Death is simple, after all. It's as Zemlyanika says in Gogoclass="underline" If a person is to die, he'll die anyway, and if he's going to survive, he'll
•Pavel lvanovich Apostolov (1 905-July 1 9, 1969), colonel, leader of the Party organization of the Moscow Composers' Union.
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survive anyway. When you realize that, you see many things more simply and answer many questions more simply.
Now, I'm often asked why I do this and that and say this and that, or why I sign such-and-such articles. I answer different people differently, because different people deserve different answers. For instance, Yevtushenko once asked me a question of that kind, and I remembered it. I consider Yevtushenko a talented man. We did quite a lot of work together and perhaps we'll work together once again. I wrote my Thirteenth Symphony to his poetry, and another work, the symphonic poem The Execution of Stepan Razin. At one time Yevtushenko's poetry excited me more than it does now. But that's not the point. Y evtushenko is a worker, and I think he's worked hard. He had the right to ask me the question. And I answered as best I could.
Yevtushenko did a great deal for the people, for the reading public.
His books had huge printings, all the Soviet copies must add up to millions, maybe more. Many of his very important poems were printed in the newspapers: for example, "Stalin's Heirs" in Pravda, "Babi Yar" in Literaturnaya gaze ta, and they publish in the millions. I feel Yevtushenko's poems such as those mentioned are honest and truthful.
It would do anyone good to read them, and I must point out this important circumstance. These important, truthful poems were available to almost everyone in the country. You could buy a book or a newspaper with Yevtushenko's poetry, or you could go to the library or any reading room and request the newspaper or magazine with a poem.
It's important that you could do this peacefully, legally, without looking around, without fear.
People aren't used to reading poetry. They listen to the radio, read the papers, but not poetry, not often. Here you had poetry in the paper, and naturally you'll read it, especially if the poems are truthful.
Such things have a powerful effect on the people. It's important that the work can be reread, savored, and thought over, and that it can be done in a quiet, normal atmosphere, and that you don't hear it over the radio, you read it with your own eyes.
You can't even hear well on the radio and the time might not be convenient, too early in the morning or too late at night.* You can't
*A reference to Western radio broadcasts in Russian, which-according to some sources-are regularly heard by a quaner of the urban population of the Soviet Union. These broadcasts are the main source of news for the intelligentsia of Moscow and Leningrad. Early morning or late night are best for good reception; there is less interference then.
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think well then. You can't rush through an encounter with a work of art, it won't root itself in your soul then or have a real effect. Otherwise why was the work created? To tickle the artist's ego? Satisfy his own pride? To make him a bright figure on a dark background?
No, that I don't understand; if a work isn't created for your people, then for whom? As they say, love us when we're dirty, anyone will love us when we're clean-and even that is a moot point. But when I think about the people, all of them . . . But why all of them? You don't have to, just picture the lives of two or three real people, just two or three. Naturally, not politicians or artists but true workers, hardworking, honest people. There are hundreds of occupations that people never think about, a guard, for instance, or a train conductor, or a roofer.
So take a person like that. Do you think his biography will be so pure and clean? I doubt it. And does this person deserve scorn because of it? I doubt that too. He is the potential reader, listener, and viewer of every art form, great and not so great. These people should neither be turned into icons nor despised.
One man cannot teach or change all the other people in the world, no one has succeeded at that, even Jesus Christ couldn't say that He did. No one's made that world. record, especially not in our troubled and rather nervous times. Experiments in saving all mankind at one fell swoop seem awfully dubious now.
But in my not so very long life I've come across sick people who were convinced that they were called to set mankind on the right path, and if not mankind in its entirety, at least, then, their own countrymen. I don't know, maybe I was lucky, because I personally saw two saviors of the world. Two such personages. These were, as they say, patented saviors; I also saw some five candidates for the job. Maybe four. I'm estimating now, and I can't remember exactly. I'll make a more accurate count another time.
All right, let's leave the candidates aside. The patented saviors had a lot in common. You couldn't contradict either and both were quick to vilify you in rather uncontrolled language if they were out of sorts.
And most important, both had total contempt for the very people they were planning to save.
It's an astounding trait, this contempt. How can it be? Why, 0
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great gardeners, wise teachers of all sciences, leaders and luminaries?
All right, so you despi$e the ordinary people who have nothing special about them, who are dirty rather than clean. But then why declare yourselves prophets and saviors? That's very surprising.
Oh, yes, I forgot another trait common to these above-mentioned but not named leaders, their false religiosity. I know many will be surprised by that. All right, they'll say, one of the saviors, it goes without saying, called himself a religious man on every street corner and rebuked everyone else for lacking faith.* But what about the other one?
The other one was an atheist, wasn't he?
I hope that it's clear that the other one is Stalin. And it's true he was considered a Marxist, a Communist, and so forth, and was the head of an atheistic state and put the squeeze on servitors of the cults.
But these are all externals. Who could seriously maintain now that Stalin had some idea of a general order of things? Or that he had some ideology? Stalin never had any ideology or convictions or ideas or principles. Stalin always held whatever opinions made it easier for him to tyrannize others, to keep them in fear and guilt. Today the teacher and leader may say one thing, tomorrow something else. He never cared what he said, as long as he held on to his power.
The most striking example is Stalin's relationship with Hitler. Stalin didn't care what Hitler's ideology was. He made friends with Hitler as soon as he decided that Hitler could help him keep and even expand his holdings. Tyrants and executioners have no ideology, they only have a fanatical lust for power. Yet it's that fanaticism that confuses people, for some reason. Stalin saw the church as a political enemy; a powerful rival, and that's the only reason he tried to do away with it. Of course, it would be hard to call Stalin a religious man, simply because he didn't believe in anything or anyone. But aren't there quite a few people just like him-believing in nothing, cruel, powermad-who proclaim themselves to be deeply religious?
And Stalin could definitely be called superstitious. There are different kinds of superstitions, I know people who are afraid of black cats and the number thirteen, others fear Mondays, and so on. But there are superstitions that are connected to religion and I know people who have those too. Such a person thinks that he is a believer when what