Hello, gaucho34!
You have posted another extremely interesting question. You have also
managed to pique the interest of a host of researchers who are
anxiously awaiting your completed novel. After researching this
question, I believe I have become as intrigued as those who have
answered your questions before me!!!
I have provided an overview of the emergence and beliefs of the
Eurasian movement among the Russian émigrés in 1920‘s France. It was
impossible to narrow down the movement, or Sergei Efron’s involvement
strictly to the years 1923-1925. However, I am sure you will be able
to use the following references to your advantage!
=============
EURASIANISM
=============
Eurasianism is a political ideology that was embraced by Russian
"White Guard" émigrés who settled in Europe in the 1920's. The major
tenet of Eurasianism is that Russia is a unique and separate political
and social entity compared to Europe and Asia. The movement produced a
publication to espouse it's ideas, tilted "Eurasia", or "Evraziia",
between 1928 and 1929.
==
"Interestingly, a lot of self-styled political gurus specializing in
the so called new "Russian idea" draw heavily -- wittingly or
unwittingly -- upon the intellectual legacy of Eurasianism - the
school of thought that emerged in the 1920s among the Russian "White
Guard" émigrés in Europe. The main thrust of the Eurasians’ teaching
was that Russia constituted a separate geopolitical and geocultural
entity, in fact, the whole continent - Eurasia - with its own peculiar
historical path, markedly different from other European and Asian
nations.
"RUSSIA IN SEARCH OF NEW PARADIGM: EURASIANISM REVISITED", by Igor
Torbakov. Eurasianet.org (3/24/00)
http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/eav032400.shtml
==
"Many present-day Russian traditional thinkers tend to call themselves
Eurasianists after the group of Russian émigrés that was active in
Europe in the 1920s. One of the central tenets of both the founders of
the movement and their contemporary followers is that Russia
constitutes a unique and separate society from both Europe and Asia."
From "EURASIAN IDEA COULD BRING TOGETHER ERSTWHILE ENEMIES TURKEY AND
RUSSIA", by Igor Torbakov. Eurasia Insight. (3/18/02)
http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/eav031802.shtml
==
(The following excerpts are drawn from an article which focuses on the
Eurasian movement as it still exists today!)
"Popularized at the beginning of the twentieth century by an eccentric
British geographer, Sir Halford Mackinder, geopolitics posits that the
earth will forever be divided into two naturally antagonistic spheres:
land and sea."
** "In this model, the natural repository for global land power is the
Eurasian heartland - the territory of the former Russian empire.
Whoever controls the heartland, wrote Mackinder, will forever seek to
dominate the Eurasian landmass and ultimately the world".
"The theory (of Eurasianism) is a direct descendant of the Slavophile
movement of the nineteenth century, now retooled for the 21st. Cribbed
from Mackinder and born in 1921 with the publication of historian
Peter Savitsky's Exodus to the East, Eurasianism seeks to establish
Russia's unique identity as distinct from the West".
"The Eurasianists transformed the contradictions between white
[ultraconservative] and red on the basis of a broad civilizational
project," said Dugin in his office across from Moscow's Novodevechy
monastery.
* "Nobody else except the Eurasianists presented such a project, which
dates from the 1920s but is just as operative in the 1990s"
From "Dreams of the Eurasian Heartland", by Charles Clover.
http://www.geocities.com/eurasia_uk/heartland.html
==
The following excerpt provides an interesting view of the ideologies
contained in the Eurasian movement of the 1920's:
"Proponents of Eurasianism, including émigré academics of the early
1920s like the historian Georgy Vernadsky, the Petr Savitsky and the
linguist Nikolai Trubetskoy, argued that living on one geographically
homogeneous landmass facilitates the economic, political and cultural
integration of the peoples populating it. The unity of a large
continental landmass is determined by the economic interdependence of
neighboring regions. The Eurasians regarded an ethnically defined
federation as an ideological invention of the
Bolsheviks, while arguing that an administrative division into
provinces was more conducive to the cultural and historic unity of the
Eurasian population".
From "PUTIN TAKES AIM AT THE PRINCIPLE OF NATIONAL
SELF-DETERMINATION", by Elena Chinyaeva. Prism Volume 6, Issue 10
(October 31, 2000)
http://www.jamestown.org/pubs/view/pri_006_010_002.htm
===
A range of thoughts which comprise Eurasianism from its inception to
the present day are compiled in the following abstract:
"Certain kinds of imagery pervade Eurasianist political thought from
the late nineteenth century down to the present day. For example,
metaphors of unity and disunity - which indicate psychological
boundary issues - are common. The Eurasianists were concerned about
the temporal gap between pre-Petrine and post-Petrine Russia, the
division between the upper and lower layers of Russian culture
(Nikolaj Trubeckoj's "verxi" and "nizy"), the disconnection of humans
with their natural environment, the split between Russian and Western
Europe,
** the chasm between émigré Russians and the homeland forever left
behind,
and various other anxiety-producing separations. There were altogether
too many of these splits and chasms for the Eurasianists. The
Eurasianists welcomed, on the other hand, merging of East Slavs with
non-Slavic peoples in the Eurasian expanse, the allegedly "symphonic"
wholeness of the Eurasian personality, and, of course, the harmonious
union of Europe with Asia in one "Russia-Eurasia" (Petr Savickij).
Psychoanalysis of this separation vs. unity issue indicates unresolved
feelings about the early relationship with the mother. The aging
Savickij, for example, emphasized his feelings of unity with "our
Russian moist-mother earth." Nikolai Danilevskij characterized Europe
as a "Mama" who tried to order Russia around (this image extends
Chaadaev's metaphor of Russia as a "child"). Further investigation of
these and other images favored by the Eurasianists will have
interesting psychoanalytic implications."
From "The Imagery of Eurasianism: From Danilevskij to Dugin", by
Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, University of California, Davis.
http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~ludwig/aatseel/Daniel_Rancour-Laferriere.html
========================================================
THE EURASIAN MOVEMENT AND TIES TO THE COMMUNIST PARTY
========================================================
The following excerpts are from a very interesting article that
examines the effects of Eurasianism, Marxism and Formalism on arts and
literature in the 1920's, both on artists living in Russian and on
Russian exiles. It provides a unique "picture" of the intertwining of
ideology and artistic expression as political movements changed and
grew over that period. The primary focus of the article is on a
Russian émigré writer named Emiliia Litauer.
The article mentions ties that existed between the Eurasian movement
and the Communist party in 1927. However, when this association was
first initiated is not mentioned. It seems possible, from the account
in this article, that Russian émigrés involved with the Eurasian
movement were expected to join the Communist party, due to "conviction
and dictate".
I have pulled out some excerpts which relate to the movement in
Paris. To make sense of it all, however, you "may" need to read the
entire article (more than once, as in my case! :)
==
"In 1927 Litauer joined the Eurasian organisation in Paris and was
also prompted to become a member of the French Communist Party, which
she dutifully joined, presumably out of a mixture of conviction and
dictate. Her behaviour was not untypical at the time: the increasingly
pro-Soviet stance of the Clamart group of the Eurasian movement (named
after the Paris neighborhood where Suvchinskii lived, and where from
his private address the newspaper Eurasia (Evraziia) was published
between November 1928 and September 1929) was nurtured by the
isolation of the Eurasians from real political power and their growing
belief that the Soviet Union was the only promoter, however
unpalatable and imperfect, of their dream of an imperial Russia
straddling both Europe and Asia without fully identifying itself with
either".
"In 1928-29 Litauer was among the frequent contributors to Eurasia,
where she published a host of reviews and short articles on
philosophy, aesthetics and history. Among the books she wrote about
were some of the most significant works of Continental philosophy and
social thought in the 1920s: Georg Lukács’s History and Class
Consciousness, Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia, Martin Heidegger’s
Being and Time, Drieu la Rochelle’s Geneva or Moscow; she also wrote
about Husserl, Lenin, and Croce, among others".
"She was expelled from France for a time in 1933, following
accusations of Communist propaganda in French and émigré circles".
*****
"On 27 August 1939 Litauer was arrested and charged with espionage.
Under interrogation, she said she had been assigned tasks by Sergei
Efron, {Marina} Tsvetaeva’s husband, who had allegedly ordered her to
penetrate Soviet military installations. After being found guilty,
along with Efron, she was shot on 27 August 1941".
*****
"... Litauer’s engagement with Medvedev and Formalism was more than an
act of mere individual curiosity, and the product of more than just
personal circumstances".
* "In many ways, in 1929 the moment was ripe for a discussion that
would bring the ideas of Formalism and Marxism closer together through
the mediation of a particular section of the Eurasian movement. The
duel between Formalism and Marxism presented a window of opportunity
for the Paris Eurasians to claim their own stake in the redistribution
of the ideological capital taking place in Soviet Russia".
"By 1928, the ideological climate had changed: freedom of speech was
still possible, but the consequences of dissenting from Marxism were
already noticeably harsher. On the other hand, both Marxism and
Formalism were clearly showing signs of a certain methodological
fatigue, part of which was the recognition - stronger among the
Formalists, who were by then taking stock of the school’s recent
history - that neither method would work in isolation and without some
form of mediation and co-operation with the other. As early as 1924
Eikhenbaum registered in his diary that a student at the university
had read out to him a comic poem, in which the young man ridiculed the
Formal Method. Marxism, in turn, was seeking to establish its own
sociological poetics (Jakobson quipped that the phrase was a
contradiction in terms). Medvedev himself was a crucial player in this
process, as the very subtitle of his book, A Critical Introduction to
Sociological Poetics, clearly suggests".
** "The Eurasians, not surprisingly, had a different agenda. They
approached the polemic between Marxism and Formalism with the ambition
to assert a third way for Soviet aesthetics, and for Soviet
ideological life in general. This ‘third way’ was to rest on a blend
of reconciliation and competition with Marxism over the capacity to
mobilise society for projects, highlighting the uniqueness of Russia
in an even more radical fashion. Art was to be seen both as a specific
phenomenon, much along the lines of Formalism, and as a domain
possessing the potential to transform everyday reality in accordance
with the activist spirit of Marxism. It was thus essential to maintain
unobtrusive solidarity with the Marxist framework, while professing at
the same time the overall supremacy of Formalism in supplying impulses
for an aesthetics of production that would better promote, in
Litauer’s own words, a ‘stylistics of Russian modernity’ (stilistika
russkoi sovremennosti).
"Eurasianism, Marxism and Formalism all come into view entangled in a
competition over the power to determine the direction of art and the
place it should occupy in society. This competition assumed the forms
of constant mediation and negotiation between these three streams: the
Formalists had to open their doctrine to the pressures of the
so-called extraliterary ‘series’; the Marxists, or at least the more
sophisticated (which often also meant the less orthodox) among them,
had to accept that the sociology of literature was best applied when
married in some guise to poetics; the Eurasians, as Litauer’s
engagement with Medvedev attests, preferred to have it both ways: to
insist along with the Formalists on the specificity of art, but also
to seek to place art in service of the people by enhancing the
creativity of everyday life. Litauer sought a way out of this apparent
contradiction in the reinvention of Formalism as a movement possessing
- from its very beginnings -considerable potential to endorse and
guide the new forms of social activism and artistic creativity arising
in Soviet Russia".
"Litauer’s approach reflects the
**intrinsic instability of the Paris faction of the Eurasian
movement, which was doomed to spend its last months poised between the
intoxicating ambition of rivalry and the growingly dispiriting reality
of submission vis-ŕ-vis Soviet Marxism".
Read "Seeking a "third way" for Soviet aesthetics: Eurasianism,
Marxism, Formalism" by Galin Tihanov.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/sipa/REGIONAL/HI/tihanov.PDF
=============
SERGEI EFRON
=============
EVERYTHING I found written about Sergei Efron is in conjunction with
his marriage to the writer Marina Tsvetayeva. Therefore, to understand
his life, you cannot escape reading about her!
Summary of the life of Sergei Effron:
--------------------------------------
A young journalist and Cadet in the Officers Academy
1912 - Married Marina Tsvetayeva
1917-1921 - Joined and fought in the White Army
1922 - Reunited with his family in Berlin
1925 - Family settled in Paris and remained for the next fourteen
years.
Developed sympathies for the Soviet Union. Joined the Eurasian
movement. Aligned himself with the Communist NKVD as a spy.
1937 - Implicated for murder of former Soviet agent Ignaty Reyss and
returned to France, but escapes.
In Russia, Efron and daughter Alya are arrested for espionage.
1941 - Efron shot by firing squad.
==
"MARINA TSVETAYEVA (1892-1941), whose father was a classicist and
whose mother was a pianist, was born in Moscowand published her first
book of poems at seventeen. Tsvetayeva left Russia in 1922 with her
two children and ** her husband, Sergei Efron, who fought against
the Red Army in the 1918-1921 Civil War but was later to become a
Soviet spy. ** Often living from hand to mouth, the family remained
abroad until 1939. Two years later, after the execution of her husband
and the arrest of her daughter, Tsvetayeva committed suicide."
From "Letters: Summer 1926 - Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva,
Rainer Maria Rilke". Preface by Susan Sontag.
http://www.nybooks.com/shop/product-file/21/lett21/introduction.pdf
==
"Marina married a weak man, Sergei Efron, whom she romanticised. When
he went away to fight for the White Russians she was unable to cope in
Moscow and the youngest child starved in a state orphanage. She went
** into exile with Efron in 1922 ** but, still involved in one of her
many romantic affairs with weak people, she appeared to him as a
despairing hurricane. They lived first in Czechoslovakia and survived
on her translations, then, disastrously, moved to France where their
living conditions were poor.
** Here Efron’s pro- Soviet activities involved him in some
unpleasant activities including the murder of Gorky’s son. **
When Marina returned to Russia she did so in disbelief of the stories
of purges and forced labour camps. Within four months, however, both
her daughter and husband had been arrested.
** Efron died in prison. **
From an essay written by Gina Wisker, Anglia Polytechnic University,
about the book "A Captive Lion" by Elaine Feinstein. The Literary
Encyclopedia
http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=7282
====
"In 1911, Marina Tsvetayeva met with her destiny, ** Sergei Efron, a
young journalist, **
whom she married the following year. Sergei Efron was to become a
reason why she twice had to change her life dramatically. The first
time was when in 1922, she left Russia in the wake of the Bolshevist
Revolution of 1917 to reunite with her husband in Prague. In so doing,
she became an émigré and a public enemy back home as ** Efron was
targeted by Bolshevik persecutions as an officer and member of the
White Volunteers' Army". **
"The second time she turned over a new leaf was in 1939 when she
followed her husband to the Soviet Union. ** To obtain permission to
return home, Efron had to start collaborating with the N.K.V.D. in
France, which was home to them during the last years of their
emigration".
"The homecoming would become a tragedy as ** her husband and
18-year-old daughter Ariadna were immediately arrested and charged
with 'espionage'. By the time Tsvetayeva hanged herself in Yelabuga in
1941, ** Efron had been shot by firing squad after months in an
N.K.V.D. prison". **
From "MARINA TSVETAYEVA: TALENT AND TRAGEDY." The Embassy of the
Russian Federation in the Netherlands.
http://www.netherlands.mid.ru/netherlands/dnev/eng/dnev2001e/dnev_38_e.html
===
"In 1911, she met and married her fate, the young journalist Sergei
Efron. Many of her famous lyrical poems are dedicated to him, such as
this one: "It is with a challenge that I wear his ring, a wife in
eternity, not on paper..." It was because of Efron that she had to
radically change her life twice: first in 1922, when she left Russia
to join him in Prague ** (he was an officer of the Volunteer White
Army that fought against the Soviet authorities), ** and then in
1939, when she followed her husband back to Russia. Before that, while
still in France, where they and their children lived in emigration, he
had been forced to cooperate with the NKVD in order to be allowed to
return to Russia".
"The return turned into tragedy. The USSR was going through a period
of Stalinist repressions. Tsvetayeva's sister was serving time in a
Stalinist camp. Her husband and 18-year-old daughter Ariadna, too,
were soon arrested on espionage charges".
From "110th anniversary of the birth of Russian poetess Marina
Tsvetayeva". OnLine Pravda (2002)
http://english.pravda.ru/culture/2002/10/08/37868.html
===
"The revolutionary years were a mess; ** Efron fought for the Whites
and they were separated for a few years.** Tsvetaeva lived in poverty
in Moscow with her two daughters, one of whom died of starvation in a
poorhouse. She emigrated to Berlin in 1921 and was reunited with
Efron. They later moved to Paris, where she lived from 1925-39. Her
return to the USSR in 1939, following her husband's disappearance
after his alleged involvement in an émigré assassination plot, was a
dead end.
** Efron had indeed made it back to Russia, but he was seen as
unreliable and was shot shortly afterward". **
"Tsvetaeva Marina". http://www.geometry.net/authors/tsvetaeva_marina.php
==
At Koktebel Tsvetaeva also met Sergei Yakovlevich Efron, a cadet in
the Officers' Academy. They were married in 1912...... Tsvetaeva and
her husband lived in the Crimea until the revolution, and they had two
daughters: Ariadna, or Alya (born 1912) and Irina (born 1917). When
the Revolution began, Efron joined the Tsar's White Army, and Marina
returned to Moscow in the hope of meeting him there. However, it would
be five years before they were reunited; after the Bolsheviks took
Moscow, Efron left for the Crimea.....In 1921, after three years of
silence, Tsvetaeva finally received word from her husband. He was
alive and in Germany. In May 1922, Tsvetaeva and Alya left the Soviet
Union and were reunited with Efron in Berlin.....In 1925 the family
settled in Paris, where they would live for the next 14
years....Tsvetaeva did not feel at home in Paris's circle of Russian
émigré writers. Although she had written passionately pro-White poems
during the Revolution, her fellow émigrés thought that she was not
sufficiently anti-Soviet.......
"Meanwhile, Tsvetaeva's husband really was developing Soviet
sympathies. Homesick for Russia,
** he joined a movement called the Eurasians, which supported the
repatriation of émigrés.
"He dreamed of returning to the U.S.S.R., but was afraid because of
his past as a White soldier. Eventually -- whether out of idealism or
to gain acceptance from the Communists -- he began spying for the
NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB....Alya (his daughter) shared his
views, and increasingly turned against her mother. In 1937, she
returned to the Soviet Union. Later that year, Efron too was forced to
return. The French police had implicated him in the murder of the
former Soviet agent Ignaty Reyss.......After his escape, the police
interrogated Tsvetaeva, but she seemed confused by their questions and
ended up reading them some French translations of her poetry. The
police thought that she might be mad, and concluded that she knew
nothing of the murder. Tsvetaeva does not seem to have known that her
husband was a spy.......In 1939 she and her son returned to the Soviet
Union.....Soon after Tsvetaeva's return, Efron and Alya were arrested
for espionage. Alya's fiancé, it turned out, was actually an NKVD
agent who had been assigned to spy on the family. Efron was shot in
1941; Alya served eight years in prison. Both were exonerated after
Stalin's death, owing to 'lack of corpus delicti."
From "Tsvetaeva, Marina Ivanovna."
http://www.cartage.org.lb/en/themes/Biographies/MainBiographies/T/tsvetaevavanovna/1.html
*****************
I hope the above information proves enlightening and helpful. I
thank you for the opportunity to spend time on a delightful research
task. I certainly look forward to reading your book in the future!
Sincerely,
umiat
Search Strategy
Sergei Efron
Sergei Efron biography
1920s eurasian movement
eurasian movement 1923 - 1925
Paris 1920s AND Eurasianism
Eurasianism |
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