Yekaterina Gavrilovna Stravinsky (; January 25, 1881 – March 2, 1939) was a Russian and French painter and amanuensis who was the cousin and first wife of Igor Stravinsky.
Born in Gorval, a village in Minsk Governorate, she spent most of her childhood in Kiev, where her mother died from tuberculosis in 1883. Yekaterina contracted latent tuberculosis from her mother, which would manifest itself later in her adult life. By the end of the decade, she moved to Ustilug, where her father had purchased an estate that formerly belonged to the Lubomirski family. As she matured, she developed her talent for painting, calligraphy, and music. After her father's death in 1897, she and her sister inherited the estate. Between 1901 and 1905 she studied art at the Académie Colarossi in Paris.
She first met her cousin Igor in 1890 during his family's first visit to the Nosenko estate in Ustilug. Their relationship developed into a furtive romance—which was accepted, but not openly acknowledged by their families—that culminated with their marriage in 1906. After spending their honeymoon in Finland, the couple moved into Igor's family home in Saint Petersburg, where she gave birth to the first of their four children. They built a new summer cottage for their family in Ustilug, which they would visit every summer until the outbreak of World War I, and moved to their own apartment in Saint Petersburg in 1909. After his international success with The Firebird in 1910, they and their family continuously moved around Switzerland and France until 1934, when they settled into their final home together along the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in the 8th arrondissement of Paris. Throughout their marriage, Yekaterina was the first to whom Igor would play his newest music, which she enjoyed. She was the principal copyist of his scores, counseled him on private and professional matters, and was an important influence in his reembrace of Russian Orthodox Christianity.
Chronic disease and Igor's adulterous affair with Vera Sudeikina marked her later years. His confession resulted in what he later described as a "tearful, Dostoyevskian scene", but he and Yekaterina agreed to maintain the marriage and their family's unity. In what musicologist Stephen Walsh called "an atrocious act of self-immolation", she acquiesced to Igor's demands to serve as an intermediary between him and Vera, establish an amicable relationship with her, and deliver the regular financial stipend he provided for her. By the 1930s, Yekaterina's health degraded to the point where Robert Craft observed that her marriage "had almost become purely vicarious". Both she and her eldest daughter became fatally ill with pneumonia in late 1938. Yekaterina, who outlived her daughter by three months, died in 1939. She is buried at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery.
Biography Early life
Yekaterina was born in the village of Gorval, located in the Rechitsky Uyezd of the Minsk Governorate, on January 25, 1881; and was christened on January 27. She was the second daughter of Gavriil Trofimovich, a college counselor and doctor who worked at Lukyanovskaya Prison, and Mariya Kirillovna Nosenko (née Kholodovsky); the couple was living temporarily at the Kholodovsky estate in Gorval at the time of Yekaterina's birth. Her father was a descendent of Cossacks who had served in the Chernigov Regiment; her mother descended from the Russian nobility, military officers, and government officials. Yekaterina's maternal aunt was Anna Kirillovna, later the wife of Fyodor Stravinsky and the mother of Igor. Mariya's first husband, whose ancestors included Ivan Pushchin, a Decembrist and friend of Alexander Pushkin, died from tuberculosis in 1876.
Yekaterina and her older sister Lyudmila spent most of their early childhood in Kiev. Although Gavriil had purchased property in Ustilug at some point in the early 1880s for the sake of moving his wife to a location where the weather would not aggravate her tuberculosis, there is no record of the Nosenko family living there until 1889. In October 1883, her mother died at the age of 35. A subsequent medical examination in June 1890 determined that Yekaterina had no trace of tuberculosis and that she was found to be "completely healthy", although in later life she became ill with the disease.
Ustilug In 1887, Gavriil purchased an estate in Ustilug that consisted of several thousands of acres of land that had formerly belonged to the Lubomirski family. The Nosenko estate was soon recognized as one of the finest in the Volhynian Governorate and the family became known among locals for their charity work and efforts to improve social welfare. In the late 1890s, the Nosenkos built a free hospital, hired a doctor to attend to patients in the Ustilug area, and donated land for the establishment of a community cemetery. Later, when Yekaterina's sister married Grigory Belyankin, a graduate of the Marine Architecture Institute in Philadelphia, the family built a school and fire station as well. The Nosenko family was known for its benevolent treatment of their workers, who were among the few not to revolt against their owners during the Russian Revolution of 1905.
Gavriil died in 1897; he bequeathed the Ustilug estate to his daughters. His cousin Dmitri took over its management, while the responsibility for raising Yekaterina and her older sister Lyudmila was tasked to Sofiya Velsovskaya, a distant and elderly relative the Nosenko sisters nicknamed "Baba Sonya". Later, Grigory assumed control of the estate's daily affairs and modernized its equipment.
As Yekaterina matured, she became a talented painter and calligrapher. She also developed a profound interest in music and was regarded as a skilled musician.
First meeting with Stravinsky and growing affection
Yekaterina first met her cousin Igor Stravinsky in September 1890, during his family's first visit to the Nosenko estate. In the early 1960s, he recalled to his amanuensis Robert Craft:
From our first hour together we both seemed to realize that we would one day marry—or so we told each other later. Perhaps we were always more like brother and sister. I was a deeply lonely child and I wanted a sister of my own. Catherine, who was my first cousin, came into my life as a kind of long-wanted sister... We were from then until her death extremely close, and closer than lovers sometimes are, for mere lovers may be strangers though they live and love together all their lives... Catherine was my dearest friend and playmate ... and from then until we grew into our marriage.
Musicologist and Stravinsky biographer Stephen Walsh wrote that Igor was attracted to Yekaterina's "serious-mindedness" and love of art which complemented his own:
And perhaps she was the one person in Igor's first 20 years who recognized in him something exceptional—even if she can hardly have guessed what it was. Above all, she gave him unqualified sympathy, which, for him, was always to be the pearl without price... But she gave him much more than that, and one should guard against the implication that, in its physical and social aspects, [Yekaterina's] love left something to be desired. It was only later when it became necessary or convenient to make such distinctions.
They began referring to each other by affectionate nicknames; "Katyenka" and "Kotyulya" for Katerina, "Gimura" and "Gimochka" for Igor, which she used throughout her life. The two encouraged each other's interest in painting and drawing, swam together often, went on wild raspberry picks, helped build a tennis court, played piano duet music, and later organized group readings with their other cousins of books and political tracts from Fyodor Stravinsky's personal library. At the Ustilug estate they also mounted plays and entertainments, including Anton Chekhov's The Bear, which were acted by them and other members of the Nosenko and Stravinsky families.
On July 17, 1901, Stravinsky reported having been briefly infatuated with Lyudmila Kuxina, the best friend of Yekaterina to whom she bore a physical resemblance. By the end of the month, the "summer romance" had ended and Stravinsky, instead, wrote to his parents on July 27 that he had begun to take note of the "great change" in Yekaterina. Their relationship developed into a furtive romance which was accepted by both families, although not openly acknowledged at first. The precise dating of this shift cannot be ascertained, but it occurred before they formally announced their engagement on August 15, 1905. During the intervening four years that they did not see each other, Yekaterina completed her classical studies, then went to study painting at the Académie Colarossi in Paris. She regularly visited the Louvre in her spare time.
Wedding and early marriage
Yekaterina and Igor married on January 24, 1906, at the , located in what was then , a village five miles north from Saint Petersburg. Although as first cousins they were legally prohibited from marrying, they were able to procure Father Afanasy Papov, later described by the composer as "a kind of Graham Greene bootleg priest", to officiate the service without asking them for identification; Andrei and served as witnesses. After the ceremony, they visited the home of Igor's teacher, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who blessed them and presented them with an icon as a wedding gift.
The couple spent their honeymoon in Imatra and Helsingfors in Finland. They brought along with them the score to Rimsky-Korsakov's The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, which they played and sang through together during the trip. According to Igor's later reminiscences, he also began to develop in his mind the music for what later became the vocal cycle Faun and Shepherdess, a setting of erotic verses by Alexander Pushkin, which he dedicated to Yekaterina.
After the honeymoon, the couple moved into the Stravinsky family home in Saint Petersburg along the Kryukov Canal, where they lived together with Igor's mother and brothers. Yekaterina got along well with her aunt, now new mother-in-law, despite the cramped living circumstances.
In May 1906, Yekaterina and Igor visited Kiev, before arriving at the Nosenko estate in Ustilug for the summer. Their projected vacation to Crimea with Baba Sonya was cancelled because of political unrest there during that period. By the time the couple returned to Saint Petersburg in September, Yekaterina was pregnant. She gave birth to her first son, Théodore, on February 20, 1907. Unable to produce enough milk to breastfeed her child, Katya immediately sent Igor to hire a wet nurse. Shortly after, Yekaterina chose to abandon pursuing a career in painting in order to devote herself to her family.
During the summer of 1907, Igor designed and supervised the building of a new house for him and his family on the Nosenko estate in Ustilug, which was built next to the residence of Yekaterina's sister and her husband. He called it a "haven for composition" and spent the summer months playing piano duet arrangements of Ludwig van Beethoven's symphonies with Yekaterina.
Yekaterina gave birth to a second child, Lyudmila, in December 1908. Their growing family and Igor's first professional successes led to the family moving to a new home on Angliysky Prospekt in 1909. Their residence there would be brief.
Switzerland and France