And the young salesman answered along these lines: "If you're unhappy here, citizeness, why don't you go to Israel? There are no lines there and you can probably buy peas just like that."
So Israel was pictured in a positive way, as a country without lines and with canned peas. And that's a dream for the Soviet consumer, and the line looked with interest at the citizeness who could go to a country where there are no lines and more peas than you could want.
The last time I was in America I saw the film Fiddler on the Roof and here's what astounded me about it: the primary emotion is homesickness, you sense it in the music, the dancing, the color. Even though the motherland is a so-and-so, a bad, unloving country, more a stepmother than a mother. But people still miss her, and that loneliness made itself felt. I feel that that loneliness was the most important aspect. It would be good if Jews could live peacefully and happily in Russia, where they were born. But we must never forget about the dangers of anti-Semitism and keep reminding others of it, because the infection is alive and who knows if it will ever disappear.
That's why I was overjoyed when I read Yevtushenko's "Babi Yar"; the poem astounded me. It astounded thousands of people. Many had heard about Babi Yar, but it took Yevtushenko's poem to make them aware of it. They tried to destroy the memory of Babi Yar, first the Germans and then the Ukrainian government. But after Y evtushen-1 58
ko's poem, it became clear that it would never be forgotten. That is the power of art.
People knew about Babi Yar before Yevtushenko's poem, but they were silent. And when they read the poem, the silence was broken. Art destroys silence.
I know that many will not agree with me and will point out other, more noble aims of art. They'll talk about beauty, grace, and other high qualities. But you won't catch me with that bait. I'm like Sobakevich in Dead Souls: you can sugar-coat a frog, and I still won't put it in my mouth. Zhdanov, a great specialist in the musical arts, also stood fast for beautiful and graceful music. Let anything at all go on around you, but serve high art, and nothing but, at the table.
It's amusing to see how pronouncements on art from people who consider themselves to be in opposite camps correspond. For example:
"If music becomes ungainly, ugly, vulgar, it stops satisfying those demands for the sake of which it exists, and it ceases being music."
Now wouldn't any aesthete who campaigns for high art be willing to sign his name to that excerpt? And yet this was said by that brilliant music critic Zhdanov. Both he and the aesthetes are equally against music reminding people about life, about tragedies, about the victims, the dead. Let music be beautiful and graceful and let composers think only about purely musical problems. It'll be quieter that way.
I've always protested harshly against this point of view and I strove for the reverse. I always wanted music to be an active force. That is the Russian tradition.
There is another notable phenomenon that is characteristic of Russia. It is so notable that I would like to dwell on it, it needs to be detailed to make it more understandable. In one of Rimsky-Korsakov's letters I found words to which I have returned many times. They make one think. The words are: "Many things have aged and faded before our eyes and much that seems obsolete I think will eventually seem fresh and strong and eternal, if anything can be."
I'm delighted once more by the soundness and wisdom of that man.
Of course we all, while still of sound mind, have our doubts about eternity. I'll be frank: I don't have much faith in eternity.
Once so-called eternal needles for Primus stoves were advertised, 1 59
and Ilf said, "What do I need eternal needles for? I have no intention of living forever, and even if I did, will the Primus stoves exist forever?
That would be very sad." That was how our famous humorist expressed himself on eternity, and I agree wholeheartedly.
Was Rimsky-Korsakov thinking about his music when he spoke of eternity? But why should his music have eternal life? Or any music, for that matter? Those for whom the music is written, the ones who are born with it-those people don't plan on living forever. How dreary to picture generation after generation living to the same music!
What I want to say is that what may remain "fresh and strong"
may not be music at all, and not even creativity, but some other, more unexpected and prosaic thing, such as attentiveness toward people, toward their humdrum lives, filled with unpleasant and unexpected events, toward their petty affairs and cares, and toward their general lack of security. People have invented many curious things: the microscope, Gillette razor blades, photography, and so on and so forth, but they still haven't invented a way of making everyone's life tolerable.
Naturally, solving world problems by creating oratorios, ballets, and operettas is a noble undertaking. Of course, you address yourself to the lovers of these lofty genres, but you must also respond to the feelings of other, say, more average, people. And these people may be occupied with something quite different from the construction of the Volga-Don Canal and the re-creation of that momentous event via cantatas, oratorios, ballets, and such. Those miserable characters, so to speak, are concerned with a leaky toilet that the janitor won't fix, or the fact that their son passed the entrance exams but won't be accepted because he's the wrong nationality for the institute he wants to enter, and similar problems, not very exalted and therefore not appropriate for oratorios and ballets. Perhaps Rimsky-Korsakov's "freshness and strength"
would lie in attention to these problems of average people in certain circumstances.
They'll say that this is all talk and that there's too much talk, and that the little action there is becomes silly. But I feel that the history of Russian music is on my side. Take Borodin, for instance, whose music I rate very highly taken as a whole, even though I don't always agree with the ideology behind it. But we're not talking about ideology now, and Borodin was highly gifted as a composer. Any Western composer 1 60
with such a gift would sit around and dash off symphony after symphony and opera upon opera, and live a life of ease.
But Borodin? Stories about him paint a picture that seems fantastic to an outsider, but is completely normal and customary for us. All right, everyone knows that besides music, Borodin was also a chemist and that Borodin made a name for himself in the field of catalysts and precipitates with his discoveries. I've met chemists who insisted that they are truly valuable discoveries. (However, one chemist told me it was all nonsense and that he would trade all Borodin's scientific discoveries for a second set of Polovetsian Dances. And then I had the thought that perhaps it was good that Borodin was interested in chemistry and didn't write a second set.) But besides chemistry, there was also the women's movement. We don't have feminism in Russia now, we simply have energetic women.
They work and earn money, with which they buy groceries, and then cook dinner for their husbands, and then do the dishes, and also bring up the children. So we have individual energetic women but no feminist movement. But if feminism did exist, a monument would certainly be erected to Borodin. I remember that in my early years, feminists and suffragettes treated the opposite sex with disdain, but in this case they would be willing to spend money for a monument. After all, we have a monument for Pavlov's dog, which served humanity-that is, was butchered in the name of humanity. Borodin would get one of those monuments too, because he plunged headlong into women's education and spent more and more time as he grew older on philanthropy, primarily for women's causes. And these causes butchered him as a composer.