Within the demeaning confines of an almost Zamyatinesque cell, a one-room apartment with a metal number on the door (Sanya had just read the novel We), there was nothing but a piano and bookshelves, cabinets, and racks full of books and sheet music. There was no table to eat on, no bed to sleep on, no armoire where one could hang a coat. In his own home, Yury Andreevich looked as though he were just a guest—wearing a freshly pressed suit and a yellow ascot, in shoes polished to a high gleam and fit for the stage. For some time Sanya thought that this apartment was only the teacher’s study, and that he lived in another one, more fit for human habitation. Then he spied a terra-cotta teapot and a wooden box containing Chinese tea in the kitchen. And, sometime later, Sanya realized that Yury Andreevich, in his freshly pressed suit, his ascots tied with almost military precision, was in fact a recluse, and that this masquerade costume concealed a true ascetic.
How did he manage to observe the demands of his musical monkhood in this vulgar and dirty world, amid the crushing reality of Soviet existence, nauseating and dangerous? It was completely improbable.
On that very first evening, Sanya started preparing for the Conservatory entrance exam. He wished to enter the department of music theory. Yury Andreevich taught his student in the way a carpenter teaches an apprentice to drive in a nail with a single blow, a chef to slice onions and carrots with a precision measured in millimeters, or a surgeon to wield a scalpel lightly and with the utmost skill. He taught him the craft.
And it wasn’t just the explanations themselves—what tone must be doubled when resolving a dominant seventh chord into the tonic chord, how to harmonize a tritone modulation, the interplay of corresponding registers of the extreme voicings at the golden-section point, and so on. The fact was that Kolosov taught with the same enjoyment as Sanya learned.
“You don’t understand how lucky you were with your hand. A true musician is not a performer, but a composer, a theoretician. Above all a theoretician. Music is the quintessence, an infinitely compressed message; it’s what exists outside the range of our hearing, our perception, our consciousness. It is the highest form of Platonism, eidos descended from the heavens in its purest form. Can you grasp that?”
Sanya didn’t understand it; rather, he felt it. But he suspected that his teacher was getting a bit carried away. He remembered too well his childhood joy when music was born under his very fingers.
Nevertheless, this was the happiest year in Sanya’s life. The shell of the coarse and dirty world split open, and fresh new air gushed in through the gap. It was the only kind of air his soul needed to breathe. It was the same kind of upheaval that the sixth-graders had undergone ten years earlier, when Victor Yulievich arrived at their school and began showering the class with verse. The difference was that Sanya was now an adult, and, having overcome the devastating experience of parting with music forever, had discovered that his love had become even more profound. His gift, slumbering in the deepest part of him, had awakened and surfaced after a ten-year hibernation. The tedium of the solfeggio he had learned as a child was transformed into fascination with the science of musical structure. Several years later Sanya would become certain that solfeggio explained, in the simplest terms, as a rough approximation, the structure of the world itself.
Twice a week Sanya spent an hour and a half at Yury Andreevich’s. He did complex dictations and countless ear-training exercises. Yury Andreevich played the piano, and Sanya tried to identify the various intervals and chords, progressions, and modulations.
Sanya’s former piano teacher, Evgenia Danilovna, was summoned again. She was able to squeeze out two hours a week for Sanya from her tightly packed schedule (at that time she was training Wunderkinder, no fewer than ten of whom brought subsequent fame to the Central Music School). The well-known teacher, bent on producing superperformers, was only wasting her time with Sanya and his crippled hand; but she was a close friend of Anna Alexandrovna’s, and for someone of her generation it was unthinkable to refuse a friend such a request, although the child had no prospects whatsoever. Finally, with a new fingering that took into consideration his two crippled fingers, Sanya managed to master a very cleverly selected program, crowned by a performance of the Bach Chaconne in a transposition for the left hand only by Brahms. Anna Alexandrovna sold the remains of her jewelry that year—diamond earrings and a pendant—to pay for the lessons.
Sanya flew to his lessons with Yury Andreevich as though to a lovers’ rendezvous. Yury Andreevich was no less taken with his new student, who could grasp everything on the fly, sometimes posing questions that far outstripped the material they were covering. Yury Andreevich would then bloom, and break into a smile, before immediately recovering his usual composure and severity of expression. He didn’t believe in indulging his students. The lessons ended precisely when they were scheduled to end. Once, when Sanya was fifteen minutes late because a bus had broken down, his teacher refused to extend the lesson to make up for the time lost.
In addition to solfeggio, harmony, and the history of music, Sanya had to take exams in other subjects: writing, a foreign language, and the history of the USSR. He wasn’t in the least worried about these exams. The most challenging one for him was “general piano.” He would have to play a prepared program, as well as sight-read another piece. Naturally, students of music theory were not expected to master an instrument on a professional level, but Sanya was nervous nevertheless. From the time his tendon had been ruined by Murygin’s knife, he had lost the boldness of spirit necessary for performing.
Sanya passed the theoretical subjects easily. Even “general piano” was quite satisfactory; Evgenia Danilovna had not spent her precious time in vain. But the most remarkable thing was that no one on the admissions committee had even noticed that two fingers of his right hand were crippled. This was his chief victory.
In the autumn, when his fellow students at the Institute of Foreign Languages were beginning their fifth and final year of studies, Sanya began his first year in the theory department of the Conservatory. Anna Alexandrovna was happy, Evgenia Danilovna even more so. To mark the occasion, she gave Sanya some sheet music autographed by Scriabin himself. But by this time Sanya already had his doubts about Scriabin.
* * *
Victor Yulievich had been right a thousand times over—and Sanya agreed—when he said that finding the right teacher is like being reborn. Only now it was not Victor Yulievich, but another teacher, who introduced him to a new system of coordinates, who showed him new meanings and expanded his conceptions of the world. His brightest students discovered, with shivers that traveled up and down their spines, that they were dealing not only with music, but with the structure of the entire universe, with the laws of atomic physics, molecular biology, falling stars, and the rustling of leaves. It was a commingling of science, all of poetry, and every kind of art.
“Form is what transforms the content of a work into its essence. Do you understand? The character of music arises out of its form like steam from hot water,” Yury Andreevich said. “With a solid understanding of the general laws of form, which encompass all that is amenable to formulation, one can, by groping further, perceive the individual, the particular. Then, subtracting the general, one can sense a residue where wonder lurks in its purest, most undiluted form. Herein lies the goal of theory: the more fully one grasps what is available for comprehension, the more intensely the ineffable shines. Listen, and try to grasp it!” He put a black disk on the record player. The needle drew out sounds that were not perfect in themselves; but by looking at the notes while he listened, absorbing them with his eyes, and through his eyes with his ears and brain, Sanya discovered a new conception of the world, and his thoughts were drawn into unknown spaces and dimensions.