Where's Itsik? "You'll have your Itsik," Stalin decided, and pulled his usual base trick.

•Shostakovich made his fint trip to the United States in March t 949 for the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, which took place at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York.

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Itsik Fefer invited Paul Robeson to dine with him in Moscow's most chic restaurant. Robeson arrived and was led to a private chamber in the restaurant, where the table was set with drinks and lavish zakuski.

Fefer was really sitting at the table, with several unknown men. Fefer was thin and pale and said little. But Robeson ate and drank well and saw his old friend.

After their friendly dinner, the men Robeson didn't know returned Fefer to prison, where he soon died. Robeson went back to America, where he told everyone that the rumors about Fefer's arrest and death were nonsense and slander. He had been drinking with Fefer personally.

And really, it's a lot easier living that way, it's more convenient to think that your friend is a rich and free man who can treat you to a luxurious ·dinner. Thinking that your friend is in prison is not pleasant. You have to get involved, you have to write letters and protests.

And if you write a protest you won't be invited the next time and they'll ruin your good name. The radio and papers will smear you with dirt, they'll call you a reactionary.

No, it's much easier to believe what you see. And you always see what you want to see. The mentality of the chicken-when a chicken pecks, it sees only the one grain and nothing else. And so it pecks, grain by grain, until the farmer breaks its neck. Stalin understood this chicken mentality better than anyone, he knew how to deal with chickens. And they all ate out of his hand. As I understand it, they don't like to remember this in the West. For they're always right, the great Western humanists, lovers of truthful literature and art. It's we who are always at fault.

I'm the one who gets asked, "Why did you sign this and that?" But has anyone ever asked Andre Malraux why he glorified the construction of the White Sea Canal,* where thousands upon thousands of people perished? No, no one has. Too bad. They should ask more often. After all, no one can keep these gentlemen from answering, noth-

*A canal in northern Russia, constructed on Stalin's orders between September 1931 and April 1933 by penal labor. Hundreds of thousands of workers died during its construction. Stalin cleverly turned this "concentrated labor on gigantic objectives, stunning the imagination with their grandiose scope" (a quote from a contemporary Soviet source) to propaganda aims. The talents of hundreds of writers, artists, and composers were used to glorify the White Sea Canal. See Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago.

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ing threatened their lives then and nothing threatens them now.

And what about Lion Feuchtwanger, famous humanist? I read his little book Moscow 1937 with revulsion. As soon as it saw the light of day, Stalin had it translated and printed in huge numbers. I read it with bitterness and contempt for the lauded humanist.

Feuchtwanger wrote that Stalin was a simple man, full of good will.

There was a time when I thought that Feuchtwanger had the wool pulled over his eyes too. But then I reread the book and realized that the great humanist had lied.

"What I understood is wonderful," he announced. What he und�rstood was that the political trials in Moscow were necessary-and wonderful. According to him, the trials favored the development of democratization. No, in order to write that, it's not enough to be a fool, you have to be a scoundrel as well. And a famed humanist.

And what about the no less famous humanist George Bernard Shaw? It was he who said, "You won't frighten me with the word

'dictator.' " Naturally, why should Shaw be frightened? There weren't any in England, where he lived. I think their last dictator had been Cromwell. Shaw just came to visit a dictator. It was Shaw who announced upon his return from the Soviet Union, "Hunger in Russia?

Nonsense. I've never been fed as well anywhere as in Moscow.'' Millions were going hungry then and several million peasants died of starvation. And yet people are delighted by Shaw, by his wit and courage.

I have my own opinion on that, even though I was forced to send him the score of my Seventh Symphony, since he was a famous humanist.

And what about Romain Rolland? It makes me sick to think about him. I get particularly nauseated because some of these famous humanists praised my music. Shaw, for one, and Romain Rolland. He really liked Lady Macbeth. I was supposed to meet this famous humanist from the glorious pleiad of lovers of truthful literature and just as truthful music. But I didn't go. I said I was ill.

Once I was tormented by the question: why? why? Why were these people lying to the entire world? Why don't these famous humanists give a damn about us, our lives, honor, and dignity? And then I suddenly calmed down. If they don't give a damn, then they don't. And to hell with them. Their cozy life as famous humanists is what they hold most dear. That means that they can't be taken seriously. They be-200

came like children for me. Nasty children-a hell of a difference, as Pushkin used to say.

There were a lot of nasty children in Petrograd. You walk down Nevsky Prospect and you see a thirteen-year-old with a cigar in his mouth. His teeth are rotten, he has rings on his fingers, a British cap on his head, and brass knuckles in his pocket. He's tried all the prostitutes in the city and had his fill of cocaine. And he doesn't like life. It's scarier to run into a punk like that than any gangster. The little angel could playfully knock you off-anything can come into a child's head.

I have the same fears when I look at the famous humanists of our times. They have rotten teeth and I don't need their friendship. I just want my feet to carry me as far away as possible.

Once a .Young American woman was visiting me. Everything was going well, in a proper dignified way. We spoke of music and nature and other highfalutin subjects. It was nice. Suddenly she grew frightened and upset. Spots of color rose on her face. She began waving her arms and almost jumped on the table, shouting, "A fly, a fly!" A fly had got into the room and my highly educated guest was scared to death. I was in no shape to chase after the fly, so we said our goodbyes.

For these people a fly is a mysterious animal from another world and I'm just an excavated dinosaur. All right, suppose that I am.

Then, my honorable guests, do you take it upon yourselves to discuss dinosaurs? Their problems, rights, and duties? Ah, so you don't discuss dinosaurs? Then don't talk about me either. Because you know even less about my rights and duties than you do about the rights and duties of the dinosaur.

Once during the war they showed the Hollywood film Mission to Moscow. The makers must have thought that it was a drama, but we saw it as a comedy. I don't think I laughed as much during the war as I did at that film. A fly, a fly.

One day when he was in a good mood, Nemirovich-Danchenko told me about the Hollywood version of Anna Karenina. I think he was present when they shot the film, at least he read the screenplay when he was in America. In the American version Vronsky possessed Anna in an inn, taking advantage of the fact, you see, that his pajamas and slippers were in Anna's room. And the film had a happy ending (I 201

think the great Garbo was Anna)-Karenin died and Vronsky and Anna got married.* Isn't that a fly? Of course it is.

I know, this is all silly, stupidly funny. Big deal: flies, mosquitoes, roaches. People just don't want to strain their minds. It's just not serious, just flitting around. A fly. All right, let them flit, but a creature born to crawl can't fly, as the stormy petrel of the Revolution Maxim Gorky said with great knowledge. And that holds in reverse.'

But once you've got used to flitting, you don't feel like returning to our sinful soil. And everything looks marvelous and wonderful from above; even the White Sea Canal is marvelous and amazing.

Of course, I know that an entire brigade of respected Russian dullards wrote a collective book praising that White Sea Canal. If they have an excuse at all, it's that they were taken to the canal as tourists one day and the next day any one of them could have been shoveling dirt there. Then again, Ilf and Petrov got out of participating in that shameful "literary camp" anthology by saying that they "knew little"

about the life of inmates. Ilf and Petrov were lucky, and they never did find out about that life, the way hundreds of other writers and poets did.

They did bring back one joke from the "recreational and familiarizing" trip to the canal. The writers and poets were greeted by a band whose members were all criminal (as opposed to political) convicts, imprisoned for crimes of passion. Ilf looked at the diligent musicians and remembered the famous Russian horn bands, and muttered, "This is a horned cuckold band."

Is that funny? I don't know. That was nervous laughter, you know, they were powerless and so they laughed. But it's not at all funny when you hear that Henry Wallace was touched by the Kolyma camps director's love for music. And he wanted to be President of the United States.

It wasn't funny when I was told how foreign visitors let down Akhmatova and Zoshchenko. Akhmatova had found herself on the brink of disaster many times. Gumilyovt was shot, her son was sent to the camps with a long sentence, and Punin died in the camps. She wasn't

*A reference to the 1927 M-G-M version, Love, in which Anna Karenina was played by Greta Garbo and Vronsky by John Gilbert. A later Hollywood version was called Anna Karenina and again starred Garbo as Anna, while Fredric March played Vronsky. In this version she did die.

tNikolai Stcpanovich Gumilyov (1 886-1921), poet, Anna Akmatova's first husband. He was 202

published for many years, and what is published now is perhaps only a third of what she wrote. Zoshchenko and Akhmatova felt the first

"Zhdanov blow"* -and there's no need to explain · what might follow.

They were called out to meet with foreign tourists, some delegation of defenders of this or fighters for that. I've seen plenty of these delegations and they all have one thing on their minds-to eat as soon as possible. Yevtushenko has a pointed poem about these friendly delegations: "Meal coupons in the hand bring friends from all the continents." So Zoshchenko and Akhmatova were forced to meet with this delegation. The old trick, to prove that they were alive, healthy and happy with everything, and extremely grateful to the Party and the government.

The "friends" with meal vouchers in their hands couldn't think of anything Cleverer to ask than what Zoshchenko and Akhmatova thought of the resolution of the Central Committee of the Party and Comrade Zhdanov's speech. This is the speech in which Akhmatova and Zoshchenko were used as examples. Zhdanov said that Zoshchenko was an unprincipled and conscienceless literary hooligan and that he had a rotten and decayed sociopolitical and literary mug. Not face. He said mug.

And Zhdanov said that Akhmatova was poisoning the consciousness of Soviet youth with the rotten and putrid spirit of her poetry. So how could they have felt about the resolution and speech? Isn't that sadistic-to ask about it? It's like asking a man into whose face a hooligan has just spat, "How do you feel about having spit on your face? Do you like it?" But there was more. They asked it in the presence of the hooligan and bandit who did the spitting, knowing full well that they would leave and the victim would have to stay and deal with the bandit.

Akhmatova rose and said that she considered both Comrade Zhdanov's speech and the resolution to be absolutely correct. Of course, she did the right thing, that was the only way to behave with those shame-shot as a member or an antigovernmcnt conspiracy (the so-called Professor Tagantsev Affair), despite Maxim Gorky's plea to Lenin to spare him. Nikolai Nikolayevich Punin (1 888-1953), art historian, Commissar of the Hermitage after the Revolution, was Akhmatova's third husband.

Arrested several times, he finally perished in Siberia.

*The postwar ''tightening of the screws" began with Zhdanov's move against Zoshchcnko and Akhmatova {1946). Both were expelled Crom the Writers' Union, stripped or all means or sunival, and viciously badgered in the newspapers and at innumerable meetings.

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less, heartless strangers. What could she have said? That she thinks she's living in an insane asylum of a country? That she despises and hates Zhdanov and Stalin? Yes, she could have said that, but then no one would have ever seen her again.

The "friends," of course, could have bragged about the sensation back at home, "among friends." Or even slipped a report about it into the papers. And we would have all suffered a loss, we would have lived without Akhmatova and her incomparable late poetry. The country would have lost its genius.

But Zoshchenko, a sweet and naive man, thought that these people really did want to understand something. He naturally couldn't say everything he felt, that would have been suicide, but he embarked on an explanation. He said that at first he didn't understand either Zhdanov's speech or the resolution. They seemed unfair to him and he wrote a letter about it to Stalin. But then he started thinking and then many of the accusations seemed fair and just.

Poor Mikhail Mikhailovich, his nobility did not serve him well. He had thought that he was dealing with decent people. The "decent people" applauded and left. (They didn't think Akhmatova deserved applause.) And the already ill Zoshchenko was starved as punishment.

He wasn't permitted to publish a single line. His feet were swelling, he was starving. He tried to make a living by repairing shoes.

The moral is clear. There can be no friendship with famous humanists. We are poles apart, they and I. I don't trust any of them and not one of them has ever done anything good for me. I do not acknowledge their right to question me. They do not have the moral right and they dare not lecture me.

I never answered their questions and I never will. I never took their lectures seriously and I never will. I am backed up by the bitter experience of my gray and miserable life. And I'm not happy in the least that my students have adopted my suspiciousness. They don't believe the famous humanists either and they're right.

It's too bad. I'd be very happy if they managed to find some famous humanist who could be trusted, with whom you could chat about flowers, brotherhood, equality and liberty, the European soccer championships, and other lofty topics. But no such humanist has been born.

There are more than enough scoundrels, but I don't feel like talking to 204

them: they'll sell you cheap for foreign currency or a jar of black ·caviar.

That's why I derive a sad satisfaction from the fact that my best students, seeing my sad example, refrain from friendship with humanists.

I heartily recommend a dog to keep from being lonely.

Don't believe humanists, citizens, don't believe prophets, don't believe luminaries-they'll fool you for a penny. Do your own work, don't hurt people, try to help them. Dori't try to save humanity all at once, try saving one person first. It's a lot harder. To help one person without harming another is very difficult. It's unbelievably difficult.

That's where the temptation to save all of humanity comes from. And then, inevitably, along the way you discover that all humanity's happiness hinges on the destruction of a few hundred million people, that's all. A trifle.

Nothing but nonsense in the world, Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol once said. It's that nonsense that I try to depict. World issues grab man by the collar; he's got plenty of problems of his own, and now there are world issues as well. You could lose your head-or your nose.

I'm often asked why I wrote the opera The Nose. Well, first of all, I love Gogol. I'm not bragging, but I know pages and pages by heart.

And I have striking childhood memories of The Nose. Now when they write about The Nose, they harp on Meyerhold's influence: to wit, that his production of The Inspector General astounded me so that I took on The Nose. That's not correct.

When I moved to Moscow and into Meyerhold's apartment, I was already working on The Nose. It was all thought through, and not by Meyerhold. I was working on the libretto with two marvelous men, Sasa Preis and Georgi Ionin. It was a marvelous, magical time. We would get toget�er in the morning, early. We didn't work at night, first of all because we were put off by the Bohemian style of work.

You should work in the morning or afternoon, no need for midnight drama.

And secondly, Sasa Preis couldn't work at night. He was busy at night, working. His job had an important-sounding title, "agent in conserving nonliquid property," while what he really was was a watchman. He guarded a candy factory, formerly Landrin's. The owner, George Landrin, ran off abroad and his son did too. They left 205

the property behind and Sasa guarded it to keep looters away.

It was a lot of fun. As Oleinikov said, "Truly, it was fun. Truly, it was funny." At first we approached Zamyatin, we wanted him to take charge of our libretto since he was a great master. But the great master didn't add to the fun and didn't stand out in any way from the rest of us.

Mayor Kovalyov needed a monologue. Everyone else backed away from doing it, but Zamyatin said, "Why not?" He sat down and wrote it. By the way, it's a bad monologue. That was the extent of the contribution by the great master of Russian prose. So Zamyatin got on the credits by accident, so to speak. He wasn't very much help, we managed on our own. So much for the influence of the great masters.

They were very special people, Preis and Ionin. Preis wrote Gogol's comedy St. Vladimir Third Grade for him. As you know, Gogol didn't finish the play, he only left rough sketches, and Sasa wrote the play.

He didn't just write whatever came into his head, no, he put it together all from Gogol's own words. He didn't add a single word of his own, he got every line from Gogol's works. It's astonishing; The man worked scrupulously. I read the manuscript. After each bit of dialogue there's a reference for the source, the Gogol work from which it came.

For example, if someone says, ."Dinner is served," the footnote tells you the work and page number. Honestly. The play was staged in Leningrad and Sasa read a review in the papers titled "Slop it on, just as long as it's hot."

Later Sasa Preis was of great help with the libretto of I.Ady Macbeth. He also created a marvelous opera plot especially for me: the life of women who want to be emancipated. It was to be a serious opera.

But nothing came of it, nothing. Alexander Germanovich Preis died, he died young. They killed him.

Ionin was also an outstanding figure in his way. He was once a street urchin and a criminal, and was brought up in the Dostoevsky Reform Colony for Handicapped Children. You couldn't make up a name like that. Ionin was an expert in Russian literature, I . don't know where he learned all he knew. Literature teachers didn't stay long at the colony, Ionin drove them away. One lady came and read them "The Grasshopper and the Ant" out loud. Ionin said, "We know all that, why don't you tell us about the latest trends in literature in-206

stead?" She replied, "Don't talk dirty to me. What's -a trend?"

Ionin also died young. He wanted to become a director. He caught typhus from someone and died. Two of his friends wrote a book in which Ionin is a protagonist. He's called The Jap in the book even though he was Jewish. But he was short and had slanted eyes. The book became very popular, you might say famous, and not so long ago it was made into a film. I understand they use the film for educational purposes. Think how strangely things turn out.

I'm surrounded by amazing subjects, perhaps because I'm surrounded by so many amazing people, even if they're not famous. And these people helped me much more than the famous ones. Famous people never have enough time. So much for Meyerhold.

And as for his Inspector General, well, of course I liked the production very much, but there's an inverse relation here: I liked it because I was already working on The Nose and saw that Meyerhold was resolving many things as I was, and not the reverse. I didn't like the music for The Inspector General at all. I'm not ref erring to the musical numbers that Gnessin wrote-no, they're excellent and quite appropriate. But Meyerhold threw all kinds of stuff into the play, and not all of it worked. For instance, I still don't understand why authentic folk songs (I think from the Kaluga region) were necessary for the characterization of Osip. Meyerhold thought that Osip was a healthy element in the play. I think that's a mistake. And I don't understand why they used Glinka's song "The fire of desire bu.:ns in my blood."

There's nothing lustful in that song, but Meyerhold decided that it would express Anna Andreyevna's lust. Raikh played the role. I played the piano on stage, portraying one of the guests, and Raikh sang Glinka's romance, moving her voluptuous shoulders and glancing meaningfully at Khlestakov. Raikh played herself in The Inspector General-an obnoxious, pushy woman. God will forgive her, she died a horrible martyr's death.

I don't know, maybe Meyerhold did inftuence the production of my opera The Nose that Smolich directed at the Maly Theater. That's another matter, the composer has nothing to do with that. But as far as The Nose and myself are concerned, a greater inftuence was the production of The Nose at the famous Crooked Mirror.

This was before the Revolution, the war was raging, and I was just 207

a kid. I remember my delight in the play, it was very cleverly staged. I remember that later, when I was looking for a subject for an opera, I immediately thought of the production of The Nose, and I thought that I would be able to write the libretto myself without much trouble.

And in general, that's what I did. I sketched the outline myself, basing it on memory, and then we developed it together. Sasa Preis set the pace. He was sleepy, coming straight from work, but he ignited· us all, we set our course by him. And the three of us worked as one, merrily and well.

I didn't want to write a satirical opera; I'm not completely sure what that is. Some say that Prokofiev's Love for Three Oranges is a satirical opera. I just find it boring; you're constantly aware of the composer's attempts at being funny, and it's not funny at all. People find satire and grotesquerie in The Nose, but I wrote totally serious music, there's no parody or joking in it. It's rather hard to be witty in music-it's too easy to end up with something like Three Oranges. I tried not to make jokes in The Nose, and I think I succeeded.

Really, when you think about it, what's so funny about a man losing his nose? Why laugh at the poor monster? The man can't marry or go to work. I'd like to see any of my friends lose his nose. They'd all cry like babies. And that should · be kept in mind by anyone who plans to produce the opera. You can read The Nose like a joke, but you can't stage it as one. It's too cruel, and most important, it won't fit the music.

The Nose is a horror story, not a joke. How can police oppression be funny? Wherever you go, there's a policeman, you can't take a step or drop a piece of paper. And the crowd in The Nose isn't funny either.

Taken individually, they're not bad, just slightly eccentric. But together, they're a mob that wants blood.

And there's nothing funny in the image of The Nose. Without a nose you're not a man, but without you the nose can become a man, and even an important bureaucrat. And there's no exaggeration here, the story is believable. If Gogol had lived in our day, he would have seen stranger things than that. We have noses walking around such as to boggle the mind, and what's going on in our republics along those lines isn't funny at all.

A composer friend of mine told me a story that's extraordinary and 208

ordinary at the same time. It's ordinary because it's true and extraordinary because it's about chicanery on an epochal level, worthy of the pen of Gogol or E. T. A. Hoffmann. This composer worked for decades in Kazakhstan. He's a good professional, a graduate of the Leningrad Conservatory, also in Steinberg's class but a year behind me. He really made it in Kazakhstan, becoming something like the court composer, and therefore he knew many things that are generally secret.

Everyone in the U.S.S.R. knows Dzhambul Dzhabayev, my son studied his poetry in school, and my grandsons study it too-in Russian, naturally, translated from the Kazakh. They're very touching little poems. You can imagine how it was during the war. "Leningraders, my children . . . " And this coming from a hundred-year-old wise man in a robe. All our foreign guests liked being photographed with him, 'the pictures were so exotic. A folk singer, the wisdom of the ages in his eyes, and so on. Even I fell for it, I confess, I wrote musi�

for some lines of his. It happened.

And it turns out it was all made up. I mean, naturally Dzhambul Dzhabayev existed as a person, and the Russian texts of his poems existed too, the translations, that is. Only the originals never existed.

Dzhambul Dzhabayev may have been a good man, but he was no poet.

I suppose he might have been, but no one cared, because the so-called translations of the nonexistent poems were written by Russian poets and they didn't even ask our great folk singer for permission. And if they had wanted to ask they couldn't have, because these translators didn't know a word of Kazakh and Dzhambul didn't know a word of Russian.

No, that's not true. He knew one Russian word, the word for "fee."

They explained it to Dzhambul: every time he signed his name (it goes without saying that Dzhambul was illiterate, but they taught him how to make a squiggle that represented his signature), he should say the magic word "Fee" and he would get money and he could buy many new sheep and camels.

Every time Dzhambul put his sign on a contract he got a fee, and he got richer and richer. He liked that. Once, though, there was a problem. They brought him to Moscow and as part of the itinerary of conferences, receptions, and banquets, they arranged for a meeting with children, a squad of Pioneers. The Pioneers surrounded Dzhambul 209

and begged for his autograph. It was explained to him that he had to write his famous squiggle. He did, but kept saying, "Fee." He was sure that it was his signature that he was paid for, he didn't know anything about "his" poems. He was very disappointed when it was explained that there would be no fee this time and that his riches would not increase.

How sad that Gogol wasn't around to write about this-'-a great poet, known by the entire country, who doesn't exist. However, every grotesque story has its tragic side. Maybe this pathetic Dzhambul really was a great poet? After all, he plucked away at his dombra and sang something. But no one was interested. Magnificent odes to Stalin were needed, compliments in the Oriental style for any occasionbirthdays, the inauguration of the Stalin Constitution, then the elections, the Civil War in Spain, and so on. Dozens of reasons for rhyming, none of which the illiterate old man knew anything about. How could he have known, what did he care, about the "miners of Asturias" ?

An entire brigade of Russian poetasters labored for Dzhambul, including some famous names, like Konstantin Simonov. And they knew the political situation well and wrote to please the leader and teacher, which meant writing mostly about Stalin himself. But they didn't forget his henchmen, Y ezhov* for instance.

I remember that at the time the song about Yezhov was highly praised. It sang in pseudo folk style about the secret police and Yezhov, its glorious leader, and expressed the wish that "my song spread universal fame for our warrior around the world." Yezhov's fame was widespread, but not for the reasons they thought.

They wrote fast and prolifically, and when one of the "translators"

dried up, he was replaced by a new, fresh one. That way production never halted, and the factory was closed down only on Dzhambul's death.

As usual, people will say that none of this is typical, and I'll reply: Why not, it's very typical. There's nothing here against the rules; on the contrary, everything followed the rules, everything was as it should be. The great leader of all the peoples needed inspired singers from all

*Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov (1 895-1939), major Party worker, and from 1936, Chief of Security Organs. In 1939, on Stalin's orders, Y ezhov was apparently shot. Historians calculate that during the years of "Yczhovism," close to three million people were annihilated in the U.S.S.R.

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the peoples, and it was the state's function to seek out these singers. If they couldn't find them, they created them, as they did Dzhambul.

And the story of the appearance of the new great poet is also typical, as I see it, and educational. A Russian poet and journalist, working in the thirties on a Kazakh Party newspaper (published in Russian), brought in a few poems which he said he had written down from the words of some folk singer and translated. They liked the poems and printed them. Everyone was happy. Just then an exhibition of the accomplishments of Kazakh art was being planned in Moscow. The Party leader of Kazakhstan read the poems of the "unknown poet" in the paper and ordered him to be found and made to write a song in honor of Stalin immediately.

They approached the journalist-where's your poet? He hemmed and hawed· and it became clear that he had lied. They had to get out of the fix and they needed a "native Kazakh poet" to praise Stalin anyway. Someone remembered that he had seen an appropriately colorful old man who sang and played the dombra and who would photograph well. The old man didn't know a word of Russian, there would be no problems. They would just have to find him a good "translator."

They found Dzhambul and a hurried song in his name praising Stalin was sent off to Moscow. Stalin liked the ode, that was the most important thing, and so Dzhambul Dzhabayev's new life began.

What is there atypical or unexpected in this story? Everything is as it should be. Everything develops smoothly, as planned. The story was so typical that it had even been predicted and captured in fiction, so to speak. My friend Yuri Tynyanov wrote a long story called Lieutenant Kije, based supposedly on historical material professedly from the reign of Tsar Paul. I have no idea what things were like in Paul's reign, but for our day this story was a reality. It tells how a nonexistent man becomes an existent one, and an existent one becomes nonexistent. No one is surprised by this-because it is usual and typical and could happen to anyone.

We read Lieutenant Kije with laughter-and fear. Every schoolboy knows the story now. A clerical error creates a mythical figure and that figure, Lieutenant Kije, goes through a long career, marrying, falling into disfavor, and then becoming the "emperor's favorite" and dying with a general's rank.

Fiction triumphed because a man has no significance in a totalitar-21 1

ian state. The only thing that matters is the inexorable movement of the state mechanism. A mechanism needs only cogs. Stalin used to call all of us cogs. One cog does not differ from another, and cogs can easily replace one another. You can pick one out and say, "From this day you will be a genius cog," and everyone else will consider it a genius.

It doesn't matter at all whether it is or not. Anyone can become a genius on the orders of the leader.

This mentality was reinforced fiercely. A popular song that was played on the radio several times a day insisted, "Anyone can become a hero here."

Mayakovsky, "the best, the most talented,'' often published his poems in Komsomolskaya pravda. Someone called up once and wanted to know why that day's paper didn't have a poem by Mayakovsky. "He's on vacation," they explained. "All right, but who's replacing him?"

asked the caller.

I don't like Mayakovsky, but this is significant. The psychology is that every creative figure must have a replacement, and that replacement his own replacement. And they should always be ready, at any moment, to replace "the best, the most talented,'' as Stalin termed him.

So remember, yesterday you were the best, the most talented, and today you're no one. Zero. Shit.

We're all familiar with that sensation-numerous nameless "replacements" standing behind your back, waiting for the signal to sit at your desk and write your novel, your symphony, your poem. Worthless composers were called "Red Beethovens" in the magazines. I don't compare myself to Beethoven, but it's impossible to forget that at any moment a new "Red Shostakovich" can appear and I'll disappear.

These thoughts pursued me quite frequently in connection with my Fourth Symphony. After all, for twenty-five years no one heard it and I had the manuscript. If I had disappeared, the authorities would have given it to someone for his "zeal." I even know who that person would have been and instead of being my Fourth, it would have become the Second Symphony of a different composer.*

•A reference to Tikhon Khrennikov. The years of terror and the shameless revision of history (including cultural history), coupled with an almost total absence of public outcry, created a good climate for officially sanctioned plagiarism. Historians think, for instance, that one of Stalin's fundamental theoretical works, "On the Bases of Leninism," was plagiarized (the real author, I.

Kscnofontov, perished in 1937). A typical example from literature involves Nobel Prize-winning writer Mikhail Sholokhov: many people, among them Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, think that Sholokhov's famous novel The �iet Don was plagiarized.

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You see, the atmosphere was conducive to the fabrication of geniuses on a mass scale and their equally massive disappearance. Meyerhold, with whom I worked and whom I dared to call my friend, is proof of this. It's impossible to imagine now how popular Meyerhold was. Everyone knew him, even those who had no interest in or connection with the theater or art. In the circus, clowns always made jokes about Meyerhold. They go for instant laughs in the circus, and they wouldn't sing ditties about people the audience wouldn't recognize immediately. They even used to sell combs called Meyerhold.

And then the man disappeared, he just disappeared and that was it.

As though he had never existed. That went on for decades, no one mentioned Meyerhold. The silence was terrible, deathly. I met very well educated young people who had never heard anything at all about Meyerhold.· He had been erased, like a tiny blot with a large ink eraser.

This was going on in Moscow, the capital of a major European power, with people who were known all over the world. You can imagine what was happening in the provinces, in our Asian republics.

In the provinces this exchange in which a man became nothing, a zero, and the zeros and nonentities became important, was a usual occurrence, an everyday event. This spirit still reigns in the provinces.

It leads to sad consequences in music. An enormous number of operas, ballets, symphonies, oratorios, and so on produced in, say, Central Asia-Tashkent, Ashkhabad, Dushanbe, Alma-Ata, Frunze-are not written by the local composers credited on the published scores and the concert programs. The real authors will remain unknown to the public at large, and no one will ask, Who are these musical slaves ?

I know many of them. They're different people with different destinies and there have been several generations of ghost composers by now. The oldest ones are dying off. They found themselves in the faraway provinces because they had been exiled there or because they ran away from Moscow and Leningrad, escaping possible arrest.

Sometimes running to the sticks helped. A man changed his address and they left him alone. I know several such cases.

These composers made a life for themselves in the national republics. This was just when Moscow was interested in big showcases of native talent from the national republics. It was so shameful that I 2 1 3

want to dwell on it separately, particularly since it is still thought that the cultural f ests of the thirties were not only necessary but beneficial.

Actually, the first comparison that should spring to the mind of any sober (and not too stupid) person seeing all these jigs and dances is with Ancient Rome, because it was to Rome that the emperor had the natives brought from the conquered provinces, so that the new slaves could demonstrate their cultural accomplishments to the residents of the capital. As all can see, the idea is not new and we can be certain that Stalin borrowed more than his favorite architectural style from Rome. He also borrowed-to a certain degree-the style of cultural life, an imperial style. (I doubt that he was erudite, and it was probably an adapted version of Rome that impressed him, Mussolini's version.) In short, the vanquished tribes sang and danced and composed hymns in honor of the great leader. But this shameful spectacle certainly· had nothing to do with national art. This wasn't art. They simply needed fresh-baked odes to the greatest and the wisest.

Traditional national art and traditional-marvelous-music didn't fit. For many reasons. First of all, the art was too refined, too complex, too unfamiliar. Stalin wanted things simple, striking, quick. As pushcart pirozhki vendors used to say in Russia, "It'll be hot, but I can't vouch for the taste."

Second, national art was considered counterrevolutionary. Why?

Because it was, like any ancient art, religious, cultic. If it's religious, then tear it out with its roots. I hope someone will write down the history of how our great native art was destroyed in the twenties and thirties. It was destroyed forever because it was oral. When they shoot a folk singer or a wandering storyteller, hundreds of great musical works die with him. Works that had never been written down. They die forever, irrevocably, because another singer represents other songs.

I'm not a historian. I could tell many tragic tales and cite many examples, but I won't do that. I will tell about one incident, only one.

It's a horrible story and every time I think of it I grow frightened and I don't want to remember it. Since time immemorial, folk singers have wandered along the roads of the Ukraine. They're called limiki and banduristy there. They were almost always blind men-why that is so is another question that I won't go into, but briefly, it's traditional.

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The point is, they were always blind and defenseless people, but no one ever touched or hurt them. Hurting a blind man-what could be lower?

And then in the mid thirties the First All-Ukrainian Congress of Lirniki and Banduristy was announced, and all the· folk singers had to gather and discuss what to do in the future. "Life is better, life is merrier," Stalin had said. The blind men believed it. They came to the congress from all over the Ukraine, from tiny, forgotten villages. There were several hundred of them at the congress, they say. It was a living museum, the country's living history. All its songs, all its music and poetry. And they were almost all shot, almost all those pathetic blind men killed.

Why was it done? Why the sadism-killing the blind? Just like that, so that they wouldn't get underfoot. Mighty deeds were being done there, complete collectivization was under way, they had destroyed kulaks as a class, and here were these blind men, walking around singing songs of dubious content. The songs weren't passed by the censors. And what kind of censorship can you have with blind men? You can't hand a blind man a corrected and approved text and you can't write him an order either. You have to tell everything to a blind man. That takes too long. And you can't file away a piece of paper, and there's no time anyway. Collectivization. Mechanization. It was easier to shoot them. And so they did.

And that's just one story out of many like it, but I've said that I'm not a historian. I just wanted to tell what I know well-too well. And I know that when all the necessary research is completed, when all the facts are gathered, and when they are confirmed by the necessary documents, the people who were responsible for these evil deeds will have to answer for them, if only before their descendants.

If I didn't believe in that completely, life wouldn't be worth living.

But let me return to where I began. I was talking about composers who left Moscow and Leningrad and moved to the boundaries of the country. They sat around in Godforsaken corners, living in fear, waiting for the knock on the door in the middle of the night, waiting to be taken away forever, like their friends or relatives. And then it turned out that they were needed. There was a crying need for triumphant songs and dances for festivities in Moscow, and for musical accusations 2 1 5

of the past and musical praise for the new. They needed "folk" music that retained one or two reminiscent melodies from authentic folk art, something like the Georgian "Suliko," the leader and teacher's favorite song.

The real folk musicians had been almost completely eradicated, only individuals here and there were· left alive. And even if they had been spared, they wouldn't have been able to switch over as fast as the authorities wanted them to, they wouldn't have been able to do it. The ability to switch over instantaneously is a quality of the professional of the new era. It's a quality of our intelligentsia. "Excellency, give the order and I'll switch over this instant," as one character said in Mayakovsky's play The Baths. (I'm sure that Mayakovsky wrote that about himself.)

It called for an "extraordinary nimbleness of thought," in Gogol's phrase, and a similar attitude toward the local national culture. The composers I'm talking about were strangers and professionals. And they were also very, very scared. Thus all the necessary prerequisites for a "lush burgeoning" (as they began calling it) of national art-a completely new socialist national art-were there. The fellows got to work and national operas, ballets, and cantatas poured forth in a mighty stream. Things weren't as good with symphonies, but there wasn't much of a demand for symphonies. They didn't need concertos or chamber music either. They needed loyal lyrics, an easy-to-understand plot. They took plots from the terrible past, usually about some uprising or other. It was easy to work out stereotyped conflicts within the plot and then add on a doomed love story to elicit a tear or two.

The central protagonist, naturally, was a hero without fear or reproach. But there always had to be a traitor, that was necessary, it called for increased vigilance. This corresponded to reality too. From a professional point of view, this was all rather sound, in the best traditions of the Rimsky-Korsakov school which I knew so well. It's disgusting to admit it, but it's true.

They took local folk melodies (the ones that were most accessible to the European ear) and developed them in a European style. Everything "superfluous" (from their point of view) was ruthlessly excised.

It was just like the old joke: "What's a cane? A well-edited Christmas tree."

It was all harmonious and neat, but once the last note was written 2 1 6

on the score and the ink had dried, the most difficult part began. They had to find an author for the concoction. An author whose name would be as euphonious as the music, but in the oppasite direction, so to speak. While the music had to be maximally European, the author's name had to be maximally national. They glued· a vivid exotic label onto a standard European product. In general, they managed well with this problem. They found some agreeable young, or some not so young but vain, natsmen (this derogatory contraction of natsionalnoye men'shinstvo, or national minority, became current at that time too), who, without the slightest tremor from his conscience, signed his name on the cover of a work he hadn't compased. The transaction was completed and the world gained one more rogue.

But our "professionals" didn't stay in the woodwork. First of all, their nanies sometimes appeared on the title pages of the scores or in the programs and posters, naturally only as co-authors, but that was a big honor for the homeless compasers. Second, even if their names remained in the shadows, they were rewarded, and quite generously.

They were given titles, decorations, and they were well paid. They ate well, slept on soft feather beds, and lived in their own little houses. Finally, and most importantly, they were less frightened, The fear hadn't disappeared completely, of course, it never does. The fear was in their blood forever, but they could breathe more easily. And for that they were eternally grateful to the national republics in which they had settled.

I have several friends among these workers and I can say that they were satisfied with the situation for decades. I was always amazed by that. I knew how poets suffered when need and extenuating circumstances (for instance, that same fear) drove them to translation. Poetic translation in connection with the "lush burgeoning" of the national cultures deserves special attention, but it's not my business. I will just say that the picture was the same. The pact was given a Russian

"pony" of a poem that didn't exist at all in the national language. In other words, there was a bad prose Russian version of what the poem would have been had the national "author" been able to write it.

And so the Russian poet wrote a poem based on the plot summary and sometimes the poems were marvelous. The poet made candy from shit, as we say, forgive my vulgarity.

Pasternak and Akhmatova suffered when they did such work. They 2 1 7

felt-and quite rightly-that they were committing a two-fold crime.

The first was falsifying the true picture. For money and out of fear they pretended that something existed. The second crime was against their own talent. They were burying their own talent through this translation.

I'll admit that writing doesn't always come, but I'm totally against walking around looking at the sky when you're experiencing a block, waiting for inspiration to strike you. Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov didn't like each other and agreed on very few things, but they were of one opinion on this: you had to write constantly. If you can't write a major work, write minor trifles. If you can't write at all, orchestrate something. I think Stravinsky felt the same way.

This seems to be the Russian composers' stand, and I feel it's thoroughly professional and differs greatly from what they apparently think about us in the West. I think that there they still believe that we write between bouts of drinking, dipping pen into vodka. Actually, interest in alcohol doesn't exclude professionalism and I'm not the exception to the rule of the Russian school of composition in this respect.

So you must constantly train your hand, and there's nothing bad about translations or reworkings per se, but you should work with material that is necessary or dear to you. I realize that you don't say to yourself: "This I need and this is dear to me," but you sense it in your gut. In the country, if a dog is sick it goes into the fields and seeks out the right herbs and grasses by instinct. It chews on them and gets well.

I was saved that way by working "with" Mussorgsky several times and I could name a few other times when working with the composition of someone else refreshed and relaxed me. For instance, I did a new orchestration of the First Cello Concerto by the young and extraordinarily talented Boris Tishchenko* and gave the score to him on his birthday. I don't think he was terribly pleased, but the work gave me nothing but benefit and pleasure.

When Pasternak translated Htzmlet or Faust it must have enriched him, but he also translated third-rate and completely unknown poets, a huge number of Georgian poets. This was a way-one way-to please Stalin. The same thing was happening to Akhmatova. They both suf-

•Boris lvanovich Tishchenko (b. 1 939), composer, Shostakovich's favorite student. He is extremely prolific and his works arc widely pcrt'ormcd in the Soviet Union.

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f ered, of course, and talked about it rather frequently. But my composer friends were always happy and satisfied. Things were going well for them, no one bothered them, and they feared less and less. It seemed that they would flourish for eternity. But alas, nothing is eternal on this earth, and even their strange happiness came to an end.

A new generation of national composers grew up. These young people were educated at our best conservatories and they were talented and ambitious-two elements that give the fastest chemical reaction.

They had to make it themselves, and the sacred oaks, hung with orders and medals, were in their way. In most cases, there was no romance between the patriarchs and the young, the contrast in education was too great. At first the young composers from the national republics imitated Prokofiev, Khachaturian, me. Later, Bartok and Stravinsky.

They studied whatever Western scores they could get their hands on.

Not particularly avant-garde, but still . . . And as a result, they came to a conclusion: they had to seek their own paths, or they wouldn't get ahead. And then they remembered their own native music; not the songs that were always on the radio and television, but the real folk music-still not reworked, and unmutilated.

Until that time everyone used the anthologies of folk songs made by folklorists thirty, forty, and even fifty years earlier. They were considered the best and most literate recordings, and perhaps they were-for their time. But the young people were beginning to have doubts, so they started looking for real folk singers, and there weren't many left.

But there were a few and those few had even secretly found students, young ones. I suppose it is true that folk culture can't be completely eradicated after all. It will go on living underground-or at least smoldering, like a weak flame, waiting for better times.

And the young composers saw an amazing picture, one they were seeing for the first time. They saw that what was passing as ''folk"

and "national" was sheer falsification. They tried to raise a hue and cry and in some places things reached the level of fights and even brawls. But they achieved only partial success. The sacred oaks stirred, the sacred rocks, covered with moss and medals, moved, and so did our old friends the professionals from Moscow and Leningrad, who had been living such a cozy life in their marvelous houses, planning on reaping the rich- harvest forever.

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Life in the fresh air, on the periphery, far from the worries and pollution of the capital, had been good for them. They were in wonderful health and were ready to work. They had no plans to stop putting out newer and newer "national" operas, ballets, and cantatas for all the holidays and festivities, which kept increasing in number. It was so good, and you could even creep into the history of music-not world music, but local music, and if not as a composer, then as co-coi;nposer.

And suddenly their positions, their glorious historic past and future, were threatened. How unfair.

This was the first time that I saw my friends in a glum mood. They were very philosophical about it, they sighed and spoke of human ingratitude. They said that these savages would have remained savages if not for their enlightened help and support, and that the local bosses still ate lamb with their hands, which they wiped on their robes, and that they were scoundrels and polygamists.

But this period of pure unclouded reflection didn't last long, because their positions were crumbling on all fronts. Maybe this really wasn't so, maybe they just imagined it was. But the children of the Rimsky

Korsakov school, allied with the local sacred oaks, moved into counterattack.

The oaks were pushed in front, moving awesomely and jangling their medals. It was an impressive sight, let me tell you. And in their hands they carried denunciations and complaints, written by the coauthors, of course. They were quite professional in that area too.

Rimsky-Korsakov would spin in his grave from shame. The complaints held that a serious threat hung over our state, and that the threat was coming from the.young natsmen, who were conspirators because their interest in folk music and art was only a cover. Actually, they were interested in a return of bourgeois nationalism, and hiding it under their interest in national art, those young people were planning to secede from our great and mighty lands. Such hostile actions must be stopped immediately and the rebels must be hit hard.

The complaints were sent to the most varying offices, from the Composers' Union on up. I don't know what was in the ones that went higher, but I did read some of those addressed to the Union. My advice wasn't sought, of course, but I did get to see the complaints. I did what I could to help the young people.

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Of course, no one cared what I thought, but actually the whole business ended rather well, in that no one was shot or jailed or deprived of his means of support-as far as I know. I may be wrong about the last part, and then again, I'm speaking only of composers. Let someone else report on writers or cinematographers.

The decision made on these matters was indescribably, superhumanly wise. A decisive blow fell on bourgeois nationalism, with "discussions" and meetings in the appropriate offices. They discussed, they accused. The formula, as Ilf and Petrov joked, was a familiar one; just fill in the blanks: "In response to . . . we, Herculeans, as one . . . " In general, the young people were categorically forbidden "to make attempts on the life of sacred things." The sacred oaks could continue to grow in freedom from danger. The swamp was tranquil. Nothing floated up to the surface, not a single reputation suffered, and no dirty linen was aired.

The situation did change somewhat-every national culture divided into two parts. One was the old, in which everything was false, a fake: the names, the reputations, the list of works. The other part, whatever you might say about it, was authentic. The music might have been good or average or even very bad, but it was not false. It was written by the people whose names were on the title pages of the scores. And it was the real composer who came out for a bow after the performance, not a figurehead. So some progress was made.

But the false culture isn't giving up. I'm often invited to the republics for various gala performances of musical achievements, exhibits, plenums, and so on, and I often go. I act as the wedding guest and naturally. praise everything in sight, or almost everything. But I see through it all, and my hosts see that I see. And both parties pretend that everything is fine.

These musical festivals always begin with the works of famous composers-and that is all baloney,. And the opera house always has the premiere of another opera or ballet on the same theme-national uprising in the distant past. And that's all baloney too. I chuckle to myself when I see that the symphonies of various composers are written-or at the very least, orchestrated (and that's one and the same, as far as I'm concerned)-by one hand. And it's a game for me to guess who the composer really is. Most of the time I do guess, because the 221

real composer (usually from Moscow or Leningrad) will also present a work under his own name.

I easily recognize individual styles in orchestration, even if the

"style" is nothing more than good craftsmanship, and I'm almost never wrong. Sometimes I chastise myself for keeping quiet rather than talking, and not only talking but' even publishing articles on these trumped-up musical festivals. But what can I do? Can I change anything? Earlier this was a tragedy, that's true. But now it's more of a comedy, things are changing somewhat, and without my participation.

I can't do anything anyway.

The worst is behind us, and history can't be turned back. It's good that things are slowly changing. Who would listen to me? Everyoneor almost everyone-is interested in maintaining the status quo. I know for a fact that any attempt at a radical change would end badly, unsuccessfully. Several young Kazakh poets trie� to expose the myth of Dzhambul Dzhabayev, and what happened? They were all ordered to keep quiet, and soon afterward they celebrated another anniversary of the long dead Dzhambul, with all pomp and glory-meetings, dramatic speeches, and a great amount of wine and vodka at the banquets.

The call for more Gogols and Saltykov-Shchedrins was probably prompted by these stories. This is a subject for Gogol and for a future composer who will write, perhaps, a marvelous opera called Dzhambul's Nose. But not I-no, not I.

And I'm not even sorry, the subject is no longer for me. I really understand Pushkin, who gave the plots of The Inspector General and Dead Souls to Gogol because they were no longer for him. Everything in its own time.

For instance, I have an unfinished opera, The Gamblers, lying around.* I began it during the war, after the Seventh. The fact speaks for itself. I wrote a lot, almost an hour's worth of music, and the score is written down. I had decided that I wouldn't throw away a si�gle word of Gogol's. I didn't need a libretto, Gogol was the best librettist.

I set the book in front of me and began writing, turning page after page in the book. And it went well.

But when I got past ten pages, I stopped. What was I doing? First

•Jn 1978, The Gamblers was fint heard in Leningrad in a concert performance under the baton of Gennady Rozhdestvensky.

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of all, the opera was becoming unmanageable, but that wasn't the important thing. The important thing was, who would put on this opera?

The subject wasn't heroic or patriotic. Gogol was a classic, and they didn't perform his works anyway. And me, I was just dirt to them.

They would say that Shostakovich was making fun, mocking art. How could you have an opera about playing cards? And then, The Gamblers had no moral, except perhaps to show how unenlightened people used to be-all they did was play cards and try to cheat one another.

They wouldn't understand that humor was a great thing in itself and that it didn't need additional morals.

Humor is a manifestation of the divine impulse, but to whom was I going to explain that? They don't understand serious things like that in the opera houses and certainly not in the offices that run cultural affairs. So I abandoned The Gamblers. Sometimes now people suggest that I finish the opera, but I can't. I'm too old, You can't enter the same river twice, as the old saying goes.

I'm thinking about another subject for an opera now, and another writer, Chekhov. A different time and different songs. I'm definitely going to write the opera The Black Monk. I'm much more interested in The Black Monk than I am in The Gamblers. The subject has rubbed my soul full of calluses, you might say.

Chekhov was a very musical writer, but not in the sense that he wrote alliteratively, like "chuzhdy charam chemyi chyoln. "* That's bad poetry and there's nothing musical in it. Chekhov is musical in a deeper sense. He constructed his works the way musical ones are constructed. Naturally, this wasn't conscious, it's just that musical construction reflects more general laws. I am certain that Chekhov constructed The Black Monk in sonata form, that there is an introduction, an exposition with main and secondary themes, development, and so on.

One literary critic, to whom I confided my theory, even wrote a scholarly article on it, and quite naturally, got it all confused. Literary critics always get things wrong when they try to write about music, but the article was still printed in some scholarly collection. In general, literary men writing about music should follow the example of Count

*This line from •-poem by Symbolist poet Konstantin Balmont is a textbook example of poor and primitive alliteration.

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Alexei Tolstoy, who wrote two major articles about my symphoniesthe Fifth and Seventh. Both articles are included in his collected works and there are few people who know that actually the articles were written for him by musicologists. They were summoned to Tolstoy's dacha and they helped him through the morass of violins and oboes and other confusing things that a count couldn't possibly fathom.

Braga's serenade, "A Maiden's Prayer," plays an important part in The Black Monk. Once upon a time it was very popular, but now the music is forgotten. I'll definitely use it in the opera. I even have a recording of it-I asked some young musicians to play it for me. When I listen to it, I can picture clearly what the opera must be like. I also think about this: What, in essence, is good music and bad music? I don't know, I can't answer definitively. Take that serenade, for instance. According to all the rules it should be bad music, but every time I listen to it, tears come to my eyes. And that music, that "Maiden's Prayer," must have affected Chekhov too, or he wouldn't have written about it as he did, with such insight. Probably there is no good or bad music, there is only music that excites you and music that leaves you indifferent. That's all.

And that, by the way, makes me sad. For example, my father liked gypsy songs and sang them, and I liked the music. But then those songs were humiliated so much, reduced to mud. They called it Nepman music,* bad taste, and so on. I remember how shocked Prokofiev was when I told him that I personally wasn't offended by gypsy music.

He used every opportunity to point out that he felt above such things.

And what was the end result? The persecution was unsuccessful and gypsy music is flourishing. The audiences are breaking down the doors, I point out, disregarding the anger of the more advanced elements of musical opinion. And here's an opposite example, Hindemith's music. It's published and recorded but there's no great interest in listening to it. Yet once his works had a great impact on me. Hindemith is a true musician, a serious one, and a rather pleasant man. I knew him slightly, he played in Leningrad as part of a quartet. He

• "Nepman music" is one of the official pejorative definitions of pop music, an object of constant persecution in the Soviet Union. NEP (New Economic Policy, proclaimed by Lenin in 1 921

in the race or economic problems) led to a renaissance or private enterprise and to the appearance or restaurants and nightclubs where, in addition to gypsy music, they played the tango, fox trot, Charleston, and so on-that is, "bourgeois" music. In 1928 Maxim Gorky in Pravda called jazz

"music of the fat bourgeoisie," and for many years this was an official definition.

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made a nice impression. And his music is like his personality; everything is in place, well put together, and it's not merely craft, it has feeling and meaning and content. It's just impossible to listen to. The music doesn't spark, it doesn't spark. But gypsy songs, damn them, do.

Go figure it out.

I want to have time to write that opera based on Chekhov. I love Chekhov, I often reread "Ward Six." I like everything he wrote, including the early stories. And I feel sorry that I didn't do as much work on Chekhov as I had wanted to. Of course, my student Veniamin Fleishman wrote an opera based on Chekhov's "Rothschild's Violin."

I suggested he do an opera on the subject. Fleishman was a sensitive spirit and he had a fine rapport with Chekhov. But he had a hard life.

Fleishman had a tendency to write sad music rather than happy music, and naturally, he was abused for it. Fleishman sketched out the opera but then he volunteered for the army. He was killed. He went into the People's Volunteer Guard. They were all candidates for corpsehood. They were barely trained and poorly armed, and thrown into the most dangerous areas. A soldier could still entertain hopes of survival, but a volunteer guardsman, no. The guard of the Kuibyshev District, which was the one Fleishman joined, perished almost completely. Rest in peace.

I'm happy that I managed to complete Rothschild's Violin and orchestrate it. It's a marvelous opera-sensitive and sad. There are no cheap effects in it, it is wise and very Chekhovian. I'm sorry that our theaters pass over Fleishman's opera. It's certainly not the fault of the music, as far as I can see.

I would like to write more music on Chekhovian themes; it's a shame that composers seem to overlook Chekhov. I have a work based on motifs from Chekhov, the Fifteenth Symphony. It's not a sketch for The Black Monk, but variations on a theme. Much of the Fifteenth is related to The Black Monk, even though it is a thoroughly independent work.

I never did learn to live according to Chekhov's main tenet. For Chekhov all people are the same. He presented people and the reader had to decide for himself what was bad and what was good. Chekhov remained unprejudiced. Everything inside me churns when I read

"Rothschild's Violin." Who's right, who's wrong? Who made life nothing but steady losses? Everything churns within me.

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M USSORGSKY and I have a "special relationship." He was an entire academy for me-of human relations, politics, and art. I didn't study him with only my eyes and ears, for that's not enough for a composer or any professional. (That holds for other arts as well. Think how many great painters spend years slaving over copies without seeing anything shameful in it.) I revere Mussorgsky, I consider him one of the greatest Russian composers. Almost simultaneously with the creation of my piano quintet, I was busy on a new edition of his opera Boris Godunov. I had to look through . the score, smooth out a few wrinkles in the harmonization and some unfortunate and pretentious bits of orchestration, and change a few discrete progressions. A number of instruments had been added to the orchestration that had never been used by either Mussorgsky or Rimsky-Korsakov, who edited Boris.

Mussorgsky had made many changes and corrections on the advice of Stasov, Rimsky-Korsakov, and others, and then Korsakov made quite a few changes on his own. Korsakov's edition of Boris Godunov reflects the ideology, ideas, and artistry of the last century. You can't 226

help respecting the enormous amount of work done by him. But I wanted to edit the opera in a different way, I wanted a greater symphonic development, I wanted the orchestra to do more than simply accompany the singers.

Rimsky-Korsakov was despotic and tried to ma:ke the score submit to his own style, rewriting a lot and adding his own music. I changed only a few bars and rewrote very little. But certain things did have to be changed. The scene in the forest outside Kromy had to be given a worthy spot. Mussorgsky had orchestrated it like a student afraid of failing an exam. Falteringly and badly. I did it over.

This is how I worked. I placed Mussorgsky's piano arrangement in front of me and then two scores-Mussorgsky's and Rimsky-Korsakov's. I didn't look at the scores, and I rarely looked at the piano arrangement either. I orchestrated from memory, act by act. Then I compared my orchestration with those by Mussorgsky and Rimsky

Korsakov. If I saw that either had done it better, then I stayed with that. I didn't reinvent bicycles. I worked honestly, with ferocity, I might say.

Mussorgsky has marvelously orchestrated moments, but I see no sin in my work. I didn't touch the successful parts, but there are many unsuccessful parts because he lacked mastery of the craft, which comes only through time spent on your backside, no other way. For instance, the polonaise in the Polish act is abominable, yet it's an important moment. The same holds for Boris's coronation. And the bell-now, what kind of bell is that? It's just a pathetic parody. These are very important scenes and can't be tossed away.

Of course, there was one notable character, Boris Asafiev, who proposed that there was a theoretical basis for Mussorgsky's incompetence. This Boris was known for his ability to invent a theoretical basis for almost anything. He spun like a top. Anyway, Asafiev maintained that all the scenes I just mentioned were orchestrated wonderfully by Mussorgsky, that it was part of his plan. He intended the coronation scene to be lackluster to show that the people were against Boris's coronation. This was the people's form of protest-clumsy orchestration. And in the Polish act, Asafiev would have you believe, Mussorgsky was exposing the decadent gentry, and therefore let the Poles dance to poor instrumentation. That was his way of punishing them.

Only it's all nonsense. Glazunov told me that Mussorgsky himself 227

played all these scenes for him on the piano-the bells and the coronation. And Glazunov said that they were brilliant and powerful-that was the way Mussorgsky wanted them to be, for he was a dramatist of great genius from whom I learn and learn. I'm not speaking of orchestration now. I'm talking about something else.

You don't enter by the front door in composition. You have to touch and feel everything with your own hand. Listening, enjoying, saying,

"Ah, how wonderful," isn't enough. For a professional that's self-indulgence. Our work has always been manual, moreover-no machines, no technology can help. That is, if you work honestly, without any chicanery. You can always tape something and then let others arrange and orchestrate it for you. I know one such "talented" man* who behaves in just this ugly manner-he's lazy, I suppose. The Kirov put on an entire ballet written that way. In fact, things turned out quite mysteriously there; they wouldn't let the composer into the hall during rehearsal. The ushers at the Kirov tore the persistent "talented" composer's jacket when he insisted. The ushers are excellent bouncers; it's an official theater.

The funniest part was that the ballet was based on "the best, the most talented" Mayakovsky's The Bedbug. {The choreography by Yakobson, t however, was good.) The Bedbug on stage at the former Maryinsky Theater is grotesque enough to suit even Mussorgsky.

Look how far it crawled, as they say. That bedbug didn't pass anyone by, including me.

Of course, composing by tape recorder is a special taste, like licking rubber boots, and I not only eschew such perversion, I don't even like composing at the piano. Now I really can't, even if I wanted to. I'm training my left hand to write, in case I lose ability in my right. That's gymnastics for the dying.

But composing at the piano was always a secondary way for me.

That's for the deaf and those who have a poor sense of the orchestra, who need some small aural support for their work. Yet there are

"great masters" who keep a staff of secretaries to orchestrate their epochal opuses.* I never could understand that way of increasing "productivity."

• A reference to Leningrad composer Oleg Karavaichuk.

tLeonid Veniaminovich Yakobson (1 904-1974), avant-garde choreographer, one or the producers 0£ Shostakovich's ballet The Golden Age.

*A reference to Sergei Prokofiev.

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As a rule, I hear the score and write it down in ink, finished copywithout rough drafts or studies-and I'm not saying this to brag. In the final analysis, everyone composes as best suits him, but I've always seriously warned my students against picking out tunes on the piano. I had a near-fatal case of this disease, improviser's itch, in childhood.

Mussorgsky is a tragic example of the dangers of piano composing.

Very tragic-while he plinked away, so much great music was never written down! Of the many works about which only stories remain, I am most tormented by the opera Biron. What a piece of Russian history! It has villainy and a foreign martinet. He showed parts of it to friends, he did. They tried to talk him into writing it down, but he replied stubbornly, "I've got it firmly in my head." What you have in your head, put down on paper. The head is a fragile vessel.

People · will say, What's this fellow doing teaching Mussorgsky?

That's all we need, someone to teach the classics. But for me Mussorgsky is not a classic (incidentally, he wrote a marvelous musical lampoon, "The Classic," directed against critics; the subtitle reads:

"Apropos the Musical Scribblings of Famintsyn") but a living man.

Trite, but true. I would probably share several of my critical comments with Mussorgsky without fear of being laughed at. And I would not talk down, like the generals of the Mighty Five (I mean, above all, Cui,* a thoroughly average and self-reliant composer), or up, like Mussorgsky's boozy pals from the Maly Yaroslavets tavern, but as one professional to another. If I didn't feel that way about Mussorgsky, I wouldn't have taken on the orchestration of his works.

Doing the instrumentation of Boris was like a poultice for a wound.

The . times were difficult and mean, unbelievably mean and hard.

There was the agreement with our "sworn friend," t Europe was crumbling, and you know our hopes were dependent on Europe. Every day brought more bad news, and I felt so much pain, I was so lonely and afraid, that I wanted to distract myself somehow, to spend some

*Cesar Antonovich Cui (1 835-191 8), composer, general (military engineer), music critic, and member of the famous group of composers (Balakirev, Cui, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin) called the "Mighty Five," or the "Mighty Bunch." The name, once used by critic Vladimir Stasov and entrenched in history, unites composers differing widely in tastes, temperaments, and levels or talent. Generally speaking, the common ideal of the Mighty Five might be termed ''musical realism ...

tThe "sworn friend" was what wags called Nazi Germany, which signed a treaty of nonaggression with Stalin in August 1939, and in September of the same year a treaty of friendship.

Any criticism or Hitler was strictly forbidden at the time and the word "fascism" disappeared from use. Instead the papers made daily attacks on England and France.

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time with a musically like-minded man, tete-a-tCte.

The Sixth Symphony was finished and I knew for sure what the next one would be about, so I sat down with the complete composer's piano reduction of Boris, published by Lamm (it included the St. Basil's and Kromy scenes). I put it on the desk and there it lay, for I didn't disturb it too often. After all, I do know the music rather well, in fact, quite well.

I should mention Lamm's role and work in the field. Whenever he acted alone, without Asafiev, his work was substantial and beautiful, you might say solid, in the St. Petersburg academic manner. But as soon as Asafiev involved himself, all kinds of unthinkable deviltry and nonsense crept in-for example, the so-called composer's score of Boris, published jointly by Asafiev and Lamm in the late twenties. I can suggest-with a strong sense of probability-that Asafiev's motivating impulse was for royalties for Boris. The old ring of the scorned metal.

They slapped together the staging too, which was really shameful.

They turned a good idea-restoring the authentic Boris-into God knows what, some sort of self-serving enterprise with Marxist underpinnings. In order to put Rimsky-Korsakov's edition out of commission, our iconoclasts accused it of all the mortal "ideological" sins. And Glazunov, who came to Korsakov's defense-partly out of principle and partly out of conviction-was smeared in print by Asafiev, who used phrases like "shark of imperialism" or "the last imperialistic toady," I don't remember exactly which. But insults were used and Glazunov's feelings were badly hurt. I think it was the last straw-he was a patient man but this was too much. Soon after, Glazunov went

"for a rest" in the West.

I was forced to consider this history while I was orchestrating Boris.

I was entering into direct conflict with Asafiev and I think I later felt the repercussions. That's what Mussorgsky's music is like-it's always alive, too alive (if such a quality can ever be excessive)-and that means that an argument with citizens grabbing each other by the lapels is not far behind. Meyerhold told me that in his day and I've finally come . to believe it.

Nothing compares with the feeling you get orchestrating a revered composer. I think it's the ideal method for studying a work, and I would recommend that all young composers make their own versions 230

of the works . of those masters from whom they want to learn. I had known Boris almost by heart since my Conservatory days, but it was only when I orchestrated it that I sensed and experienced it as if it were my own work.

I suppose l can spend some time talking about the "Mussorgsky orchestra." We must assume that his orchestral "intentions" were correct but he simply couldn't realize them. He wanted a sensitive and flexible orchestra. As far as I can tell, he imagined something like a singing line around the vocal parts, the way subvoices surround the main melodic line in Russian folk song. But Mussorgsky lacked the technique for that. What a shame! Obviously, he had a purely orchestral imagination, and purely orchestral imagery , as well. The music strives for "new shores,'' as they say-musical dramaturgy, musical dynamics, language, imagery. But his orchestral technique drags him back to the old shores.

So, naturally, the Leningrad production of 1928 was a flop, and since then all attempts to stick to the composer's score have come to a shameful end. It's funny and it's sad that sometimes nowadays the basses with rather weak voices plump for the Mussorgsky score because they have to strain less. But the public isn't very concerned about that and therefore Boris Godunov is usually performed in either the Korsakov version or mine.

I kept thinking, Well, maybe I'll be able to do Mussorgsky a service, bringing his opera closer to the listener. Let them go and learn.

There's plenty to learn here. I kept thinking that the parallels were so obvious, they'd have to notice, they wouldn't be able to miss them.

Rimsky-Korsakov softened the point a bit, he muffled the eternal Russian problem of the upstart tsar versus the embittered people. Mussorgsky's concept is profoundly democratic. The people are the base of everything. The people are here and the rulers are there. The rule forced on the people is immoral and fundamentally anti-people. The best intentions of individuals don't count. That's Mussorgsky's position and I dare hope that it is also mine.

I was also caught up in Mussorgsky's certainty that the contradictions between the rulers and the oppressed people were insoluble, which meant that the people had to suffer cruelly without end, and become ever more embittered. The government, in its attempt to estab-231

lish itself, was decaying, putrefying. Chaos and state collapse lay ahead, as prophesied by the last two scenes of the opera. I expected it to happen in 1939.

I always felt that the ethical basis of Boris was my own. The author uncompromisingly decries the amorality of an anti-people government, which is inevitably criminal, even inexorably criminal. It is rotten from within and it is particularly revolting that it hides ui;ider the name of the people. I always hope that the average listener in the audience will be moved by Boris's words, "Not I . . . it's the people . . .

it's the will of the people." What familiar phraseology! The style of justifying villainy in Russia never changes, the stench of evil lingers.

There are the same evocations of "legality." Boris is hypocritically incensed: " . . . Questioning tsars, legal tsars, tsars who were appointed, elected by the people, and crowned by the great Patriarch!" I shudder every time I hear it. The stench of evil lingers.

Strangely enough (and this may be a professional quirk), I don't see all that in the Pushkin-I mean, theoretically, I can understand it, but I don't feel it as much, I just don't. Pushkin puts it all much more elegantly. So for me, the abstract art-music-is mote effective, even when it's a question of whether or not a man is a criminal. I was always very proud of music for that.

Music illuminates a person through and through, and it is also his last hope and final refuge. And even half-mad Stalin, a beast and a butcher, instinctively sensed that about music. That's why he feared and hated it. I've been told that he never missed a performance o( Boris at the Bolshoi. He understood absolutely nothing in music, contrary to firmly rooted opinion. Now I'm observing a renaissance of the Stalin legend. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that his "brilliant works" were written by someone else. He was like Hoffmann's sweet Klein Zaches, but a million times more vicious and dangerous.

What bothered Stalin in Boris? That the blood of the innocent will sooner or later rise from the soil. That's the ethical center of the opera.

It means that the ruler's crimes cannot be justified in the name of the people or hidden by the butcher's "legality." You will have to answer for your crimes someday.

However, Tsar Boris is much better than the "Leader of the Peoples." According to Pushkin and Mussorgsky, he worries about the 232

well-being of those peoples and he is not completely lacking in kindness and fairness. Just take the scene with the Yurodivy. And finally, unlike Stalin, he's a loving, tender father. And what about his guilty conscience? That's not so little, is it ? Of course, it's easy to feel guilty once you've committed evil. Sometimes that typically Russian trait sickens me. Our people are much too fond of making a . mess and then pounding their chests and smearing tears all over their faces. They howl and howl, but how can howling help? That's a slave mentality, a treacherous habit.

Still, you can sometimes believe a repentant man, and here we have a repentant ruler, a truly rare sight. Yet the people hate Boris, because he forced himself on them, because he besmirched himself with murder.

I remember that I was very bothered by one other thought at the time. It was clear to everyone that war was coming, sooner or later it was coming. And I thought that it would follow the plot of Boris Godunov. A chasm had developed between the government and the people, and let's not forget that it was the breach with the people that caused Boris's armies to lose in the battle with the Pretender, and it was also the cause of the subsequent state collapse.

The time of troubles was ahead. "Dark darkness, impenetrable!"

And "Sorrow, sorrow for Russia, weep, oh, weep, Russian people!

Hungry people!" cries the Yurodivy. In those days it sounded like news from the papers-not the official brazen lies that paraded on the front pages, but the news that we read between the lines.

My score of Boris has several not bad, in fact rather nice spots, I'm pleased with them. It's easier for me to judge my work here because I'm not really dealing with my own music. After all, it is Mussorgsky's music. I just did the coloring, so to speak. But as I've said, I sometimes got so carried away that I considered the music mine, particularly since it came from within, like something I composed.

There was no mechanical work in that score for me. That's the way it is for me in any instrumentation. There are no "insignificant details," no "inessential episodes" or neutral phenomena when it comes to sound. Take the big monastery bell in the scene in the monk's cell.

Mussorgsky (and Rimsky-Korsakov) used the gong. Rather elem�ntary, too simplistic, too flat. I felt that the bell was very important 233

here, I had to show the atmosphere of the monastery's estrangement, I had to cut Pimen off from the rest of the world. When the bell tolls, it's a reminder that there are powers mightier than man, that you can't escape the judgment of history. That's what I felt the bell was saying, so I depicted it by the simultaneous playing of seven instrumentsbass clarinet, double bassoon, French horns, the gong, harps, piano, and double basses (at an octave)-and I think the sound was more like a large real bell.

In Rimsky-Korsakov's version, the orchestra often sounds more colorful than mine. He uses brighter timbres and chops up the melodic lines too much. I juxtapose the basic orchestral groups more often, and stress more sharply the dramatic "outbursts" and "splashes." Rimsky

Korsakov's orchestra sounds calmer and more balanced. I don't think that's appropriate to Boris. He should have followed the mood changes of the characters with more flexibility. And besides, I feel that the meaning of the choruses is more easily made clear by setting off the melody. In Rimsky-Korsakov's version the melody and the subvoices usually blend, which perhaps obliterates their meaning.

Meaning in music-that must sound very strange for most people.

Particularly in the West. It's here in Russia that the question is usually posed: What was the composer trying to say, after all, with this musical work? What was he trying to make clear? The questions are nai°ve, of course, but despite their nai°vete and crudity, they definitely merit being asked. And I would add to them, for instance: Can music attack evil ? Can it make man stop and think? Can it cry out and thereby draw man's attention to various vile acts to which he has grown accustomed? to the things he passes without any interest?

All these questions began for me with Mussorgsky. And after him I must add the name of the little-known (despite all the reverence accorded him) Alexander Dargomyzhsky and his satiric songs "The Worm" and "Titular Counselor," and his dramatic "Old Corporal."

Personally, I consider Dargomyzhsky's Stone Guest the best musical embodiment of the Don Juan legend. But Dargomyzhsky doesn't have Mussorgsky's scope. Both men brought bent backs and trampled lives into music and that's why they are dearer to me than so many other brilliant composers.

I've been berated all my life for pessimism, nihilism, and other so-234

dally dangerous traits. Once I came across a marvelous letter of the poet Nikolai Nekrasov, an answer to rebukes for excessive bile. I don't remember the exact words, but the point was that he had been told that one's attitude toward reality had to be "healthy." (Here's another opportunity · to mention that aesthetic terminology- does not change in Russia with the centuries.) Nekrasov answered this demand brilliantly: to wit, that a healthy attitude can be had only toward a healthy reality, and that he would get down on his knees to the Russian who would finally burst with anger, since there were so many reasons to do so in Russia. I think that's well said. Nekrasov ends, "And when we begin to get angry more, then we'll be able to love better, that is, more-and love not ourselves but our homeland." I would sign my name to those words. "Suddenly you could see far to the ends of the earth,'' as· Gogol said in "The Terrible Vengeance."

It's become fashionable to talk about Mussorgsky over a glass or two, and I must confess that I, too, have had deep talks about him after a few rounds, but I think that I have two excuses. First, that I've always felt the same way about Mussorgsky, unaffected by fashion and

"obligatory convictions,'' by what might please them "upstairs" or in Paris. And second, I have done something of a practical nature to popularize his music, though it didn't work that way. In fact, I think I lost and Rimsky-Korsakov's edition-rather crude, after all-is still ahead.

My orchestral version of Songs and Dances of Death isn't performed too of ten either.

Really, we musicians do like to talk about Mussorgsky, in fact I think that it's the second favorite topic after Tchaikovsky's love life.

There's much that is confused and unclear both in Mussorgsky's life and in the creation of his music. There's much that I like in his biography, above all its darkness-those entire chunks of his life about which we know nothing. There are many friends whom we know only by name, and probably we have the names wrong too. Unknown people, unknown ties: he cleverly escaped history's detectives. I like that a lot.

Mussorgsky was probably the most yurodivy of the Russian-and not only the Russian-composers. The style of his letters is horrible, simply horrible, yet he states astonishingly true and new ideas, though in very bizarre; unnatural, and tiring language. It's too pretentious.

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You have to race through the letters to get their gist.

But there are a few gems, like: "The sky is dressed in a gendarme's blue-gray pants" (this is a typical Petersburg view). And I like the way Mussorgsky grumbles, " 'The world of sound is limitless.' But brains are limited!" Or take the expression "a well-hammered head."

But you have to dig for such witty remarks, haul them out of the bathetic tirades. I'm very happy to say that he wasn't a boisterous bully or squabbler in life. As I understand it, he never took offense or fought over his works in public. When he was criticized, he kept quiet, nodded, almost agreed. But the agreement lasted only as far as the door; once he was outside, he took up his work again, like one of those dolls you can't knock down. I understand and like that very much!

Everyone who felt like it harangued and criticized him. His colleagues called him a lump of dough, even an idiot. Balakirev: "His brains are weak.'' Stasov: "He has nothing inside.'' Cui was right in line too, of course: "Naturally, I don't believe in his work.'' We can laugh now, dear comrades, everything's over, no one is hurt, art goes on. But how did Mussorgsky feel? I can imagine, based on my own reactions-you may understand it all, but you read a paper and your mood plummets.

Music that doesn't stir up arguments could be soothing and charming, but is more likely to be dreary. A hue and cry in itself doesn't prove a thing, naturally, and often is nothing but publicity. I remember that when I was young they used to lure people into side shows with loud patter, but once you got inside it was a total disappointment.

But still I fear silence or concerted, nauseatingly saccharine praise much more. In the last few years my works have been praised more at home than abroad. Once it was just the reverse. But I didn't believe my "critics" then and I don't believe my bureaucratic praisers now.

Quite often it's the same people, lackeys with brass faces. What do they want from my music? It's hard to guess. Maybe they're pleased that it's become soothing and toothless? Bringing on sweet dreams? I think that they don't understand it correctly, I think they're making an honest-as honest as they can-mistake. I seek my friends' opinions and get angry when they say stupid things. But I'm desperate to find out what audiences really think. It's impossible to tell from published reviews-whether here or abroad.

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For the listener I'm a walking mummy, something like a resurrected pharaoh. I'm troubled by the thought that I'm appreciated only for the past. Troubled, but not tormented. Something else does torment me. I confess the hardest thing for me is to appear in public, to attend concerts or plays. I love the theater, and by nature I'm a gawker and an avid fan. I love all kinds of spontaneous cheerful gatherings, and my profoundly lowbrow devotion to soccer knows no bounds. And · how can televised soccer compare with the fantastic impact of watching a match at the stadium? It's like distilled water and export Stolichnaya.

But I've had to renounce that, like many other things. Doctors talk to me about my body's ills. They examine, prod, and poke me. But I'm sure that my problem is psychological, and that's what torments me.

For some . reason, I'm certain that everyone is staring at me, that they're all whispering and watching me behind my back, and that they're all waiting for me to fall, or at least trip. And that makes me feel that I will trip any second. When the lights go down and the play or music begins, I'm almost happy (if, of course, the play or music isn't rubbish), but as soon as the lights go back up, I'm miserable again, because I'm open to any stranger's gaze.

I'm drawn to people, "I don't think I could live a day without them,"* yet if I were to become invisible, I'd be happier. I think that this is a recent problem, once upon a time I derived more pleasure from appearing in public. Or am I mistaken?

I must note that I always felt bad when I read or heard something derogatory about myself. It was that way when, in Zoshchenko's words, I was young and strong, when my heart beat madly in my chest and all kinds of thoughts raced through my brain. It's that way now, when I've suffered what he called "a complete devaluation of the organism" and it's impossible to tell where my liver and bladder are any more. It doesn't matter, criticism upsets me even though I don't set much store by it, at least as it is represented by the majority of its practitioners.

Mussorgsky disregarded the critics and listened to his inner voice.

(He was right to do so. This is an important example for me-what

•An ironic citation from Prince Eletsky's aria in Tchaikovsky's opera The {bieen of Spades.

Shostakovich sprinkled musical citations from this aria in his penultimate opus-the satiric vocal cycle to words from Dostoevsky's The Possessed.

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Mussorgsky's friends said about his second Gogol opera. I heard something like it about The Nose, that's why I was so interested when I learned Mussorgsky's reaction.) But besides all that, Mussorgsky was truly an intellectually curious man, well educated in his own way. He read history and natural sciences, and astronomy, and literature, of course, both Russian and foreign. In general, as I go over Mussorgsky's character and personality, I'm amazed at how much we have in common. This despite the obvious, striking difference. Of course, it is rather impolite to say wonderful things about oneself (knowing that it will all be published one day), and a few bourgeois citizens are sure to reproach me for it.

But it interests me personally to continue drawing these parallels, and in this instance, I won't deny it, it's pleasant. I'm talking primarily about professional things but also about a few mundane traits, as well. For instance, musical memory. I can't complain about mine and Mussorgsky memorized Wagner's operas on first hearing. He could play Wotan's scene by heart after only one hearing of Siegfried. He was also an excellent pianist, which is not always remembered. In my opinion, that is indispensable for a composer. And it's not contradictory to my conviction that one must compose away from the piano. I think it's clear why. I've always told my students that only mastery of the piano can give you an opportunity to become acquainted with world literature in music. Perhaps that's not as obligatory now, since everyone can afford records and tapes. But still, a composer must master at least one instrument-piano, violin, viola, flute, trombone, it doesn't matter. Even the triangle.

As a pianist, Mussorgsky was compared with Rubinstein. His piano

"bells" are often recalled, and even his enemies admitted that he excelled as an accompanist. He wasn't a purist about it either; he banged away as a young man, not because he needed the money as I did, but just "for company." When he was older, he did marvelous improvisations of humorous scenes-for instance, a young nun playing "A Maiden's Prayer" with great feeling on an untuned piano.

There are many other things I like about him. Mussorgsky understood children, he saw them as "people with their own little world, and not as amusing dolls" -his own words. He appreciated nature, and he was kind to animals, in general to everything living. He 238

couldn't stand the idea of catching a fish on a hook. He suffered whenever any live creature was hurt. And finally there's the question of alcohol, which embarrasses most of our music hisforians in the Soviet Union. It truly is the dark side of the great romposer's life, and they tastefully skirt it, so as not to insult the famous ·genius's memory. I will allow myself to make a heretical suggestion. If the colleagues and musicians around Mussorgsky had had greater respect for wine, he would have drunk less, or at least with greater benefit to himself.

They, too, were what we call drinking citizens, but they were hypocritical about "lemonade," especially Balakirev with his "isn't it time to set our idiot straight?" and so on. That, of course, just depressed Mussorgsky more and he drank even harder. Incidentally, in a certain situation, drink doesn't hurt at all. I'm judging by my own experience.

At a certain period of my life, I was greatly liberated by expanding my knowledge in that fascinating area. It did away with excessive reticence, which was almost a disease with me in my youth. My best friend,• who wasn't one to pass up a drink, realized it. I was acting more like an aesthete by then, bored by higher education. Actually, I was madly shy in front of strangers, probably mostly out of pride. So my friend started an intensive course of liberation, since he found great pleasure in a merry and liberated life himself, even though he worked very hard. For an extended period our drinking bouts were practically a daily occurrence. As they say, artists are probably meant to drink by the State Liquor Authority. It's very cozy drinking before lunch.

What hurts is that Mussorgsky died of it. Things were taking a turn for the better for him in the hospital, which makes me conclude that his organism was worthy of universal admiration and awe. The hospital guards were strictly forbidden to bring any wine into the ward, but he bribed one guard with an astounding sum. The wine brought on paralysis, he cried out loudly twice before dying, and that was all.

I'm also particularly moved by this death because the circumstances are rather similar to the ones surrounding the death of my best friend.

This can't be passed over with complete silence.

I must say that I began thinking about these and other parallels

•Here and below, the reference is to Sollertinsky.

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only very recently; probably it's a sign of advancing senility. I'm falling into my second childhood; in childhood you like to compare yourself with great men. In both cases (childhood and old age) a person is miserable because he doesn't live his own life, he lives other people's lives. You're happy when you live only in this life, and my unhappiness now lies in the fact that I live other lives more and more often. I exist in fantastic worlds and forget about our life, as though· it were becoming unbearable for me.

I suppose the fact that I orchestrated Songs and Dances of Death as well as Boris and Khovanshchina proves that I am jealous of Rimsky

Korsakov-that is, that I wanted to surpass him when it came to Mussorgsky. Naturally, Boris came first, then Khovanshchina. Then for many years my favorite work was Songs and Dances, but now I think that I love Without the Sun most of all. I feel that this cycle has much in common with the opera I'm determined to write, The Black Monk, based on Chekhov.

Working with Mussorgsky clarifies something important for me in my own work. Work on Boris contributed greatly to my Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, and then was recalled in the Eleventh. (There was a time when I considered the Eleventh my most "Mussorgskian"

composition.) Something from· Khovanshchina was transferred to the Thirteenth Symphony and to The Execution of Stepan Razin, and I even wrote about the connection between Songs and Dances of Death and my Fourteenth Symphony.

Naturally, this is not an exhaustive list of possible parallels. With time, willing lovers of parallels can expand it greatly. Of course, in order to do that they would have to seriously dig around in my worksboth those that have been given voice and those that are still hidden from the eyes of "musicological officials." But for a true musicologist, with a musical education and musical goals, this could be fruitful, albeit hard, work. That's all right, let them sweat a little.

Asafiev couldn't restrain himself and he orchestrated Khovanshchina too. This was in the early thirties, I think, when one could still count on the fact that anything done with Mussorgsky would be approved and praised, and bring an honorarium.

But things were developing swiftly in the direction of "good tsars,"

and A Life for the Tsar beckoned in the future, quickly renamed Ivan 240

Susanin. I love Glinka and I'm not embarrassed by the fact that Stalin

"loved" him too, because I'm sure that the leader and teacher's attention was captured by the title alone-A Life for the Tsar-and by the plot, a Russian peasant sacrificing his life for the monarch, because Stalin was already anticipating how people would sacrifice their lives for him. So they did a quick job on the libretto, with some paint and some gilt, and it took on a fresh, topical look. Glinka's opera became quite acceptable for the day, not like the rather suspect work by Mussorgsky. Here the simple man was told clearly what was what and how to behave in a critical situation, and the instruction was accompanied by beautiful music.

Two other operas were updated then, Prince Igor and Pskovitianka.

The powers that be really liked Pskovitianka's final chorus, in which the voices of the bandit oprichniki and the terrorized citizens of Pskov blend in touching harmony as they laud the autocratic rule of Ivan the Terrible. How freedom-loving Rimsky-Korsakov could have written that is beyond me. In Asafiev's words, this was "an all-healing feeling of the ultimate rightness of reality." That's it, word for word-I looked it up recently. That's an amazing little phrase, I can't think of a better example of the exalted pandering style. Asafiev's lackey spirit is served up on a tray.

Now, what kind of style is that? "The ultimate rightness of reality."

And what's this "all-healing feeling" ? Does it mean that we must have it for terror, purges, political trials, and torture? Does it mean that

"ultimate rightness" is behind all that shame? No, I refuse to accept the ultimate rightness of the villains even if they're super-real. Obviously, Mussorgsky and I were in one camp on this issue and Asafiev in a completely different one. He was with the torturers and oppressors.

He began finding flaws in Prince Igor, saying that Galitsky's personality was a rough spot and that several lines, not thought through, did not respond to the lofty patriotic concept of The Lay of Prince Igor.

According to Asafiev, Borodin is an optimist and Mussorgsky a pessimist. Asafiev also played at literature, and in one of his home-grown play lets he has Mussorgsky say to Borodin: "You are ruled by life and I by death." Now, what does that nonsense mean? As long as we're alive we are all, without exception, ruled by life, and when we die, again without exception, we will all be ruled by death. And it doesn't 241

depend on the optimistic or pessimistic nature of our work. Whether that's fortunate or not, I don't know.

I've never completely understood what it means to say that a creative man is an optimist or a pessimist. Take me, for instance, which am I ? It's hard for me to say. When I think about my neighbor* who lives a few floors above me I may be an optimist and in relation to my own life I may be a pessimist. Of course, there have been times when acute melancholy and irritation with people have brought me to the end of my tether, but sometimes it was just the reverse. I refuse to make the final judgment on my case.

In Russia we like to attack the defenseless composer and accuse him of darkest pessimism. I've been put down that way many times, but it doesn't hurt because all my favorities-Gogol, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Leskov, Chekhov, Zoshchenko-have been blackened with the same brush. But I am hurt for one of my works, I mean the Fourteenth Symphony. The point is that many of my other works, placed on the blacklist, were seen as pessimistic by citizens who were at a rather far remove from music. It would have been amazing if they had said anything else; that was their job. But in this case it was acquaintances and even friends who criticized the symphony harshly, upset that "death is all-powerful," saying that that was a crude calumny of mankind. And they used all kinds of high-flown words, like beauty and grandeur and, naturally, divinity.

One luminaryt in particular pointed a finger at the glaring errors of this minor work. I said nothing and invited him to honor my living quarters with his overwhelming genius, as Zoshchenko would have put it, to have a cup of tea with me. But the luminary refused, saying he pref erred tea for one to tea with such an irredeemable pessimist.

Another, less hardened man would have been deeply wounded by that, but I survived. You see, I'm such an insensitive, almost criminal character. Besides, I don't quite understand the cause of the brouhaha. Apparently my critics have clarity and roses growing in their souls and that's why they see the symphony as a crude and boorish slander of the way the world is. I can't agree with that. Perhaps they feel that it's not so easy for a man to lose himself in our contemporary world. I feel

*Khachaturian.

+Solzhenitsyn.

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that he's specially fitted out just for that. Too many people are applying their rather unusual talents to that end. Some major geniuses and future famous humanists are behaving extremely flippantly, to put it mildly. First they invent a powerful weapon and hand it over to the tyrants and then they write snide brochures.• But · one doesn't balance out the other. There aren't any brochures that could balance the hydrogen bomb.

And I feel that it's the height of cynicism to besmirch yourself with ugly behavior and then speak beautiful words. I think that it would be better to speak ugly words and not commit any illegal acts. The guilt of a potential murderer of millions is so great that it can't be mitigated in any way. And there's certainly no reason to praise the man.

There are too many people around us who, as Mussorgsky used to say, are oonstantly raising questions of life and death with the solemnity of an Indian rooster. They are all conscientious citizens, who seriously think about life, fate, money, and art. Perhaps their seriousness and conscientiousness make them feel better. But not me.

Unpleasant factors are constantly taking place in the human body, and medical science is at a loss. Therefore the cessation of the organism is inevitable. There is no afterlife. Mussorgsky, who is seen by our official neo-Slavophiles as a deeply religious man, wasn't one at all, I think. That's the impression you get if you believe his letters, and what else is there to believe? In Mussorgsky's day, apparently, the reading of private correspondence by the secret police wasn't the art form it is now, nor was it as widespread. In a letter to Vladimir Stasov, Mussorgsky wrote about the death of Gartman,+ quoting a ditty,

"Dead man, sleep peacefully in your grave; take advantage of life, live man." And he added characteristically, "Foul, but sincere."

He grieved deeply over Gartman's death, but he didn't give in to the temptation of comforting thoughts; in fact, he may have gone overboard here. "There isn't and can't be any peace, there isn't and can't be solace-that's weakness." I _sense his rightness with all my heart, but my mind keeps searching for loopholes, my mind keeps spinning various thoughts and dreams. My reason persists dully: What a man

•Sakharov.

tVictor Alexandrovich Gartman (1 834-1 873), architect and painter, whose drawings were the inspiration for Mussorgsky's piano cycle Pictures at an Exhibition.

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has done lives on after him. And that unbearable Mussorgsky contradicts me again: "Another meatball (with horseradish to bring on a tear) made out of human pride."

Mussorgsky seems to be facing that sad process-dying-without any sugar coating, fancy dress, or drapery. Yet even he cuts himself off, as if to say enough of that. ''Some things are better left unsaid."

I'll leave them unsaid too.

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I BECAME fascinated by Mayakovsky's poetry at an early age.

There's a book called Everything Written by Vladimir Mayakovsky, printed on bad paper in 1 9 1 9. That was my introduction to the poet. I was very young then, barely thirteen, but I had friends, young literary men, who were great fans of Mayakovsky, and they were happy to explain the more difficult parts of the book that I liked so much. In the years that followed, I tried never to miss a single one of his appearances in Leningrad. I went to his readings with my writer friends and we listened with great interest and enthusiasm.

My favorite poem of his was "Kindness to Horses," and I still like it and consider it one of his best works. In my youth, I was impressed by "A Cloud in Trousers" and I liked "Spine Flute" and many other poems. I tried to set some of his poems to music, but I couldn't do it. I must say that setting his poetry to music is very difficult, particularly for me, since even now I can hear his readings and I would want the music to reflect his intonations as he read his own work.

In early 1 929, V sevolod Emilyevich Meyer hold, who was producing 245

The Bedbug, asked me to write the music for the play. I took on the project with pleasure. I na"ively thought that Mayakovsky in real life would be just as he was in his poems. Naturally, I didn't expect him to be wearing his Futuristic yellow shirt and I didn't think that he would have a flower drawn on his cheek. That kind of foolishness in the new political climate could have done him only harm. But seeing a man who wore a new tie at every rehearsal of The Bedbug was also a shock, because in those days a tie was considered one of the most blatant attributes of a bourgeois.

Mayakovsky, as I understood it, really loved the good life, he dressed in the best imported clothing-a German suit, American ties, French shirts and shoes-and he bragged about it all. He publicized Soviet products in his poetry and his constant advertising was tiresome by then. But Mayakovsky despised the very products he hailed. I saw that for myself at the rehearsals. When Igor Ilyinsky, the actor who was playing Prisypkin, had to have an ugly suit, Mayakovsky said,

"Go to the state store and buy the first suit you see. It'll be perfect."

These were the suits that Mayakovsky praised in his inspired poems.

Well, it's just another example of the tragic discrepancy between romantic dreams and reality. The poetic ideal-in this case, a suit-is one thing and reality-in this case, the products of the state factoriesis another. The difference between the two is the poet's honorarium.

As they say, a tie doesn't bring happiness, and it doesn't prove a man's nobility either. When we were introduced to Mayakovsky at the rehearsal of The Bedbug, he offered me two fingers. I'm no fool and I responded with one, and our fingers collided. Mayakovsky was stunned. He was always impolite but here was a nobody, as low as the ground, asserting himself.

I remember that episode very well, and that's why I don't react when people try to convince me that it never happened, according to the old principle of "it can't be because it couldn't ever be," as the major once said upon seeing a giraffe. How could "the best, the most talented" be a boor?

Once I was asked to appear on a television program about "the best, the most talented." Apparently they felt that I would share my reminiscences about how sensitive, kind, and polite Mayakovsky was. I told the producers about my meeting with him. They seemed put out and 246

said, "That's not typical." I replied, "Why not? It's very typical.'' So I didn't appear on the show.

If it hadn't been for Meyerhold, I wouldn't have written the music for The Bedbug, because Mayakovsky and I disagreed about it. Mayakovsky asked me what I had written, and I told him symphonies, an opera, and a ballet. Then he asked me whether I liked firemen's bands. I said that sometimes I did and sometimes I didn't. Then Mayakovsky said, "I like firemen's bands the best and I want the music for The Bedbug to be just like the kind they play. I don't need any symphonies." Naturally, I suggested that he get a band and fire me.

Meyerhold broke up the argument.

Another time I almost quit when I heard what Mayakovksy was demanding from an actress. The point is, The Bedbug is a fairly lousy play, and Mayakovsky, naturally, was worried about its reception. He was afraid that the audience wouldn't laugh and he decided to guarantee laughs with a rather shabby trick. He demanded that the actress who played a speculator read all her lines with a pronounced Jewish accent. He thought that it would get a laugh. It was an unworthy trick and Meyerhold tried to explain that to Mayakovsky, but he wouldn't listen. Meyerhold resorted to trickery; he told the actress to do what Mayakovsky wanted at rehearsals and to drop the accent during the performance, since Mayakovsky would be too nervous to notice. And Mayakovsky didn't say anything.

The Theater of Meyerhold was poor, always struggling financially, yet Mayakovsky suddenly wrote on the cover of his play: "A Comedy in Six Acts," though it could just as easily have been in four. He did it to increase his royalties. I think that's ugly; after all, they were friends.

Meyerhold complained to me, "How can you explain to an author that he should cut down those acts?"

I can readily say that Mayakovsky epitomized all the traits of character I detest: phoniness, love of self-advertisement, lust for the good life, and most important, contempt for the weak and servility before the strong. Power was the great moral law for Mayakovsky. He had mastered a line from one of Ivan Krylov's fables: "For the strong, it's always the weak who are wrong." Except that Krylov said it in condemnation, mockingly, but Mayakovsky took the truism seriously and acted accordingly.

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It was Mayakovsky who first said that he wanted Comrade Stalin to give speeches on poetry at Party Congresses. Mayakovsky was a lead singer of the cult of personality, and Stalin didn't forget it, he rewarded Mayakovsky with the title "the best, the most talented." Mayakovsky compared himself with Pushkin, as you know, and even now many seriously rank him with Pushkin. I think that our comrades are mistaken. I'm not talking about talent now, talent is a moot point, I'm talking about position. In a cruel age Pushkin praised liberty in his writings and called for mercy for the fallen. Mayakovsky called for something completely different, he called on youth to model its life on Comrade Dzerzhinsky.* That would be like Pushkin asking his contemporaries to imitate Benkendorf or Dubelt. t After all, you don't have to be a poet, but you do have to be a citizen. Well, Mayakovsky was not a citizen, he was a lackey, who served Stalin faithfully. He added his babble to the magnification of the immortal image of the leader and teacher. Of course, Mayakovsky wasn't alone in this unbecoming behavior, he was one of a glorjous cohort.

There were many Russian creative artists who were infatuated by the person of our leader and teacher and who rushed to create works of praise for him. Besides Mayakovsky, I could mention Eisenstein and his Ivan the Terrible, with music by Prokofiev.

For some reason I am included in this list-Mayakovsky, Eisenstein-as the representative from the composers' brotherhood. But I don't include myself in it and therefore I will decline the honor with great vehemence. Let them find another candidate. I don't care whom they pick-Prokofiev, Davidenko, the "Red Beethoven," or Khrennikov. Let them figure out which among them wrote the most joyous song about "our great friend and leader," as the line we sing goes.

Many, many men were drawn to the great gardener and master of the sciences. There are toadying stories about Stalin's special magic power, which manifested itself in personal contact. I heard a few of these stories myself. They're shameful, and the most shameful part is that people told them about themselves. One such story was told to me by a film director, I won't give his name. He's not a bad person and he's given me work many a time. Here's the story. Stalin loved the

•fcJix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky (1 877-1926), creator of the Soviet secret police.

tAiexander Khristoforovich Benkendorf (1788-1844) and Leonti Vasilyevich Dubelt (1792-1862) were the highest-ranking police officers under Nicholas I.

248

movies and he saw The Great Waltz, about Johann Strauss, many times, dozens of times. (I might add that this fact has not altered my love of Strauss.) The waltz doesn't resemble the leighinka greatly, and the director didn't have to fear Stalin's wrath. Stalin also liked Tarzan films, he saw all the episodes. He naturally saw all the Soviet films as well.

It didn't take long for Stalin to see every Soviet film made, because in the last years of his life there were very few pictures produced, just a few every year. Stalin had the following aesthetic theory. Of all the pictures produced, only a small fraction was any good, and even fewer were masterpieces, because only a few people were capable of making masterpieces. Stalin determined who could create a masterpiece and who couldn't, and then he decided that bad films weren't needed, nor were the good ones. He needed only masterpieces. If the production of cars and airplanes could be planned, then why not plan the production of masterpieces? It's no more complicated, particularly if you're dealing with film, since film is also an industry.

A poet can write poetry for himself, he doesn't even have to write it down, he can keep it in his head. A poet doesn't need very much money to write poetry. We've now found out that they wrote poetry in the camps. It's hard to keep an eye on poetry. And you can't keep watch over composers either, particularly if they don't write ballets or operas.

You can write a little quartet and then play it at home with friends.

It's a bit more difficult with music, of course, it's harder to keep out of range of the watchful eye. You need music paper and even special score paper for symphonies, and as you know, there's a shortage of score paper, which is sold only to members of the Composers' Union.

But you can still make your own homemade variety and write your symphonies without the permission of the overseeing offices, getting around the regulations.

But what can a film maker do? It's a strange profession, something like being a conductor. The first impression one has is that the director-like the conductor-merely gets in the way of other people trying to do their work. The second impression is the same.

A lot of people are needed to make a movie, and a lot of money. Stalin could be in charge one hundred percent. If he ordered a film made, they'd make it. If he ordered them to stop shooting, they stopped 249

shooting. That happened many times. If Stalin ordered a finished film destroyed, they'd destroy it. That happened more than once too. Eisenstein's Bezhin Meadow was destroyed on Stalin's command, and I for one am not unduly saddened by that because I can't understand how you can create a work of art from the plot of a boy denouncing his father. The film naturally glorified that marvelous child.

And so the great leader and teacher decided to organize the planned production of film masterpieces. He followed Ilf and Petrov's recipe.

In one of their short stories they have a man walk into a publisher's office and inquire if they publish a certain percentage of dull, poorly selling books. They tell him that of course they do, and the man suggests that they commission him to produce that percentage of bad books.

Stalin's formula was that since only a few masterpieces came out each year, then only a few films should be made each, year, and every one would be a masterpiece, especially if they were entrusted to the directors who had already, in Stalin's opinion, created masterpieces.

Simple and brilliant. And so that's what they did. I remember that at Mosfilm, the country's major studio, they were shooting only three films, Admiral Ushakov, The Composer Glinka, and Unforgettable 19 19. The directors were appointed because Stalin knew for sure that they would make masterpieces, naturally with his help and his personal direction. They were Mikhail Romm, Grigori Alexandrov, and Mikhail Edisherovich Chiaureli, one of the greatest scoundrels and bastards known to me. He was a great fan of my music, of which he understood absolutely nothing. Chiaureli couldn't tell a bassoon from a clarinet or a piano from a toilet bowl.

The planned masterpieces were under way, but it just so happened that all three guaranteed creators of masterpieces were put out of commission. Romm broke his leg, Alexandrov had trouble with his blood pressure, and Mikhail Edisherovich had too much to drink at somebody's wedding. There was a catastrophe-the Soviet film industry was at a standstill. All the sound stages at Mosfilm were shut down, the bats moved in. The only room with lights burning was the studio director's office, where he sat up at night and awaited Stalin's call, because Stalin liked calling at night.

The phone would ring and the trembling director would give the 250

leader and teacher the lastest report on the condition of the masterpiece makers. You might have thought that the man wasn't a studio head but the chief surgeon of a hospital. Stalin was angry, his theory wasn't being put into practice, and Stalin didn't like that. The fate not only of the studio head but of Mosfilm itself hung ·on the condition of Romm's leg. Stalin could have shut down the studio and let all the cinemas in the country show his favorite Tarzan and nothing else, except perhaps the newsreels.

Poor directors. Stalin watched each one like a hawk. They froze under his gaze like rabbits before a snake. And most shamefully, they were proud of it.

Stalin had his own projection room at the Kremlin, and he watched films at night. That was work for him and he worked, like all criminals, at night. He didn't like to watch alone and he made all the members of the Politburo, all the leaders of the country, so to speak, join him. Stalin sat behind them all, in his own row, he didn't let anyone sit in his row. I heard all these details more than once. Once, according to a director friend of mine, the leader and teacher had a brilliant new idea. Stalin was watching some Soviet film and when it was over he said, "Where's the director ? Why isn't the director here? Why don't we invite the director ? We'll invite the director. I think, comrades, that it will be beneficial to invite the director. If the director were here, we could have thanked him, and if necessary we could have given him our critical comments and wishes. Let's ask the directors to be present at our screenings. This will be beneficial for the directors and for their work."

It so happened that the first to be so honored-to watch his own film with Stalin-was my friend. He is a man who is well educated but not very brave, and he has a squeaky, high-pitched voice. He's no warrior, neither in spirit nor in body, but he did try to be a decent man, and whenever he found his film work too oppressive, he directed a play or two to give his unheroic body and spirit a rest. Stalin didn't keep such close tabs on the theater and one could breathe a little more freely there.

They brought the director to the Kremlin. He was searched fifteen times on the way to the screening room, where he was seated in the first row, next to Minister of Cinematography Bolshakov. An industry 25 1

that was producing three films a year still had its own minister. I would give that minister three glasses of milk a day for the ulcers that his nerve-racking job had caused. They say the minister wrote his memoirs when he retired. I wonder what he called them-Crime Without Punishment?

The screening began. Stalin, as usual, sat in the back. Naturally, the director didn't watch his film and didn't listen to my sound track.

He was listening to what was going on in the back row. He had turned into a giant receiver; every squeak that came from Stalin's seat seemed decisive, every cough seemed to toll his fate. That's how my director friend felt and how he later described it to me. This screening could carry my friend way up high-ah, how he wanted that-and it could spell his downfall.

During the screening, Poskrebyshev, Stalin's long-time secretary, came in. He was a faithful, experienced workhorse. Poskrebyshev went up to Stalin with some dispatch in his hand. The director was sitting with his back to Stalin, not daring to turn around. Therefore he didn't see any of this, but he could hear it. Stalin's angry voice proclaimed loudly, "What's this rubbish?" It was already dark in the screening room, but my friend saw black. There was a noise. My friend had fallen on the floor. The guards rushed up to him and took him out.

When the director came to, they explained his error to him and told him that Stalin had also said, "The film's not bad. We liked the film, but we won't invite directors; no, we won't. They're all so highstrung."

So my friend didn't fly way up high as he had hoped. And they didn't give him a new pair of trousers for the ones he soiled, either.

But that's all right. As the poet Sasha Cherny said, "Instead of selling their souls on credit, they should let their souls go about without pants."

In this other story that I know, I will mention the hero's name, since he's named me once or twice in various articles and speeches, not to mention many reports to higher-ups. Posters in our stores exhort us:

"Customer and clerk, be mutually polite." Inspired by these splendid posters, I will be polite. I'll be the customer and my hero can be the clerk. I'm talking about Tikhon Khrennikov, chairman of the Com-252

posers' Union, and therefore my chairman too. Then why am I the customer and he the clerk? Well, first of all, the clerk is always more important than the customer. you always hear him say, "There are lots of you and only one of me." That's the way it is with Khrennikov-there are lots of us composers and only one· of him. You really have to look hard for the likes of him. And second, Khrennikov's father was a clerk, he found work in some rich merchant's store. That's why our immortal leader always put down in every application: son of a worker behind a counter. I think that circumstances played the decisive role when Stalin was looking for a "boy" to run the Composers'

Union. First, as I was told, Stalin studied the applications of all the candidates for the post of administrator and then called for their photographs. He spread them out on the desk and after some thought, poked his 'finger at Khrennikov's face. "Him." And he was right. Stalin had a wonderful instinct for such people. "A fisherman sees another fisherman from afar," our old Russian proverb runs.

Once I saw a charming pronouncement by our leader and teacher. I even wrote it out, because it's such a perfect characterization of Khrennikov, I had the impression that Stalin was writing about him.

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