In our age of cosmetic fantasy, a dramatic love story between two bespectacled art historians sounds implausible. But add in the Montague-Capulet effect of the Iron Curtain, along with a fearless Russian heroine who proved that love can conquer every barrier, and you have an enchanting tale: a completely true one, beautifully written by the art historian and novelist Iain Pears, the author of An Instance of the Fingerpost among many other books.
Pears, who had been a pupil of Francis Haskell, began to visit his former tutor’s widow Larissa Salmina on a regular basis after 2000. He soon realised from odd remarks just how extraordinary their lives had been. He pointed to a photograph of a boy in naval uniform. ‘Ah,’ Larissa replied, ‘that’s my cousin. He was eaten by a bear.’ And then she added for emphasis: ‘It was a white bear.’
Larissa’s father was Nikolai Salmin, an officer in the Red Army whose family had been members of the minor nobility. He had been commissioned into the Tsarist army from the Page Corps, yet he joined the Bolsheviks during the civil war when Trotsky wanted former officers to train and command their troops. Salmin later joined the staff of Marshal Tukhachevsky, Stalin’s hated rival.
This might have been a death sentence, but he escaped by a miracle. Another Nikolai Salmin, a young chess player, was mistakenly arrested in his stead. Larissa’s uncle, a naval officer, was also arrested and tortured, an experience with which he regaled friends after the downfall of Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the NKVD. The upper reaches of Soviet society constituted a bizarre network. When the 90-year-old Larissa happened to discuss Lavrenti Beria, Yezhov’s equally vile successor, she came out with a perplexing qualification. ‘But we always quite liked Beria in my family. Well, you see he murdered the man who tortured my uncle.’ After that exchange, Pears urged her to record her memories.
The ‘lost continent’ of the subtitle conveys the Eurasian Atlantis of scholarship which existed before the flood of television and social media. Knowledge, for that rarefied international intelligentsia, of art, literature and music was the work of a lifetime, not a fleeting meme from a few keystrokes. Haskell, educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, where he was a member of the Apostles, came from an Iraqi Jewish family, like the Sassoons. Awkward and no Lothario, he suffered from paralysing shyness, almost a form of impostor syndrome, despite his outstanding mind. Having abandoned attempts to become a novelist, he chose a career that would lead to his appointment as professor of the history of art at Oxford. He would be recognised as ‘one of the most innovative and influential historians of his generation’.
Using Francis’s 60 volumes of diaries deposited at the National Gallery, together with a record of many months of kitchen-table conversation with Larissa, Pears brilliantly reconstructs how this improbable couple came from opposite sides in the Cold War to meet in a side-street restaurant in Venice in 1962, the year of the Cuban missile crisis.
Larissa, who had been evacuated from Leningrad with her mother during the wartime siege, survived thanks to guardian angels and sheer good luck. The two lived in Ufa, near the Urals, where they made friends with Dolores Ibarurri, La Pasionaria, quartered there with leading members of the Spanish Communist party. In 1944, they returned to Leningrad, a place they both loved. It was a ghost city by then, but Larissa was happy. She read voraciously and, on returning to school, happily flouted all regulations. She learned how to forge signatures and even official stamps. But to gain entry to the Academy of Fine Arts she needed to join the Komsomol and pretend to be a good communist.
She possessed an instinctive genius for surviving the ideological minefield of Soviet bureaucracy. In 1953, during exams in philosophy for which she had done no work and in which she had no great interest, she told the examiner as she stood up to answer questions that she could not speak because of Stalin’s death a few days earlier:
I was not very well versed in dialectical materialism, and so when it was my turn I said: ‘You know, I’m so upset that I can’t answer!’ The examiner replied ‘I understand, I understand’ and passed me anyway.
Larissa possessed an instinctive genius for surviving the ideological minefield of Soviet bureaucracy
Having gained a degree in the history of art, Larissa was selected for a career at the Hermitage. She was put to work cataloguing Old Master drawings, having been semi-adopted by Mikhail Dobroklonsky, the leading expert in the field. The Hermitage was one of the few places where her irreverence and joie de vivre were not at risk. She found herself surrounded by fellow spirits, several of whom had suffered in the gulag. She also studied Tiepolo and began to learn Italian, and that was why, to everyone’s astonishment, she was later chosen by Nikita Khrushchev to lead the Soviet team at the Venice biennale.
During this decade before they met, Francis had been travelling in Italy. While Larissa concentrated on Old Master drawings, he studied religious art up and down the country in churches and uncatalogued archives. He discovered that there was no ‘Jesuit style’, as had been lazily assumed. The needy Jesuits had simply accepted the self-aggrandising art preferred by rich merchants, in which family patriarchs were included in biblical scenes. This led Francis off in interesting directions about patronage, taste and art appreciation.
His diaries also depicted numerous ‘Felliniesque’ encounters with bizarre aristocrats in crumbling palazzi – ‘macabre and grotesque enough for a 19th-century novel’ – alongside observation trips to brothels and vignettes of Italian life which could have come out of the Decameron. Yet he witnessed the country migrating rapidly from inbred village life to cities, largely due to the Lambretta and the Fiat Cinquecento.
In the summer of 1962, Larissa arrived in Venice, knowing far more about Tiepolo than the Soviet art she was supposed to be promoting. Once she had set up the exhibition and escorted Stravinsky and the film director Andrei Tarkovsky around it, she had time to herself. Francis, who had always loved Venice, was there in a strange mood, a sort of melancholia brought on by loneliness. Fortunately, an Italian friend presented him with a ticket to a concert in the Fondazione Cini. He gave another ticket to Larissa.
The concert was perfectly pleasant and the friend went home, leaving Francis and Larissa entranced with one another and talking together until the early hours. Francis wrote in his diary that night:
She is rather pretty and immensely attractive with, as so often in Russians, absolutely no poise whatsoever so that one is often surprised by her clumsiness. She is wholly delightful, full of enthusiasm, gay, always bursting out in laughter, exceedingly intelligent and cultivated. I could marry someone like her.
In fact Larissa was already married, albeit in a very casual way, and was a great friend of her husband’s mistress. But it was not long before Francis and Larissa realised that they could not live apart. And so their troubles began.
The 1960s saw a new age of spy mania and spy movies. Francis, as a former member of the Apostles, went to Guy Burgess’s birthday party in Moscow, to find his homesick host wearing an Old Etonian tie and eager to discuss mutual friends. Through their poetry, Russians believed that they, above everyone else, felt love to the depths of their being. Old-fashioned communists could not. Human affection was far too uncontrollable and subversive for the Soviet state.
Pears’s account provides a rollercoaster ride of hopes and fears, of secret trysts in non-aligned Yugoslavia, smuggled letters written in code, the Cuban missile crisis apparently ending all hopes of marriage, and then the threat of the hardline Leonid Brezhnev replacing Khrushchev. Yet a mixture of luck and Larissa’s inspired string-pulling within the Soviet system achieved success against the odds. The couple’s story is a wonderful tribute to the power of love overcoming a soulless ideology.
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