And one more Meyerhold rule helped me to be calmer in the face of criticism of my work. This is Meyerhold's third lesson, and it is useful for others, not just me. Meyerhold stated it more than once: If the production pleases everyone, then consider it a total failure. If, on the other hand, everyone criticizes your work, then perhaps there's something worthwhile in it. Real success comes when people argue about your work, when half the audience is in raptures and the other half is ready to tear you apart.
In general, when I remember Meyerhold I feel sad. And not only because of the horrible fate that befell him. When I think of his end, it merely hurts. The sadness comes because V sevolod Emilyevich and I didn't do anything together. Nothing came of the vast plans we made to collaborate. Meyerhold wanted to stage my opera The Nose; it didn't work. He also wanted to put on Lady Macbeth; that didn't work out either. I wrote the music for one of his productions, Mayakovsky's The Bedbug, yet essentially, I felt great antipathy for that play. I had fallen under Meyerhold's spell.
I refused Meyerhold's other proposals because I was angry with him over The Bedbug. I didn't work with him on Mayakovsky's awful play The Baths, which was a failure. I even refused to write the music for his play Thirty- Three Swoons, based on Chekhov. And naturally, I didn't write the music for Meyerhold's production of One Life. That 82
was a terrible creation based on Ostrovsky's horrible novel How the Steel Was Tempered. Meyerhold wanted to disassociate himself from formalism* with this play. He ordered realistic scenery so that everything looked real. But it was too late for disassociation. His list of ideological sins was too long. And the authorities, seeing the realistic sets, decreed, "This is intentional, the better to mock realism."
The play was banned, and they shut the Theater of Meyerhold.
It's like the Ilf and Petrov story: Come on over, the Petrovs won't be here. Neither will the lvanovs. Come over, do. The Sidorovs won't be here either. No matter what I think of, it's the same: it didn't happen, we didn't have the time, we didn't do this because we were afraid, that we just didn't do at all. You look, and your whole life is gone.
Meyerhold wanted to do an opera with me based on Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time. He planned to write the libretto himself. Then we thought about doing an opera with Lermontov's Masquerade. And he proposed that I write an opera on Hamlet, which he also planned to produce. It's very sad. Though I can imagine what we would have got for doing Hamlet, since Meyerhold's ideas on that were as wrong as they could be for those times. We would have been decried for formalism.
It's a shame that it didn't work out with Meyerhold. I ended up writing music for a Hamlet anyway, for a most formalistic one. I'm very unlucky with that formalism. An artistic project is planned, I'm asked to be the composer, and then there's always a scandal. It must be fate. "Fateful eggs," like Bulgakov's story.
One of the most "fateful eggs" was the first of the three productions of Hamlet with which I was involved. The production was scandalous, the most scandalous, they say, in the history of Shakespeare. It may be so, I don't know. In any case, there was a great hue and cry. And of course, it was over the same old thing: formalism.
• "Formalism" has been a "cant" word in Soviet art and literature since the 1 920s. As history has shown, this word has almost no real aesthetic content. It has been an epithet for the most varied creative figures and tendencies, depending on the political line and personal tastes of the leaden of the Soviet Union at a particular time. Let us quote one typical Soviet definition of "formalism": "Formalism in art is the expression of bourgeois ideology that is hostile to the Soviet people. The Party did not cease its vigilant struggle even for a moment against any even minute manifestation of formalism." It therefore is not strange that all kinds of punishments were brought upon those branded as "formalists," up to and including extermination.
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Akimov* was doing Hamlet at the Vakhtangov Theater. He's five years older than I, and that's an enormous difference, especially when you're young. This was in the early 1930s, and Hamlet was Akimov's first independent production. Daring, wouldn't you say? Particularly if you bear in mind what kind of Hamlet he wanted to show the audience.
To this very day, that scandalous production is a nightmare for Shakespearian scholars. They blanch at the mention of the production, as though they're seeing the Ghost. Incidentally, Akimov got rid of the Ghost. I think that this must have been the only version of Hamlet without him. The production had a materialistic base, so to speak.
Meyerhold, as you know, adored Hamlet. He considered it the best play of any time and any country. He said if all the plays ever written suddenly disappeared and only Hamlet miraculously survived, all the theaters in the world would be saved. They could all put on Hamlet and be successful and draw audiences.
Meyerhold may have overstated the case a bit. But really, I love Hamlet too. I "went through" Hamlet three times from a professional standpoint, but I read it many more times than that, many more. I read it now.
I'm particularly touched by Hamlet's conversation with Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, when Hamlet says that he's not a pipe and he won't let people play him. A marvelous passage. It's easy for him, he's a prince, after all. If he weren't, they'd play him so hard he wouldn't know what hit him.
Another Shakespeare play I love is King Lear. I met "the prince"
three times and "the king" twice, and in one case I shared their music-King Lear shared with Hamlet. t Crowned personages, I thought, would work it out between them.
In King Lear the important thing as I see it is the shattering of the miserable Lear's illusions. No, not shattering. Shattering comes all at once, and it's over; that wouldn't make it tragedy. It wouldn't be inter-
*Nikolai Pavlovich Akimov (1901-1968), theater director and artist, perpetually charged with
"formalism." His 1932 production of Hamlet was highly regarded in its day in the American literary press.
tThe director Grigori Mikhailovich Kozintsev (1905-1973) used Shostakovich's music, written earlier for his production of King Lear, in his staging of Hamlet. Later Shostakovich wrote the scores for Kozintsev's famous films of Hamlet and King Lear.
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esting. But watching his illusions slowly, gradually crumbling-that's another thing. That's a painful, morbid process.
Illusions die gradually-even when it seems that it happened suddenly, instantaneously, that you wake up one fine day and you have no more illusions. It isn't like that at all. The withering away of illusions is a long and dreary process, like a toothache. But you can pull out a tooth. Illusions, dead, continue to rot within us. And stink. And you can't escape them. I carry all of mine around with me.
I think about Meyer hold. There were many tragedies in his life.
His whole life was tragic, and one of the tragedies was that he never directed Hamlet. Meyerhold liked to discuss how he would stage this or that scene from Hamlet. His ideas had much in common with Akimov's concept. Meyerhold had thought of it all earlier and carried it around in his head. Then he shouted on every corner that Akimov had robbed him. Of course, he hadn't. Akimov thought of everything himself. But it's significant that the idea of staging Hamlet as a comedy was in the air.