•Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev {1878-1927), painter, illustrator, and theater designer, famous for his colorful, rather exaggerated depiction of Russian life: heavily bearded merchants, voluptuous sloe-eyed wives, dashing artisans. His is a world of fairs, troikas, and bars. He could achieve both pathos and irony in his paintiilgs, and this combination is found in Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth.
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likeness. I think it's the best one of me, the most truthful one, and yet at the same time, not an insulting one. I like it very much.
The portrait is done in charcoal and sanguine. I had just turned thirteen. It was a birthday present from Kustodiev.
I don't feel like talking about the portrait. It seems to me that it speaks for itself. And I, an old man, sit at my desk and keep looking at it. It hangs on the wall to the side, it's easy to look at.
The portrait is not only a reminder of the way I was at thirteen, it's also a reminder of Kustodiev, and the suffering that befalls man.
Fate, higher powers-all that is meaningless. What explanation can there be for Kustodiev's lot ? Now he is probably the most popular Russian artist. The least educated person, seeing any drawing or painting of his, will say, "A-a-ah, that's Kustodiev." That's what's called the "Kustodiev style." In bad times they used to call it "Kustodievism."
When a person finds himself in an ancient Russian city or sees typical Russian countryside, he says, "Just like a Kustodiev landscape."
And a full-figured, voluptuous woman walks by and he says, "There's a Kustodiev type." And this whole movement was created by a hopelessly sick man, a paralytic.
The diagnosis, if I'm not mistaken, was sarcoma of the spinal cord.
There's a man the doctors abused as they wished. He was treated, by the way, by the best doctors. The last operation-the fourth-was done by the same surgeon who had treated Lenin. He removed the growth on Kustodiev's spine.
The operation lasted five hours, Kustodiev said, the last hours without anesthetic. It was local anesthetic and it wore off quickly. That was a form of torture, plain and simple.
Almost none of my friends avoided torture. They tortured Meyerhold, and Tukhachevsky, and Zhilayev. * You know how things turned out.
I never knew Kustodiev as a healthy man. I saw him only in his wheelchair, which, I must say, he used with unusual ease. Sometimes he gritted his teeth-from pain-and then his face divided sharply into
•Nikolai Sergeyevich Zhilayev (1881-1942), composer and musicologist, Shostakovich's mentor. An eccentric and mysterious figure, a friend of Marshal Tukhachevsky, Zhilayev was taken by the secret police right after Tukhachevsky's arrest and killed.
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two: one half turned red, the other stayed white.
And it was in that pathetic state that Kustodiev painted his famous portrait of Chaliapin, larger than life-size. It has Chaliapin, and his bulldog, and two of his daughters, Marfa and Marina, and a coachman with a horse. Chaliapin came to pose for Kustodiev after his performances. And they made the bulldog pose by putting a cat on the wardrobe; when it mewed, the dog froze.
Chaliapin felt that this portrait was the best representation of him.
He took Kustodiev to all his performances. He came for him, took him out of his wheelchair, and carried him down from the fifth floor. And then he drove Kustodiev to the Maryinsky Theater, where he settled him in his box. After the performance, Chaliapin brought him back.
I was taken to Kustodiev by his daughter Irina, with whom I studied at the 108th Labor School. I wasn't eager to go to a strange house, but I was told that Kustodiev was a very sick man who loved music and I had to play for him.
I wrote down the titles of everything I knew and took the list with me. Kustodiev, leaning back in his chair, listened closely. He had kittens cuddling inside his jacket, dozing in ecstasy. When the music bored them, the kittens jumped noisily to the floor.
Kustodiev liked to listen to me play. He told me many things about art and Russian painters. And he was very pleased to be able to tell me something I didn't know. He told me and grew happy, pleased that now I also knew.
I was deeply impressed by Kustodiev's passion for voluptuous women. Kustodiev's painting is thoroughly erotic, something that is not discussed nowadays. Kustodiev made no secret of it. He did blatantly erotic illustrations for one of Zamyatin's* books.
If you dig deeper into my operas The Nose and Lady Macbeth, you can find the Kustodiev influence in that sense. Actually, I had never thought about it, but recently in conversation I remembered a few things. For instance, Leskov's t story "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk Dis-
•Yevgeny lvanovich Zamyatin (1 884-1 937), writer, author or the utopian novel We; he was branded a counterrevolutionary arter We was published in the West. When the campaign against him was at its peak, Zamyatin wrote to Stalin, who eventually allowed him to emigrate. He died in Paris. We is still banned in the Soviet Union.
+Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov ( 1 831-1895), short-story writer and novelist, whose artistic world is related in some ways to that or Kustodiev (who liked to illustrate Leskov's stories). His stylized prose depicts Russia in bold transformation and bright colors. Shostakovich wrote an opera based on Leskov's short story "Lady Macbeth or Mtsensk District."
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trict" was illustrated by Kustodiev, and I looked through the drawings at the time I decided to write the opera.
The Nose was designed in Leningrad by Vladimir Dmitriev, a marvelous artist, who seemed to be stuck on Kustodiev: he made fun of him all the time but couldn't get away from him.
Parody and stylization are one and the same, after all. Dmitriev either stylized the production after Kustodiev or parodied Kustodievbut the result was the same: Kustodiev on stage. The same thing happened with Katerina Izmailova in Nemirovich-Danchenko's* production. The designer was also Dmitriev.
These names are connected for me-Kustodiev, Zamyatin, Leskov.
Zamyatin wrote a play, The Flea, based on a Leskov story. It was produced in Leningrad at the Bolshoi Dramatic Theater. The sets and costumes were by Kustodiev.
The play and the production made a great impression on me. I even turned to Zamyatin when I decided to write my opera The Nose. I asked him to help with the libretto. Zamyatin knew of me from Kustodiev and so he agreed. But it didn't work, Zamyatin couldn't do it, he just didn't understand what was needed. But I'm grateful to him for a few ideas.
As for Kustodiev, I grew further and further away from him with the years. For a while I was in love with animation. Actually, with Mikhail Tsekhanovsky, a talented director. I consider him our most talented animator. It's a pity that he's been forgotten.
I wrote two small operas for Tsekhanovsky. They're listed as music for cartoons, but actually the films were made for my music, real operas, small-The Story of the Priest and His Worker Balda, based on the Pushkin poem, and The Story of the Silly Mouse. There was a lot of music. Too bad it's all been lost somewhere.
The Story of the Priest was completely anti-Kustodiev. It depicted a drunkard selling pornographic postcards at a fair. And the cards were a painting by Kustodiev, called Venus Without Shirt and with Fat Thighs. That was an obvious reference to Kustodiev's popular Russian Venus.