I spoke of these people, my acquaintances, in various ways throughout my life. Occasionally I contradicted myself-and I'm not ashamed of that. I changed my mind about these people and there's nothing shameful in that. There would have been, had I done so because of external pressures or to make my life better. But that was not the case.
These people simply changed and so did I. I listened to new music and grew to know the old better. I read, I was told many things, I suffered from insomnia and I spent my nights ruminating. All this affected me.
And that's why today I don't think about people the way I did thirty, forty, or fifty years ago.
75
When I was younger, I often used swear words in conversations with friends. With the years I came to use them less and less. I'm getting old, death is near, you might say that I'm looking it in the eye.
And now I think that I understand my past better. It, too, has. come closer to me and I can look it in the eye as well.
Yuri Olesha,* when we were still friends, told me this parable in a didactic voice. A beetle fell in love with a caterpillar and she returned h�s love, but she died and lay still, wrapped in a cocoon. The beetle grieved over his beloved's body. Suddenly the cocoon opened and a butterfly appeared. The beetle decided to kill the butterfly because it disturbed his meditations over the body. He rushed over to her and saw that the butterfly's eyes were familiar-they were the caterpillar's eyes. He had almost killed her, for after all, everything was new except the eyes. And the butterfly and beetle lived happily ever after.
But you need to look things in the eye for that, and not everyone can do it, and sometimes a lifetime isn't long enough.
•Yuri Karlovich Olesha (1 899-1 960), writer and playwright, whose brilliant style resembles Nabokov's. Olesha stopped writing fiction for a long time after the publication 0£ his long story
"Envy" (1927), in reaction to the sociopolitical situation, which was not conducive to creative work. He esteemed Shostakovich, but after the article "Muddle Instead 0£ Music" appeared, he publicly criticized his work, declaring that "Leo Tolstoy would have signed the article in Pravda," and that Shostakovich's music "humiliated" him, Olesha. Later the critic Arkady Belinkov commented: "His speech was one or the earliest and most brilliant examples or betrayal or the 1 934-53 model."
76
I THINK of Meyerhold too frequently, more frequently than I should, because we are now neighbors of sorts. I often walk or drive past the memorial plaque that depicts a repulsive monster and I shudder. The engraving says: "In this house lived Meyerhold." They should add,
"And in this house his wife was brutally murdered."
I met Meyerhold in Leningrad in 1 928. Vsevolod Emilyevich called me on the telephone and said, "This is Meyerhold speaking. I want to see you. If you can, come to me. Hotel So-and-so, room such-andsuch."
I don't remember what we talked about. I only remember that V sevolod Emilyevich asked if I would like to join his theater. I agreed immediately and a short time later I went to Moscow and began working in the Theater of Meyerhold in a musical capacity.
But I left the same year: it involved too much technical work. I couldn't find a niche for myself that satisfied both of us, even though it was very inter�sting to be part of the theater. Most fascinating were 77
Meyerhold's rehearsals. Watching him prepare his new plays was enthralling, exciting.
My work in the theater, basically, was playing the piano. Say, if an actress in The Inspector General was called upon to sing a romance by Glinka, I donned tailcoat, went on as one of the guests, and sat down at the piano. I also played in the orchestra.
I lived at Vsevolod Emilyevich's apartment on Novinsky Boulevard.
In the evenings we often spoke of creating a musical drama. I was working hard then on my opera The Nose. Once there was a big fire at Vsevolod Emilyevich's apartment. I wasn't home at the time, but Meyerhold grabbed my music and handed it to me perfectly intact.
My score survived thanks to him-a magnificent deed, for he had things much more valuable than my manuscript.
But everything ended well; I don't think that his property was heavily damaged either. If it had been, he would have had to answer to his wife, Zinaida Nikolayevna Raikh.
My feelings for Raikh are subjective and probably stem from the following fact: Meyerhold himself tried to underplay the difference in our situations and ages. He never would have dared to raise his voice to me. But his wife yelled at me now and then.
Raikh was an energetic woman, rather like the sergeant's widow in The Inspector General. She imagined herself a social lioness. This reminds me of a poem by Sasha Cherny.• It notes a certain rule of life.
While a celebrity, Cherny says, may casually give you his hand, his wife at best will proffer two fingers. And this could have been written about Zinaida Nikolayevna.
Meyerhold loved her madly. I had never seen anything like it. It's hard to imagine that such a love could exist in our day. There was something ominous about it-and it did end badly.
It makes you think: the best way to hold on to something is to pay no attention to it. The things you love too much perish. You have to treat everything with irony, especially the things you hold dear.
There's more of a chance then that they'll survive.
•s� Cherny (Alexander Mikhailovich Glikberg; 1880-1932), satirical poet. He died in France. Shostakovich loved Chemy's mocking poems and wrote a vocal cycle based on his texts in 1960. His prerevolutionary poems turned out to be so relevant more than four decades later that the first performance of the cycle created havoc among the apparatchiks of the Ministry of Culture.
78
That is perhaps one of the greatest secrets of our life. The old men didn't know the secret. That's why they lost everything. I can only hope that the young people will be luckier.
Meyerhold liked to dress elegantly and to surround himself with beautiful things-paintings, porcelain, crystal, and so on. But it was nothing compared to Zinaida Nikolayevna's passion for luxury. Raikh was a very beautiful woman, but perhaps a bit on the heavy side, which was particularly evident on stage. She moved with astounding clumsiness on stage.
Raikh loved her own beauty. And she knew how to make herself look good, how to frame her beauty. Everything in the Meyerhold house served that purpose: the furniture, the decor, everything. And of course, the jewels.
Almost . immediately after Meyerhold's disappearance,"' bandits came to Raikh's house. They killed her. Seventeen knife wounds; she was stabbed in the eyes. Raikh screamed for a long time, but none of the neighbors came to her aid. No one dared to go into Meyerhold's apartment. Who knew what was going on? Maybe Raikh was being battered by the iron fist of an official thug. Better keep away from trouble. And so they killed her and got away with all the jewels.