Marguerite's Journey

By Michelle Goff Grant Writer

When she was in grade school, Marcia Cassady, ’80, a University of Pikeville trustee, started taking art lessons from Marguerite Weber, a professor of art at Pikeville College. Although Cassady discontinued the lessons after middle school and later forged a friendship with Marguerite, she still refers to her one-time teacher as Mrs. Weber. She also continues to receive inspiration from Marguerite’s extraordinary and often tragic life.

Marguerite Fedotoff was born on May 30, 1900, in St. Petersburg, Russia. Educated in France, her Swiss mother was a governess to the children of Grand Duke Constantine, a cousin of Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia. Marguerite’s father oversaw St. Petersburg’s post and telegraph services. His father, Paul Fedotoff, is considered one of Russia’s most prominent 19th century artists.

Her mother’s role in Constantine’s household brought Marguerite into contact with the aristocracy. Many years later, she recorded in her journal that the family had spent a summer on the grand duke’s estate. Marguerite, age eight at the time of the visit, wrote, “It was a happy summer and we started to consider the family of the grand duke as ordinary people.”

At age nine, Marguerite enrolled in the Smolny Institute. Her mother taught French at the school, which Catherine the Great established in 1764 as an educational facility for daughters of the nobility. (Vladimir Lenin would later choose Smolny as the Bolshevik headquarters.) Marguerite remained at the school for seven years, earning the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree. In 1916, with Russia’s World War I casualties growing, she took nursing classes so she could work in a military hospital.

Around this time, Marguerite met and married a young military officer. Together, they had a daughter named Suzanne. In 1917, their lives changed forever with the outbreak of the Russian revolution.

According to a story published in the Williamson Daily News following Marguerite’s death in 1980, she described the time as “full of anxiety and fear. The nights were sleepless because that’s when groups of soldiers, armed with rifles, were searching the private homes and arresting people just for the reason of being from another social class than the proletariat.”

Marguerite’s husband, whose heart had been weakened during his military service, died shortly after the revolution began. She also lost family valuables, including works of art, which were seized by soldiers or sold for food.

Fearing that the Bolsheviks would soon target her and Suzanne, Marguerite sewed the family’s remaining valuables into her clothing and she and her daughter made their way to Siberia, a trip of more than 2,000 miles. According to Marguerite’s obituary, they walked “in snow drifts that at times rose over their heads.”

Exposure and starvation eventually claimed three-year-old Suzanne.

Marguerite continued on to China. Tying a scarf around her head to avoid detection, she had a photo taken for a fake passport.

In China, she met a fellow Russian emigrant, Arkady Weber. The son of a German father and a Tatar countess, Arkady spent two years as a prisoner of war in Germany during World War I. By the time he escaped prison and returned to Russia, the revolution was underway. Although he joined up with the White Russians to fight the Bolsheviks, he fled the country when it became apparent that the communist forces would win.

Arkady found work as a movie pianist and bandleader in China. He and Marguerite married in 1937. For more than a decade, they enjoyed their life in China. They eventually settled in Shanghai where Marguerite taught school and Arkady directed an orchestra. In the late 1940s, however, communist forces overthrew the Chinese government. According to her obituary, Marguerite and Arkady were on the last ship out of Shanghai before the city fell to the communists.

The couple found their way to Brazil where they spent two years teaching before meeting Presbyterian missionaries who told them about Pikeville College. The Webers started teaching at Pikeville in 1952. Arkady retired in the early 1970s. Marguerite retired in 1975, the same year her husband died. In the early 1980s, the college named the Weber Art Gallery in Marguerite’s honor.

Before their retirement, the couple also taught private lessons in their home. One of their students was Marcia Cassady.

“Both my parents (Roma Clark McClanahan and Thelmer McClanahan) were teachers and they valued art and music,” Cassady said.

“They gave me weekly piano lessons with Mr. Weber and art lessons with Mrs. Weber in her bedroom that doubled as her studio. I still have every one of the paintings we did together.”

“My dad was Mrs. Weber’s student at Pikeville College in the early ’60s. One day in class, she challenged him with the assertion that only someone with talent could paint a portrait that captured a true likeness. He thought she was of the opinion he didn’t have enough talent. So, he created

a portrait of me, perhaps four-years-old at the time. It meant the world to him that she was impressed, that she revised her opinion of his abilities. She had that effect on students. She could be warm and good-humored, but she had high standards and pulled no punches. By the time I studied art with her in that tiny bedroom/studio a decade later, she may have mellowed a bit. But drawing and painting were still central to her understanding of a good life, and she was exacting about technique and best efforts.”

Cassady believes the Webers initially viewed the Eastern Kentucky mountains as a “place of refuge from war and communism. She continued to travel to San Francisco, where there was an active Russian community, and she travelled frequently to Europe. She always came home, though. She had not forgotten the way they had been welcomed by the community. It wasn’t just a sanctuary for her. It was her home.”

According to Marguerite’s obituary, the community’s affection for the Webers was so great that when the couple became U.S. citizens in 1954, the streets of Pikeville were blocked and a party was thrown in their honor.

The story also noted that the Webers adopted the college students as their own. Following Arkady’s death, Marguerite asked Cassady to live with her.

“She had never learned to drive and lacked transportation,” Cassady recalled. “She approached my parents with the offer to let me live with her in lieu of dorm living. She said to me, ‘You can teach me to drive and I can teach you to cook.’”

Marguerite never became a licensed driver. (“I was the worst driving instructor in the world,” Cassady joked.) But Cassady was introduced to international

cuisine and treasures, Marguerite’s gift to her of handwritten recipes for borscht and stroganoff.

“She had lived in Russia and Shanghai and Rio de Janeiro and was practicing fusion before it was popular. I would walk in at the end of the day and be greeted by wonderfully exotic smells. I think she still wanted somebody to cook dinner for.”

Describing the Webers as “Cold War poster children,” Cassady said reporters and others “traveled great distances to interview them. This was in the 1960s when travel to Pikeville was more difficult.” Due, in part, to this publicity, Cassady was aware of Marguerite’s history. But she credits Marguerite’s friend, Thede May, and another student, Tinker Page, ’74, with the foresight to record as much of that history as possible in her final years.

May and Page transcribed Marguerite’s journals and, following her death, contacted her relatives. They learned that some believed Marguerite to be the biological daughter of Grand Duke Constantine. During one of Marguerite’s trips to Italy, Constantine’s granddaughter learned of her visit and asked to meet with her father’s childhood acquaintance. Marguerite refused, which her family found strange. After finding photos of Constantine, however, Cassady saw a striking resemblance between Marguerite and the grand duke, perhaps strong enough to have made a meeting with his family awkward.

“We had always thought she was able to attend the Smolny Institute because her mother taught there,” Cassady said. “After the news about the Grand Duke Constantine, we wondered if she was placed there based on her parentage.”

Regardless of her true parentage, Cassady said Marguerite didn’t dwell on the past and never spoke to her about the loss of her daughter.

“She had made peace with the worst of times and didn’t want to relive them further,” she said. “She also didn’t place great value on things. She told me she had much in her life and had lost everything multiple times. She recognized the transitory nature of things that can be owned. She valued people and experiences and beautiful music and art. There was no hunger left in her for valuables.”

According to a profile of the couple published in the Herald-Advertiser in August 1965, the Webers had not corresponded with relatives still living in Russia since 1925. “The last request I had from my

brother,” Marguerite told the reporter, “was not to write.”

Cassady said she felt the impact of Marguerite’s forced separation from her family at her death.

“In my world, families gathered at times like that. Having been cut off from her family through forced emigration, she had only us,” said Cassady who, along with May and Page, was at Marguerite’s bedside when she died.

“She was a fascinating person, unlike anyone I’d ever met or hope to meet. She was a window on a pivotal moment in world history, and her life offered me lessons that go far beyond art,” Cassady said. “I have never stopped searching for information that can deepen my understanding of who she was.”

In the 1980s, with the hope of writing about Marguerite, Cassady shared materials from Marguerite’s life with the Hillwood Museum. Located in Washington, D.C., the museum specializes in Russian decorative art.

“It was affirming to be received so warmly and taken to a part of the museum that is not open to visitors. Hillwood had stacks of books – all in Russian – on the work of Paul Fedotoff, Mrs. Weber’s grandfather. But they also made me realize I could not do the necessary research without significant travel and French and Russian translators. I had three small children. I had to give it up.”

“As the Internet began to develop, I started preserving the materials we had in hopes of one day putting them online so that, if someone is researching related lives and stories, hers is there to be found.”

Cassady, who has never forgotten the woman who twice escaped communism, summered at a grand duke’s palace, and taught her art lessons in a tiny studio, added, “Her life is that important.”

UPIKE brings together special collections and archives from Central Appalachia. The Frank M. Allara Library Special Collections focuses on Appalachian history and culture and includes photographs, manuscripts, newspapers and ephemera. To share stories about your time on campus or memorabilia, contact Edna Fugate, archivist, at (606) 218-5625 or ednafugate@ upike.edu. Donations are accepted. Documents and photos can be copied and originals returned.