I violated decorum on all fronts. A scandal was brewing.
By the way, there was a scandal with Zoshchenko when he published his parody. The intelligentsia who sprang to Sologub's defense maintained that the mockery of the man was too blatant. Yet Zoshchenko hadn't intended to mock Sologub at all. He was laughing at people who wove all sorts of nonsense out of a sad and altogether prosaic event. "How can you laugh when the lady drowned?" That's from Zoshchenko. So she drowned. Why turn Sologub and his wife, Chebotarevskaya, into Tristan and Isolde?
I shared my memories. The audience was in an uproar, and I 1 3
thought, Even if you drag me off the stage, I'll finish my story. And I did.
And as I left I heard Sologub ask his neighbor loudly, "Who is that young bastard?" I bowed to him politely. For some reason, he didn't respond.
And so what might have been our historic meeting didn't take place that evening. He didn't pass his torch to me and now I can't boast that I continue Sologub's treatment of death.
Sologub died soon after.
Zoshchenko tried a materialistic approach to the issue. He thought that if he wrote about death ironically he would stop fearing it. For a while I was in complete agreement with Zoshchenko, I even wrote a composition on the theme-"McPherson Before Execution," based on a poem by Robert Burns. But later I decided that Zoshchenko apparently had been unable to rid himself of the fear of death. He only wanted to convince himself and others that he had succeeded. In general, my feelings on the subject changed with the years. But more about that later.
Zoshchenko created his own method of psychoanalysis. He called it self-healing. He treated himself for hysteria and melancholia. Zoshchenko didn't trust doctors.
He thought that you could free yourself of melancholy and depression. You only had to understand what it was you feared. When a man realizes the reason for his fears, depression will flee. You have to untangle your fears.
Zoshchenko was right about a lot. He was wrong, .J suppose, only in that he sought the causes of fears in early childhood. After all, he himself said that catastrophes are more likely to occur at a mature age, because neuroses come to a head when you're at a mature age. True fear comes at a mature age.
Of course, fear is always with us. It's with us from earliest childhood. But you don't fear in childhood as you do as an adult.
As a child, Zoshchenko was afraid of beggars. More precisely, he was afraid of outstretched hands. He was afraid of water. He was also afraid of women.
I, apparently, was also afraid of outstretched hands. A hand can grab you. That's the fear of being grabbed. And besides, a stranger's 1 4
hand might take away your food. And thus the fear of being hungry.
I was also afraid of fire. A story I read as a boy left a deep impression on me. The clown Durov told it. It happened in Odessa before the Revolution. There was an outbreak of plague. They decided that it was being spread by rats, and the mayor of Odessa gave the order to destroy rats.
The rat hunt began. Durov was walking down an Odessa side street and saw that some boys had set fire to several rats they had caught.
The rats were running around in a frenzy, the boys were cheering.
Durov yelled at the boys and managed to save one of the rats. It was covered with burns, but somehow survived. Durov named the rat Finka. Finka hated people. Durov moved Finka in with him, and fussed over it a long time, treating it. It was very hard for him to win the rat's trust, but finally Durov succeeded.
Durov felt that rats were smart and talented animals. He cited examples. He said that a dislike of rats was one of man's many superstitions. Tukhachevsky* had a mouse living in his office. He was very used to the animal and fed it.
Setting fire to animals is horrible. But unfortunately, these things happen even in our day. A talented director,+ a young man, was making a film and he decided that what he needed in this film was a cow engulfed by flames. But no one was willing to set fire to a cow-not the assistant director, not the cameraman, no one. So the director himself poured kerosene over the cow and set fire to her. The cow ran off bawling, a living torch, and they filmed it. They were shooting in a village and when the peasants found out about it they almost killed the director.
When I hear about someone else's pain, I feel pain too. I feel pain for everything-for people and animals. For all living things.
I'm afraid of pain too, and I'm not too thrilled about death. But I'll live a long time, I know that, because I've learned to be calmer about
*Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky (1 893-1 937), Soviet marshal, a patron of Shostakovich. He had a brilliant career from the stan, with a series of important military victories, including the rout of the anti-Bolshevik Kronstadt Uprising in 1 921 . The uprising had a profound impact in nearby Petrograd and was remembered vividly by Shostakovich. Stalin saw Tukhachevsky as a possible competitor and had him shot, using as an excuse false documents supplied by the Gestapo that named Tukhachevsky as a German spy.
tA reference to Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky (b. 1932), a leading Soviet film director. This episode took place during the filming of Andrei Rublyov (1966), a film well received in the West.
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death. When I was a child I was terrified of death, maybe because of the war, I don't know.
I was afraid of corpses when I was a child. I thought that they would jump out of their graves and grab me. Now I know that unfortunately corpses don't jump out of graves. You can't jump out of there.
Of course, there was an incident in the late thirties that made me ready to believe that the dead fled their coffins. For some reason or other, they dug up Gogol's grave, and Gogol wasn't in his coffin. The lid was thrown back and the coffin was empty. A great corpse had run off.
Unpleasant rumors began circulating throughout Leningrad-it goes without saying-to the effect that the times were so bad even Gogol took off, couldn't stand it. And naturally, the appropriate departments took an interest: How could he have run off? What did this signify?
They cordoned off the burial place and conducted a search. It turned out that Gogol hadn't gone far. He lay nearby, headless. His head was next to him. And everything was cleared up simply.
It seemed that on some anniversary of Gogol's, they decided to erect a monument. It was made of brick and the bricks broke through the coffin, knocking off the lid. There were so many bricks that they knocked the body out of the grave and tore off Gogol's head.
Well, they put him back. The moraclass="underline" Don't put too many bricks on the graves of great men. The deceased don't like it. And if you are going to put bricks above a grave, then at least don't dig around inside. It will be better that way.
No, I don't feel like digging around in my childhood. Let's leave that to others. If others, that is, have the time and the inclination.
I've worked at remembering a few times. Not for amusement, but following Zoshchenko's method. Nothing good ever came of it, my sickness got worse, and I couldn't sleep at night, I fell apart completely. Those who wish to know what I was like should take a good close look at my portrait by Kustodiev.* I think it's a good portrait. A good