And that's just one story out of many like it, but I've said that I'm not a historian. I just wanted to tell what I know well-too well. And I know that when all the necessary research is completed, when all the facts are gathered, and when they are confirmed by the necessary documents, the people who were responsible for these evil deeds will have to answer for them, if only before their descendants.
If I didn't believe in that completely, life wouldn't be worth living.
But let me return to where I began. I was talking about composers who left Moscow and Leningrad and moved to the boundaries of the country. They sat around in Godforsaken corners, living in fear, waiting for the knock on the door in the middle of the night, waiting to be taken away forever, like their friends or relatives. And then it turned out that they were needed. There was a crying need for triumphant songs and dances for festivities in Moscow, and for musical accusations 2 1 5
of the past and musical praise for the new. They needed "folk" music that retained one or two reminiscent melodies from authentic folk art, something like the Georgian "Suliko," the leader and teacher's favorite song.
The real folk musicians had been almost completely eradicated, only individuals here and there were· left alive. And even if they had been spared, they wouldn't have been able to switch over as fast as the authorities wanted them to, they wouldn't have been able to do it. The ability to switch over instantaneously is a quality of the professional of the new era. It's a quality of our intelligentsia. "Excellency, give the order and I'll switch over this instant," as one character said in Mayakovsky's play The Baths. (I'm sure that Mayakovsky wrote that about himself.)
It called for an "extraordinary nimbleness of thought," in Gogol's phrase, and a similar attitude toward the local national culture. The composers I'm talking about were strangers and professionals. And they were also very, very scared. Thus all the necessary prerequisites for a "lush burgeoning" (as they began calling it) of national art-a completely new socialist national art-were there. The fellows got to work and national operas, ballets, and cantatas poured forth in a mighty stream. Things weren't as good with symphonies, but there wasn't much of a demand for symphonies. They didn't need concertos or chamber music either. They needed loyal lyrics, an easy-to-understand plot. They took plots from the terrible past, usually about some uprising or other. It was easy to work out stereotyped conflicts within the plot and then add on a doomed love story to elicit a tear or two.
The central protagonist, naturally, was a hero without fear or reproach. But there always had to be a traitor, that was necessary, it called for increased vigilance. This corresponded to reality too. From a professional point of view, this was all rather sound, in the best traditions of the Rimsky-Korsakov school which I knew so well. It's disgusting to admit it, but it's true.
They took local folk melodies (the ones that were most accessible to the European ear) and developed them in a European style. Everything "superfluous" (from their point of view) was ruthlessly excised.
It was just like the old joke: "What's a cane? A well-edited Christmas tree."
It was all harmonious and neat, but once the last note was written 2 1 6
on the score and the ink had dried, the most difficult part began. They had to find an author for the concoction. An author whose name would be as euphonious as the music, but in the oppasite direction, so to speak. While the music had to be maximally European, the author's name had to be maximally national. They glued· a vivid exotic label onto a standard European product. In general, they managed well with this problem. They found some agreeable young, or some not so young but vain, natsmen (this derogatory contraction of natsionalnoye men'shinstvo, or national minority, became current at that time too), who, without the slightest tremor from his conscience, signed his name on the cover of a work he hadn't compased. The transaction was completed and the world gained one more rogue.
But our "professionals" didn't stay in the woodwork. First of all, their nanies sometimes appeared on the title pages of the scores or in the programs and posters, naturally only as co-authors, but that was a big honor for the homeless compasers. Second, even if their names remained in the shadows, they were rewarded, and quite generously.
They were given titles, decorations, and they were well paid. They ate well, slept on soft feather beds, and lived in their own little houses. Finally, and most importantly, they were less frightened, The fear hadn't disappeared completely, of course, it never does. The fear was in their blood forever, but they could breathe more easily. And for that they were eternally grateful to the national republics in which they had settled.
I have several friends among these workers and I can say that they were satisfied with the situation for decades. I was always amazed by that. I knew how poets suffered when need and extenuating circumstances (for instance, that same fear) drove them to translation. Poetic translation in connection with the "lush burgeoning" of the national cultures deserves special attention, but it's not my business. I will just say that the picture was the same. The pact was given a Russian
"pony" of a poem that didn't exist at all in the national language. In other words, there was a bad prose Russian version of what the poem would have been had the national "author" been able to write it.
And so the Russian poet wrote a poem based on the plot summary and sometimes the poems were marvelous. The poet made candy from shit, as we say, forgive my vulgarity.
Pasternak and Akhmatova suffered when they did such work. They 2 1 7
felt-and quite rightly-that they were committing a two-fold crime.
The first was falsifying the true picture. For money and out of fear they pretended that something existed. The second crime was against their own talent. They were burying their own talent through this translation.
I'll admit that writing doesn't always come, but I'm totally against walking around looking at the sky when you're experiencing a block, waiting for inspiration to strike you. Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov didn't like each other and agreed on very few things, but they were of one opinion on this: you had to write constantly. If you can't write a major work, write minor trifles. If you can't write at all, orchestrate something. I think Stravinsky felt the same way.
This seems to be the Russian composers' stand, and I feel it's thoroughly professional and differs greatly from what they apparently think about us in the West. I think that there they still believe that we write between bouts of drinking, dipping pen into vodka. Actually, interest in alcohol doesn't exclude professionalism and I'm not the exception to the rule of the Russian school of composition in this respect.
So you must constantly train your hand, and there's nothing bad about translations or reworkings per se, but you should work with material that is necessary or dear to you. I realize that you don't say to yourself: "This I need and this is dear to me," but you sense it in your gut. In the country, if a dog is sick it goes into the fields and seeks out the right herbs and grasses by instinct. It chews on them and gets well.