At the same time, his teacher scorned pathos, elevated words and expressions, and verbiage. He cut short any attempt to discuss music by resorting to literary devices and conceits.
“We’re not applying algebra to harmony. We’re studying harmony! It’s an exact science, just as algebra is. And for the time being, we’re putting poetry aside!” He spoke passionately, as though he were disputing with an invisible opponent.
His students adored him; the administration, always wary, regarded him with suspicion. There was something potentially anti-Soviet about him.
Yury Andreevich Kolosov was a structuralist at a time when the term had not yet been established. And the powers that be, in all eras, are particularly wary about what they don’t understand.
Kolosov expanded the horizons of the courses in harmony, the history of music and musical theory systems. He immersed the students in ancient history, and also exposed them to the newest, most innovative music, the second avant-garde, which had just begun to take hold in the USSR—spiritual heirs of Webern: Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono. And side by side with them, through the corridors of the Conservatory, walked their local avant-garde counterparts: Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina, Alfred Schnittke …
All of this was still in its infancy, tentative and tremulous. Even the music of Schoenberg was still novel.
Sanya’s head was awhirl with a powerful wave of myriad sounds: Baroque, early classical, the ubiquitous Bach, romantic music, overthrown, and then welcomed again with the passage of years, the later music of Beethoven, which approached the final threshold, it would seem, of classical music—and now all these new composers, with their new sounds and new ideas …
In the world outside the rains came down, snows fell, the poplar trees released their summer fluff, and the unbearable political blather about achievements and victories—that soon we would catch up with America—continued unabated. People drank tea and vodka in their kitchens, illegal pages of paper rustled, and tape recordings of Galich and the young Vysotsky, who gave birth to more new sounds and ideas, whirred. But Sanya hardly noticed any of this. This all happened in the world of Ilya and Mikha, his friends from his school days, who were drifting further and further away from him.
Khrushchev’s thaw was still under way, but Khrushchev himself had exited out the back door. At some Party powwow, he was heard to say: “The notion of some sort of thaw was just an invention of that shifty rascal Ehrenburg!”
Thus, a signal was given, and received. The cold had set in again.
At this historical juncture, the government music experts traded places with the government visual arts experts. Sanya only caught the tail end of rumors about a battle in the halls of the Manezh exhibition center, primarily through Ilya.
Mikha seemed to have disappeared for good after he went to live and work in a school for children with special needs, outside of town. Anna Alexandrovna saw him more often than anyone else did. She was the one he confided in about his experiences working with the deaf-mute children, who had won his incautiously open heart. But his heart did not belong in its entirety to this younger tribe; the other half beat for Alyona, who had a habit of returning his affections, then vanishing like the Snow Queen in the rain. She was the living embodiment of this fairy-tale creature: icy, fluid, and volatile, she seemed to crystallize, flare, and fade at will.
Mikha introduced Sanya to Alyona. Sanya, conscious of her charm, felt a sense of alarm: a dangerous girl. Mikha’s anxious, nervous loving was not something he had any desire to try on for size. But Ilya’s easy confidence and success with women, which smacked of the dreadful storeroom, failed to inspire envy in him either. He was afraid of the female sex. At the Conservatory he socialized more often with the male students, although he never grew really close to anyone. Sanya was no less wary of the boys who looked meaningfully at him than of the women who threw themselves at him and reeked of the yardkeeper’s storeroom on Potapovsky Lane. The musical milieu that seethed behind the bronze back of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was predisposed to the sin eschewed in the Bible. For that matter, it was even more inclined to the sins of envy and vanity. But they didn’t throw you in prison for those.
Sanya was not affected by Conservatory passions. He was even more oblivious to what was going on outside it, in the larger world. Neither the Thaw, nor the new cold snap, had anything to do with him.
Somewhere at the top, the powers-that-be had the jitters; but, luckily, Khrushchev had no interest in music, whether “sublime and superhuman” or “muddled and confused.” He was completely happy with the straightforward tune of “In the park, or in the garden.” Primitive, poorly educated, and drunk on power, he ruled the huge country as he saw fit. He raised his fist at Stalin, kicked his corpse out of the Mausoleum, released prisoners, cultivated virgin soil, sowed the Vologda region with corn, threw underground knitwear manufacturers, satirists, and parasites into prison, one after another, strangled Hungary, launched a satellite, and brought glory to the USSR through Gagarin. He destroyed churches and built Machine-Tractor Stations, merged some things, dismantled others, augmented this, downsized that. He inadvertently gave Crimea to Ukraine.
He set the creative intelligentsia straight with language of the gutter, and almost barely learned to pronounce that strange foreign word intelligentsia, which twisted the tongue without mercy. At the same time, radio announcers changed their pronunciation to reflect Khrushchev’s—“communism” and “Communists” becoming “commonism” and “Commonists,” for example. Sensing degeneration, deception, and bourgeois influences everywhere, Khrushchev promoted Lysenko, with his easily accessible theories, and shunted aside geneticists, cyberneticists, and all those who fell outside the scope of his limited intelligence. An enemy of culture and freedom, religion and talent, he suppressed all those his ignorant, myopic vision could discern. He couldn’t discern his primary enemies, however: neither great literature, nor philosophy, nor art. He couldn’t touch Beethoven, Bach was beyond his reach, even Mozart slipped out of his grasp—his simplicity of soul prevented him from understanding that they were the ones who should have been banned!
In 1964, Brezhnev came to power. The upper echelons of government were rearranged; one group of vampires changed places with another. Their mediocrity in matters of culture set a precedent for the entire country; it was dangerous to try to rise above the lowest common denominator. This diet of literary and artistic pablum was profoundly depressing. A handful of people, insignificant in all respects—surviving eggheads holed up in math and biology departments, some of them true scholars and respected academics, but far more of them marginals and eccentrics vegetating in low-level positions or languishing in third-rate research institutes, and one or two truly brilliant students of chemistry or physics or musical theory—these invisible, impractical people with spiritual needs existed illegally, outside the system.
And how numerous could they have been, these strangers who crossed paths in the cloakroom of the library, or the coat check at the Philharmonic, or in the quiet recesses of museums? They did not constitute a party, a social circle, a secret society; they were not even a cohort of like-minded people. Perhaps the only thing that united all of them was a mutual hatred of Stalinism. And, of course, reading. Hungry, unrestrained, obsessive reading. Reading was a passion, a neurosis, a narcotic. For many, books became surrogates for life rather than mere teachers of life.