Every day the honorary citizen of Milan showed up at the ballet school and looked at the girls with satisfaction. This was Volynsky's little harem. He was about sixty then. He was a short man with a large head and a face like a prune.
He gave his harem good publicity, by the way. He published A Book of Rejoicing. The title in capitals. And in rejoicing, Volynsky prophesied world fame for his protegees. Nothing came of it. It turned out that Volynsky's patronage wasn't enough, you needed some talent as well.
My month of labor at the Bright Reel didn't fly by, it dragged. And then I went to see Volynsky for my salary. The honorary citizen of Milan ran from me as from the plague. But I finally caught up with him. I dragged him away from his contemplation of the ballet girls.
Volynsky looked at me with disdain. He was, let's be honest, extraordinarily august in his pre-Revolutionary frock coat. Once upon a time, that coat had been made for him, and not badly. His oversized head was propped up by a dirty collar. Volynsky looked down at me, even though that was difficult.
He asked me, "Young man, do you love art ? Great, lofty, immortal art ?" I felt uncomfortable, and I replied that I did. That was a fatal t o
mistake, because Volynsky put it this way: "If you love art, young man, then how can you talk to me now about filthy lucre?"
He gave me a beautiful speech, itself an example of high art. It was passionate, inspired, a speech about great immortal art, and its point was that I shouldn't ask Volynsky for my pay. In doing so I defiled art, he explained, bringing it down to my level of crudity, avarice, and greed. Art was endangered. It could perish if I pressed my outrageous demands.
I tried to tell him that I needed the money. He replied that he couldn't imagine or understand how a man of the arts could be capable of speaking about such trivial aspects of life. He tried to shame me.
But I held my own.
I hated art by then. It made me sick. We were desperate for money, I had worked hard, and now they didn't want to pay me for that work.
I was seventeen, but I knew that I was being cheated. It disgusted me. All the fine words of the world taken together were worthless-so I thought. What right does that man have to lecture me? Let him pay me my money. And I'll go home. Had I worked so hard in order to support Volynsky's harem ? Not at all.
But Volynsky didn't give me my money. I came to see him a few more times, in vain. He lectured me but didn't give me the money. Finally he paid part of it. I had to sue for the rest.
Naturally, I left the Bright Reel, and it goes without saying that I didn't harbor any warm feelings for Volynsky after that business. I read his high-flown articles on ballet and other exalted matters with revulsion.
And then my First Symphony was performed and I acquired a certain fame. As a result, one fine day I received an invitation. At first I was insulted, because the invitation was to a memorial evening for Volynsky, who had died by then. They were planning to memorialize his creative activity with a gala evening and they wanted me to appear with my reminiscences of him, since I had had contact with him at the Bright Reel.
I was angry at first. But then I thought about it and decided why not ? Why shouldn't I appear with my reminiscences ? I had a story to tell and I went. There was a large audience. The master of ceremonies was Fyodor Ktizmich Sologub, a very famous man, a poet and writer.
At the time Sologub was chairman of the All-Russian Writers' Union.
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Anyone with the slightest interest in Russian literature knows Sologub. In those days he was a living classic. No one was reading his books by then, but a strange and mysterious occurrence in Sologub's life was making the rounds.
Sologub had a wife. Not just a wife, but a second Sologub. Sologub's wife was unquestionably an outstanding woman. They say that she collaborated with him on many of his novels and·she also wrote many erudite articles on her husband's work. Not limiting herself to that, she put together an entire anthology in his honor. In other words, she was more than the ideal wife. Every artist should have such a wife.
Sologub wrote often about death. Of course, even that theme can pay off. You can set yourself up comfortably, write about death, and live well.
Mr. and Mrs. lived very well. But one day mystical vapors thickened in their house or they had a fight. In either case, one not very fine autumn evening Sologub's wife left the house and didn't return.
This was, of course, a tragedy. And in view of Sologub's fame, and the mystical nature of his work, this tragedy was given special significance. You could only venture a guess as to what happened to his wife, who had disappeared so mysteriously.
Someone had seen a woman throw herself into the Neva River from a bridge on that fateful night. Her body wasn't recovered. Perhaps that had been Sologub's wife.
The poet suffered and emoted. He languished for his wife. They say he set a place for her at dinner every night. Many members of the city's intelligentsia suffered and emoted along with Sologub. Winter passed and spring arrived. The ice on the Neva broke and right in front of Sologub's house, by the Tuchkov Bridge, a drowned woman surfaced.
They came for Sologub, he had to identify the body. "Yes, it's she,"
the poet said glumly, turned, and walked away.
This story was much discussed. There was something mysterious about it. Why had the body surfaced right in front of Sologub's house?
"She came to say farewell," one writer. decided.
Zoshchenko heard about this. It was too much for him and he wrote a parody. There were similarities: an unearthly love, a drowned woman, and so on. The commentary went something like this: "Maybe she 1 2
had lived with this backward element for years and years and then went and drowned herself. And maybe it was because he filled her head with his mysticism. But that's really unlikely. Actually, if you want a psychological explanation, she slipped on the logs and drowned."
The hero of Zoshchenko's parody was an engineer, not a writer, but when they brought him to view his drowned wife he behaved exactly like Sologub.
The whole business of the poet's wife who floated over to the house to bring him a greeting from the other world grated on Zoshchenko.
And with a laugh he concluded: "And this unfortunate incident has proved conclusively that all this mysticism, this idealism, all kinds of unearthly love, and so on are just absolute garbage and nonsense. Let us rise in honor of the memory of the drowned woman and the profound unearthly love for her and then let's move on to current events.
Particularly since these are not the times to spend a lot of time on drowned citizens." Zoshchenko called his parody "The Lady with the Flowers."
And so it was this famous Sologub who was in"charge of the evening for the great idealist and ballet lover Volynsky. I came out and started telling my story. I heard a murmur go through the audience.
Naturally, my performance was out of tune with the other orators.
They remembered primarily what an exalted personage Akim Lvovich had been. And here I was with my crude materialism, talking about money. One didn't bring up money on memorial evenings. And if one did, it was only to remind those present what a selfless man the dear departed had been.