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read his sermons from a piece of paper. This was a scandal; what to do? They asked the Metropolitan to wait a bit and rushed to eall the bosses, but no one wanted the responsibility, only Stalin could resolve problems like this. And Stalin decided: let the Metropolitan say whatever he wanted, and they allowed the Metropolitan at the microphone.
Funny? It's sad.
And what about the Leningrad Ivan Susanin? You know that Glinka's opera is called A Life for the Tsar, and I believe that it's performed abroad under that name. It's a totally monarchistic work and before the Revolution A Life played at the Maryinsky Theater on
"tsar's days."
In the thirties, with the help of a miserable poet and great scoundrel, Sergei Gorodetsky, • the text of Glinka's opera was edited. (Stravinsky wrote two pleasant songs to poems by Gorodetsky. He says that Gorodetsky was a faithful friend of his wife's. Perhaps.) When with Gorodetsky's help A Life for the Tsar was changed to Ivan Susanin, they started editing the music. The opera was produced almost simultaneously in Moscow and Leningrad. In Moscow they threw out the prayer ensemble in the epilogue, but the musical director of the Leningrad production, stubborn Ari Pazovsky, ref used. He insisted on keeping the prayer. Zhdanov was informed. You would think that all Zhdanov had to do was order them to take out the prayer. But he knew about Stalin's weakness, about his superstition. Zhdanov decided to let Stalin make the decision.
And the leader and teacher ordered, "Let them pray, the opera won't lose any of its patriotism." And so in Pazovsky's production they prayed, yet I don't think Pazovsky was baptized or anything.
Sometimes I have the feeling that Gogol wrote these stories. They seem funny but actually they're horrifying. Will they pray or not in the opera? Will the Metropolitan read his sermon from a paper or not? The leader, puffing on his pipe, decided these vital government problems. "Stalin thinks for us," as the popular poem went. He walked around his office at night and "pondered," mostly about such nonsense.
•Sergei Mitrofanovich Gorodetsky (1 884-1967), a famous poet before the Revolution, who later wrote "ideologically correct" opera libretti and slavish poems "for occasions." Nadezhda Mandelstam once noted that there is one moral to be drawn from Gorodetsky's story: one should not let oneself be frightened to the point of losing one's human face.
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Yes, I'll say it again: Stalin was a morbidly superstitious man. All the unforgiven fathers of their countries and saviors of humanity suffer from it, it's an inevitable trait, and that's why they have a certain respect for and fear of yurodiuye. Some people think that the yurodiuye who dared to tell the whole truth to tsars are a thing of the past. A part of literature, Boris Godunov and so on. "Pray for me, blessed one"-Mussorgsky is marvelous in that scene, he proves what a great operatic dramatist he is. He discards all effects for the sake of dramatic veracity, and it's so effective that it brings tears to the audience's eyes.
But the yurodiuye aren't gone, and tyrants fear them as before.
There are examples of it in our day.
Of course, Stalin was half mad. But there's nothing odd about that, there are lots of crazy rulers, we've had our share in Russia-Ivan the Terrible and Paul I. Nero was probably mad, and they say one of the Georges in Britain was crazy. So the fact itself should elicit no surprise.
What is amazing is this: Ivan the Terrible died in his bed, a fully empowered monarch. He had had some trouble, opposition, Prince Kurbsky and so on. But Ivan with the help of Malyuta Skuratov took care of his opponents. The next madman had a harder time. As you know, Paul I was killed; they were tired of him. That seemed like progress, enlightened people could believe in the progress of history, and Russian history specifically. It seemed that the future would go well, and that the next mad Russian leader could simply be invited to check into a sanatorium, relax from his work, and take a cure.
, But nothing came of the rosy hopes of educated people. True, there was some small opposition to Nicholas I, but the most mad, most cruel of tyrants ruled without any opposition. Whether Stalin died in his bed or under it I don't know, but I do know that he caused more harm than all the abnormal kings and tsars of the past put together. And no one ever dared hint that Stalin was crazy.
They say that Vladimir Bekhterev, a prominent psychiatrist and a good friend of our family friend Dr. Grekov, a surgeon, dared to pronounce Stalin mad. Bekhterev was about seventy then, and he was world-famous. He was called to the Kremlin, he carefully probed Stalin's mental condition. He died soon afterward, and Grekov was certain that Bekhterev had been poisoned.
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But that's just another horrible joke from the series on insane asylums and their inhabitants. The madman poisons his physician. Why?
A wise man answered thus: "The point is that some madmen are allowed to start their own crazy kingdoms and others aren't." That's all.
In his final years, Stalin seemed more and more like a madman, and I think his superstitiousness grew. The leader and teacher sat locked up, in one of his many dachas, amusing himself in bizarre ways. They say he cut out pictures and photos from old magazines and newspapers, glued them onto paper, and hung them on the walls.
One of my friends (a musicologist, by the way) had the "luck" to live next door to one of Stalin's bodyguards. The man didn't crack right away, at first he denied it, but then they got drunk together and talked. The work paid well and, in the eyes of the bodyguard, was highly respectable and responsible. With his many co-workers, he patrolled Stalin's dacha outside Moscow. In winter on skis, in summer on bicycles. They circled the dacha without stopping, all day and all night, without a break. The guard complained that he got dizzy. The leader and teacher almost never went outside the dacha grounds, and when he did come outside he behaved like a real paranoiac. According to the guard, he kept looking around, checking, peering. The bodyguard was in awe. "He's looking for enemies. One look and he sees all," he explained delightedly over a bottle of vodka to my friend.
Stalin didn't let anyone in to see him for days at a time. He listened to the radio a lot. Once Stalin called the Radio Committee, where the administration was, and asked if they had a record of Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 23, which had been heard on the radio the day before.
"Played by Yudina," he added. They told Stalin that of course they had. Actually, there was no record, the concert had been live. But they were afraid to say no to Stalin, no one ever knew what the consequences might be. A human life meant nothing to him. All you could do was agree, submit, be a yes man, a yes man · to a madman.
Stalin demanded that they send the record with Yudina's performance of the Mozart to his dacha. The committee panicked, but they had to do something. They called in Yudina and an orchestra and recorded that night. Everyone was shaking with fright, except for Yudina, naturally. But she was a special case, that one, the ocean was only knee-deep for her.
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Yudina later told me that they had to send the conductor home, he was so scared he couldn't think. They called another conductor, who trembled and got everything mixed up, confusing the orchestra. Only a third conductor was in any shape to finish the recording.