Russian Paris – part 1

Before tens of thousands of Russians flooded into France following the forced migrations of WWI and the Bolshevik revolution, a Russian community of an artistic nature had already taken root in Paris. In the early 1900s, Sergei Diaghilev and his Russian ballet became a cause célèbre in the French capital and championed immigrant artists. Picasso, Miro and Chagall all contributed set designs to Diaghilev-staged masterpieces, scored by none other than Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, De Falla and a host of other luminaries. The ballet dancers themselves were the talk of the town, with names like Anna Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky resonating all the way down to the modern-day. After WWI and over the next two decades, the Russian community expanded to become an increasing part of the city’s character.

My own introduction to Russian Paris came through Dimitri Vichenay whom I met whilst researching the possible location of the infamous ‘Auberge du Jehan Cottard’ – the restaurant where Eric Blair and his Russian friend Boris had worked in late 1929. Dimitri was in his early nineties by the time I started dropping in for afternoon chats. Over tea and biscuits I’d quiz him on his childhood; spent in what was then Paris’s Russian quarter.

From the early 1920s, immigrant families had banded together in southern Paris’s 15th arrondissement and turned the quartier into a veritable Russian fief. Some years before I turned up on Dimitri’s doorstep, he had also tried to pinpoint the location of the elusive restaurant described in ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’ (supposedly situated on the Rue du Commerce) and the true identity of its owners. He’d even published his research in the local Historical Society Journal along with pieces about his grandfather – Alexandre Benois, a costume and set designer for the Russian Ballet. Other than being a delightful soul, full of energy and with curiosity to spare, Dimitri Vichenay was the most fortuitous encounter I made along my own path to uncovering the story behind Orwell’s Paris period. He opened his door and his address book to me, introducing me to people without whom the full story would never have unfolded.

At the time we met, neither of us had yet succeeded in pinning down the location of the restaurant. All we had were theories, street numbers that we’d marked as possibles, buildings with question marks hanging over them. Dimitri stuck fast to the idea that the ‘Auberge du Jehan Cottard’ had been, as Orwell had described, on the Rue du Commerce, whereas I was fairly certain that it couldn’t have been. There was one restaurant in Orwell’s tale whose location and identity Dimitri and I did agree on though…

In ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’, Eric and Boris follow up on a rumour that a Russian restaurant is looking for staff. It was in the more upmarket 8th arrondissement where a Russian community of a different stripe had taken root; aristocratic families and dispossessed princes and princesses had settled there, just down the road from the oldest Russian orthodox cathedral in France. If you chose to dine on the rue Boissy-d’Anglas in the 1920s you may very well have caught a glimpse of one of the rarefied crowd that was to be found at Le-Boeuf-sur-le-Toit – Picasso, Cocteau, Stravinsky and Sergei Diaghilev himself were just some of its illustrious patrons. L’Ermitage, the Russian restaurant just down the road at number 21, was where Eric and Boris came looking for employment in the late summer of 1929. Boris’s knowledge of Russian-owned businesses in Paris would certainly come in useful for finding work in the not-so-distant future, but on this day, L’Ermitage was not hiring, and the two fatigued jobseekers made their way back to their hotels, tired and demoralised.

The real people & places from Down and Out in Paris and London are revealed in the forthcoming book, Orwell in Paris – Down & Out with the Russian Captain.
To be published first in French: Orwell à Paris – Dans la dèche avec le capitaine russe. By EXILS éditions, Paris on the 24/04/2024

References:
Dimitri Vichenay’s publications in Le journal de l’association historique du 15e arrondissement, Retronews service.
Illustrations:
Ermitage postcard circa 1925 – courtesy of Gallica.
Alexandre Benois’s set design for Petrouchka in 1911 – courtesy of Andreï Korliakov