These thoughts pursued me quite frequently in connection with my Fourth Symphony. After all, for twenty-five years no one heard it and I had the manuscript. If I had disappeared, the authorities would have given it to someone for his "zeal." I even know who that person would have been and instead of being my Fourth, it would have become the Second Symphony of a different composer.*
•A reference to Tikhon Khrennikov. The years of terror and the shameless revision of history (including cultural history), coupled with an almost total absence of public outcry, created a good climate for officially sanctioned plagiarism. Historians think, for instance, that one of Stalin's fundamental theoretical works, "On the Bases of Leninism," was plagiarized (the real author, I.
Kscnofontov, perished in 1937). A typical example from literature involves Nobel Prize-winning writer Mikhail Sholokhov: many people, among them Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, think that Sholokhov's famous novel The �iet Don was plagiarized.
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You see, the atmosphere was conducive to the fabrication of geniuses on a mass scale and their equally massive disappearance. Meyerhold, with whom I worked and whom I dared to call my friend, is proof of this. It's impossible to imagine now how popular Meyerhold was. Everyone knew him, even those who had no interest in or connection with the theater or art. In the circus, clowns always made jokes about Meyerhold. They go for instant laughs in the circus, and they wouldn't sing ditties about people the audience wouldn't recognize immediately. They even used to sell combs called Meyerhold.
And then the man disappeared, he just disappeared and that was it.
As though he had never existed. That went on for decades, no one mentioned Meyerhold. The silence was terrible, deathly. I met very well educated young people who had never heard anything at all about Meyerhold.· He had been erased, like a tiny blot with a large ink eraser.
This was going on in Moscow, the capital of a major European power, with people who were known all over the world. You can imagine what was happening in the provinces, in our Asian republics.
In the provinces this exchange in which a man became nothing, a zero, and the zeros and nonentities became important, was a usual occurrence, an everyday event. This spirit still reigns in the provinces.
It leads to sad consequences in music. An enormous number of operas, ballets, symphonies, oratorios, and so on produced in, say, Central Asia-Tashkent, Ashkhabad, Dushanbe, Alma-Ata, Frunze-are not written by the local composers credited on the published scores and the concert programs. The real authors will remain unknown to the public at large, and no one will ask, Who are these musical slaves ?
I know many of them. They're different people with different destinies and there have been several generations of ghost composers by now. The oldest ones are dying off. They found themselves in the faraway provinces because they had been exiled there or because they ran away from Moscow and Leningrad, escaping possible arrest.
Sometimes running to the sticks helped. A man changed his address and they left him alone. I know several such cases.
These composers made a life for themselves in the national republics. This was just when Moscow was interested in big showcases of native talent from the national republics. It was so shameful that I 2 1 3
want to dwell on it separately, particularly since it is still thought that the cultural f ests of the thirties were not only necessary but beneficial.
Actually, the first comparison that should spring to the mind of any sober (and not too stupid) person seeing all these jigs and dances is with Ancient Rome, because it was to Rome that the emperor had the natives brought from the conquered provinces, so that the new slaves could demonstrate their cultural accomplishments to the residents of the capital. As all can see, the idea is not new and we can be certain that Stalin borrowed more than his favorite architectural style from Rome. He also borrowed-to a certain degree-the style of cultural life, an imperial style. (I doubt that he was erudite, and it was probably an adapted version of Rome that impressed him, Mussolini's version.) In short, the vanquished tribes sang and danced and composed hymns in honor of the great leader. But this shameful spectacle certainly· had nothing to do with national art. This wasn't art. They simply needed fresh-baked odes to the greatest and the wisest.
Traditional national art and traditional-marvelous-music didn't fit. For many reasons. First of all, the art was too refined, too complex, too unfamiliar. Stalin wanted things simple, striking, quick. As pushcart pirozhki vendors used to say in Russia, "It'll be hot, but I can't vouch for the taste."
Second, national art was considered counterrevolutionary. Why?
Because it was, like any ancient art, religious, cultic. If it's religious, then tear it out with its roots. I hope someone will write down the history of how our great native art was destroyed in the twenties and thirties. It was destroyed forever because it was oral. When they shoot a folk singer or a wandering storyteller, hundreds of great musical works die with him. Works that had never been written down. They die forever, irrevocably, because another singer represents other songs.
I'm not a historian. I could tell many tragic tales and cite many examples, but I won't do that. I will tell about one incident, only one.
It's a horrible story and every time I think of it I grow frightened and I don't want to remember it. Since time immemorial, folk singers have wandered along the roads of the Ukraine. They're called limiki and banduristy there. They were almost always blind men-why that is so is another question that I won't go into, but briefly, it's traditional.
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The point is, they were always blind and defenseless people, but no one ever touched or hurt them. Hurting a blind man-what could be lower?
And then in the mid thirties the First All-Ukrainian Congress of Lirniki and Banduristy was announced, and all the· folk singers had to gather and discuss what to do in the future. "Life is better, life is merrier," Stalin had said. The blind men believed it. They came to the congress from all over the Ukraine, from tiny, forgotten villages. There were several hundred of them at the congress, they say. It was a living museum, the country's living history. All its songs, all its music and poetry. And they were almost all shot, almost all those pathetic blind men killed.
Why was it done? Why the sadism-killing the blind? Just like that, so that they wouldn't get underfoot. Mighty deeds were being done there, complete collectivization was under way, they had destroyed kulaks as a class, and here were these blind men, walking around singing songs of dubious content. The songs weren't passed by the censors. And what kind of censorship can you have with blind men? You can't hand a blind man a corrected and approved text and you can't write him an order either. You have to tell everything to a blind man. That takes too long. And you can't file away a piece of paper, and there's no time anyway. Collectivization. Mechanization. It was easier to shoot them. And so they did.