Russians in 20th century France is one of the most dramatic and vivid pages of our culture. And, first of all, it concerns the capital of France.
In Paris there are a number of unique churches and the Cathedral of Alexander Nevsky, through which the entire Russian emigration passed. To this day, the cathedral keeps icons of White Guard units, the Russian Tsar came here, Picasso and his Russian wife were married here, princes, counts, poets, writers, artists, military men were buried here….
The Montparnasse neighborhood was no less significant for the Russian emigration. Vladimir Mayakovsky, Ilya Ehrenburg and Alexei Tolstoy met in its restaurants with those who did not wish to live in the USSR, in the very restaurants where Vladimir Lenin and Lev Trotsky were seen not so long ago… In the schools of painting in Montparnasse one could meet Marc Chagall, Zinaida Serebryakova, Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova…. Evenings of Ivan Bunin, Vladislav Khodasevich, Boris Zaitsev were held in one of the most fashionable hotels… To this day, descendants of the Grzybins, Benois, Rachmaninov and many others live in Montparnasse …..
As you travel along the streets in the 8th and 16th arrondissements, you are literally haunted by memories associated with our compatriots. Here is the theater where Ivan Bunin’s Nobel Prize was honored, the street where the famous Onegin lived, here they tried to revive the traditions of Russian opera, here Savenkov made his plans to fight the Bolsheviks, in this house Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Gippius gathered for the famous literary evenings, and here is a memorial plaque in honor of Ivan Bunin who lived here….
The central districts of Paris are no less connected with it: Petliura’s assassination, the first Diaghilev Seasons, addresses where Marina Tsvetaeva, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam lived… Names, events, dates, destinies – all this is inscribed in the enchanting beauty of the city, which is more than 23 centuries old….
