The Tchaikovsky Saga (Part Three)

{In which Nikolai Tchaikovsky, one of Russia's many 19th-century dreamers, wakes up and smells the coffee percolating in Kansas.} 

“‘Leave your revolvers at police headquarters and get a check,’ read the sign that greeted them in Wichita, but the sound of six-shooters being fired at flies on saloon walls spoke of a certain laxity in the enforcement of this rule.” (Alex Butterworth)

When it came to Nikolai Tchaikovsky’s emigration to Cedar Vale, Kansas in 1875, a brief stop in Wichita was memorable, as Alex Butterworth details:

In 1875, Wichita was booming. Rail links to the eastern cities and a steamboat connection to New Orleans saw to that, along with the influx of cash that came from the jangling-spurred cowboys who delivered herds of longhorn cattle for shipment along the Chisholm trail from Texas. In the six years since it had been founded, Wichita had already acquired close to 3,000 regular inhabitants, outstripping its once larger neighbors. The building plots on its grid plan were rapidly starting to fill. Bars occupied a disproportionate number, though the Masons had already secured a prominent position for their hall. Arriving as they did in the final weeks of 1875, Tchaikovsky and his companions would have been just in time to witness the dregs of the wild carnival that engulfed the town between June and December. For a few months, the population of Wichita swelled to twice its normal size with seasonal traders bringing with them an influx of gamblers and whores. Brass bands blared from the doors and windows of saloons every hour of the day and night, while Deputy Sheriff Wyatt Earp attempted to keep order. ‘Near Brimstone’ was how one journalist headlined his report on Wichita, and Tchaikovsky is unlikely to have lingered long. ¹

Let us speak no more of Wyatt Earp. Instead, we return to Alex Butterworth’s narrative:

Undaunted, Chaikovsky crossed the verdant plains outside Wichita with high hopes, approaching the ‘Happy Valley’ in which Cedar Vale lay. The place did not disappoint, at least at first sight: a pleasant community of seventy farms and twenty schoolhouses spread across rolling prairie, its people hard-working and peaceable. However, when William and Mary Frey – thin and feverish, shivering in threadbare old Unionist overcoats and smiling a slightly too eager greeting – emerged from a ramshackle building, the travelers must have felt more like a rescue party happening upon marooned sailors than hopeful recruits to a thriving social experiment.

It seemed that William and Mary Frey, founders of the Cedar Vale commune, were perhaps not the ideal leaders for a utopian experiment:

The ‘second-rate prairie’ on which Frey had chosen to stake out his plots yielded little to the incompetent husbandry of the colonists, who lacked even the skill to milk their cow, let alone produce the cheese or butter that might have made more appetizing the ascetic diet of unleavened bread prescribed by the vegetarian Frey. The material challenges the group faced, however, were at least equaled by the emotional torment they suffered. Though a modest lifestyle was accepted as part and parcel of the struggle for a new social order, the newcomers balked at Frey’s evangelical imperative to ‘break yourself’ to release the true communist within; they vigorously resisted when he urged them to renounce clothes. Mealtimes were a trial too, with anyone late to the table forbidden to eat, even if delayed by urgent community business; the other families winced as Frey subjected his daughter to daunting tests of mathematical prowess and punished her failure with a dowsing of cold water. ‘This slow, constant mockery of man’s moral liberty’ was the overriding impression that would stay with Tchaikovsky, who must have dearly wished that he had been more aware of the perverse tendency of utopian communities to constrain rather than to encourage liberty, and their susceptibility to petty tyrants.

As for Mary Frey, William’s wife:

As a radiant young bride, eight years earlier, she would have been entitled to expect great things of marriage to a well-connected and highly respected scientist. Even after settling in America, the prospect of being free to pursue her own ambitions as a doctor would have made the hardships endurable. Since then, though, Frey’s neglect of his wife’s romantic and libidinous needs had led her to search for satisfaction outside the marriage. Grigori Machtet, a fellow émigré, was among the first to fill the gap in Mary’s heart and bed, but after his return to Russia, she had struck out desperately for independence, her brief visit to Chicago in search of a baby to adopt turning into a year’s absence. When necessity forced her back to Cedar Vale, she quickly conceived a child by her next young Russian paramour. Frey’s jealousy seems to have bitten deep, and in his ever more pedantic enforcement of the community’s rules he may well have been sublimating the frustration he felt at the loss of control over his personal life. With his original partners in the foundation of Cedar Vale long gone, few of its subsequent residents were psychologically strong enough to withstand the Wednesday meetings that he still found so ‘electric, thrilling, [and] beneficent’: mutual criticism followed by enforced public confession may have been intended to clear the air, but the effect was rarely restorative.

Soon, Tchaikovsky understandably soured on the American paradise which had beckoned him so irresistibly:

Sinc Tchaikovsky’s arrival, the reality of their shipwrecked existence had become painfully apparent to him and to everyone at Cedar Vale; it was the colonists themselves who lacked assistance and Frey who needed resisting, while the ideal future to which they aspired lay so far over the horizon as to be quite fantastical. By late 1876, Tchaikovsky and a chastened Malinkov had moved their families to a second shack just across the river from Frey’s own. Tchaikovsky bridled as the other residents of Cedar Vale helplessly watched their social experiment failing, and when the Kansas authorities launched a formal investigation into the commune’s supposed immorality, the humiliation became too much. To extricate himself, though, was no easy matter; Tchaikovsky had staked everything on Cedar Vale and was penniless. Reluctantly leaving his wife and child behind, he set off on foot in the hope of earning the price of their escape.

Tchaikovsky’s escape will be the subject of our next installment. For those wondering about the fate of the Cedar Vale commune, Alex Butterworth relates that “In 1879 disagreements and financial pressures came to a head, and the community dissolved. The Freys lived for a short time at the New Odessa colony in Oregon, then spent their remaining years in London, from where William carried on a widely publicized correspondence with Leo Tolstoy.” ²

_______________________________________________ 

Inexplicably, I have failed to this point to sufficiently credit Alex Butterworth, from whose book The World That Never Was I have extensively, um, borrowed. An anarchist at heart, I sometimes 'forget' that copyright laws exist. In any case, The World That Never Was captures brilliantly the ideological illusions, delusions, and confusions that proliferated from 1870 to 1920. We were so much older then; we're younger than that now.

¹ It is a rule (the “Earp Rule”) that anyone writing about America’s frontier “wild West” must never pass up a chance to mention Wyatt Earp. It is unlikely that Tchaikovsky and Earp would have crossed paths; the Russian was not in town long and would not have frequented Earp’s hangouts. That, however, will not prevent me from honoring the Earp Rule and providing some wild West color:

In early 1874, Earp [aka the ‘Peoria bummer,’ aka a ‘notorious pimp’] and Sally [Sally Heckel, aka Sarah Earp, aka ‘a notorious madam’] moved from Peoria, Illinois to the growing cow town of Wichita where his brother James ran a brothel with his wife Nellie "Bessie" Ketchum. Local arrest records show that Sally and Nellie managed a brothel there from early 1874 to the middle of 1876. Wyatt was likely a pimp, although some claim that he was an enforcer or bouncer.

Earp officially joined the Wichita marshal's office on April 21, 1875, after the election of Mike Meagher as city marshal (or police chief). He also dealt faro at the Long Branch Saloon. Earp's stint as a Wichita deputy came to a sudden end on April 2, 1876, when former marshal Bill Smith accused him of using his office to hire his brothers as lawmen. Earp beat Smith in a fistfight and was fined $30. The local newspaper reported, "It is but justice to Earp to say he has made an excellent officer." Meagher won re-election, but the city council voted against rehiring Earp.

Wyatt Earp - Wikipedia [bracketed additions are mine]

² Apparently, either Mary Frey quit her lowdown dirty ways or William Frey got over his jealousy and accepted his beloved for the soiled dove she was. 

We left Mother Russia for this?