He didn't just write whatever came into his head, no, he put it together all from Gogol's own words. He didn't add a single word of his own, he got every line from Gogol's works. It's astonishing; The man worked scrupulously. I read the manuscript. After each bit of dialogue there's a reference for the source, the Gogol work from which it came.
For example, if someone says, ."Dinner is served," the footnote tells you the work and page number. Honestly. The play was staged in Leningrad and Sasa read a review in the papers titled "Slop it on, just as long as it's hot."
Later Sasa Preis was of great help with the libretto of I.Ady Macbeth. He also created a marvelous opera plot especially for me: the life of women who want to be emancipated. It was to be a serious opera.
But nothing came of it, nothing. Alexander Germanovich Preis died, he died young. They killed him.
Ionin was also an outstanding figure in his way. He was once a street urchin and a criminal, and was brought up in the Dostoevsky Reform Colony for Handicapped Children. You couldn't make up a name like that. Ionin was an expert in Russian literature, I . don't know where he learned all he knew. Literature teachers didn't stay long at the colony, Ionin drove them away. One lady came and read them "The Grasshopper and the Ant" out loud. Ionin said, "We know all that, why don't you tell us about the latest trends in literature in-206
stead?" She replied, "Don't talk dirty to me. What's -a trend?"
Ionin also died young. He wanted to become a director. He caught typhus from someone and died. Two of his friends wrote a book in which Ionin is a protagonist. He's called The Jap in the book even though he was Jewish. But he was short and had slanted eyes. The book became very popular, you might say famous, and not so long ago it was made into a film. I understand they use the film for educational purposes. Think how strangely things turn out.
I'm surrounded by amazing subjects, perhaps because I'm surrounded by so many amazing people, even if they're not famous. And these people helped me much more than the famous ones. Famous people never have enough time. So much for Meyerhold.
And as for his Inspector General, well, of course I liked the production very much, but there's an inverse relation here: I liked it because I was already working on The Nose and saw that Meyerhold was resolving many things as I was, and not the reverse. I didn't like the music for The Inspector General at all. I'm not ref erring to the musical numbers that Gnessin wrote-no, they're excellent and quite appropriate. But Meyerhold threw all kinds of stuff into the play, and not all of it worked. For instance, I still don't understand why authentic folk songs (I think from the Kaluga region) were necessary for the characterization of Osip. Meyerhold thought that Osip was a healthy element in the play. I think that's a mistake. And I don't understand why they used Glinka's song "The fire of desire bu.:ns in my blood."
There's nothing lustful in that song, but Meyerhold decided that it would express Anna Andreyevna's lust. Raikh played the role. I played the piano on stage, portraying one of the guests, and Raikh sang Glinka's romance, moving her voluptuous shoulders and glancing meaningfully at Khlestakov. Raikh played herself in The Inspector General-an obnoxious, pushy woman. God will forgive her, she died a horrible martyr's death.
I don't know, maybe Meyerhold did inftuence the production of my opera The Nose that Smolich directed at the Maly Theater. That's another matter, the composer has nothing to do with that. But as far as The Nose and myself are concerned, a greater inftuence was the production of The Nose at the famous Crooked Mirror.
This was before the Revolution, the war was raging, and I was just 207
a kid. I remember my delight in the play, it was very cleverly staged. I remember that later, when I was looking for a subject for an opera, I immediately thought of the production of The Nose, and I thought that I would be able to write the libretto myself without much trouble.
And in general, that's what I did. I sketched the outline myself, basing it on memory, and then we developed it together. Sasa Preis set the pace. He was sleepy, coming straight from work, but he ignited· us all, we set our course by him. And the three of us worked as one, merrily and well.
I didn't want to write a satirical opera; I'm not completely sure what that is. Some say that Prokofiev's Love for Three Oranges is a satirical opera. I just find it boring; you're constantly aware of the composer's attempts at being funny, and it's not funny at all. People find satire and grotesquerie in The Nose, but I wrote totally serious music, there's no parody or joking in it. It's rather hard to be witty in music-it's too easy to end up with something like Three Oranges. I tried not to make jokes in The Nose, and I think I succeeded.
Really, when you think about it, what's so funny about a man losing his nose? Why laugh at the poor monster? The man can't marry or go to work. I'd like to see any of my friends lose his nose. They'd all cry like babies. And that should · be kept in mind by anyone who plans to produce the opera. You can read The Nose like a joke, but you can't stage it as one. It's too cruel, and most important, it won't fit the music.
The Nose is a horror story, not a joke. How can police oppression be funny? Wherever you go, there's a policeman, you can't take a step or drop a piece of paper. And the crowd in The Nose isn't funny either.
Taken individually, they're not bad, just slightly eccentric. But together, they're a mob that wants blood.
And there's nothing funny in the image of The Nose. Without a nose you're not a man, but without you the nose can become a man, and even an important bureaucrat. And there's no exaggeration here, the story is believable. If Gogol had lived in our day, he would have seen stranger things than that. We have noses walking around such as to boggle the mind, and what's going on in our republics along those lines isn't funny at all.
A composer friend of mine told me a story that's extraordinary and 208
ordinary at the same time. It's ordinary because it's true and extraordinary because it's about chicanery on an epochal level, worthy of the pen of Gogol or E. T. A. Hoffmann. This composer worked for decades in Kazakhstan. He's a good professional, a graduate of the Leningrad Conservatory, also in Steinberg's class but a year behind me. He really made it in Kazakhstan, becoming something like the court composer, and therefore he knew many things that are generally secret.
Everyone in the U.S.S.R. knows Dzhambul Dzhabayev, my son studied his poetry in school, and my grandsons study it too-in Russian, naturally, translated from the Kazakh. They're very touching little poems. You can imagine how it was during the war. "Leningraders, my children . . . " And this coming from a hundred-year-old wise man in a robe. All our foreign guests liked being photographed with him, 'the pictures were so exotic. A folk singer, the wisdom of the ages in his eyes, and so on. Even I fell for it, I confess, I wrote musi�
for some lines of his. It happened.