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only very recently; probably it's a sign of advancing senility. I'm falling into my second childhood; in childhood you like to compare yourself with great men. In both cases (childhood and old age) a person is miserable because he doesn't live his own life, he lives other people's lives. You're happy when you live only in this life, and my unhappiness now lies in the fact that I live other lives more and more often. I exist in fantastic worlds and forget about our life, as though· it were becoming unbearable for me.
I suppose the fact that I orchestrated Songs and Dances of Death as well as Boris and Khovanshchina proves that I am jealous of Rimsky
Korsakov-that is, that I wanted to surpass him when it came to Mussorgsky. Naturally, Boris came first, then Khovanshchina. Then for many years my favorite work was Songs and Dances, but now I think that I love Without the Sun most of all. I feel that this cycle has much in common with the opera I'm determined to write, The Black Monk, based on Chekhov.
Working with Mussorgsky clarifies something important for me in my own work. Work on Boris contributed greatly to my Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, and then was recalled in the Eleventh. (There was a time when I considered the Eleventh my most "Mussorgskian"
composition.) Something from· Khovanshchina was transferred to the Thirteenth Symphony and to The Execution of Stepan Razin, and I even wrote about the connection between Songs and Dances of Death and my Fourteenth Symphony.
Naturally, this is not an exhaustive list of possible parallels. With time, willing lovers of parallels can expand it greatly. Of course, in order to do that they would have to seriously dig around in my worksboth those that have been given voice and those that are still hidden from the eyes of "musicological officials." But for a true musicologist, with a musical education and musical goals, this could be fruitful, albeit hard, work. That's all right, let them sweat a little.
Asafiev couldn't restrain himself and he orchestrated Khovanshchina too. This was in the early thirties, I think, when one could still count on the fact that anything done with Mussorgsky would be approved and praised, and bring an honorarium.
But things were developing swiftly in the direction of "good tsars,"
and A Life for the Tsar beckoned in the future, quickly renamed Ivan 240
Susanin. I love Glinka and I'm not embarrassed by the fact that Stalin
"loved" him too, because I'm sure that the leader and teacher's attention was captured by the title alone-A Life for the Tsar-and by the plot, a Russian peasant sacrificing his life for the monarch, because Stalin was already anticipating how people would sacrifice their lives for him. So they did a quick job on the libretto, with some paint and some gilt, and it took on a fresh, topical look. Glinka's opera became quite acceptable for the day, not like the rather suspect work by Mussorgsky. Here the simple man was told clearly what was what and how to behave in a critical situation, and the instruction was accompanied by beautiful music.
Two other operas were updated then, Prince Igor and Pskovitianka.
The powers that be really liked Pskovitianka's final chorus, in which the voices of the bandit oprichniki and the terrorized citizens of Pskov blend in touching harmony as they laud the autocratic rule of Ivan the Terrible. How freedom-loving Rimsky-Korsakov could have written that is beyond me. In Asafiev's words, this was "an all-healing feeling of the ultimate rightness of reality." That's it, word for word-I looked it up recently. That's an amazing little phrase, I can't think of a better example of the exalted pandering style. Asafiev's lackey spirit is served up on a tray.
Now, what kind of style is that? "The ultimate rightness of reality."
And what's this "all-healing feeling" ? Does it mean that we must have it for terror, purges, political trials, and torture? Does it mean that
"ultimate rightness" is behind all that shame? No, I refuse to accept the ultimate rightness of the villains even if they're super-real. Obviously, Mussorgsky and I were in one camp on this issue and Asafiev in a completely different one. He was with the torturers and oppressors.
He began finding flaws in Prince Igor, saying that Galitsky's personality was a rough spot and that several lines, not thought through, did not respond to the lofty patriotic concept of The Lay of Prince Igor.
According to Asafiev, Borodin is an optimist and Mussorgsky a pessimist. Asafiev also played at literature, and in one of his home-grown play lets he has Mussorgsky say to Borodin: "You are ruled by life and I by death." Now, what does that nonsense mean? As long as we're alive we are all, without exception, ruled by life, and when we die, again without exception, we will all be ruled by death. And it doesn't 241
depend on the optimistic or pessimistic nature of our work. Whether that's fortunate or not, I don't know.
I've never completely understood what it means to say that a creative man is an optimist or a pessimist. Take me, for instance, which am I ? It's hard for me to say. When I think about my neighbor* who lives a few floors above me I may be an optimist and in relation to my own life I may be a pessimist. Of course, there have been times when acute melancholy and irritation with people have brought me to the end of my tether, but sometimes it was just the reverse. I refuse to make the final judgment on my case.
In Russia we like to attack the defenseless composer and accuse him of darkest pessimism. I've been put down that way many times, but it doesn't hurt because all my favorities-Gogol, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Leskov, Chekhov, Zoshchenko-have been blackened with the same brush. But I am hurt for one of my works, I mean the Fourteenth Symphony. The point is that many of my other works, placed on the blacklist, were seen as pessimistic by citizens who were at a rather far remove from music. It would have been amazing if they had said anything else; that was their job. But in this case it was acquaintances and even friends who criticized the symphony harshly, upset that "death is all-powerful," saying that that was a crude calumny of mankind. And they used all kinds of high-flown words, like beauty and grandeur and, naturally, divinity.
One luminaryt in particular pointed a finger at the glaring errors of this minor work. I said nothing and invited him to honor my living quarters with his overwhelming genius, as Zoshchenko would have put it, to have a cup of tea with me. But the luminary refused, saying he pref erred tea for one to tea with such an irredeemable pessimist.
Another, less hardened man would have been deeply wounded by that, but I survived. You see, I'm such an insensitive, almost criminal character. Besides, I don't quite understand the cause of the brouhaha. Apparently my critics have clarity and roses growing in their souls and that's why they see the symphony as a crude and boorish slander of the way the world is. I can't agree with that. Perhaps they feel that it's not so easy for a man to lose himself in our contemporary world. I feel
*Khachaturian.
+Solzhenitsyn.
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that he's specially fitted out just for that. Too many people are applying their rather unusual talents to that end. Some major geniuses and future famous humanists are behaving extremely flippantly, to put it mildly. First they invent a powerful weapon and hand it over to the tyrants and then they write snide brochures.• But · one doesn't balance out the other. There aren't any brochures that could balance the hydrogen bomb.