NO OTHER RUSSIAN TRAIN is quite so full of hope as Train 17, the year-round weekly rail service that links Moscow with the Riviera. The first part of the journey has a certain novelty appeal, as passengers accustom themselves to lives shaped by the quiet rhythm of the train. Solyanka for supper in the restaurant car, with the bleached beauty of birch forests slipping by beyond the window. In the sleeping cars, the provodnitsy are the guardians of order.
On the second day, the country becomes less two-dimensional: Central Europe’s soft hills eclipse Russia’s great plains... Stern castles perched on hilltops preside over gentle valleys.
By the morning of the third day, the train is cruising through Italian sunshine. There are pelmeni for lunch in the on-board restaurant as the train creeps past the Certosa di Pavia, the ornate Charterhouse where generations of Carthusian monks have lived quiet lives full of faith and hope. Then, soon after lunch comes the moment for which many travelers on the train have patiently waited: that first glimpse of the Mediterranean.
Suddenly, as the train screeches around a tight curve in the hills behind Genoa, the valley opens out to reveal an inviting sweep of blue sea to the south. Within a few minutes, the train is down on the coast, which it hugs for much of the final four hours of its journey to Nice. There are trademark green Ligurian shutters on the windows of sturdy villas, and there is a repeating panorama of beaches and coves, citrus and olive groves, peach trees and artichoke bushes. There are sparkling views of the azure sea, tunnels aplenty, Menton and Monaco, and a tantalizing glimpse of the bay at Villefranche just before the train pulls into Nice.
Russia’s love affair with the Riviera is symbolized in this new train service, which made its maiden journey in September last year, restoring a link that had not existed since summer 1914. Russians helped create the Riviera, adopting it as a winter retreat in the mid-nineteenth century. In those days, the County of Nice was more Italian in demeanor than it feels today, and the region’s political and economic ties were with Sardinia and Savoy rather than France. The seasonal Russian visitors to the Riviera were as surprised as anyone when they arrived in Nice in 1860 to find that Garibaldi’s home city and its hinterland had been ceded to France. Henceforth there were two Rivieras. The one west of the Ponte San Luigi was French, while that to the east was Italian. And Russians made themselves equally at home on both sides of the frontier.
During the last four decades of the nineteenth century, Russian communities blossomed along the coast, most conspicuously in Nice and Menton, both in France, and at Sanremo on the Italian side of the border. The Riviera had many uses. A sojourn by the Mediterranean was a winter diversion for those who on summer nights entertained in the salons of St. Petersburg. But many Russians sought Riviera sunshine to avoid illness or to alleviate the symptoms of disease. Scattered epidemics of typhus appeared in many communities in Russia during and after the Napoleonic Wars, and by the 1830s entire provinces of Russia were afflicted.
By the mid-nineteenth century, typhus had become commonplace in St. Petersburg and, though the wealthy were largely immune from infection, those with means were inclined to flee the city during the typhus season (which extended from Christmas until Easter). Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (Отцы и дети) reminded a wide readership of educated Russians of the terrors of typhus, and gave them a fine excuse to look south. English residents of the Riviera, observing the massive influx of Russian visitors in the year or two after the publication of Turgenev’s 1862 novel, referred to Russians’ sudden affection for the Mediterranean coast as “the Turgenev effect.”
Russians did not always return to St. Petersburg in the spring in quite the same good health as they had left the preceding fall. This is because thousands of tubercular English had traveled to the Riviera to find respite for their bad lungs, liberally distributing their bronchial bacilli through Riviera society. Unlike typhus, tuberculosis was no respecter of social class, and many a Riviera cemetery has graves of Russian princes lying cheek by jowl with impoverished English poets or French philosophers — all victims of virulent consumption.
Russians had of course visited the Riviera coast well prior to Turgenev’s book. The Russian fleet had discovered the great natural harbor at Villefranche-sur-Mer (just east of Nice) in the eighteenth century. Count Alexey Grigorevich Orlov, favorite of Catherine the Great and commander of the Imperial Fleet dispatched in 1770 against the Turks, sought shelter from rough weather at Villefranche, sending back reports to St. Petersburg on the quality of the moorings, the civility of the local population, and the excellent food that he and his officers enjoyed during a few days exploring the coast around Villefranche. Soon Russian naval captains were looking for any opportunity to berth at Villefranche-sur-Mer. Count Orlov’s younger brother, Fyodor Grigoryevich, also a distinguished naval commander, was a regular visitor to Villefranche.
Before long, Russia had secured a lease on the port, converting the town’s impressive sixteenth-century citadel into a fuel depot and establishing an oceanographic research station in an erstwhile lazaretto near Villefranche harbor. For the Russians, access to the bay at Villefranche (rade de Villefranche in French) was not merely an excuse for Riviera diversions; it assumed great strategic significance as a safe port-of-call for Russian ships transferring between the Baltic and Black Sea fleets. The Russian navy made regular use of its Villefranche prerogative until the outbreak of World War I.
Positive reports of the coast east of Nice made a considerable impact on St. Petersburg society, and in 1856 Alexandra Fyodorovna, Tsar Nicholas I’s ailing widow, arrived in Villefranche, delivering an aristocratic endorsement of the region. Her patronage allowed the construction in 1859 of the Riviera’s first Russian Orthodox church, on rue Longchamp in Nice. It was the first of over a dozen to be built in the region, most of which are still well-used today (see page 50). Russians built homes in the newly developing quarters of Nice. Artisans and business folk opted for the lower areas behind the Promenade des Anglais, while those with aristocratic connections (or pretensions) favored the Carabacel district, tucked away behind the Old Town, or the airy hills of Cimiez and Caucade. The number of Russian permanent residents in Nice increased twenty-fold during the 1860s.
By the time the County of Nice was incorporated into France in 1860, Russian enthusiasm for the Riviera was well-established. The French media delighted in this exotic element in their new Mediterranean département. The news pages eagerly reported on every fresh development in the growing Russian diaspora along the coast, while the feuilletons pondered serious matters like the nature of l’âme slave (the Slavic soul), or more frivolous issues like the latest Romanov romance.
The death of the Grand Duke and Crown Prince of Russia, Nikolai Alexandrovich, then only 21 years old, in the Villa Bermond in Nice in 1865, meant that the Riviera became not merely a destination for play and passion, but also a place for pilgrimage. The young prince’s coffin lay in state in the Russian church in rue Longchamp before being taken to Villefranche, where the frigate Alexander Nevsky carried the prince’s remains to St. Petersburg. It is a mark of Nice’s strong engagement with its Russian community that the authorities in Nice promptly renamed the road by the Villa Bermond the boulevard Tsarévitch, so signaling a civic empathy with Russia’s bereavement. The Villa Bermond, site of so painful a tragedy, was demolished and replaced by parkland, where a commemorative chapel was constructed. The Russian cathedral in Nice was later built in the same park.
The Russian colony on the Riviera was boosted each winter by seasonal migrants from the homeland. The journey became very much easier with the opening in 1872 of the final section of the railway from Genoa, along the Ligurian coast. But it was not until 1898 that the first direct train from Russia to the Riviera — a luxury express — was launched from St Petersburg, following much the same route via Vienna and Genoa as today’s service between Moscow and Nice. The direct train brought artists and writers to the Riviera, among them Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, a company that was to develop an intimate association with the region. When the dancers arrived by train for a performance in Monaco around Easter 1911, they were still clad in heavy winter furs from St. Petersburg. Bronislava Nijinska recorded the extraordinary experience of walking through Monte Carlo in warm spring sunshine, while locals looked in amazement at the new arrivals from the East with their heavy boots, coats and gloves.
Russians and French interests intermingled. When Diaghilev wanted to produce an acrobatic ballet about a famous train, he chose not the luxury express from St. Petersburg to the Riviera, but Le Train Bleu, the exclusive first class train with distinctive blue carriages that connected Calais and Paris with the principal Riviera resorts. Russians sponsored and supported music on the Riviera and their French neighbors rushed to buy tickets for events with a Russian flavor. Sometimes there were unexpected results. When Mikhail Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar was performed in Nice in 1890, the proceedings were punctuated by the audience proclaiming “Vive la Russie” and “Vive La France.” It is probably the only time that a Glinka opera was interrupted to allow the orchestra to perform both God, Save the Tsar and La Marseillaise.
To visitors from northern climes, the lush, warm-blooded Riviera seemed like a veritable garden of Eden, a place not just for princes, but for poets, playwrights and philosophers. Gogol and Tolstoy had both visited long before the Romanovs arrived. Later, Chekhov brought his bad lungs to the Riviera, staying — as many impecunious Russians did — at the Pension Russe in Nice’s rue Gounod. A few years later, Lenin was a guest at the same establishment.
Riviera life had its Russian characters, women like Youzia Koberwein, the illegitimate daughter of Tsar Nicholas I. She married the famous Nice artist Joseph Fricero. Few women brought such provocative color as Marie Bashkirtseff, the diarist and artist, who injected a dose of feminist zeal in Nice society before moving to Paris, where she died of tuberculosis at just 25.
By the time Nice’s luxurious hotel Negresco opened in 1913, storm clouds were gathering over Europe. The direct train from St. Petersburg ran for the last time in July 1914. Tsar Nicholas II had ordered a huge, 16,000-crystal chandelier for delivery to Nice, intending that it be transported on to St. Petersburg. War and revolution intervened, and the Romanovs never took delivery of their glittering chandelier. Today it hangs in a grand salon in the Negresco.
Russia’s love affair with the Riviera came to an abrupt and untimely end. A generation of minor Russian royals, along with a few distinguished Romanovs, found themselves stranded on the Riviera. Their visits to the pawnbroker in Monte Carlo became ever more frequent, until eventually they had nothing left to pawn. By the mid-1920s a whole brigade of Nice refuse collectors was made up of impoverished but grandly titled Russians.
In the years after World War I, Americans discovered the Riviera, favoring the region as a summer rather than a winter destination, persuading Nice hoteliers not to bar and shutter their premises after Easter. Russia’s star on the Riviera had faded, yet many aspects of Russian life remained. Prince Nicholas Romanov was born on the Riviera in 1922 and, as head of the Romanov Family Association, still claims today to be the legitimate heir to the Russian throne. The graves of many of his relations are in the wonderful Russian cemetery at Caucade, on the edge of Nice.
Soon a different kind of Russian discovered the Riviera. Men like Serge Voronoff, who arrived on the Riviera in the 1920s with a bold plan for rejuvenating the aged by grafting the tissue from young apes onto his frail patients’ sexual organs. Voronoff touted a scheme for monkey farms across the Riviera, but the French kept him at bay, limiting his activities to the Italian side of the border, where Voronoff set up his monkey cages and clinic at the Château Grimaldi.
The Russian-born novelist Vladimir Nabokov shared the staying power of the Romanovs. He had first visited the Riviera in 1904, and five decades later was still a regular. He spent spells living in Cannes, Menton and Antibes. During his last visit to the region in the winter of 1960-1961, when he stayed in Nice, Nabokov wrote Pale Fire. By that time, Russia’s flame for the Riviera had truly been extinguished.
The Russian fleet no longer calls at Villefranche. But today the beautiful bay, framed by the wooded slopes of Mont Alban in the west and Cap Ferrat to the east attracts a new breed of Russian visitors, who arrive both on cruise ships and private yachts. The ample rade de Villefranche affords deep-water moorings for even the largest cruise ship, while still leaving space for a fleet of luxury yachts. Russian visitors come ashore and wander past the old lazaretto up to the fort. The Orlov brothers are commemorated in busts of Russian naval commanders that decorate the streets of Villefranche. Some Russian visitors are surely surprised to find locals lunching on selle de veau Orloff, a nice reminder that the dietary preferences of early Russian visitors to the Riviera contributed much to modern Riviera cuisine.
Auguste Escoffier, later to become a celebrated chef, was apprenticed to his uncle François, who ran the Restaurant Français in Nice, an establishment much favored by officers of Russian ships berthed at Villefranche. The brigade de cuisine at the Restaurant Français included a Russian cook, whose approach to food seemed deliciously exotic to young Auguste. He was quick to imitate dishes like Russian kulebiak (Кулебяка), which many years later emerged as Escoffier’s trademark coulibiac de saumon.
Some of the Russians who arrive at Villefranche in their private yachts are tempted to stay. Realtors from Nice to Menton and beyond have long targeted foreign property buyers, printing their advertisements in English, German, French and Italian. Over the last dozen years, their linguistic repertoire has been extended to include Russian. Advertisements in Cyrillic for expensive villas are now commonplace. Russians have been particularly keen to buy or rent trophy properties on Cap Ferrat, the gorgeous wooded headland that juts out into the Mediterranean on the east side of the rade de Villefranche. The pampered hotel at the southern extremity of the cape, the Grand-Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat, has become extraordinarily popular with Moscow’s business elite and their families, as well as with expatriate Russians based in Paris, London and New York. Appropriately, in 2007 it was purchased by the Russian-born businessman Len Blavatnik.
The tiny footpath around the pine-clad coast of Cap Ferrat is called the Sentier des Douaniers, a reminder that these trails were created to help customs officials prevent smuggling. Friedrich Nietzsche found those paths ideal for quiet reflection. Somerset Maugham walked those same routes, as did Jean Cocteau and Evelyn Waugh. Nowadays it is Russian voices you will hear on the paths around Cap Ferrat and the talk is more likely to be of business and finance than literature and art.
On the west side of the rade de Villefranche, Maurice, who has lived in Villefranche all his life, sits on the quayside where once Russian frigates moored. He has an excellent view of Cap Ferrat. “Yes, Russians are all over the cape nowadays,” he says, and goes on to tell the tale of the sumptuous villa that King Leopold of Belgium built on Cap Ferrat in 1902. “It was a place to keep his mistress,” explains Maurice with a conspiratorial wink, going on to hint that the Villa Leopolda has always been surrounded by intrigue. “It’s the world’s most expensive private home,” says Maurice, who recounts how, in 2008, owner Lily Safra agreed to sell the villa to Russian entrepreneur Mikhail Prokhorov for $500 million. “That was the moment when we all knew where today’s real wealth lies,” says Maurice. The story took a further twist last year when Prokhorov walked away from the deal and a Nice court ruled that he had to forfeit his $50 million deposit on the villa. “That’s the new Riviera Russians for you,” says Maurice with a smile. RL
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