ter. It's a theme for satire. But the Art Theater staged a comedy on the topic. They decided to have a pleasant laugh over it when they should have been weeping, as I've said. And Stanislavsky, to general amazement, didn't even comprehend the mechanism of the plot. He asked,
"What's the point? Why are all these people living in one room!"
Stanislavsky lived in a town house.
They told Stanislavsky, "They don't have individual apartments."
Stanislavsky didn't believe it. Stanislavsky's famous "I don't believe it." Actors of the world, start trembling. Stanislavsky said, "It can't be!
It can't be that people don't have their own apartments. You're pulling my leg."
They tried to convince Stanislavsky that this was the unadulterated truth, that there were some citizens living in the!!e abnormal conditions. The old man became upset. They calmed him down. And then Stanislavsky made the brilliant decision: "All right, in that case we'll put in the posters that this is a comedy about people who don't have their own apartments. Otherwise the audience won't believe it."
This is a true story about one of the great directors of our time.
Now, it's clear that Stanislavsky lived in his own world. He was an exalted man with an artistic soul. He received groceries from an exclusive distributor, as did all geniuses and Party workers bringing outstanding benefit to the state.
But in his naivete, the old man called the exclusive distributor his
"secret provider." People in the theater talked about it with a smirk.
Stanislavsky really did think that it was a great secret. But it was no secret. Everyone knew about exclusive distributors. Everyone knew that important people got their groceries from a different source than other citizens, in special places set up just for them. Everyone was used to this fact of our life, as though that was the way it was supposed to be. And everyone kept quiet, thinking he was keeping the
"great secret."
One Leningrad con man made a lot of money ·over it. He took both 92
circumstances into account, as it were, and used them. The circumstance that everyone knew about exclusive distribution and the circumstance that everyone kept quiet about it. The ones who didn't get groceries kept quiet so that they wouldn't end up behind bars for spreading slander, and as for the ones who got groceries, it's obvious why they kept quiet.
The con man operated this way. He read the paper, paying special attention to the obituaries. When he saw that the Party organization of some plant or office "expressed condolences to the family of the deceased," he clipped it, got the phone number, and sometime later called the number. The con man represented himself as the head of an exclusive distribution concern and said that they had received "orders from above" to provide the family of the deceased with "everything necessary." "Since the deceased had performed such great services for them,'' the con man added. He asked them to place an order for whatever they wanted-eggs, butter, meat, sugar, even cocoa and chocolate.
All at fantastically cheap prices. And why not-an exclusive distributor, just for deserving comrades.
Waiting for a few more days, the con man called again and said the order was ready. He asked the honored relatives of the deceased to appear for the groceries at such-and-such a place, and when the trusting people came to the appointed spot for the order, he took the money, promised immediate delivery, and disappeared.
The scoundrel got away with it for a long time, even though he pulled the trick dozens and perhaps hundreds of times, because he had worked it out so well-the plan was simple, but a work of genius. If the crook had come to a worker's family with such a proposition, they simply wouldn't have believed him. But a bureaucrat's family-they believed and how, because they knew very well that exclusive distribution existed, that it functioned openly, that it was done covertly, and that they shouldn't talk about it.
The new life style brought so many new and fresh conflicts. The exclusive distributor. The communal apartment. In previous eras a man might wander around a castle with a sword, looking for a ghost. In our times a man wanders around a communal apartment with an ax in his hands, ke�ping watch for the resident who doesn't turn out the 93
light in the toilet. Imagine a novel of secrets and horrors of the new era. Here's my hero, ax in hand, threatening to chop up the sloppy resident if he catches him in the act. I feel that I didn't sing his praises enough, that is to say, I didn't portray him fully enough.
I'm not indulging in irony now. For some reason, people think that music must tell us only about the pinnacles of the human spirit, or at least about highly romantic villains. But there are very few heroes or villains. Most people are average, neither black nor white. They're gray. A dirty shade of gray.
And it's in that vague gray middle ground that the fundamental conflicts of our age take place. It's a huge ant hill in which we all crawl. In the majority of cases, our destinies are bad. We are treated harshly and cruelly. And as soon as someone crawls a little higher, he's ready to torture and humiliate others.
That is the situation that needs watching, in my opinion. You must write about the majority of people and for the majority. And you must write the truth-then it can be called realistic art. Who needs the tragedies? There's an Ilf and Petrov story about a sick man who washes his foot before going to the doctor. When he gets there he notices that he washed the wrong one. Now, that's a real tragedy.
To the extent of my ability I tried to write about these people, about their completely average, commonplace dreams and hopes, and about i their suspicious tendency toward murder.
I regret that I wasn't consistent enough, perhaps, in that regard. I didn't have Zoshchenko's determination and will power. Zoshchenko plainly rejected the idea of a Red Leo Tolstoy or a Red Rabindranath Tagore, and that sunsets and dawns had to be described in flowery prose.
But I do have one great excuse. I never tried to flatter the authorities with my music. And I never had an "affair" with them. I was never · a favorite, though I know that some accuse me of it. They say that I stood too close to power. An optical illusion. What was not, was not.
It's simplest to look at the facts. Lenin, as it is easy enough to surmise, never heard my music. And if he had, I doubt that he would have liked it. As far as I can tell, Lenin had specific tastes in music.
He had a rather distinctive approach to it, more peculiar than is usually imagined.
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Lunacharsky* used to speak of it in this way: Lunacharsky often invited Lenin to his house to listen to music, but Lenin was always busy and refused. Once, tired of Lunacharsky's invitations, he said directly,
"Of course, it's very nice to listen to music. But can you imagine, it depresses me, I find it hard to bear." You see, poor Lenin was saddened by music. A telling fact, if you think about it.
Chief of Petrograd Zinoviev didn't become a fan of my music. Zinoviev was replaced by Kirov,+ and I had no luck with him either.
In his time, Zinoviev ordered all the opera houses in Leningrad closed. He explained it something like this: The proletariat doesn't need opera houses. They are a heavy burden for the proletariat. We Bolsheviks can't carry the heavy burden any more. (Lenin, if you recall, also called opera a "piece of purely upper-class culture.") Kirov, on the contrary, often attended the opera. He liked being a patron of the arts. But that didn't help my opera The Nose any. Kirov had a strongly negative reaction to The Nose and the opera was taken out of repertory. They blamed it on the fact that it needed too many rehearsals. The artists, they said, got tired. At least they didn't shut down the theater. They had planned to squash the opera house completely over Krenek's operas.