Mapping the Feminine: Russian Women and Cultural Difference

Marina Ledkovsky at Columbia

Marina Ledkovsky at Columbia Robert Belknap Marina Ledkovsky and I both came to the Slavic Department at Columbia in 1952 and still rejoice in it as emeriti. We rarely met, at first, because she was an undergraduate and I a graduate student, though she already knew most of the things I had come to learn. After completing school in the Lyceum Cecilienschule in Berlin, she had attended the Universita di Perugia and the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat in Berlin. Her English, French, and German were native, and the Russian she speaks has often been the envy of Russians who treasure what the Soviets laid waste. More important than her formal education, growing up in Germany, France, Italy, and on family estates that the Versailles liberation of Poland had left outside Soviet control had socialized her into a Europe that history has since pulled apart, a world of great privilege, great obligation, and cultural riches that transcended national boundaries. At Columbia, Marina produced scholarship that Slavists will depend on for generations; she also taught literature , linguistics, and advanced language with a grace and energy that continue to turn her students and her students' students into richly civilized human beings. Most important of all, perhaps, she not only explored and taught Russian culture; she exemplified the best of it for all of us. Russians can be grim and arrogant, but Marina showed us the unpretentious, reassuring charm that holds that whole culture together and attracts so many of us to the Russian world. Her father and her mother's mother were both German, with Scandinavian and French Protestant ancestry further back, but her strongest family ties were with her mother's family, the Nabokovs. Vladimir Nabokov's father, Vladimir, was the son of Dimitrii Nikolaevich Nabokov, Alexander II's Minister of Justice. Dimitrii's oldest son, Dimitrii Dimitrievich, married Lydia Eduardovna Falz-Fein, who came from a grand German family and gave birth to the important composer Nikolai Nabokov, and Sofiia, Marina's mother. In 1918, a German officer, Victor Fasolt, helped Sofiia's family to flee the Revolution through Ukraine on their way to Sebastopol and Athens. They moved to Berlin, and in 1920, she married Fasolt there in the Orthodox Church at the Russian Embassy that still maintained allegiance to the Tsar. Marina has recorded her family memories in a number of articles written for the sake of history both before and after it became possible to visit the old estates and Petersburg houses and help preserve the family heritage in its Russian milieu. Mapping the Feminine: Russian Women and Cultural Difference. Hilde Hoogenboom, Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, and Irina Reyfman, eds. Bloomington, IN: Siavica Publishers, 2008,11 - 14. 12 ROBERT BELKNAP She lived through the Second World War in Germany, where her father's death was connected with one of the final attempts to assassinate Hitler. She married Boris Mikhailovich Ledkovsky in 1943, and three of her four children were born in Germany. Her husband had been born into a priestly family and educated in Novocherkassk and Rostov on the Don before going to study composition, conducting, and musicology at the Moscow Conservatory. He served in the tsarist and the White armies in the south and emigrated to Bulgaria in 1921, where he became assistant chorus-master in the Sofia Opera and choir director at the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. In 1925, he moved to Paris, played in orchestras, and was choir director in the Synod Church. He moved to Berlin, where he conducted Cossack choruses and Orthodox Church choirs. All his life, he bore himself like a soldier. He looked austere and only occasionally came to Slavic Department occasions, but when he did, I always sought him out, because he was one of the most engaging conversationalists I have encountered. In 1951, the family was able to move to New York. Even with lots of practice , emigration is not easy. Alexandra Tolstoy'S Foundation, with its deep religious and cultural roots, helped Marina and her family find its way in the weirdness of New York. Boris became choir director at the Synod Church in New York and taught church singing at St. Vladimir's Seminary; at the same time he was composing liturgical music or adapting it for English-speaking churches. Marina's American experience began with the most menial work, but by 1956, she had American university credentials and was teaching Latin, French, and German to the children of the West Side intelligentsia at St. Hilda's and St. Hugh...