Natasha Rostova

Natasha is one of the main characters in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, first published 1869. She was based on a real person, one of his wife’s sisters, and remains one of the most lifelike characters in literature. Partly this is because of the method Tolstoy uses. We discover life along with and through Natasha as we watch her grow up.

We first meet Natasha at 13 in 1805 at a dinner given on her name day. “The young girl with her black eyes and wide mouth was not pretty but she was full of life.” Though an aristocrat, her loving family doesn’t really have the money to keep up appearances and the Countess, Natasha’s mother, begs her children to marry well. Natasha, with high spirits, falls for several attractive young men before meeting Prince Andrei at a ball and responding to his admiration for her “shy grace.”

Natasha as played by Ludmila Savelyeva

Once after spending the day hunting with her brother Nikolas and others, they are invited home to the wooden dacha of an uncle. “A smell of fresh apples pervaded the entrance, and the walls were hung with the skins of wolves and foxes.” A wonderful meal is spread out by the uncle’s peasant wife and a balalaika plays. Uncle takes up his guitar and motions to Natasha. “Natasha flung off the shawl that had been wrapped around her, ran forward facing Uncle, and setting her arms akimbo made a motion with her shoulders and waited.” Natasha’s performance is so perfect, everyone wonders how she could have known (with her French education), how she could understand “all that was in every Russian man and woman.”

Natasha becomes engaged to Prince Andrei, but secretly, because Andrei’s father requires that the marriage not take place for a year. When Natasha meets Andrei’s sister Maria and his father they show their disdain for her. At the opera she is introduced to Anatole, who plots with a friend to spirit her away. Natasha loses her heart, agrees to elope and breaks off her engagement to Andrei. But her cousin Sonja, terrified, gives away the plot. Pierre, another rich friend of the family, drives Anatole, who was already married, away. Natasha, full of shame upon learning of this, tries to kill herself.

Napoleon’s advance into Russia in 1812 began to involve all of the aristocracy. Prince Andrei leaves for the front. Natasha is very ill for a long time. She is somewhat buoyed by the visits of Pierre. Prince Andrei’s father dies and Princess Maria, detained on an estate where the French are about to arrive, is rescued by Nicholas, Natasha’s brother.

As Napoleon enters Moscow, everyone who can leaves and Moscow burns. The Rostovs are slow to leave, packing all their goods. But Natasha sees that there are many wounded who need to get away too. She has a fit and insists that the furniture be unloaded and the wounded men be put onto their carts. “Are we a lot of wretched Germans?” Natasha asks. She finds that Prince Andrei is among the wounded.

The Rostov family retreats to Yaroslavl and Natasha nurses Prince Andrei. When his sister Maria hears he is there, she comes to help. By the time she gets there, however, Prince Andrei is ready to “awaken” from life. Maria and Natasha become close. Andrei’s death makes Natasha intensely sad, until the need to console her mother for the death of a younger brother brings her back to family responsibility. Finally she and Pierre meet in Moscow and understand that they are meant for each other.

In an Epilogue, Tolstoy shows us the happy married life of Natasha and Pierre. Natasha gives herself completely to her family and is jealous when Pierre is not at home. She lets herself go and nurses her children herself. “As soon as Natasha and Pierre were alone they too began to talk as only husband and wife can talk – that is, exchanging ideas with extraordinary swiftness and perspicuity, by a method contrary to all the rules of logic, without the aid of premises, deductions or conclusions, and in a quite peculiar way.”

I could not help loving Natasha when I listened to War and Peace read by Alexander Scourby on 69 long-playing records which my father ordered from the state of Iowa at a time when I was unable to see well. I can still hear the respect and love in Scourby’s voice as he gave the proper weight to every sentence. It was a wonderful experience to live with the Rostov family, which was actually that of Tolstoy himself during the happiest years of his marriage.

As Tolstoy saw it, “in 1812 simplicity, goodness and truth overcame power, which ignored simplicity and was rooted in evil and falsity” [Rosemary Edmonds, translator]. Natasha, like the peasant Platon Karatayev, never sees her life as a separate entity, but as a part of a whole of which she never loses consciousness. It is for her rushing life, and for this consciousness, that everyone loves her.

Adèle Eugénie Sidonie Landois Colette

Garden, 1890, Vincent Van Gogh

Colette's mother, known as Sido to her family, was born in August, 1835. Sido was left with a peasant family and her father and older siblings moved to Belgium when her mother died. It was the time of the Citizen King, Louis-Philippe, in France, but as journalists and members of radical groups, Sido’s brothers sought the haven of free expression Belgium had become.

Sido’s father traded in coffee, cocoa, cotton, rum and dyes. When Sido joined the family, she grew up in Brussels in a house filled with beautiful furniture and paintings. Sido acquired her father’s expensive tastes. At seventy she maintained she had never been able to drink out of a glass not made of crystal or a cup not of bone china.

Brussels was a hotbed of radicalism and buzzing with ideas, particularly those of Francois Raspail and Charles Fourier. Sido’s older brothers became editors and publishers of these men and others of their circles. The scientist Raspail advocated healthy living and preventative medicine, trying to spread notions of hygiene and moderation among the poor by operating free clinics. In Fourier’s utopian society, the passions — labeled vices in our Western civilization, or deadly sins in Christianity — would be used wisely and channeled from anti-social to social behavior, eventually evolving into harmony.

Sido lapped up these theories, becoming an atheist with a strong, independent personality. The Landois home was a refuge for radicals fleeing France and Sido was happy in the sophisticated, liberal milieu around her brothers. "Nothing supplanted in my mother's heart the beautiful Belgian cities, the warmth of their refined and gentle life, epicurean and enamored of the things of the mind," wrote Colette.

When Sido was 22, the family of Jules Robineau-Duclos sought her hand. Robineau had inherited farms, fields, wooded lands, cattle, and a vineyard that produced hundreds of liters of wine and brandy. He was an introverted, slouching alcoholic, but his family hoped Sido would be good for him. They were married in 1857 and Sido went to live in St.-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, a small village in an impoverished area of Burgundy. Called by Colette “the Savage,” Robineau, a “descendant of a once noble family, had inherited their disdain, their courtesy, their brutality and their taste for the society of inferiors.”

Sido was lonely but she had two children by “the Savage.” She also began an affair with Capt. Jules-Joseph Colette, a military hero who had lost a leg and had a post as tax collector in the village. They had a son together, and after Robineau finally drank himself to death, were married in 1865. Their daughter, the writer Sidonie Gabrielle Colette was born a few years later. Always an outsider and often the subject of the scandals the village looked forward to, Sido and her husband lived in St.-Sauveur-en-Puisaye for the rest of their lives. Preferring the provinces to Paris, Sido developed a strong sense of the social hierarchy, of the necessity for irreproachable conduct, and pride at inhabiting an ancient and honored house. “After all, I belong to my village,” she told her daughter.

I know Sido from the lush books Colette wrote about her: My Mother’s House, Sido and the frequent quotations from her letters in Break of Day. Colette wrote she was the personage “who has dominated all the rest of my work.” Colette recounts how she, her father and brothers, lived in a large house and garden utterly dependent upon Sido’s vivacious presence. “I still cherish happy memories of the sixth hour of the evening, the green watering-can soaking the blue sateen frock, the strong smell of leaf-mould, and the afterglow that cast a pink reflection on the pages of a forgotten book, the white petals of the tobacco flowers and the white fur of the cat in her basket.”

As Sido grew older, “she lived on, swept by shadow and sunshine, bowed by bodily torments, resigned, unpredictable and generous, rich in children, flowers and animals like a fruitful domain.” Sido worried her children, writing to Colette, “I’m better, and the proof is that at seven o’clock this morning I did the washing in my stream. I was enraptured. What a pleasure it is to dabble in clear water! I sawed wood, too, and made six little bundles of firewood. And I’m doing my housework myself again, which means it’s being properly done. And after all, I’m only seventy-six!” She died a year later.

Sido reminds me of my own mother, who tamed her powerful intelligence into a life of service and partnership with my father, a Lutheran pastor. With a great love of nature and surrounded by her many children, she was able to live in happiness and contentment in successive villages in the American Midwest. Like Colette herself, I loved and longed after my mother, treasuring her judgments and avid for her favorable regard.

It is women like Sido and my mother whom I wish to celebrate in these posts. Their large hearts and capacious intelligence have convinced me that women need not compete with men. Rather, women need recognition for their gifts. A culture based on strict rationality, in which only what can be measured counts for knowledge, is impoverished without the rich discretion as well as the understanding of natural laws which women, through hard-won physical experience and yes, education, richly provide.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Carrie, Mary and Laura Ingalls, approx. 1880

Laura Ingalls Wilder hardly needs introduction. Born in 1867 in Wisconsin, she and her family traveled west, mostly by covered wagon, living in various places until they settled on a homestead near DeSmet, South Dakota. The fictionalized story of their travels was written by Laura between 1930 and 1943 and published as a series for young readers. “I realized that I had seen and lived it all – all the successive phases of the frontier, first the frontiersman, then the pioneer, then the farmers and the towns. I understood that in my own life I represented a whole period of American history,” Wilder told her fans.

Wilder married Almanzo Wilder, who homesteaded near her family. So many troubles befell them during their early marriage that they sought a less harsh climate, and finally settled at Rocky Ridge Farm near Mansfield, Missouri in 1894. While there, Laura and Almanzo produced poultry, dairy and apples from their orchard. Their daughter Rose became a journalist, and Wilder wrote articles for the Missouri Ruralist.

When her sister Mary died, Wilder sat down with a pencil and yellow tablets and wrote a memoir which she called Pioneer Girl. Rose Wilder Lane tried to place the memoir with her various contacts in the publishing world, but it was rejected. Lane then reworked it as a story for young people, and got some interest in it, though Lane feared ‘juveniles’ never made money. But Wilder began to write what became the “Little House” books, fictionalizing material from her memoir. Though she was already 75 when the books were finished, Wilder lived to be 90 years old and saw how popular they became.

Two recent publishing events underscore the importance of Wilder’s work. In 2012, the Library of America published the series in two volumes, edited by Caroline Fraser. In their eyes, “here Wilder’s prose for the first time stands alone and can be seen for exactly what it is — a triumph of the American plain style.” In December, 2014, an annotated version of Pioneer Girl was published by the South Dakota Historical Society Press, edited by Pamela Smith Hill. It has sold out in many bookstores and quickly went into a third printing.

Annotations to the memoir Pioneer Girl show how both Wilder and her daughter used the material. For her fiction, Wilder changed the actual locations of the story so that her family continued heading west, while in fact they zigzagged a couple of times across the prairies. She also streamlined the narrative, removing characters and attributing incidents differently. Wilder’s sympathies are clearly with Pa, highlighting his ingenuity and heroism. She said at one point that the novels were “a memorial for my father.” But Ma is also a courageous partner, taking the reins when Pa must lead the horses across a swollen creek, reaching for the coffee grinder when Pa wishes they had a mill to grind wheat during the long winter and sustaining the family for many months while Pa is gone.

Though fictionalized, Wilder wanted her books to accurately reflect the historical spirit of her time. Once when her daughter made editorial suggestions that were “all wrong,” Wilder wrote: “After all, even though these books must be made fit for children to read, they must also be true to history … I have given you a true picture of the times and the place and the people. Please don’t blur it.” She said, “What girls would do now has no bearing whatever. This is a true story and supposed to show a different (almost) civilization.”

Lately, as Caroline Fraser points out here, the “Little House” books have been taken up and politicized. But, she writes, “the Little House books have always been stranger, deeper, and darker than any ideology. While celebrating family life and domesticity, they undercut those cozy values at every turn, contrasting the pleasures of home (firelight, companionship, song) with the immensity of the wilderness, its nobility and its power to resist cultivation and civilization.”

My own mother asked the grocery and drygoods store owner in our tiny North Dakota town to order the “Little House” books as they came out in the 1950’s with the Garth Williams illustrations. She read them to us, as did our teachers in school at the time. The influence of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s work upon me would be hard to over-estimate.

Gemma Roselli

Dark-haired Beauty by Alexeievich Harlamoff

Gemma Roselli is a young Italian girl living in Frankfurt, Germany, and working in her family’s pastry shop where she meets Sanin, a Russian nobleman. The story of this 1840 meeting is told by a mature Sanin as he looks back over his life with regret in Ivan Turgenev’s The Torrents of Spring, published in 1872.

Sanin, who is traveling in Europe before settling down to employment in Russia, enters the pastry shop in order to take a glass of lemonade. The shop is empty but soon a beautiful girl rushes out from a back room, imploring him to save her brother, who has fallen into a faint. Sanin asks for brushes, loosens the boy’s collar and begins rubbing the boy’s chest and arms. When he recovers consciousness, Sanin leaves, but not before Gemma thanks him, requesting that he return to take a cup of chocolate with her family.

Sanin is welcomed by the Rosellis as if he is one of the family. He is so delighted that he misses his coach to Berlin that night. Though they are Italian, they have settled in Frankfurt and Gemma is engaged to a German, Herr Klueber. Gemma’s mother laments that the pastry shop is no longer doing as well as when her husband was alive. The next day Sanin is invited on an outing with Gemma, her brother Emil and Herr Klueber.

Sanin is unhappy to learn that Gemma is engaged and also finds that Klueber is condescending to Gemma and her brother. Klueber is after all a successful tradesman. When they sit down for lunch together near some German officers, one of them comes over to drink to “the most beautiful coffeehouse lady in all Frankfurt and in the world.” Gemma is embarrassed and Herr Klueber immediately insists that his party leave. But Sanin goes over to the officers and presents his card, telling the young man his conduct was “unbecoming to a gentleman and unworthy of the uniform you wear.”

Sanin is called upon to a duel, as he expected. But on the dueling grounds, the officer shoots into the air and apologizes. Emil has watched all of this and reports it to his sister. When Sanin next sees the Rosellis, a melancholy has settled over them quite unlike their former gaiety. In the evening, Gemma gives him a flower and Sanin realizes he loves her.

The next day Gemma’s mother tells Sanin that Gemma has broken off her engagement. She is terribly worried about ruin and scandal and what will become of the family. She begs Sanin to talk sense into her daughter. Sanin goes out into the garden where Gemma is sorting cherries for putting in pastries. Sanin begins to speak to her and she asks him, “I know what my mother thinks. But what advice will you give me?” But Sanin breaks off and asks her to wait. “I will write to you,” he says.

Sanin then impulsively asks Gemma to marry him. He will sell one of his Russian estates and use the proceeds to help her family make the pastry shop a going concern. “First love is exactly like a revolution,” writes Turgenev. “The regular and established order of life is in an instant smashed to fragments.”

When Sanin meets a fellow Russian whose very rich wife might be willing to purchase the estate, he goes off with him to Wiesbaden to negotiate with her. And here we leave Gemma, because we never see her again. Sanin succumbs to the power of the Russian woman, Maria Nikolaevna, who seduces and enslaves him. He sends Gemma a “wretched, lying, miserable letter” which remains unanswered.

Thirty years later, Sanin comes upon the cross set with garnets which Gemma once gave him and wonders what became of her. He goes to Germany to find her, but she has emigrated to America. He writes her a letter and she answers, saying “she regarded her meeting with him as a source of happiness, since it had prevented her from becoming the wife of Herr Klueber.” She was married and lived in New York in complete happiness, contentment and prosperity with her husband, four sons and a daughter.

Turgenev took great care over this story, which grew into a lengthy novel and is regarded as among his best. Though Turgenev wrote A Sportsman’s Sketches which helped turn the Russians against the evils of serfdom, he saw himself as a coward and weak in will. He spent most of his life in thrall to a married woman and never established a nest of his own. The man or woman of will and commitment, embodied here in Maria Nikolaevna, obsessed him and appears in most of his work.

What I loved about Gemma was her liveliness and graciousness. She is in a difficult position in that her mother believes that only through Gemma’s marriage can the family’s economic fortunes be remedied. Gemma, without ever stepping out of the role of the dutiful daughter, nevertheless saves herself through her own deep feeling from marrying a man who patronizes and condescends to her. She regards with friendship the unfortunate Sanin, who thirty years before had betrayed her with the beautiful and powerful Maria Nikolaevna.

Kristen Lavransdatter

Statue of Kristen Lavransdatter, Sil, Norway

Set in medieval Norway, the story of Kristen Lavransdatter is so rich in the understanding of both the seen and the unseen worlds, and their relationship, that it must be read in its entirety. It has enthralled people all over the world since its completion in 1927 by Sigrid Undset. Its historical and cultural accuracy helped win her the Nobel prize for literature.

Kristen is the favored daughter of a wealthy Norwegian landowner, born about 1260 A.D. Even as a young woman, Kristen’s spirit gets her in trouble. She loves a peasant boy, though her father has betrothed her to a neighboring landowner. When the boy is killed, his mother rages that it happened because of Kristen. Kristen is sent to a convent in Oslo until the gossip dies down. When Erlend Nikulausson, a knight of noble birth, rescues her and a friend, she quickly loses her heart, and even her body, to him.

When Kristen goes home, she insists she will marry no one but Erlend. Her father resists, but after three years of Kristen’s stubborn insistence, he gives in and Kristen and Erlend are married. Kristen is pregnant, but she has told no one, not even her husband, and wears the golden bridal wreath and long flowing hair reserved for virgins at her wedding.

Near the time of the child’s birth, Kristen is utterly miserable at all the sin she has kept quiet about. Fearful of dying in childbirth, she confesses all to her husband’s brother, a learned priest. After a difficult birth, Kristen is delivered of a beautiful, unmarked boy. Binding him on her back, she goes barefoot to the cathedral at Nidaros, to the archbishop of Norway, for absolution.

Though Kristen’s early years are very dramatic (the movie made by Liv Ullmann based on the book ends with her marriage), I loved the continuing story of her later life. At first Kristen has one son after another, five sons in five years, and is ill much of the time. But, when Erlend spends several years away in the north, she recovers and becomes just as blooming and lovely as when she was a girl. She works hard to restore Erland’s neglected household and brings honor to it.

Simon, the landowner Kristen was first betrothed to, is now married to Kristen’s younger sister. When Erlend’s attempt to return a Norwegian king to Norway’s throne fails, he is tried for treason and Simon, because of his enduring love for Kristen, contrives his release. Erland is returned to his family, but his lands are forfeited to the Swedish crown and he and his many sons must move back to Kristen’s much smaller farmstead. Kristen, in her turn, when Simon’s son is expected to die, takes upon herself the sin of witchcraft to save him.

No matter how deeply they love each other, Erlend and Kristen cannot keep faith with each other during everyday life. Kristen worries constantly that her sons will now have to leave home, as her lands will not support seven sons. When she finally says so, Erlend packs up and rides away to a small ghost-ridden northern farm, the only thing he owns. Their sons suffer and so does Kristen, but she cannot apologize. When Simon dies, he secures Kristen’s promise to go and make up with Erlend. Kristen does. The two of them are happy alone there in the unkempt place. “Yet never, more than now, had he seemed the son of chiefs and nobles. So fairly and easily he bore his tall slim form, with the broad shoulders somewhat stooped, the long, fine limbs.” When she goes home to their sons, Kristen is again pregnant.

Erlend and Kristen are not destined to live long and happily. Erlend dies defending Kristen’s honor once again, and Kristen enters a nunnery, giving herself at last to God. She nurses people when the plague comes, and finally it claims her too.

Every one of the characters in the book is filled out with humanity, including the priests who befriend Kristen. None of them forgets the past, either. Both kinds of being, the intrinsic unchangeable self and the self that unfolds in time are always sensed in these remarkable people who lived so long ago in a feudal culture that affected their every movement, while they fought, as we do, to become the people they were meant to be.

At one point, I felt I was so involved with this book I sent my copy away! Like Kristen I first married a weak and possibly dangerous man and tried to redeem our life by steadfastly providing a courteous and seemly home for us. I could easily understand Kristen’s fears and her struggle, and I was heartened as she grew into a wise and valued woman. My worn copy of this book (which came back to me) was translated by Charles Archer and J.S. Scott, but I understand a new and better translation by Tiina Nunnally is now available.

Dalva Northridge

Dalva, portrait by Jim Harrison

The story of Dalva Northridge is both contemporary and ageless. The main character in two books by Jim Harrison, Dalva [published 1988] and The Road Home [published 1998], Dalva’s is an American story.

When we first meet her, Dalva is 45 and it is 1986. She has just lost her job as a social worker in Los Angeles due to her direct involvement in the case of an abused kid. It would take too long to go through “channels” to help him, so Dalva just took him to a hospital. Having made an enemy of his powerful abuser, Dalva decides to go home.

Home is an inherited ranch in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. Her great grandfather Northridge acquired it after failing to help the Sioux (called Lakota among themselves) adjust to their lives after their losses to disease and battle, and the extermination of the buffalo. Northridge imported thousands of trees, made shelterbelts around his land and became nurseryman to the area. He also married a Sioux woman after his Swedish wife died. The son that resulted is Dalva’s grandfather.

Dalva’s mother Naomi has her own homestead nearby. She has been a country schoolteacher for most of her life, a lover of birds and animals as is Dalva. When Dalva’s father died in the Korean war, she and her sister were raised by her mother and grandfather.

Time means very little in Nebraska. The decisive events in Dalva’s life recur again and again for her. Riding around the ranch on her horse, she circles the places where the great love of her life occurred. Duane Stone Horse came to the ranch in 1956 and began to work for her grandfather. Dalva fell in love with him. She slept with him only once, but became pregnant and had a son at 15. Duane disappeared when he was told Dalva is his half sister. His mother, a Sioux woman, had slept with Dalva’s father at a hunting lodge a year before Dalva was born.

Dalva’s baby is given up for adoption at her grandfather’s insistence. We are not given all the details of how Dalva survives this, but she is helped by her close family. She goes to college, gets a master’s degree and works at various jobs. In one page she tells the story of her working history: “I had always worked because nothing whatsoever in my background had prepared me to act like a rich person, a notorious non-profession, the dregs of which everyone has witnessed in life, or in magazines and on television … All of this adds up to a wonderfully undistinguished career, but an interesting enough life.”

She is in New York in 1972 when Duane Stone Horse calls Naomi from Key West. Dalva goes to him. Duane is dying and wants Dalva, and his son if she can find him, to have the benefits accruing from his army career. He has a sackful of medals from having spent a record amount of time in combat in the Vietnam war, but his kidneys, liver, pancreas, stomach are all shot, the trailer where he lives full of medicine bottles. The captain of a fishing boat marries them and Duane and Dalva fall asleep holding each other. In the middle of the night Duane disappears, riding his horse into the ocean. His body is never found.

Dalva never finds a love to equal her love of Duane. She continues to work, but uses her wealth to fuel her uncompromising nature and restlessness. When she comes home to the ranch in 1986, she begins to look for her son, although everyone tells her it is up to the son to look for her. Also the Northridge saga envelops her. At the ranch are Dalva’s great-grandfather’s secret journals, valuable paintings and native American artifacts which many think belong in a museum. A Stanford historian says that “other than southern New Mexico with its remnant Apache and Comanche conflicts at the end of the century, this was the last area in America where the full collision of cultures had taken place.”

The summer Dalva returns to the ranch, Nelse, a young man who “prefers sky to ceilings,” arrives to work on a Breeding Bird Survey of a section of the ranch. He works with Naomi, who knows instantly that he is Dalva’s son because he looks so much like Duane. He has been nosing around Dalva for months, afraid of showing himself. When he finally meets Dalva, he says she doesn’t look old enough to be his mother. “Oh my God I was only a kid when I had you,” she says.

Finding her son helps Dalva in many ways. Nelse is much like Duane and they become, she thinks, the closest of friends. It is also clear he is able to take on the Northridge mantle and inherit the ranch. In May of the next year, Dalva and Nelse go on a camping trip together, but Dalva is ill. She is taking many pills and has an appointment at Sloan-Kettering in New York. When Nelse realizes how ill she is, he pushes up the appointment. Dalva has ovarian cancer, which has metastasized into the rest of her organs. She refuses the radical chemo and radiation offered and goes back to the ranch to say goodbye to her beloved family. She goes to Key West and drowns herself, writing in a final journal that “I hope I am going to join my lover.”

Dalva’s story is embedded in a rich, overlapping narrative told by many characters. The notebooks of the first John Wesley Northridge tell of his life in the late 1800’s. Dalva’s grandfather, mother, uncle and son each tell their own stories, as does Dalva herself. The picture that emerges is of the kind of nobility which results from hard work, luck and inheritance on the dry plains of western Nebraska. “How could this happen, when there’s an ocean?” asks Dalva when she sees what is done to her charge in Los Angeles. Nelse says, “Drugs are vehicles for people who have forgotten how to walk.” Though Dalva has spent much of her life in cities, she is not in sync with civilization, but with the natural world as it still exists in less-inhabited places.

Tina Modotti

Tina Modotti 1924, by Edward Weston

Tina Modotti was at the center of artistic and revolutionary movements in Mexico from 1923 to 1930. She was born in Italy in 1896 and became a fine photographer, before becoming a communist and doing aid work through International Red Aid. Mysterious and provocative, her life gives one answer to the pressing question of how art and life can be integrated. She was 46 at the time of her death.

As a young immigrant to the United States, Tina lived in San Francisco and then in Los Angeles, becoming involved in film and meeting Edward Weston, who financed his photography with a portraiture business. Tina became his favorite model. When Tina decided to move to Mexico, Weston left his family (though taking his eldest son with him) and went with her. Tina apprenticed herself to Weston, learning photography and print-making, and in return, managed the studio they opened in Mexico City.

Mexico was in a cultural renaissance and Weston’s photos of Tina were published ahead of their arrival. They were welcomed everywhere. Their friends included the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, Siqueiros, Orozco and many others. Tina’s photographs (made with the large format cameras Weston favored) began to be published and shown alongside Weston’s. She became the favorite documentation photographer for the muralists. Rivera met Frieda Kahlo at one of Tina’s parties.

“Tina had become increasingly idealistic and was moving towards a deeper commitment to revolutionary art and politics,” writes her biographer Margaret Hooks in Tina Modotti: Photographer and Revolutionary. The great love between Weston and Tina eroded due to jealousy. Both of them took lovers as they pleased. When Weston returned to California in 1926, Tina took an apartment which became a center for local communist leaders and political exiles. She also began to photograph social injustice, political rallies, workers and the poor.

In 1927, Tina became a member of the communist party. She was involved with Xavier Guerrero and the Cuban Julio Antonio Mella whose assassination was never solved. A student who knew her at the time writes: “She was a free woman; I mean, she did not have the usual limitations that women in Mexico had. She was very intelligent and quick to express herself, a rapid thinker … extroverted and very sure of herself. What immediately attracted you to her was her great human empathy.” As the political stew thickened around her, she was estranged from Diego Rivera because of politics. She became the victim of sensationalist journalism and police surveillance. In 1930 she was arrested and deported to Europe.

In Europe, Tina was no longer able to support herself with photography. She worked for communist aid organizations and went to Moscow with the nefarious Italian operative Vittorio Vidali. In Moscow, she gave up her camera and photographic work. During the Spanish Civil War, she was in Spain, working in hospitals, sometimes in disguise, for the Republicans. As Spain fell to the Fascists, Tina joined a wave of refugees crossing the Pyrenees into France with no more than the clothes on her back.

When Tina tried to land in New York in 1939, her sister waiting for her, she was turned away. Immigration officials were reluctant to let in Spanish refugees and insisted Tina continue on to Mexico. She traveled under an assumed name, but was terrified Mexico would not take her back. She did get back in to Mexico, however, and spent her time working with aid organizations for the Spanish refugees. Her health grew poor and she stayed home more, typing and translating. She died in a taxi of heart failure three years later.

I first learned about Tina from the Daybooks of Edward Weston. The work Weston did in Mexico depended upon Tina’s friendships and language abilities but when he left Tina in Mexico, I lost track of this intriguing, mysterious woman. In Margaret Hooks’ above-mentioned book the rest of the story is told. The book is filled with portraits of her by Weston as well as her own most famous photographs.

Modotti’s work is the complement of Edward Weston’s. She said at one point, “I cannot solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art.” Weston had said the opposite. Her epitaph was written by Pablo Neruda:

“Pure your gentle name, pure your fragile life,

bees, shadows, fire, snow, silence and foam,

combined with steel and wire and

pollen to make up your firm

and delicate being.”