The Three Motherlands of Leon Weber: RUSSIA, FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

The name of Leon (Lev) Weber (1870-1956) is hardly known to the general public. In publications dedicated to Maria Yakunchikova-Weber, he is mentioned incidentally and generically. Essentially, these references are limited to the friendship between Maria and Leon that began in 1889 and resulted in a happy marriage in 1897, his care for the artist in the last years of her life and the role he played in conserving her artistic heritage and organising her first personal exhibition in 1905. In publications on the life story of Weber’s mother, Alexandra Golshtein, his name is mentioned even less.

The present article is based on Weber's memoirs, which are rarely considered by other researchers. The book “From Orient to Occident. Memoirs of a Doctor" was first published in 1940. It tells the life story of our compatriot who, while living far from Russia, in France and Switzerland, never lost his spiritual connection with his motherland.

Leon Weber. Photograph. [1910s] © Manuscript Department of the Tretyakov Gallery

Leon Weber was born on June 12, 1870[1], in St. Petersburg, into the family of a successful lawyer, Nikolai Ivanovich Weber, and Alexandra Vasilievna Weber (1850-1937, nee Bauler), a future public figure, writer and translator (better known as Golshtein after her second marriage). Leon, or Maka, as he was called within the family, was the eldest child. The younger son, Valerian[2], or Makusya, was born on September 14 (26), 1871, also in St. Petersburg.

Leon Weber was a member of an extraordinary family that had been integrating Swiss, French, Finnish, Mongolian, Cossack and Russian blood for many centuries, like a wide river with many tributaries. Contemplating on his own national identity, Weber used to remark that, in character and mentality, he was Russian, “but there were streaks in me that were Swiss and French"[3].

Leon's full last name, Weber-Bauler, was of Finnish and Swiss origin. His grandfather on his father's side, Johanni Weber, was a full-blooded Finn, a land surveyor from Vyborg who married Vera Khanykova, a Russian admiral's daughter of Mongolian origin. According to Weber, “In my father's veins were mingled the blood of the Finns, a race that came from goodness knows where, speaking a language like none other, and of khans of Mongolia, the men of the Golden Horde"[4]. The alliance of the aristocratic Vera and the humble Juhani, secretly blessed by a Finnish priest, was a great scandal. The young family settled down in Vyborg and then moved to St. Petersburg, where their son Nikolai, the father of Leon Weber, was born.

On his mother's side, Weber had Swiss, French and Russian roots. His great-grandfather, Jean-Jacob Bauler, was descended from a family of doctors living in Basel. A republican in his spirit, Jean-Jacob could not stand the burgher lifestyle of Switzerland. In the year 1814, together with his wife, Elizabeth Desgouttes, he moved to Russia, which, he was convinced, was to be transformed by Napoleon Bonaparte into a new world, based on the ideals of the revolution. Having worked as an assistant doctor at the court in St. Petersburg for a while, he was invited by a marshal of the Kostroma nobility to work as the head doctor of the military field hospital and a surgeon of the Hussars regiment. This is where his son Vasily (1822-1884), the grandfather of Leon Weber, was born. At the age of 18, Vasily left for Moscow, where he was admitted to the Department of Physics and Mathematics of Moscow University. There, he entered a circle of liberal-minded youths; his closest friends were Nikolai Ogarev, Alexander Herzen, Nikolai Stankevich, Vissarion Belinsky and Mikhail Bakunin. In 1840, Bauler married Natalia Semyonova, who belonged to one of the richest Russian-Cos- sack families of Russia. Even though the alliance of a progressively thinking student, a talented mathematician, later a recognized inventor, and a high-society girl with no remarkable educational background was not happy, it lasted for more than 40 years. In 1850, the Baulers had a daughter named Alexandra, the mother of Leon Weber.

Devoted as he was to his mother, Weber treated her difficult and exuberant personality with understanding. He used to say that the main trait of her character was an inborn sense of leadership and craving for power. In the 1870s-1880s, Alexandra was heavily under the influence of socialistic ideas and revolutionary commitments. Her marriage to Nikolai Weber did not last long and was effectively over by 1876. The spouses disagreed upon views held by Alexandra that contradicted the world outlook of her husband as well as family values in general. “But for a woman student in the Russia of those days, what did marriage mean, or the family, or relations, or the traditional environment?"[5] Leon Weber inquired, before answering: “Nihil, nothing". According to him, the father, “this Finnish giant, this precise and conscientious jurist - he was an examining magistrate, always well-dressed, always correct - did not find the masculine ideal of the neo-Nihilist women of the period, for whom theoretical interests, hectic dogmas, careless dress, long hair, and disregard for bourgeois comfort were the chief attractions"[6].

Leon Weber spent his early childhood in St. Petersburg, his hometown. The first memory he was aware of was the view of the ice-bound River Neva from his playroom window, from where he watched the full moon at the age of approximately four years old. Throughout his life, he cherished memories of the large, cosy house in Nesterovo[7], of peaceful manor life and of the majestic full-flowing Oka.

In 1876, Alexandra Weber left Russia, together with her two sons[8]. That was a new page in the life of little Levushka, with many houses to change and many bright memories to excite his enquiring and lively mind. At first, the three of them went to the motherland of their ancestors, to Switzerland. The Russian boy was awestruck by the miraculous world of the snow-white mountains and clear blue lakes. For several months, the family stayed in the village of Castagnola on the shores of Lake Lugano below Monte Bre, in the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino in the south of Switzerland. At first, the children were home-schooled until they joined a local school, where they quickly adopted the Italian language. In the background, the underground activities of their mother continued, along with the daytime and nocturnal absences they entailed. Having heard that Bakunin, the friend of her father's youth, was in Lugano, Alexandra went to see him at first alone and then together with her sons. They met a couple of months before the death of Bakunin, who passed away in the summer of 1876. Weber had vivid memories of the revolutionary who, as he said, was adored by the children for encouraging their childish mischief. In obedience to Bakunin's last request, in November 1876, Alexandra and her children headed to Ravenna to meet his followers as well as supporters of Giuseppe Garibaldi. There, she grew close to Vladimir Golshtein9, her consulting physician in Switzerland and husband-to-be. Weber described his first impression of Golshtein when from the window he saw his “mother was seated beside a comrade whose magnificent white cape stood out from the dark mass of the Italians.

I thought him extremely handsome, with his brown beard and his round Garibaldian beret"[10]. Several years later, Alexandra and Vladimir had a daughter Natalia[11] and a son Alexei, nicknamed Uka in the family. As recalled by Vladimir Vernadsky, a close friend of the Golshteins, “It was a beautiful family of intelligent people who loved each other"[12].

In January 1877, escaping from a police raid in the dead of night, Alexandra and her children fled Italy. This time, the family settled down in Paris. Due to a lack of money, they lived an ascetic life in France. During that period, they rented various small apartments in La Villette and in the Latin Quarter. Longing to join the proletariat, Alexandra was doing her best to make a living on her own. Following the example of her husband, a doctor by profession who worked as a carpenter and a cabinet-maker, she found a job at an artificial flower workshop. Nonetheless, she dedicated all of her free time to social activism. Unattended, the children grew up as little rascals. It was a happy childhood, full of joy and mischief. After many years, Leon wrote: “I think with gratitude of my mother, who, since at this period she did not have much time for me, allowed me to enjoy these delights and these liberties"[13].

The only shadow in Leon's life was the separation from his beloved brother Valerian. The elder brother took the changes in his stride, but the younger missed his father badly. At the age of six, Makusya was taken to St. Petersburg, to Nikolai Weber. Leon pined for his brother in the following years - they were only finally reunited many years later. This dramatic episode drew an invisible line under his careless childhood.

Leon spent his adolescence in Switzerland, to which his family returned from France in the summer of 1879. At first, they settled down in Clarens, a small village in the canton of Vaud, and then in the village of Tavel. Although Leon loved living in the countryside, in autumn, his parents took him to Geneva, where he stayed until the age of 15. In Geneva, the Golshteins found success in a new endeavour: journalism. Leon's parents were not involved in their teenage son's development: Vladimir was busy writing articles for Russian medical journals and Alexandra immersed herself in vivisection studies as an assistant to the German physiologist Moritz Schiff. Besides, by that time, she had had another child.

At the same time, the Golshteins went through a dramatic transformation in their political views, adopting liberalism. Absolutely indifferent to politics, their son preferred to stay away from any debates. He devoured one book after another, engrossed in the novels of Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper and Charles Dickens, as well as Gogol and Pushkin, and then Plutarch and Homer. It was also at this time that he discovered the Grand Theatre de Geneve. An important milestone in his life was his enrolment into the College de Geneve (currently the College Calvin), where he first came in contact with academic disciplines and significantly expanded his knowledge in a variety of domains. After two years of studies, Leon obtained a bachelor's degree. In about 1885, the Golshteins left Geneva for Paris, this time for good.

The personality of Leon Weber was shaped, first of all, in Switzerland and in France. As soon as he came of age, he made the decision to renounce his Russian citizenship in favour of French. Recollecting this episode, Weber wrote: “My father, who had become an eminent judge, obtained through the minister Stolypin the Tsar's signature to a ukaz which liberated me from allegiance to the Emperor. This ukaz was delivered to me in person by the ambassador Morenheim so that I could now with perfect legality become a French citizen and a national of a country to which I was attached by the bonds of culture"[14].

Choosing a profession, Leon Weber followed in the footsteps of his stepfather Vladimir Golshtein and became a doctor, which he never regretted. In 1888, he was admitted to the Medical School of the Lycee Louis- le-Grand in Paris. The scope of his interests encompassed psychiatry, surgery and bacteriology. There, he was lucky enough to meet talented mentors who made up a constellation of the top physicians of France: the psychiatrist Jean-Martin Charcot, the surgeon Jean- Franpois-Auguste Le Dentu, the professor of histology and physiology Mathias-Marie Duval and the chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur. Weber dedicated his entire life to medicine, beginning his career as an assistant surgeon, a private psychotherapist and a doctor at St. Louis Hospital and eventually achieving the position of a medical expert at the Secretariat of the League of Nations. During World War I, he was recruited to serve as head doctor and surgeon at the hospitals of Lyon, Valence and the commune of La Courtine. Being a fluent Russian speaker, in 1916 Weber was appointed physician of the Russian division that arrived in Marseille from Vladivostok. From that time on, he was involved in solving a number of issues related to the Russian soldiers, administrative as well as medical.

From his early years, Leon had been strongly nostalgic about Russia. He dreamt of visiting the places where his mother had spent her youth, of seeing the Volga, the Oka and Moscow. He passionately studied Russian language and literature. Having left Russia at the age of six, the first time Weber came to his motherland as an adult was in 1897, just before his wedding. His fiancee was Maria Yakunchikova, a relative of his step-father, Vladimir Golshtein. Recalling the image of his wife, Weber remarked that Masha was “somewhat retiring, a keen and reflective observer, she was tall, but inclined to stoop a little. <...> her blue-green eyes, with their look of veiled attention, studying forms and colours. She had the brain of Minerva, in which everything took its proper place and awaited the moment when it would blossom into plastic expression. <...> she was a creature of restrained fire and passion, a delicate feminine complex under the virile guidance of a philosophic mind. She was misunderstood by my family, who regarded her concentration as distraction, or even indifference, and my mother's instinct for domination was defeated by this delicate-seeming creature, who was steadfast in the intuitive conviction of her own values, and in the defence of her personality. We were of the same age, and we became close friends at once. <...> We went forward side by side, at the close of this second decade of life <...>’’[15]. Maria played a great role in Leon’s exploration of his motherland: the connection between them helped him feel and comprehend Russia. Yakunchikova became the guide he had long been waiting for to immerse himself into the world of Russian culture.

As Maria wished, the wedding was held in Russia. In June 1897, Leon set out on the long journey from Paris to Moscow, where his fiancee had been waiting for him. “She was radiant, her golden hair, dressed a la Veni- tienne, gleaming under her little hat, and her delicate cheeks were flushed with emotion. The big Vladimir (Maria’s brother, Vladimir Yakunchikov. - A.D.), a magnate of Russian industry, lifted his Periclean head and offered me a limp hand"[16], wrote Weber about their meeting at the train station. Guided by his fiancee and according to the extensive programme she had prepared, Leon visited all the places that were precious to her: the house of her parents in Sredny Kislovsky Pereu- lok; Borok, the estate of her step-sister Natalia Polenova; Lyubimovka, the dacha (summer cottage) of another of her step-sisters, Yelizaveta Sapozhnikova; Nara, the dacha of her brother Vladimir Yakunchikov and his wife, Maria; and Abramtsevo, the estate of her uncle Savva Mamontov, as well as the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius and, indeed, Vvedenskoye, the former estate of the Yakunchikov family. Maria also introduced her future husband to her friends: Mikhail Vrubel, Konstantin Balmont and Feodor Chaliapin.

After the marriage service[17], the young Webers made a trip to the place that was most precious for Maria: the place where she had spent her childhood. “Our brief honeymoon journey was a piligrimage to Vvedenskoye. <...> At Zvenigorod we were lodged in the hostel of a convent; our room... smelt faintly of incense and oil of carnations. Not far from ... still uplifted its classic fagade on the hilltop; but indoors, what dilapidation! The people who had bought the estate had abandoned it, and the house had suffered the fate of all old things: decrepitude and destruction. The great salon with the Louis XVI panelling was moulting, the couches were losing their stuffing, and the graceful lyre-shaped backs of the chairs showed the marks of the hatchet... A great mirror, still intact, returned a mournful image of our faces from its greenish foil <...> On the other hand, the national surroundings, the avenues and the trees of the park, had acquired the majestic charm of the immemorial forest. <...> We left this melancholy spot alone with its past: a past that could never return"[18]. The visit to Vvedenskoye was a great inspiration for Maria. After the visit, she created the painting titled “From the Window of the Old House. Vvedenskoye" (1897, Tretyakov Gallery), depicting the upper part of the colonnade visible from the room where she had been born.

As the first cold struck, the Webers returned to Paris, where they settled in an apartment on the Avenue Niel. Among regular guests of the house were both physicians and artists, such as Aleksandr Golovin, Konstantin Korovin, Leon Bakst, Alexandre Benois and Sergei Diaghilev. The family spent winters in Paris and summers in Savoie. There, in the district of Monthey, they built a small house in a forest glade by the foot of Mont Blanc. “There, in religious expectancy, Macha made ready for the advent of a child. He was born at the beginning of winter, on a miraculous day <...>. ‘“Now", Macha whispered to me, “I am a completed entity: Art and Procreation"'[19], remembered her husband. However, the tranquil days of happiness did not last long. After the birth of their first child, Stepan, Maria began slowly fading away due to the tuberculosis from which she had been suffering. “I can recall the cold perspiration that stood on my forehead when under the microscope, in an imperceptible smear, I saw the sinister crimson rod- lets of Koch's bacillus..."[20], wrote Weber. After the birth of their second son Iakov, the disease took hold and, after a desperate struggle, Maria died.

Maria YAKUNCHIKOVA-WEBER. Mother and Child. 1898
Pencil on paper. 23.5 × 21.9 cm. © Vasily Polenov Museum-Reserve

Leon finally settled down in Switzerland, in the municipality of Chene-Bougeries. He bought the house where Maria had spent her last year. After a while, he married for the second time, to a Swiss nurse from the mountain sanatorium in Leysin, a peasant woman called Bertha Anderegg. She had been Maria’s caregiver and had been asked by Maria to bring up her sons. “She was an exceptional being: one of those to whom God gives the power of absolute devotion to others. A slender, golden-haired Diana, she seemed to fly up and down the stairs, and when she opened a patient's door it was as though a radiance had entered"[21], Leon wrote about Bertha.

Weber nurtured his connection to Russia. It was important for him that his sons spoke the Russian language. From autumn 1905 to spring 1906, that strong nostalgia brought him back to Russia again. During that visit, he went to Moscow to see the parents of his late wife and stayed at the Yakunchikovs’ dacha in Nara, where he witnessed a strike. It was the first time in many years that Weber had visited St. Petersburg, his hometown. That year, he spent his Christmas in Finland, in Taaperi, the house of his old friend. He went to the place where his father, who had died several years previously, spent his last years.

Leo Weber at the posthumous exhibition of Maria Yakunchikova-Weber
(held within the 2nd Exhibition of the Union of Russian Artists). Moscow. 1905
Photograph. © Manuscript Department of the Tretyakov Gallery

From abroad, he watched the political events happening in Russia with an aching heart. The metamorphoses in the land of his fathers scared and upset him. Deep in his soul, he nurtured an image of the other, old Russia, resonant with the landscapes by Maria Yakunchiko- va-Weber. Looking at her paintings hanging on the walls of the house in Chene-Bougeries and re-reading the vibrant letters Maria had sent from Russia, Leon Weber silently addressed the most precious person of his youth: “Your pictures, Masha, your affectionate letters, and your tales of what you had seen and done! The love in them drew me to you and made me love your Russia"[22].

1. Weber noted that he was the same age as his wife, who was born in 1870. In 1950, he celebrated his 80th birthday (see: Doctor Leon Weber-Bauler was 80 years old on June 12, 1950 // “Med Hyg" (Geneve). 1950. Jun 15; №8 (172). P. 213).
2. Valerian Nikolaevich Weber (1871-1940) - great Soviet geologist, paleontologist and pedagogue, a disciple of Vladimir Vernadsky and a graduate of the Mining Institute (1897). The scope of his research encompassed Turkestan, the Caucasus and the Far North. He was married to Yelena Bekaryukova, a cousin of Maria Grevs, the spouse of Ivan Grevs.
3. Dr. L. Weber-Bauler. “From Orient to Occident. Memoirs of a Doctor" / translated by B. Miall. Kessinger Publishing, LLC. 2007. P. 15 (Hereinafter: Memoirs of a Doctor).
4. Ibid. P.17.
5. Ibid. P.64-65.
6. Ibid. P.70.
7. Several years later, the estate in Nesterovo was sold. The manor house did not survive.
8. The decision was made after her "going to the people" in autumn 1875 - early winter 1876.
9. Vladimir Augustovich Golshtein (1849-1917) - doctor, political immigrant (since 1871). Studied at the Medical Department of Moscow University, from which he was expelled in 1869 for getting involved in the "Polunin story". In 1870, he was prosecuted under the Nechaev case. He spent all his fortune on the needs of the revolution (see: Vernadsky V.I. Diaries, 1935-1941: in two volumes. Vol. 2: 1939-1941. Moscow, 2006. P. 158, 176 (Hereinafter: Vernadsky. Diaries. Vol. 2).
10. Memoirs of a Doctor. P. 122.
11. Natalia Vladimirovna Golshtein (1880-1953) - professional musician, spouse of Yuly Fedorovich Semionov (1873-1947), Doctor of Physics, disciple of V.I. Vernadsky, writer (see: Vernadsky. “Diaries". Vol. 2. P. 155, 176).
12. Vernadsky. “Diaries". Vol. 2. P. 158.
13. Memoirs of a Doctor. P. 157.
14. Ibid. P. 189.
15. Ibid. Р. 185-186.
16. Ibid. Р. 190.
17. The marriage service was held in “in the warm radiance of the candles of a great church which overlooked the Arbat, opposite the very windows behind which my mother was born" (Ibid. Р. 203)
18. Ibid. Р. 203-204.
19. Ibid. Р. 210-211.
20. Ibid. P. 211.
21. Ibid. P. 212.
22. Ibid. P. 188.