre un motivo popular ruso (“Russian romance (Dark eyes), inspired by a Russian folk motif”). This “Russian romance in Spanish” wasn’t issued on a disk. Instead, the recording came out in the revolutionary format of a “1934 Youtube”, a short standalone movie clip, one of the earliest “talkies” in Spanish language. Famous Spanish movie director Florian Rey cast his lead actress (and fiancee) Imperio Argentine in this film clip. Rey (born Antonio Martínez del Castillo) was a great fan of Russian culture (and a sworn enemy of the Left), who soon moved to Germany on Hitler’s personal invitation. But when the Führer started making advances at his beautiful Argentine wife, it ended up in a divorce and a low-key return of the director to oblivion in his home country.


Manuel Salina y Florian Rey: Ojos negros, performed by Imperio Argentina in the clip of 1934, which we, however, could not find and link here

Imperio Argentina, born Magdalena Nile del Rio and known to her friends as Malena, specialized in folkloric song and dance on stage and on screen. She proudly declared herself the only woman who ever sung together with Carlos Gardel, the iconic symbol of Argentine tango. (They performed together in a Spanish-language talkie made in Paris in 1935, Melodia de arrabal). She wrote that, although Gardel was rumored to be gay, his problem with female singers stemmed from simple dislike of their voices… but even Gardel couldn’t resist the feminine magic of his beautiful dark-eyed compatriot.

It was after the Parisian adventure that Florian Rey decided to cast her in a short movie with a Russian-Spanish folk song stylized as Argentine tango. The original Russian romance already reverberate across the world after Feodor Chaliapin’s tours. The legendary opera bass is said to have added several new stanzas, in adoration of his dark-eyed Italian wife Iola Tornagi. For Iperio Argentina’s Dark Eyes, the song was arranged by Manuel “Paco” Salina, a Spanish songwriter and composer of German extraction, whose birth name was Günther Ehrenfried Salinger. Salina was well known by his adaptation of other composers’ music to popular styles. With their only foray into tango, Salina and Rey have made quite a remarkable job. Of course, being true to the Argentine tradition of his day, Francisco Canaro has retained just one bridge-estribillo in his recording, completely skipping the verse stanzas.

Time to travel deeper into the past now. From this point on, the poems we’ll encounter will all be in Russian. We are going to 1928, to Paris and Riga! Or, for that matter, let’s head straight into 1893, to Dvinsk (presently Daugavpils in Latvia), then a county seat of Russia’s Vitebsk Gubernia. On the 17th of the month of Tevet, year 5653 of the Jewish calendar, the youngest son is born into a big family of a musician Dovid bar Morduch Strok. Little Osher will in time become Oscar Davidovich Strok, the King of Russian Tango.

Dvinsk was a garrison town with a giant fortress and army, and Dovid Strok moved there for a job of military musicians, but by the time of Oscar’s birth, his father and his older brother worked in a theater orchestra.

The Russian 1897 Census sheets were supposed to be destroyed, but the sheet enumerating the Stroks of Dvinsk has miraculously survived. Osher, age 4, is on line 8.

“Rigas Tango Karalis”: A memorial plaque honoring the King of Tango Oscar Strok is unveiled in Riga in 2013

Oscar Strok followed the footsteps of his musical clan, but he only wrote his first (and, in my opinion, the best) tango at the age of 35. It was Dark Eyes, a different tango drawing on the same Russian song.

A hot romance with a secretary of his Riga-based magazine, Leni Libman, lead Oscar to abandon his family and to escape to Paris with his dark-eyed girlfriend. That’s where he fell under the spell of tango. That’s where he composed his Dark Eyes, complete with an extensive musical quote from the classic Russian romance.

The love to the dark eyes, as every superstitious Eastern European knows, couldn’t portend any good. All what it gave Strok was a wounded heart, a pile of debts… and this one unforgettable tango, with the lyrics completed by Oscar’s friend and fellow Riga entertainer, a Cossack Yesaul (chieftain) Aleksandr Perfilyev, a heir to a famed line of Siberian explorers.

Оскар Строк, Александр Перфильев 1928 Был день осенний, и листья гpустно опадали В последних астpах Печаль хpустальная жила Гpусти тогда с тобою мы не знали Ведь мы любили и для нас весна цвела. Ах, эти чеpные глаза меня пленили, Их позабыть нигде нельзя, Они гоpят пеpедо мной. Ах, эти чеpные глаза меня любили Куда же вы скpылись бы тепеpь, Кто близок вам дpугой. Ах, эти чеpные глаза меня погубят, Их позабыть нигде нельзя Они гоpят пеpедо мной. Ах, эти чеpные глаза, кто вас полюбит, Тот потеpяет навсегда И сеpдце и покой. Очи чёрные, очи страстные, Очи милые и прекрасные! Как люблю я вас, как боюсь я вас! Знать, увидел вас в недобрый час! …Ах, эти чеpные глаза, кто вас полюбит, Тот потеpяет навсегда И сеpдце и покой.

Oscar Strok, Alexander Perfilyev Dark Eyes tango It was an autumn day With leaves falling, dejectedly, And in the last chrysanthemums Lurked a sad sparkle of frost But the two of us didn’t know sadness yet For we were in love, and our spring was abloom Oh the dark eyes that captivated me, One can’t forget them anywhere; They are ablaze before me. The dark eyes which once loved me, Where are you hiding now? Who else is close to you? Oh, the dark eyes will spell my doom, One can’t forget them anywhere; They are ablaze before me. Whoever falls in love with the dark eyes Shall lose forever One’s heart and one’s peace Dark eyes, eyes of passion, Dear and beautiful eyes! How I love you, how I fear you! I think I met you in an ill-fated hour! …Whoever falls in love with the dark eyes Shall lose forever One’s heart and one’s peace

Piotr Leschenko, a Russian singer from Romania, also drawn to Riga by a potent cocktail of love and tango, made the most famous recording of this song in Austria, with Frank Fox – born Franz Fux in today’s Czech Republic, then Moravia – who conducted an orchestra and composed music for dancing and for movies in Vienna.


Piotr Leschenko’s bootleg records were immensely popular – albeit technically illegal – in Russia, but he only set foot there under most tragic circumstances, as a Romanian conscript in the Nazi-allied occupation forces in WWII. Despite this stain of being a collaborationist, Leschenko was offered forgiveness and a clean slate in the Soviet Union after the end of the war. But at his farewell party, the singer confessed his love to Romania too eloquently. A snitch denounced him, and the Russians withdrew the invitation at the last moment. Instead, Leschenko has been sent to the Romanian labor camps. He died in a prison hospital, and his case remains classified even now. In a recent Russian bio-pic, Piotr Leschenko is pictured as a proud defender of Russian culture under the Nazi yoke, and Konstantin Khabensky re-enacts his Dark Eyes for the movie. Here he is still hot in love with his first wife, Zinaida Zakit from Riga, whom he would leave during the occupation of Odessa for the new singer of his cabaret, Vera Belousova.


Decades later, Strok’s Dark Eyes made it all the way to Argentina as well, in a powerful instrumental cover by Florindo Sassone’s orchestra:


Oscar Strok was once erased from the official history of the Russian song as well, when in the late Stalin’s years he was blacklisted and forbidden from composing as a punishment for his “bourgeois degraded music of tango”, and forced to earn living by private piano lessons. The very word “tango” was proscribed, replaced by a euphemistic “slow dance”. Still, now we know Strok’s biography in great detail. But after the next leg of our time travel, we are going to make do with lots of guesswork about all characters of the story.


Let’s hire a troika and order the coachman to race up Tverskaya Street! We are in the 1880s Moscow and we’re heading to the famous suburban restaurant, the “Yard”. We leave the old city boundaries, and the restrictions of the municipal ordinances, behind, once we pass the New Triumphal Gate Square. As a different folk song about the Yard wishes, “May the raven-black horses fly me away to the place where the girls are mischievous and the nights are full of fire”. The Yard, once extolled by Pushkin for its truffles, has by now become most famous for its Romani singing. It’s partly due to the discriminatory laws of the 1850s which essentially made concert performances off limits for the Gypsy entertainers, confining them to taverns for three long decades. Even the revered Sokolov Gypsy Choir, once the darlings of the illustrious 18th-century Count Orloff, had to settle on singing in a restaurant (although the most classy of them all, the Yard). It was the musical directors of the Yard’s Choir, prolific songwriters Sergey (Sofus) Herdahl (Gerdal) and Yakov Prigozhiy, who made Dark Eyes an exemplary Gypsy romance song.


In 1884, Sofus Gerdal publishes his “Gypsy romance for voice and piano”, Dark Eyes, Passionate Eyes, crediting long-deceased Evgeny Grebenka for the lyrics, and using the music of Florian Hermann’s Valse Hommage. The same year, Yakov Prigozhiy publishes a different arrangement of the same music as “a waltz for voice with piano accompaniment”, titled You’re My Heaven on Earth (Ты мой рай земной). The lyrics ought to be different in Prigozhiy’s waltz, but we’d need to go to the Russian National Library, which has the published score, to figure out if any of its lyrics were retained in the countless later covers of Dark Eyes. And there is one more Dark Eyes song by Sofus Gerdal, published a bit earlier, in 1881, “for choir and piano”, which doesn’t credit either Evgeny Grebenka or Florian Hermann, but attributes the lyrics to a female author known only by her initials. We don’t know yet if the 1881 score is essentially the same song or something entirely different; only a trip to the Russian National Library may sort it out. At least it’s clear that Gerdal was the first in styling the song as a Gypsy romance, and that the lyrics started changing very early on, perhaps in Gerdal’s own arrangements, perhaps in Prigozhiy’s. Only the immortal opening stanza of Grebenka’s lyrics remained a constant in all of the song’s versions.

Evgeny Grebenka (Yevhen Hrebinka) 1843 Очи чёрные, очи страстные, Очи жгучие и прекрасные! Как люблю я вас, как боюсь я вас! Знать, увидел вас я в недобрый час! Ох, недаром вы глубины темней! Вижу траур в вас по душе моей, Вижу пламя в вас я победное: Сожжено на нём сердце бедное. Но не грустен я, не печален я, Утешительна мне судьба моя: Всё, что лучшего в жизни Бог дал нам, В жертву отдал я огневым глазам!

Dark Eyes Metrical translation by Stefan Bogdanov Oh you dark black eyes, full-of-passion-eyes Oh you burning eyes, how you hypnotize Now I love you so, but I fear you though Since you glanced at me not so long ago. Oh I see you now, you are dark and deep I see grief and feel that my soul will weep I see now in you a winning burning glow In my poor heart will a fire grow. I’m not sorrowful, I’m not repenting I accept all that my fate’s presenting All the best in life, God has given us- this I sacrifice, to you dark black eyes.

But any semblance of clarity disappears once we turn to the published biographic info about the arrangers, Gerdal and Prigozhiy, and the composer Hermann.

The 1884 music sheet of Gerdal’s “Gypsy Romance” Dark Eyes, Passionate Eyes, from a livejournal entry of a Russian researcher

Sofus Gerdal published Gypsy romances in Moscow in the 1880s, and worked at the Yard restaurant, but who he was and from where? An Internet legend, which started out as an innocent joke, is now repeated all across the Russian Internet as a “true discovery”. The pianist sometimes russified his name as “Sergey”, and a few later editions misspelled his surname as “Gerdel”. And so once, a search engine showed that Sergey Gerdel was alive and well (a contemporary entrepreneur with exactly this name lives and works in Berdichev in Ukraine). A classic Russian meme is the joke that “all the imported goods were actually made in Jewish Odessa”. Likewise, a blogger who made the 2011 “Gerdel discovery” exclaimed, “What if all the classic Gypsy songs were, likewise, actually made in Jewish Berdichev?” Alas, a harmless internet joke, repeated and reposted over and over again, began to sound like truth. In reality though, there is no such Jewish surname as Gerdal, nor a Jewish personal name like Sofus (a rare Ashkenazi surname “Gerdel” does exist, but its area of origin was quite far from Berdichev, in Czarist Russia’s Taurida Governorate). Sofus or Sophus is a male name in Scandinavia, Germany, and Belgium, a masculine version of the name Sophie. Gerdal (Гердаль) is a regular Russian alphabet rendition of a common Scandinavian surname “Herdahl”, literally “Hay Valley”. In the Danish town of Maribo, there is even a record of a different Sofus Herdahl, a 19th-century barber. But whether our Gypsy pianist Sofus Herdahl was a Dane, or possibly a Swede, we cannot yet tell.

Yakov Fedorovich Prigozhiy (1840-1920, Moscow) – this is how encyclopedias define the author and arranger of countless Russian and Gypsy romances, another one of which (My campfire glows in the mist – Мой костер в тумане светит) also got a second life in Argentine tango music. Better than nothing, although who he was, where he came from and grew up, remains a riddle. A little is also known about Yakov’s relatives. His musician brother Adolf Prigozhiy was, at the peak of his fame, even better known than Yakov. All Russia danced to Adolf’s waltzes, he toured the provinces, at one time owned an operetta theater in Vilna, and was married to an operetta star Serafima Beletskaya (who, after Adolf’s untimely death in St Petersburg, remarried to a famous operetta actor, nobleman Gabel-Rodon). Adolf’s son, Georgy Prigozhiy clerked in the National Bank in St. Petersburg in 1899-1900. With these name / marriage / occupation tidbits we may conclude that Prigozhiy (which means “Handsome” in Russian) was their actual surname rather than a theatrical pseudonym, that they weren’t ethnic Romani, and that they were Christians. A surname “Prigozhiy” did exist in Czarist Russia, mostly in Eastern Belorussia, home to many other “Good / Nice / Pretty” names (Among my own relatives in that region, one of the surnames was “Neplokh”, literally Good-Enough). As with many other regional Slavic surnames, Prigozhiy was used both by Belorussians and Jews. The former mostly in Vitebsk Governorate, the latter mostly in Mogilev Governorate. Personal names Adolf, Yakov, and Fedor and especially Georgy weren’t yet used by the Jewish residents of Russia at the time, but could have been used by Christian converts. The name Adolf was traditionally Polish but perhaps occasionally used by educated Belorussians, emulating their Polish landlord class. All this said, we still don’t know the native community of the Prigozhiy family (and since the genealogical documents were kept by a parish, we don’t have a clear idea where to look for Yakov’s childhood, education, and personal life).

But there is an Internet legend about the origins of Yakov Prigozhiy, too, and a beautiful one. It is said that the Karaims of Crimea consider him one of their own, a scion of the Evpatoria Karaim community!

At a first glance, the Evpatoria hypothesis shows an intriguing similarity with the facts. In the city of Evpatoria, there was indeed a Jewish Prigozhiy family, even one Yakov Prigozhiy among them (albeit from a different generation). Yakov Prigozhiy the songwriter collaborated with musicians from Crimea. And the regional Gypsy, Tatar, and Jewish folk music was a nearly indivisible phenomenon, because Crimean Tatar Gypsy musicians – called the Dauldzhi, from the name of the traditional large double-headed drum known as daul or davul – performed all these ethnic styles. Whosoever celebrate a wedding, would get one’s folk music from the same band of Dauldzhis. “Same musicians, slightly different results”.

A band of Dauldzhi, Crimean Romani musicians

But the putative Evpatoria Prigozhiy connection failed a reality check. This family moved to Evpatoria much later, and they were Ashkenazi Jewish rather than Karaim. They came from Bryansk and Mglin counties, at the boundaries of the same Mogilev Governorate (with Yakov making the move to Evpatoria only after WWII, while his sisters stayed in Bryansk region). And no such surname ever existed among the Karaim.

Plaques with Hebrew inscriptions in the Marble Courtyard of the Grand Evpatoria Kenasa

But the Evpatoria hypothesis refuses to die. According to Karaim amateur historians, the Grand Kenasa (Karaim synagogue) of Evpatoria has a memorial plaque honoring a donation made by Yakov Prigozhiy the musician “to the community of his parents, may their memory be blessed”. However, the family name is said to be spelled differently on the plaque. It is Yefet rather than Prigozhiy. Yefet (יֶפֶת) is of course Japheth, the Biblical son of Noah and the mythical ancestor of Tatars, Armenians, Greeks and pretty much all the ethnic groups of old Crimea. Yefet was also the name of one of the most revered medieval Karaim scholars. And the male name Yefet was quite popular among the Crimean Karaim. But the surname Yefet appeared in Evpatoria only in the late 1830s, brought by a family of a repatriant from Istanbul, r. Yufuda Yefet Kosdini. Reb Yufuda, a.k.a. Yehuda Qustini Yefet, was an Istanbuli Karaim wise man of Crimean origin and a close associate of Avraham “Eru” Firkovich, a Lutsk Karaim pilgrim, historian and reformer of their belief system. Qustini or Kosdini was a Greko-Karaim for “Konstantinopoli”, that is, Istanbul. In fact, Firkovich spent the first half of the 1830s in Istanbul, then the prime center of Karaim learning, but his reform zeal eventually caused him and his followers to be expelled. They moved to Crimea, and, in 1837, made Evpatoria the center of Karaim religious autonomous community. That’s when the Grand Kenasa was built, too. Now, is it possible that the first sons of the religious zealot repatriants have become operetta and night club musicians? Before you tell me that I’m totally nuts, I shall ask you to travel to Crimea and to send me a picture of the יֶפֶת stone. And then, to your valid question, how could “Yefet” ever become “Prigozhiy”, the Karaim informants have a ready answer. Both words mean “Handsome”, the first one in Hebrew, the second one in Russian.

From the glossary of Karaim surnames from the 1913 volume of “Jewish antiquities” (Еврейская старина). It does mark “Yefet” as “handsome”, albeit with a question mark. The more recent sources just mark it as a surname derived from the male personal name Yefet in Istanbul.

In the end it’s the same story with Prigozhiy as with Gerdal… a cool legend finds no support, and we have no clue who they were.

If the scale of myth-making surrounding Sofus Gerdal and Yakov Prigozhiy surprises you, then just wait until you listen to the tall tales about Florian (or Feodor) Hermann, whose Valse Hommage has been arranged into a romance song by the Yard’s pianists!

Most often, we are told that Hermann was French, and came to Russia with Napoleon’s Grand Army. Sometimes we hear that his Valse Hommage started as a march of the advancing French troops in 1812. But sometimes, that it mourns the French army losses as it forded the icy Berezina river on retreat from Moscow. We even hear that Florian Hermann visited the home estate of Evgeny Grebenka, the author of the lyrics of the future song, during the Napoleonic Wars! But sometimes Florian Hermann turns out to be a German rather than Frenchman. We are even told that the lived in Strasbourg. One has to note that Valse Hommage is always titled in French in the international score catalogs, while some of the other Hermann’s compositions are titled in German. However, my research shows that Florian Hermann was a Russian patriot from the Wilno strip area of Poland / Lithuania, and that he composed some of his most popular pieces in 1870s through 1890s. And very recently, I was able to find out a few details about his youth and his family in Wilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania).

The numbered lists of works of Florian Hermann are known from the sheet music publishers. Some of these compositions have obvious connections to historical events and geographical locations. For example, March over the Balkans and Totleben March (Забалканскiй Маршъ & Тодлебенъ-Маршъ) – Florian Hermann op. 37 & 39, resp. – are clearly linked to the Balkan Campaign of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, when the nation rose up in the wave of Pan-Slavic patriotism, the Czar’s army crossed the Balkan Mountains, and general Totleben gloriously defended Plevna). The March of Russian volunteers also glorifies the liberator warriors who saved the Balkan Slavs from the Turkish yoke. One of the latest compositions of Hermann honors the coronation of Nicholas II in 1896.

The scores of Hermann were being printed by the Moscow publishing house of Gutheil, which also issued the works of Gerdal and Prigozhiy. But the best source on Floriann Hermann is the St. Petersburg publishing house of Buttner, which in 1879 merged with D. Rahter Publishers of Hamburg. As a result, their catalogs were printed in Hamburg, and survived the ravages of time much better than the Russian rarities. We don't see any new works of Hermann after 1900.

Op. 60 – 2nd Lithuanian Quadrille – was inspired by the vocal polonaises of Stanisław Moniuszko, the leading composer of Polish Nationalist Romanticism, whose folkloric operas were all the rage in the 1860s. Op. 56, Evening Chant, has a dedication to Moniuszko as well. Stanisław Moniuszko died in 1872 and attained an even higher post-mortal glory as the Polish creator of the Pan-Slavic music. It’s easy to see that the same musical ideology attracted Florian Hermann as well. In addition to patriotic an Pan-Slavic marches and Western European themes, his list of compositions is thick with Lithuanian, Ukrainian/Belorussian, Polish and Russian folkloric-romantic themes. Polonaises, mazurkas, polkas… Op. 30 and 52 are “Little Russian polkas”. Op. 61 is dedicated to Rubno (a manor of the Dauksza family, now called Kirtimai, on the outskirts of Vilnius). The most remarkable edition of Florian Hermann’s music came out in 1881 from the famous Wilno publishing house of Eliza Orzeszkowa, a Polish freedom fighter (who barely avoided prison for her role in the Uprising of 1863), author, and an ideologist of positivism, a school of Polish nationalist thought which insisted that the future of Poland depended on its cultural growth and fostering cultural ties between its ethnic groups, rather than on continuing armed uprisings. Eliza Orzeszkowa’s publishing house was quickly shut down by the Czarist government, but not before they issued a beautiful booklet of Hermann’s “salon dances”, entitled “Wilno Carnival”, with a panoramic view of the city on its jacket, and 6 patriotic compositions inside: Lithuanian countradance, Fiery mazurka, two dances for the local rivers Vilia and Niemen, and two more glorifying Lithuania’s pre-Christian past (dedicated to a pagan priestess and the thunder-deity Perkun). Florian Hermann’s early compositions are dedicated to Lydia, Yulia, and Sofiya (presumably students of Florian) which makes it likely that the composer worked as a piano teacher in his youth. As to the Hommage Valse (future Dark eyes), Op. 21, it’s undoubtedly composed before the mid 1870s, and it was a very popular composition, judging by a variety of “updated” and orchestral arrangements in Rahter-Buttner catalogs.

The old Vilnius high school courtyard

I was lucky to find the earliest, student’s work of Florian Hermann in the catalog of the former Imperial Library. This is an 1840 polonaise, dedicated (in French) to Ustinov, the principal of Wilno Gymnasia (High Scool) “from his humblest pupil Florian Hermann”, printed at Michal Przybyłski’s lithography shop. („Dédiée du m-r Ustinoff, directeur du Gymnase imperial du gouvernement de Vilna, conseiller de la cour et membre de plusieurs ordres et composée pour le piano-forte par son très humble élève Florian Herrmann – Vilna: lith. de Przybyłski”). Yet is known that Alexandr Ustinov, a painter and an educator, remained the Principal of the 1st Wilno Men’s Gymnasia from 1836 to 1843. There are also other known lithographic sheet music editions by the Przybyłski shop, dated by the 1830s. Therefore it appears that Florian Hermann was the composer’s real name, and that he studied in a high school in Vilnius in the late 1830s. So the years of his life are approximately 1820-1900. Moreover, in the same school, other Hermann students are known from the records. Emilian Hermann (probably Florian’s brother) graduated with a Silver Medal in 1848, and Adam Hermann in 1861. The names are consistent with Polish self-identification of the family. But we can’t yet tell if they were ethnic Poles or Polish Germans, because the surname “Hermann” was shared by several ethnicities in this area. Of note, a leading Polish genealogist Iwona Dakiniewicz spotted this surname in the vital record books of the Catholic Deanery of Wilno as early as in the 1740s, so we can be reasonably sure that the ancestors of Florian Hermann were local Catholics rather than recent migrants or converts. Iwona wrote that their home parishes may have been just north of town, in Giedrojcie or Podbrzezie.

From the list of Nobleman Assembly electors, Wilno, 1834

“The Chase”, old Lithuanian coat of arms, graces the Holy (or Dawn) Gate

Only a privileged family could have sent their sons to a high school in the 1830s-1840s. So, having failed to find the Hermanns in the 19th-c. lists of local officials or merchants, I had to conclude that they must have belonged to the szlachta, the Polish-Lithuanian landed gentry. Indeed, I soon spotted a mention of a local Hermann nobleman in an 1844 Imperial government publication. Then a prominent Lithuanian genealogist Sigita Gasparaviciene told me that in the 19th c., the nobility family of the Hermans lived in Wilno proper. And, finally, at the website of Czeslaw Malewski, a specialist on Lithuania’s szlachta, we see in 1834 list of Nobleman Assembly voters that the former Head of Wilno Gentry, travelling to the assembly from a distant county, stopped at the Hermans’ house at Ostrobramska Street, right in the heart of Wilno’s Old Town, famous for its Holy / Sharp / Dawn Gate as it’s known in various local languages.

Florian Hermann lived here! (Ostrobramska street at the Gate in the 1840s)

Florian Hermann, 14, in his high school class roster

Update: Czeslaw Malewski confirmed that in 1835/36 school year, Florian Hermann, age 14. a Catholic Wilno nobleman, studied in the 4th grade of the Wilno Gymnasium. There were several Hermann families in the vicinity of Wilno. One of them owned properties in and around the village of Rubno in the late 1870s and 1880s, right when Florian Hermann composed his Souvenir de Roubno. It seems that Florian’s family were descendants of Karol Hermann and Antonina née Kozerowski. In this family Jan and Julian were known as government servants in Wilno. Jan, born ca. 1787, finished studies in Dresden and Breslau, and started teaching in Wilno in 1812. Notably, Jan Hermann taught in the only Polish-language high school still allowed in the city after the severe crackdown on Polish education in the wake of the 1831 Uprising. Florian Hermann had another very interesting teacher in his high school, a French expat Antoine Cui, who taught, of course, French. (Just like Florian, Antoine Cui is often said to be an ex-Napoleon Grand Armée soldier, stuck in Russia as the French forces disastrously retreated in 1812. But both stories are false. Antoine Cui actually swore allegiance to the Czar a year earlier). The oldest Cui children, Napoleon and Alexander, were Florian’s classmates, and the youngest, Cesar Cui, has become young Hermann’s piano student (and when Cesar developed a gift of composition, Stanisław Moniuszko started teaching the kid free of charge). Starting from the 1860s, this ex-student of Hermann and Moniuszko will become one of “The Five”, an innovating group of composers out to create truly Russian style of music, steeped in the folkloric styles. In so doing, Cesar Cui planted the seeds of his Polish teachers on Russian soil with the most profound effects on the nation’s musical heritage!

Rubno Manor and Rubno village on a 1933 Polish topo. “Las Rubionkowski”, the Rubno Woods, is now a suburban ornithology preserve, with the residential blocks of Vilnius rising right behind out. Inset: from Czeslaw Malewski’s book on Wilno area nobility

Now that our Tango Time Machine has covered a whole century, and transferred us from the 1930s to the 1830s, we no longer need to travel deeper into the past. The creators of the original Dark Eyes, Evgeny Grebenka and Nicholas DeVitte, are both alive and full of creative energy in this time period. And both of them are relatively well studied by the historians (although it doesn’t mean that the history of Dark Eyes has any fewer riddles or improbable twists).

Evgeny Grebenka, 1812-1848

Evgeny Grebenka (or Evhen Hrebinka, according to Ukrainian spelling of his name) is a classic of Ukrainian literature, an author of wonderful fables, folkloric poems, always funny but often touched by sadness, and historical novels in the style of National Romanticism. Grebenka published a handful of poems in Russian too, like a classic folkloric song about a village matron recognizing a heartthrob of her youth in a visiting gray-mustached general, and getting laid at last. In the corpus of Grebenka’s work, Dark eyes does not fit at all. No folksiness, no humor, but a burning sorrowful prescience of a well-deserved perdition. But love is capable of transforming poets in unpredictable ways… When the poem was published in January 1843, Grebenka was 31. His fiancee Maria Rostenberg, marooned at her father’s estate many provinces away, was 15. A year and a half later, they married, and she joined Evgeny in St Petersburg. Maria was a daughter of a Courlander German, a Russian army officer who received a Ukrainian estate not far from Grebenka’s family nest as a dowry when he married Maria’s mother. Alas, Mrs. Rostenberg died soon after Maria was born. Maria is said to have been on good terms with her stepmother and 9 half-siblings, but still, the money was an issue. The Grebenkas just couldn’t get any cut from the Rostenberg assets, and Evgeny Grebenka literally sacrificed his health on the family altar, working extra jobs and skipping vacations, to provide for his young wife’s luxurious live in the nation’s capital. At 36, Grebenka died of tuberculosis. The prophecy of Dark Eyes may be said to have come true, as he really died for his beloved woman.

Nicholas DeVitte, 1811-1844

Prominent historians of Russian romance song, Elena and Valery Ukolovs, are adamant that Dark Eyes could not have come from the pen of Grebenka. They note that barely a month after publication of the poem, the government censors were already reviewing a song with its lyrics, composed by a talented and mysterious poet and musician, Nicholas DeVitte. Both the subject and the choices of words of the poem were very typical for DeVitte, a bard of fatal, impossible, forbidden love, and suffering and death. The Ukolovs note that DeVitte was fond for literary mystification, both hiding behind nom-de-plumes and publishing under friends’ names, and hypothesize that he gifted the verse to Grebenka, too. A grandson of a Dutchman who went to serve the Russian Empire, Nicholas DeVitte created many timeless romance song, and was an unsurpassed harp virtuoso. An age-mate of Grebenka’s, DeVitte also died very young, at 32, only a year after publishing his score of Dark Eyes. The fire of the fatal eyes immolated everyone…


Regardless of the true authorship of the 1843 poem, we must note that DeVitte’s score of Dark Eyes has nothing in common with the classic romance we love. Nicholas DeVitte composed a mazurka, with a very different emotional tine, expressing a kind of fatalistic contentedness rather than a fateful prescient sadness of the Gypsy song. The Ukolovs note that Dark Eyes has been first mentioned as a Gypsy song in an 1859 book, decades before Gerdal’s arrangement. One may suspect that the Romani singers already relied on their emotional intuition to rework the music of “the Eyes”, long before Sofus Gerdal formalized the results. There are known precedents of this, such as another DeVitte’s romance What can I do, my heart, with you (Что делать, сердце, мне с тобою) which retained the lyrics but dramatically changed the music once it became a part of the Gypsy choirs repertoire. Perhaps Dark Eyes really owed its sound of an anguished and cruel waltz to the Gypsy musicians, even before the music of Hermann got connected with the old verse. But this a riddle which noone can ever solve…

Dissolving: A long march

Abbey Road, London. Iain Macmillan’s photo to Beatles’ Abbey Road album. 8 August 1969, right before the break-up of the band

Black Sea Road, Yeisk, a spa and trading town on the Azov Sea shore. 1910s, right before the break-up of the empire

And once we are sitting in the time machine, let’s take a look at some more views of Yeisk, this charming little town that had three large streets with beautiful eclectic buildings and a Singer sewing machine shop, a harbor and a steamship company, a girls’ gymnasium and a park, and they even drilled an arthesian well, introduced the railway, and started to build the first railway bridge right before the break-up of the empire. The water on the main street still exists today. For the painting of a pedestrian crossing, there was no time left.

Letter to the frontline

“Жди меня и я вернусь” – “Wait for me, and I will come”, wrote Konstantin Simonov in 1941 in his letter from the front to his girlfriend and later wife, the Soviet movie star Valentina Serova (who, however, did not wait for him, but mixed up with Marshal Rokossovsky). The poem, that became public only months later, together with the music of Matvey Blanter, became one of the unofficial hymns of the Great Patriotic War, and kept up the soul and hope of millions of soldiers and soldier’s wives.

In the now-running Ukrainian patriotic war, the tables turn, and women left at home send letters to the frontline, to urge their beloved ones to endure, and to foster patriotism in every Ukrainian. This is how the letter is introduced by filmmaker Ivan Kravchyshyn, who, together with his wife Natalia, designed and photographed each page of it, and whose films – such as Політ золотої мушки (The flight of the golden fly, 2014) – fit together with the visual world of the album..


Because the letter is nothing but a twelve-page album. On each page, a beautiful Ukrainian girl is looking at the reader, dressed in the costume of a different Ukrainian historical region. The pieces of the costume are authentic: most of them come from museums in Kolomea, Tarnopol and Prelesne, as well as from the private collections of Natalia Kravchishin and three of the girls photographed. On the back of each photo they give a detailed description of each piece of clothing, they mark their place of origin on the map of the traditional regions of Ukraine, and add archival photos to show how they were worn at that time.

To encourage our sons fighting on the front with girls dressed in national costumes, and at the same time to fasten national cohesion, may seem archaic to us, who saw similar publications from the time of the First World War. But the idea fits well with the nation-building endeavor of a belated nation. The photos, the girls, the costumes are beautiful, the typography tasteful, and the archive photos and texts well-rounded and informative.

What a pity that the letter has not been signed by the whole of Ukraine. The Bukovinian Romanian, Galician Pole, Black Sea Russian, Holichian Karaim, Crimean Tatar, Subcarpathian Hungarian soldiers perishing on the eastern front are looking in vain for the pictures of their loved ones in the album. These ethnic fragments shredded from here and there into Ukraine have been forgotten in the heyday of nation-building.

For them, pars pro toto, plays the Hungarian version of Wait for me and I will come, which may be a surprise to the speakers of the other languages, too. In fact, this is not identical with the well-known version of Blanter. Inasmuch as it sounds authentically Russian, it comes from the Hungarian composer Henrik Negrelli. You can make a hit, singing it with a Russian text in a Russian company. The Hungarian translation was done by Sarolta Lányi, who probably did not have the front in mind, but rather her husband Ernő Czóbel, who kept her in countenance with his letters from the Siberian Gulag. It is sung by the great Hungarian actor Iván Darvas, whose mother was a Tsarist Russian emigrant in Prague, and who in 1945 served as an interpreter to the Red Army, and in 1956, organized a revolutionary committee against the Soviet invaders, for which he spent two years in prison and worked for years as a factory laborer; and then in 1965 he featured in the pro-Soviet cult film The Corporal and Others, so he also might have had a multifaceted relationship with what he sings about.


Konstantin Simonov: Wait for me. Hungarian translation by Sarolta Lányi, music by Henrik Negrelli, sung by Iván Darvas

Жди меня, и я вернусь. Только очень жди, Жди, когда наводят грусть Желтые дожди, Жди, когда снега метут, Жди, когда жара, Жди, когда других не ждут, Позабыв вчера. Жди, когда из дальних мест Писем не придет, Жди, когда уж надоест Всем, кто вместе ждет. Жди меня, и я вернусь, Не желай добра Всем, кто знает наизусть, Что забыть пора. Пусть поверят сын и мать В то, что нет меня, Пусть друзья устанут ждать, Сядут у огня, Выпьют горькое вино На помин души... Жди. И с ними заодно Выпить не спеши. Жди меня, и я вернусь, Всем смертям назло. Кто не ждал меня, тот пусть Скажет: - Повезло. Не понять, не ждавшим им, Как среди огня Ожиданием своим Ты спасла меня. Как я выжил, будем знать Только мы с тобой,- Просто ты умела ждать, Как никто другой.

Wait for me, and I’ll come back! Wait with all you’ve got! Wait, when dreary yellow rains Tell you, you should not. Wait when snow is falling fast, Wait when summer’s hot, Wait when yesterdays are past, Others are forgot. Wait, when from that far-off place, Letters don’t arrive. Wait, when those with whom you wait Doubt if I’m alive. Wait for me, and I’ll come back! Wait in patience yet When they tell you off by heart That you should forget. Even when my dearest ones Say that I am lost, Even when my friends give up, Sit and count the cost, Drink a glass of bitter wine To the fallen friend – Wait! And do not drink with them! Wait until the end! Wait for me and I’ll come back, Dodging every fate! “What a bit of luck!” they’ll say, Those that would not wait. They will never understand How amidst the strife, By your waiting for me, dear, You had saved my life. Only you and I will know How you got me through. Simply – you knew how to wait – No one else but you.

Revolution from bottom view

Ivan Vladimirov: Burning the Tsar’s images and eagles, 5 May 1917.

November seventh, the anniversary of the October Revolution. The decisive celebration of our school years. Lenin left Smolny, and made a call to the revolutionaries. They surrounded the Winter Palace. At the cannon-shot of Aurora, the revolution began. The cadets desperately defended the palace, but the revolutionaries entered, and put an end to the rule of the Tsar (as they did not burden us with the February Revolution and the Provisional Government). And no word was made about Gergely Bors.

On the 100th anniversary of the revolution we remember this day and all that followed, with a different, less well-known chronicle.

Ivan Vladimirov: Destruction in the Winter Palace, 1918

Several years ago we published some of the watercolors made about the revolution by Ivan Alekseevich Vladimir (1869-1947). That we now return to him, is not only due to the anniversary, but rather to the fact, that in the meantime more of this series was published on the Russian web, and the history of these odd images has also been revealed.

Because it is odd indeed, that Ivan Vladimirov, the historical and battle painter of the Soviet era, awarded with the Red Banner Order, member of the Revolutionary Artists’ Association, illustrator of the official historiography of the Civil War published in the 1930s, portrait painter of Lenin, Stalin and Gorki, and decorator of the Soviet pavilion of the 1937 World Expo, also published such images, which clearly demonstrate the wickedness and cruelty of the revolutionaries as well as his sympathy for their victims.

Ivan Vladimirov: On the streets of Petrograd, 1918

Graduated both in the military and the fine arts school in the 1890s, Vladimirov soon became an official battle painter of the Russian army. He took part in the Russian-Japanese war of 1904, and also in the First World War. As his mother was British, he had good contacts in London, where The Graphic asked him to regularly report from the Eastern front. Over the course of the war, more of a hundred of his paintings, signed as “John Wladimiroff”, were published in the journal, which in 1918 also included a photo of him with this caption: “Mr. Wladimiroff enables The Graphic to be the only paper in the country giving realistic drawings of the revolution”.


As we can see, the drawings offer a truly realistic picture of the revolution, also due to the fact, that Vladimirov, as a member of the police of Petrograd between 1917 and 1918, was an eye witness of all what he painted. His opinion may be reflected by the captions of some of the drawings published in The Graphic: “Blight of Bolshevik Barbarism”, “The chaos resulting from Leninite Misrule”, “Anarchy in Russia”, “Revolution, rapine and robbery”. However, the series of the illustrations was interrupted in the summer of 1918. Vladimirov might have realized that the situation, which he considered transitional, will be persistent. But he did not stop portraiting the revolution.

At that time he might have got in contact with Frank Golder, who came to Russia to oversee the food aid program launched by the later US President Herbert Hoover. Golder also collected material for the Hoover War Library, set up by his commissioner at Stanford University, and considered Vladimirov’s images as excellent contemporary documentation. He bought one after the other, and after his leaving, another colleague of the program, Donald Renshaw continued the collection. The signature of one picture refers to him: “To Mr. Renshaw, a souvenir of the hungry years in Petrograd, with my sincere regards. John Wladimiroff, 19 June 1923”.

Ivan Vladimirov: Plundering the aid wagon of the Red Cross, 1922

Today, thirty-seven “revolutionary images” by Vladimirov are seen in Hoover Institution. During his lifetime, his signature was covered on them, to avoid his getting into trouble. Ten further pictures appeared in auction in 1953, and they are now kept in Brown University in Rhode Island. These images open a unique window to the horror and suffering which was denied by contemporary propaganda, and which could not be evoked so vividly either by later historiography.

Ivan Vladimirov: The revolutionary tribunal condemns to death the landowner and the priest, 1919

Vladimirov’s “secret painting” arrived home to Russia only this year. On the 100th anniversary of the revolution, the Moscow Museum of Contemporary History  organized for the first time a comprehensive exhibition of his works made during the revolution and the Civil War. The paintings kept in the US were just reproduced, but they also exhibited a dozen of his paintings from Vladimir Ruga’s private collection, which depict how the new “ruling class” expropriates and destroys the culture built up over the centuries.

Ivan Vladimirov: Reading the Pravda, ca. 1918-1923

Ivan Vladimirov: The last way, 1918.
On the first version, kept in the USA, the painter’s signature was covered