Kalliope’s Reviews > Moura: The Dangerous Life of the Baroness Budberg > Status Update

When he needed money in the late 1920s, Khodasevich had sold Diaghilev his first editions of Pushkin, which he had been collecting since he was a young man. The collection had been brought by him from Russia in 1925, and here it was intact, in the old nineteenth-century bindings.

Wells spoke of his future plans for an encyclopedia.. which would give people a chance to avoid the bloody catastrophe of revolutions and wars by showing them, through self-education, how to make life beautiful. He was his old self again, profoundly pessimistic on the inside and full of faith in and hope for progress on the outside.

In 1936 there were three archives in Europe that Stalin felt he needed, and he wanted to get control of them within a year. He did: the first, Trotsky's archive in Paris, he took care of by means of arson; the second, Gorky's, Stalin acquired by making a deal with the dying man; the third was seized by breaking into Kerensky's modest apartment in Past, on the rue des Eaux.

In the 1930s there existed in Parisian literary circles a strange distrust of certain women of Russian origin who had married French celebrities from the world of letters, music or the arts. It mattered little whether they were the legitimate wives of Rolland, Aragon, Éluard, Léger or their mistresses. ..the feeling was that they had been sent by Moscow to attach themselves to these celebrities.

2/2

1/2

What he (Gorky) demanded of movies and the visual arts I those years was no different from what he demanded of literature. The cinema must be useful; it mus teach something. The primary function of painting was to illustrate history since 1917. To his favorite artist Pavel Korin he assigned the theme "Russia Departing": the picture was supposed to depict "all classes and all professions"

It goes without saying that Wells never went to see Gorky in Sorrento but she liked stoking the legend about the intimacy Wells and Gorky shared. She would recount the long conventions the two of them had in America back in 1906 and others they had when they met again in London. But the portrait was not true: in the US, they saw each other only once, and in 1907 in London they met only briefly.

In Moscow Moura had once been considered a secret agent of England; in Estonia, a Soviet spy. In France the Russian émigrés thought she was working for Germany, and later, when she lived in England, it was thought she was an agent of Moscow. Peters, who changed his mind about her, wrote in 1924 that she was a German spy who had worked for the Cheka. What Mussolini government suspected we don't know.

Gorky understood what going to France would mean for him: France was the centre of the Russian political emigration, and he not only would be unable to work on his novel there but would find it hard just to live. He despised the Russian émigré community and it repaid him in kind, but he could not ignore them altogether.

She (Moura) painted portraits (Gorky's and mine) and taught us to dance the Charleston, which she had recently learnt from Mayakovsky.