July 01, 2007

A Russian Village in Connecticut

On June 19, 1930, an enigmatic advertisement appeared in the New York Times classified section. It was buried among listings for large plots of farm land and expensive vacation homes in Connecticut:

Churaevka lies in the heart of Connecticut’s Central Naugatuck Valley. East of Waterbury, Interstate-84 crosses a bridge over the Pomperaug River, along whose banks maples, oaks and birches shimmer in the wind. A narrow, hidden, two-lane road leads north off Exit 13, quickly ascends a steep slope, and arrives at the central landmark of Churaevka: a small fieldstone chapel topped with an onion dome.

Unlike many of the urban neighborhoods in American cities where Russians settled after the Revolution, Churaevka is a bucolic village that echoes the character of dacha communities around St. Petersburg and Moscow. There is a sylvan Russian atmosphere about the place: light filters through the crimson, orange and gold leaves, and the crisp country air is faintly scented with smoke from wood-burning stoves. Connecticut’s town greens feel far away, and the chapel conjures images of an Easter procession circumambulating the chapel, of euphoric Slavonic chants and puffs of incense, of babushki preparing pirozhki and kulich, of feasting and laughing, of reminiscing about life in Russia. But this place is empty – no one is to be seen.

A small historical marker in front of the chapel, replete with Russian ornament and faux Slavonic script, gives a brief history of the village: founded by Leo Tolstoy’s son Ilya and Siberian author George Grebenstchikoff, Churaevka was envisioned as an artists’ colony for White Russian émigrés after the Revolution. The placard notes Churaevka’s connection with familiar names from the post-Revolutionary diaspora: Igor Sikorsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Nicholas Roerich, Michael Fokine, and Baron Leo Von Nolde. The text provides tantalizing hints of Churaevka’s unusual history and its connection to the larger struggle of Russian refugees to reconcile their new lives in America with their former lives in Russia.

The archives of the Southbury Historical Society offer further clues. There, newspaper clippings, land deeds, photographs, transcribed interviews, and other documents dating back to the early part of the 20th century, reveal how Churaevka came about, and how the village fits into the history of Russian America.

Count Ilya Tolstoy was one of the first refugees to arrive in New York after the Russian Revolution. Like his father Lev Tolstoy, Ilya was a writer, and in the early 1920’s he started working with a translator who lived in Waterbury, Connecticut. In a story recounted by Walter Ouspensky, a longtime village resident, Tolstoy was on his way home from a visit with his translator, George Calderon, when he pulled off the road near Southbury and decided to take a stroll through the woods. What he found was surely unexpected: a peaceful landscape which reminded him of his ancestral home near Tula, 130 miles south of Moscow.

Yasnaya Polyana, the 2,100-acre Tolstoy estate near Tula, was where patriarch Lev Tolstoy had penned his epics War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Large and idyllic, Tolstoy’s estate was a town unto itself, with a manor house, village, cemetery, farm, large pond, orchards, and groves of birch, oak, and maple trees.

Ilya – the third of 13 children, eight of whom survived childhood – spent his formative years at Yasnaya Polyana, moving at age 16 with his family to Moscow, in 1881. He retained a great fondness for the estate, and for the country life. In his memoir, Reminiscences of Tolstoy, he described horseback riding as “the chief passion” of his youth. He returned to Yasnaya Polyana as an adult, and, after his father passed away in 1910, struggled with his family to maintain the estate.

In 1911, the Tolstoys tried to sell the land and holdings or to have the Russian State take it under its protection. They even sent a cousin to America to convince wealthy industrialists, including Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, to purchase the property. No one was interested. Shortly thereafter, the Russian Revolution of 1917 intervened and Count Tolstoy emigrated. His sister Alexandra stayed behind for a few years and looked after the estate, along with his brother Sergei. In 1919, the estate was taken under the protection of the Soviet state.

After a brief stopover in Paris, Tolstoy arrived in New York, where an informal Russian refugee community had begun to coalesce. Three years later, he abruptly moved with his wife to Southbury. Though his predilection for the pastoral landscape of central Connecticut was romanticized in the press of the time, and though it is clear that he enjoyed rural living, troubled finances may have been the real cause for the move. A headline in the New York Times society pages of October 14, 1922, reported that the Count had been forced to pawn his family jewels soon after moving to Connecticut. In the same article, Tolstoy said his gentlemanly pursuits in Connecticut included “painting Connecticut scenery in its autumn beauty.”

Autumn may have had a particularly strong nostalgic effect on Tolstoy, for the following fall, Tolstoy purchased a single acre of property on the Housatonic River from local farmer E. G. Scoville. There he built his own Yasnaya Polyana on a miniscule scale – a small cabin in the woods with clapboard siding, a deep porch, and exterior stairs leading into the attic. Two years later, Tolstoy expanded his land, purchasing an additional hundred acres.

Tolstoy’s dacha was a social retreat and he invited many of his friends to come and spend time with him there. In 1925, his friend George Grebenstchikoff, a Siberian author, came to visit him. While Tolstoy had seen in the landscape a resemblance to Tula region, Grebenstchikoff saw a different geography: his home village of Nikolayevsk, located in a valley of the Altai Mountains, close to the borders of Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China. In his book Gonets: Pisma s Pomperaga (“Messenger: Letters from the Pomperaug”), he wrote, “Here, among the wooded hills, in the confluence of the two ancient Indian rivers of the Housatonic and Pomperaug, I found what I only had in Altai: quiet, purity, and independence.”

Unlike Tolstoy, Grebenstchikoff came from humble beginnings. He was born into a peasant family in Altai, son of a miner. After working in menial jobs as a teenager, he began writing and became a local newspaper editor. Eventually he moved to St. Petersburg, where he fell in with artists and writers, becoming close friends with Maxim Gorky, among others. The World War disrupted his stay in Petersburg, however, and he became an officer and a war correspondent for a Moscow newspaper.

Near the end of the Russian Civil War, in 1921, Grebenstchikoff fled to Constantinople. He spent a brief time in Africa, and then moved on to Paris, which had a sizable Russian émigré community. There he became friends with Nicholas Roerich, a Russian spiritualist and painter who had fled from St. Petersburg several years earlier (see Russian Life, Jan/Feb 2001).

Grebenstchikoff and Roerich shared a love of the Altai Mountains, as well as a belief that culture and art could play a significant role the struggle for world peace. In 1924, Roerich invited Grebenstchikoff to come and lecture in the United States at the Master Institute for United Arts, a school he had founded in New York three years earlier. Later that year, he invited Grebenstchikoff to move to New York permanently, to work at the Institute and participate in his program of promoting peace through culture.

Roerich offered to set Grebenstchikoff up as director of a new publishing company under the umbrella of the Master Institute, also suggesting that Grebenstchikoff could start a center for Siberian cultural studies. Though many of his closest friends, including the writer Ivan Bunin, sought to dissuade him, Grebenstchikoff decided to accept Roerich’s offer and sail to New York. He named the new publishing house Alatas, in homage to the Altai Mountains of his youth. He later explained, in the preface to his book The Turbulent Giant, that “Alatas means ‘white stone’ and still glitters in my memory and symbolizes eternal purity and unshakable solidarity.”

Grebenstchikoff was dissatisfied with work at the Master Institute. Soon after arriving in New York, he was already making larger plans: searching for a place to form a commune based on cooperative living, where the production of Russian (and Siberian) cultural work could flourish, protected from Soviet interference. He must have discussed this with his friends Igor Sikorsky (who later invented the helicopter) and Count Tolstoy, because soon both would play instrumental roles in the formation of the utopian community.

In the Connecticut landscape Tolstoy showed Grebenstchikoff in April of 1925, Grebenstchikoff found the site where his utopian vision would be tested. With Igor Sikorsky’s financial backing, he purchased much of Tolstoy’s land, and the following year purchased an additional 100 acres.

Armed with a naturalistic philosophy of a return to the land, Grebenstchikoff hoped to promote rural living and artistic production through the creation of a bucolic artist’s commune. He named the village Churaevka, after the fictional Siberian town at the heart of his seven-volume novel, The Churaevy (the book was a best-selling novel among émigrés and went through eight printings).

In 1927, Roerich transferred ownership of Alatas to Grebenstchikoff, which the latter relocated to a new garage attached to his home in Churaevka. By this time, Grebenstchikoff had hired a friend, civil engineer Leonid Dunajeff, to lay out the village to his specifications, and Grebenstchikoff had started building homes. Churaevka would have three main streets: Russian Village Road, Tolstoy Lane and Kiev Drive, and approximately 125 small lots. Russian Village Road led off of the old Danbury-Waterbury state road, and connected to the South Britain railway station just five miles away. Grebenstchikoff’s house was the first building built on Russian Village Road.

The three roads converged in the center of the village, at the top of a steep bank that fell both towards the Pomperaug river to the west and the state road to the east. Three residential enclaves were planned, each separated from the others by larger tracts of wooded property. Steep slopes on the banks of the rivers were incorporated into longer lots, while easements allowed everyone in the village to cross their neighbors’ land to access a public beach on the Housatonic River.

One of the first residents, Ivan Vasiliyech Wassil, built most of the first homes, in consultation with Grebenstchikoff. By 1928, an article in the Bridgeport Sunday Post revealed that eight cottages had been constructed in a style mixing traditional New England and Russian architectures. The Russian influence was subtle: steeply pitched roof lines, as if trying to shrug off a deep Russian snow, window and door hoods with traditional carved patterns, and houses clad in clapboard or shakes.

Grebenstchikoff’s three goals for Churaevka were reported in the same article:

I have three main theses in founding Churaevka. First, it is a garden village, for the purpose of providing a spot where cultural workers in art, science, and literature may work unhampered by the difficulties and interruptions incident to life elsewhere, especially in a big city. It is a community run on the principle of business co-operation, where such people may best produce in harmonious surroundings, close to the peace and loveliness of nature. Such a condition we are finding here in this beautiful spot in Connecticut.

Second, the colony is to be developed as a practical school of life; to encourage and to train men, not merely in their chosen field of work, but in fostering the creative instinct – the sense of artistry in life itself.

Third, and most important, it is for the purpose of establishing an organized, active center for the dissemination of knowledge of Russia, specifically Siberia….

In the early years, Churaevka flourished as a retreat for many great artists, scientists, and writers in exile: actor Michael Chekhov, son of the playwright Anton; Michael Fokine, ballet dancer and choreographer often recognized as the father of modern dance; Sergei Rachmaninoff, composer and pianist; Nicholas Roerich, painter; Fyodor Shalyapin, opera singer; and Igor Sikorsky, aircraft pioneer and inventor. Grebenstchikoff’s house served as the focal point for village activity – he and his wife hosted get-togethers for the residents of the village and for friends from New York and elsewhere.

In 1926, Grebenstchikoff set about building the first civic improvement to Churaevka: a modest, but significant, addition to the village to enhance its spiritual life. The St. Sergius Chapel would become the village’s greatest architectural landmark. The chapel was executed to a design by Roerich, as depicted in Roerich’s 1925 painting, St. Sergius the Builder. Grebenstchikoff and Roerich both believed that art, work, and spirituality were linked, so the Russian Orthodox chapel was a natural addition to the village. And it could not be coincidental that Grebenstchikoff chose for his model a painting Roerich did while traveling in the Altai mountains.

The resemblance between Roerich’s painting and the chapel is striking: a small, one room, square building sits on a bluff in a wooded area. The chapel is in the reductive Novgorod style, evoking images of the heart of old Russia, rural and rough. From the roof sprouts a small onion dome and three-bar-cross. Above the door is a copy of Andrei Rublyov’s Holy Trinity icon (Rublyov served as iconographer in the same monastery and at the same time as St. Sergius). The only difference between the painting and reality is that Roerich’s painting shows a wooden building, while Grebenstchikoff chose to build his chapel from local fieldstone. The chapel was built by volunteer labor under the direction of Ivan Wassil, who had been an accomplished stonemason in Russia.

St. Sergius was an important figure both to the 20th century Russian refugees and to Grebenstchikoff in his mission for Churaevka. To the refugees, Sergius was patron saint of Russia and represented the country’s proud history. It was Sergius who urged Dmitry Donskoy to fight the Mongols and to unify the Russian lands, leading to the Battle of Kulikovo field in 1380; he also founded over 40 monasteries and was instrumental in the re-strengthening of the church during the waning power of the Mongols. Chapels to St. Sergius were also built in the Russian-American communities of Oyster Bay, New York and at the Tolstoy Foundation (founded by Ilya Tolstoy’s sister, Alexandra Tolstoy) in Valley Cottage, New York.

St. Sergius of Radonezh (1315-1392) probably had even more specific meanings to Roerich and Grebenstchikoff. According to church tradition, Sergius had gone into the forest to work out his spirituality in nature and in solitude. There, monks flocked to him, and he established a monastery in the woods, promoting the idea of ceaseless work as the path to God. Grebenstchikoff’s mission for Churaevka was that of a modern-day Sergius: an artistic sanctuary in the woods, where he hoped artists would flock.

When the chapel opened in 1933, Grebenstchikoff dedicated it as a memorial to the destruction of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, which had been demolished by Stalin two years earlier to make way for a new Palace of Soviets (which was never built). The cathedral, commissioned by Alexander I to commemorate the Russian victory over Napoleon, had been the largest Orthodox Church in the world (its rebuilding was completed in 2000).

That same year, Ilya Tolstoy died after a painful battle with cancer. In the years prior, he had traveled the U.S. making impassioned anti-communist speeches, had seen some success with his memoirs and some translations of his father’s work, and had consulted on the Hollywood version of Anna Karenina.

Meanwhile, Grebenstchikoff was discovering that populating his colony would be far more difficult than anticipated. His logic, it turned out, was flawed: while artists gladly came to visit Churaevka, none purchased property. “Cultural workers” in exile had enough difficulty making ends meet, to say nothing of buying a home or even a summer house.

Still, non-artistic refugees, including former officers, aristocrats and professionals, discovered in the Connecticut countryside an analog to the dacha communities they remembered from Russia. They colonized Churaevka – desiring Russian community but not aspiring to Grebenstchikoff’s lofty goals.

The 26 families who moved to the village were from similar backgrounds: the Nicoolitchefs were descended from Georgian nobility; Baron Leo von Nolde; Walter Ouspensky, grandson of Metropolitan Platon; Eugenia Shoopinsky, whose uncle directed the Bolshoi Opera at Nicholas II’s coronation, and whose husband’s family had owned property in the Crimea near Tsar Nicholas; Ivan Ushakoff, twice elected to the Duma and a member of Alexander Kerensky’s government (Ushakoff’s wife Eugenie had been the first female attorney to argue a case in Russian criminal court).

Many Russian émigrés in the early 1900s lived and worked in New York City. While a former officer might be forced by circumstances to work as an electrician or translator, at his Churaevka dacha, his pre-revolutionary position and accomplishments were still held as significant. An officer was still an officer, a baron still a baron, and residents adhered to a social hierarchy based on such titles. Most lost their wealth when they became refugees, and the dachas they built did not reflect the social hierarchy: most were very modest, with no running water and a privy in the yard. On the 125 lots shown in the original plans, only 25 had summer homes built on them.

While Grebenstchikoff’s dream of a thriving community of Russian cultural workers never materialized, the publishing house Alatas was somewhat successful in promoting Russian and Siberian literature and arts. Among their publications were works by Roerich, Igor Sikorsky, republication of Grebenstchikoff’s Churaevy, and a textbook of elementary Russian, which was used in an affiliated school (called the Churaevka School) in nearby Bridgeport. In 1940, Alatas published Grebenstchikoff’s final major work, The Turbulent Giant. Though the book found critical acclaim, Grebenstchikoff was not able to find a major American publisher, and therefore self-published the book. His wife provided the translation, proofreading, and set the type by hand.

The Turbulent Giant was Grebenstchikoff’s final chapter at Churaevka. Due to financial difficulties, he left the next year for Lakeland, Florida, accepting a position as Professor of Russian Literature and Creative Writing at Florida Southern College. He spent the next twenty years there, until his death in 1964.

After Grebenstchikoff’s departure, Churaevka remained a Russian dacha community for many years. No new houses were built by refugees, but many of the cottages were converted to year-round use as the owners retired and moved to Churaevka permanently. The names on the mailboxes at the center of the village continued to read with Russian names even into the late 1980’s, when the village applied for listing on the National Register of Historic Places, which it received in 1988. Local press covered the event, interviewing the remaining Russians in the village, who predicted that the Russians of Russian Village would soon be no more. “There are only eight of us left,” said Kronid Elin, longtime resident of the Village, to a Bridgeport Post reporter. “I have a daughter and granddaughter, but they are settled in Maine.” Today, their predictions have come true – all the houses in Churaevka now belong to American families.

Yet walking down the wooded streets of Churaevka, the village’s Russian heritage is still evident, despite the fact that new, larger, contemporary houses have filled in many of the empty lots. Even though Grebenstchikoff’s utopian experiment failed, Churaevka fulfilled a different mission – one less planned, and yet probably more important — it served as a bridge between two cultures, a displaced geography between two socio-political conditions, facilitating a group of refugees’ transition from the chaos of the diaspora to their new condition as Americans. RL

July 01, 2007

A Russian Village in Connecticut

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Churaevka on the Map

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