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 deaclass="underline" 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.