As a matter of fact, he lived until 1975, when, three-quarters paralyzed and in terrible pain, his masklike face now trembling more than ever, emitting ripples around the blurry reflection of itself, he still managed to create his Viola Sonata (Opus 147), which he himself accurately described as “bright—bright and clear.” A month later, lung cancer asphyxiated him.
When his death began, it was as if successive shrouds, each one so gauzy as to be nearly transparent, kept settling over his face, strangling away the breath almost tenderly, with Irina bending over him in the hospital ward, screaming his name like a shrilling telephone. He could hear her longer than he could see her, for the shrouds kept swirling down so that her image steadily greyed into a blackness deeper than meaning, and although for a little while longer he could almost perceive the reflection of her presence swimming on the nightstruck waters, she was fading very rapidly now; indeed, before he had time to mistake her for a certain other woman, she’d vanished with an almost playful suddenness, so that he sank irremediably alone into his velvet agony which drowned and tickled him while a blood-red spot rushed before him in ever-narrowing spirals.
By coincidence, E. E. Konstantinovskaya died that same year.
They buried him in Moscow, of course. Roman Karmen was there, and so were the Glikman brothers, of course; so was the white-uniformed girl in Produce Store Number Thirty-one. Although he was granted a funeral in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, and extolled not only as the composer of the Seventh Symphony and the “Counterplan,” but also as a good Communist, the “organs” who played all tunes might not have grieved overmuch. A detachment of men in raspberry-colored boots is said to have entered his flat within two hours of his death; they emerged with an armload of private papers, which have never been seen again. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia accords him a respectful entry, in keeping with his various honors, medals and decorations (each Stalin Prize tactfully altered to a State Prize of the USSR. Was he ever called upon to return the old trophies to have them re-engraved?) His works, we’re told, affirm the ideals of Soviet humanism. In the long article on Soviet music, he receives a number of dutiful acknowledgments. The Seventh Symphony, needless to say, is labeled an immortal monument of the period. Even his most egregious formalist error, the opera “Lady Macbeth,” now gets called “a Soviet classic.” No doubt the castrated revision is being referred to. Now that he was safely dead, there was no need to disgrace him; for that matter, he’d been dead ever since he composed Opus 110.
One might think that his reputation was embalmed as safely as was Lenin in the mausoleum (Stalin, I’m afraid, had been secretly taken out once his fame decayed). And yet the regime might have felt some bitterness about his formalist infidelities. I may be imagining things. However, The Soviet Way of Life, published the year before his demise, mentions the interesting results obtained from a poll conducted in industrial enterprises in the Urals. The workers were asked to name their favorite artists. Of the composers, Tchaikovsky gets mentioned first, and Mussorgsky last, with a couple of foreigners in between. Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich does not appear. After all, no one individual can be indispensable in our Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, greatest and most perfect country in the world, whose borders touch a dozen seas. ‣
A PIANIST FROM KILGORE
It can’t hurt you, so what are you getting excited about? You’re a skeleton; nothing hurts a skeleton.
In 1958, one year after the launch of the atomic ice-breaker Lenin, there was a musical competition in the USSR. Among the gamblers came a young American from Kilgore, Texas, named Van Cliburn.
His playing was as perfect as the stainless steel from the Krasni Oktiabr’ Stalingrad Metallurgical Works (now, of course, known as the Krasni Oktiabr’ Volgograd Metallurgical Works). And if you wish to know precisely how perfect that would be, I need only tell you that the factory received the Order of Lenin in 1939 and the Order of the Red Banner of Labor in 1948. Shouldn’t he have won first prize, then? Well, thanks to the great power chauvinism of the Anglo-Americans, a so-called “Cold War” had developed. (What’s cold war, really? We Russians know. It’s a soldier’s corpse frozen head-first into the snow. Can a piano express this? Yes, under Van Cliburn’s hands the piano keys seemed to be made sometimes of ice, sometimes of steel, and sometimes of fragrant toffee. And the notes passed by like summer clouds.) Those who with spurious “objectivism” dare to argue that laurels should get bestowed upon a provincial bourgeois lackey, merely because Moscow audiences shout: First prize, first prize! and Vanyusha, Vanyusha! miss the point: for the purpose of competitions is not to reward individual “merit,” but to educate the masses. Our Soviet Union must be seen as a winner on the cultural front! Nor could some judges and spectators fail to react disdainfully to the way the young fellow craned over the piano, his white-collared neck bent almost horizontal, for he was a full hundred and ninety-three centimeters tall; he had to push back the piano bench; to D. D. Shostakovich, for instance, he resembled an old engraving of a racehorse straining at the gate—which is not to imply that Cliburn’s interpretation of the concerto ever sounded strained. The opening’s almost military strictness and grandeur were realized with as much control as Operation “Little Saturn” had been at Stalingrad. The andantino simpico of the second movement “flowed” in patterns as unpredictable as they were perfectly right, the flow first glittering in a frozen way, like a massive shower of crystal, then lightly fluttering toward something as sweetly unattainable to every listener as a little child’s happiness. Wouldn’t it be sad if we could actually feel so happy? Van Cliburn kept smiling as if he did. Softspoken but never moody, dressed in the respectful orthodoxy of darkness intensified by narrow slivers of whiteness at neck and sleeves, he must be an innocent. After all, he was American, and moreover had been born too late to get called up for the war. (Good, really very good, said the juror Oborin, but, you know, he’s shaking his head a lot, rather sentimentally…—Three days later, this very same Oborin appeared in a photograph in the New York Times, smilingly gripping the hand of the tall, weary American.)—No question about it: Cliburn was a callow creature, an ignoramus, a pianist from Kilgore, Texas… For these and other reasons, several selfless functionaries conspired to give that gold medal, which happened to be accompanied by twenty-five thousand rubles cash, to one of the three Soviet contestants, or, failing that, to the pianist from the People’s Republic of China (with whom our differences had not yet become acute); but the distinguished juror S. Richter demanded that this faction be overruled, I think on account of the way Cliburn performed the third movement, the allegro con fuoco: Commencing with perfect neutrality (cold in execution, warm in conception), the piano suddenly took on a passion alternating with glissandos of a different sort of neutrality like ripples on a sunny Arctic lake; then came the breathless erotic haste of the finale, which never stopped being clear and careful at the same time, like a lover’s deliberate touch.