Zhilayev wasn't afraid. When they came for him, Tukhachevsky's prominently hung portrait amazed even the executioners. "What, it's still up?" they asked. Zhilayev replied, "The time will come when they'll erect a monument to him."
We forgot about Zhilayev too quickly, and the others. Sergei Popov died, a very talented man. Shebalin introduced us. He recreated Tchaikovsky's opera Voyevode, which the composer had burned in a fit of despair. When they took Popov away, the- score was destroyed a second time. Lamm• resurrected it once more.
Or Nikolai Vygodsky, a talented organist. The same story. And they've forgotten Boleslav Pshibyshevsky, the director of the Moscow
*Pavel Alexandrovich Lamm (1882-1951), musicologist, famed for his work on the academic texts of the operas of Mussorgsky (with Asafiev) and Borodin. Lamm wrote the orchestrations for many important works of Prokofiev, including The Betrothal in the Convent and War and Peace, as well as the music for the films Ale"ander Nevslcy and Ivan the Terrible (see the recent Soviet reference work Avtografy S. S. Prolcofeva, Moscow, 1977).
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Conservatory. He was the son of the famous writer. And they've forgotten Dima Gachev.
Gachev was a good musicologist, and after completing some difficult work he decided to take a rest and went to a sanatorium, where he shared a room with several others. Someone found an old French newspaper. To his misfortune, Gachev read French. He opened the paper and began reading aloud, just a few sentences, and stopped-it was something negative about Stalin. "Ah, what nonsense!" But it was too late. He was arrested in the morning. Someone from the room turned him in, or perhaps they all did.
Before his arrest, Gachev had corresponded with Romain Rolland, who liked the work Gachev had written on him. Rolland praised Gachev. I wonder, did the great French humanist ever inquire what happened to his admirer and researcher? Where he suddenly disappeared to?
I think Gachev got five years. He was a strong man and he got through the five years of hard labor, naYvely hoping that he would be released when his term was up. A few days before the end Gachev was told that he had got an additional ten years. It broke him and he died soon after.
Everyone wrote denunciations then. Composers probably used music paper and musicologists used plain. And as far as I know, not one of the informers has ever repented. In the middle of the 1 950s some of the arrested began returning, the lucky ones who survived. Some of them were shown their so-called files, which included the denunciations. Nowadays the informers and former prisoners meet at concerts.
Sometimes they bow.
Of course, one of the victims didn't turn out to be so polite. He publicly slapped the informer. But everything sorted itself out, the informer turned out to be a decent sort and didn't file a complaint with the police. The former prisoner died a free man, for his health had been seriously undermined by camp life. The informer is alive and thriving today.* He's my biographer, you might say, a Shostakovich specialist.
I was lucky then, I wasn't sent to the camps, but it's never too late.
•A reference to an incident involving Viktor Yulyevich Delson (1907-1 970), pianist and musicologist, who spent almost twenty years in Stalin's camps, and Lev Vasilyevich Danilyevich (b.
1912), the author of several works on Shostakovich's music.
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After all, it depends on how the new leader and teacher feels about your work. In my case, my music. They're all patrons of arts and refined literature-that's the general opinion, the voice of the people, and it's hard to argue with that voice.
Tyrants like to present themselves as patrons of the arts. That's a well-known fact. But tyrants understand nothing about art. Why? Because tyranny is a perversion, and a tyrant is a pervert. For many reasons. The tyrant sought power, stepping over corpses. Power beckoned, he was attracted by the chance to crush people, to mock them.
Isn't the lust for power a perversion? If you're consistent, you must answer that question in the affirmative. At the moment when the lust for power arises in you, you're a lost man. I am suspicious of every candidate for leadership. I had enough illusions in my misty youth.
And so� having satisfied his perverted desires, the man becomes a leader, and now the perversions continue, because power has to be def ended, def ended against madmen like yourself.
For even if there are no such enemies, you have to invent them, because otherwise you can't flex your muscles completely, you can't oppress the people completely, making the blood spurt. And without that, what pleasure is there in power? Very little.
An acquaintance with whom I went drinking once poured out his heart to me that night. He stayed overnight, but we got no sleep. He began confessing to me that he was tormented by one desire. One nightmare. And this is what I discovered. You see, since his childhood he had enjoyed reading descriptions of torture and executions. That was his strange passion. He had read everything that was written on this vile subject. He listed them for me, and it was a rather long list.
Strange, I thought, that when they torture in Russia, they try not to leave any traces. I don't mean on the body-those remain, even though there is a science now of torturing without leaving marks on the body.
I'm referring to written traces. But it turns out that there has been literature on the subject in Russia as well.
There's more. The man confessed that his interest in descriptions of torture was just covering up his real passion: he wanted to torture people himself. Before, I had thought that this man was a fair musician.
But the longer his story went on the less I believed he was. And he kept talking, panting and trembling.
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This acquaintance of mine had probably not even killed a fly in his life, but judging by what he said, it was not because he found executions and death repugnant. On the contrary, blood and everything that might make it flow excited and attracted him. He told me many things that night, for instance how Ivan the Terrible's famous henchman Malyuta Skuratov dealt with his victims and their wives. He made the women sit astride a thick cable and then started sawing them in half with the cable. Back and forth, pulling their legs one way and then the other, until they were sawn in half.
Another horrible method used in those times was described this way. The oprichniki* found two young trees that stood in an empty field not too far from each other. They climbed up and bent the trees down, so that their crowns almost touched. Then they tied a man to the crowns, making a living knot of the person. They released the tr�es, tearing the victim in half. They amused themselves that way with horses too, tying a man to two steeds and setting them off galloping in different directions.
This was the first I had heard of Malyuta Skuratov's sadistic exercises, even though I had known many other things about him. And it was the first that I heard of trials of animals. They had those too, people thought that it wasn't enough to torture only human beings. Of course, animals are tortured all the time, by anyone who has the energy. But this seemed particularly vicious. Not just torturing them, but hiding under the pretense of observing the law. I see a desire to drag animals down to the level of man, so that they can be dealt with like men. Actually, they tried to make men out of animals, and in doing so, the men turned into beasts.