Ariadna Aleksandrovna Scriabina (Russian: Ариадна Александровна Скрябина; also Sarah Knut, née Ariadna Alexandrovna Schletzer, pseudonym Régine; 26 October 1905 – 22 July 1944) was a Russian poet and activist of the French Resistance, who co-founded the Zionist resistance group Armée Juive. She was posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre and Médaille de la Résistance.
She was the eldest daughter of the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin and Tatyana Schloetzer. After the death of her father, Ariadna took his last name, and after the death of her mother she was exiled in Paris. Being part of the literary circles of the Russian Diaspora, she wrote and published poetry. She married three times, last time with poet Dovid Knut (real name Duvid Meerovich Fiksman). Together with her husband she supported the ideas of Revisionist Zionism. She was baptised in an Orthodox rite as a child, but later converted to Judaism taking the Hebrew name Sarah.
During the German occupation of France, she was the organizer and active member of the Jewish resistance in the south of the country. She was murdered in Toulouse by a Milice agent shortly before the fall of the Vichy regime.
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Biography
Alexander Scriabin had seven children; four from the first marriage to Vera Ivanovna Scriabina: Rima (1898–1905), Elena (1900–1990), Maria (1901–1989) and Lev (1902–1910), and three from the relationship with Tatyana Fyodorovna Schletzer: Ariadna, Julian and Marina. By 1910, Scriabin lived with Schletzer; although he was formally married to Vera Scriabina, they did not meet even at the funeral of their son Lev.
Ariadna Schletzer
Ariadna Schletzer, the eldest daughter of Scriabin and Schletzer, was born in the Ligurian seaside village of Bogliasco north west Italy, where Scriabin worked on The Poem of Ecstasy.
It was an unstable period for Scriabin, who had been moving around Europe for several years. In July 1905, his eldest daughter Rima died in Switzerland, and the birth of Ariadna finalized his separation with a legitimate wife. In December, he broke his longstanding relations with Belyayev's publishing house, which halved their fees shortly after the death of the founder, Mitrofan Belyayev. As a result, Scriabin lost his source of income for a year, until the new owners reconsidered their offer.
In late January 1906, Scriabin moved his new family to Geneva, and in the fall to Amsterdam. He and his wife went to a concert tour in Belgium, United States and Paris, while Ariadna was watched by Schletzer's aunts, Henriette and Alina Boti. In the summer of 1907, Schletzer brought Ariadna in the Swiss village of Beatenberg, where she was soon joined by Scriabin. In September, the family moved to Lausanne, where their next child Julian was born in a few months.
Scriabin had long thought of returning to Russia. However, his reputation was spoiled by his scandalous character and dubious family situation, and thus the return was delayed to February 1910.
In Moscow, Ariadna was baptized in the Orthodox rite, and in November 1912 her sister Marina was born.
Scriabin's children were mostly raised by tutors, as both Scriabin and his wife were preoccupied with their public lives. French was spoken within the family, which was frequently visited by poets, artists, theatre workers and philosophers. Ariadna from an early age wrote poetry and studied at the Moscow Conservatory. Julian showed talents as a composer, and Marina was trained as a painter. The house had a rich library, and the children received most lessons from private teachers and their mother.
With the outbreak of World War I, life become harder, and to support his family Scriabin had to spend much time playing concerts in various Russian cities. Scriabin himself welcomed the war, hoping for changes after it was over.
Ariadna Scriabina
On 14 April 1915 Scriabin died of sepsis (blood infection), leaving the family without the source of income. Thanks to the efforts of family friends, the legal wife of Scriabin, Vera, accepted the status of Ariadna, Marina and Julian as Scriabin's children. As a result, they were allowed to carry his name.
Schletzer gradually managed to collect some money for the family and focused on raising Julian, whom she saw as the successor of Alexander Scriabin. Two revolutions in 1917 again undermined the barely established family life. In 1918, famine spread through Moscow, and Schletzer took the children to Kiev, located in a better-fed Ukraine.
The Soviet government decided to organize Scriabin's museum in his Moscow house, and Schletzer was asked to assist in this matter. While she was away, in June 1919, Julian drowned in the Dnieper River. Since then, Ariadna developed a fear of deep water for life.
Julian's death shattered Schletzer. She took Marina to Moscow, while placing Ariadna in the boarding school in Novocherkassk. However, the school was soon closed down, and Ariadna was sent to her sister and mother in Moscow.
By that time, Ariadna already developed a strong and edgy personality. Although she was disliked in school due to her noble origin and temperament, she simply ignored that. By that time, she set herself a goal to become a distinguished poet.
Her favourites in literature were Dostoevsky, Shakespeare and the ancient Greeks, for their well-defined style and dramatism. She also liked the poems of Alexander Blok and Konstantin Balmont. She loved to recite the line of Balmont "I want to be the first in the world, on land and on the water".
At 15, she was composing verses together with her sister Marina under the collective pseudonym Mirra. Those verses were often devoted to Russian names and followed the style of Marina Tsvetaeva, who was a family friend. When writing alone, Ariadna used the pen name Ariadna Orlitskaya – while she adored her father, she did not want to ride on his fame.
Sarah
A week after the Congress, the Second World War started. Knut was mobilized to the French Army on the first day of the war, 1 September 1939, and the newspaper had to close. He served in Paris, and on 30 March 1940 he and Ariadna finally registered their marriage. A few days later, Ariadna converted to Judaism and took the name Sarah. She then demanded all friends to call her only by the new name.
Ariadna's conversion to Judaism was perceived as "betrayal" by the predominantly Christian Russian immigrant community.
With the approach of German troops to the capital, the military unit of Knut was moved to the south, while Ariadna stayed in Paris with the children. She started working at a plant, but it was closed only three days later as people started fleeing from Paris. Boris de Schloezer called her into the Pyrenees, but she refused to leave without her husband. Shortly before Germans entered Paris, she moved to her husband in Toulouse.
Toulouse was in the so-called "free zone", which saw no battles and occupation forces till November 1942, but had local "milice" set by the Vichy regime. The attitude toward Jews was so tense that Knuts stopped speaking Russian and used French even with their children. Most Jews tried to flee through Marseille to South America; Knuts tried too, but failed. Life was poor and hard, and they took any jobs available.
In early 1942, Dovid and Ariadna published a brochure titled "What to do?" (French: Que faire?) on the problems of Jews in World War II, where they argued the need for a Jewish underground organization. Dovid read the brochure to several Zionists in Toulouse, but only Abraham Polonski agreed with him while others found the idea of an underground fighting suicidal. Meanwhile, Polonski had an experience of creating an underground Jewish organization during the Civil War in Russia. He was arrested, but managed to escape through Germany and Belgium to Toulouse. There he graduated from the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Toulouse and later opened his own thriving business. Despite the objections of Zionists, Knuts, Polonski and his wife formed an organization, which was first named Bnei David ("descendants of David") and later Armée Juive ("Jewish army").
For conspiracy reasons, Sarah-Ariadna took a nickname – Régine. She came up with an oath and a ceremony carried out when joining Armée Juive, which over the years was followed by almost 2000 people.
Legacy and family
Toulouse was liberated three weeks after the death of Ariadna. She was posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre and Médaille de la Résistance. There is a plaque on the wall of a house where she was killed.
After the war, Dovid Knut acted as editor of Bulletin du Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine and for a while lived in the house where he had previously published Affirmation. Archives of Affirmation, the pre-war poems of Knut, and the unfinished novel of his wife had been lost. In 1947, he published the book on "The history of the Jewish Resistance in France, 1940–1944" (French: Contribution a L'Histoire de la Resistance Juive en France 1940–1944), and in 1949 his "Selected Poems". In 1948, he married the 17-year-old actress Virginia Sharovskaya. Jewish through one of her parents, she converted to Judaism to become Leah Knut. In October 1949 they emigrated to Israel, where Knut died in 1955 from a brain tumour.
Tatiana-Miriam married the composer and pianist Robert Cornman (1924–2008). She wrote a book in French about her parents, which was first translated into Russian and published in Russia. It is entitled in French: "Et c'est ma soif que j'aime", also translated into German as "Meine Liebe gilt meinem Durst". Tatiana-Miriam tried in this book to soften the image of Ariadna.
Betty Knut was involved with the French resistance and later became a war correspondent. She had a rank of lieutenant in the U.S. Army and received the Silver Star personally from George S. Patton, as well as the French Croix de Guerre. When crossing the Rhine, her jeep hit a landmine, leaving Betty with a serious shrapnel wound to the head. She recovered, but suffered from headaches for the rest of her life. She published a popular book La Ronde de Mouche on her military experiences. In the US she married a demobilized American soldier, a Jew. They had three children. After the war she became an active member of the Lehi (Stern Gang), undertaking special operations for the militant group and she became famous after being imprisoned in 1947 for planting explosives on British ships which had been trying to prevent Jewish immigrants from travelling to Mandatory Palestine. After her release from prison, she settled at the age of 23 in Beersheba in Southern Israel, where she opened a nightclub, before her early death at the age of 38 – the same age her mother and grandmother had died.