Interpolation

Abstract Communication with loved ones remaining in Stalin’s Russia became dangerous and thus, Karsavina’s brother, Lev Karsavin, despite his important role in her early memoir, is almost entirely absent from her later writings. Similarly, her first husband, Vasily Mukhin, with whom she remained affectionate, never appears in her writings. Mukhin apparently disappeared, without any communication, after receiving packages from abroad. In 1956, Karsavina revealed to a friend in unpublished correspondence that she had only recently heard of her brother’s death in a Stalinist prison camp four years earlier. This chapter focuses on the experiences of Russian émigrés in the West and describes Lev Karsavin’s exile to Germany on ideological grounds and his eventual reincorporation into Soviet society. It details Karsavina’s yearning for her homeland and her love for her Russian Orthodox religion.