And "our" hereditary worker behind the counter turned out to be a champion of "our" work (Stalin liked using the plural for himself).
The story about Khrennikov is this. As head of the Composers'
Union, Khrennikov had to submit the composer candidates to Stalin for the annual Stalin Prize. Stalin had the final say and it was he who chose the names from the list. This took place in his office. Stalin was working, or pretending to work. In any case, he was writing. Khrennikov mumbled names from the list in an optimistic tone. Stalin didn't look up and went on writing. Khrennikov finished reading. Silence.
Suddenly Stalin raised his head and peered at Khrennikov. As the 253
people say, "he put his eye on him." They say that Stalin had worked out this tactic very well. Anyway, the hereditary worker behind the counter felt a warm mass under him, which scared him even more. He jumped up and backed toward the door, muttering something. "Our"
administrator backed all the way to the reception area, where he was grabbed by two hearty male nurses, who were specially trained and knew what to do. They dragged Khrennikov off to a special room, where they undressed him and cleaned him up and put him down on a cot to get his breath. They cleaned his trousers in the meantime. After all, he was an administrator. It was a routine operation. Stalin's opinion on the candidates for the Stalin Prize was conveyed to him later.
As we see, the heroes in both stories do not emerge very well. Both fouled their pants, yet both would seem to be grownups. Moreover, both men recounted their shame with rapture. To shit in your pants in front of the leader and teacher is not something that everyone achieves, it's a kind of honor, a higher delight, and a higher degree of adulation.
What vile, disgusting toadying. Stalin is made out to be some sort of superman in these stories. And I'm sure that both men tried very hard to make sure the stories got back to him so that he would appreciate their toadying zeal, their fear and loyalty.
Stalin liked hearing such things about himself, he liked to know that he inspired such fear in his intelligentsia, his artists. After all, they were directors, writers, composers, the builders of a new world, a new man. What did Stalin call them? Engineers of human souls.
You might say, Why are you discrediting worthy people with your unworthy petty complaints? We'd like to know how you, you old soand-so, would behave with Stalin? You'd probably soil your pants with a big load.
I reply: I saw Stalin and I talked to him. I didn't soil my pants and I didn't see any magical force in him. He was an ordinary, shabby little man, short, fat, with reddish hair. His face was covered with pockmarks and his right hand was noticeably thinner than his left. He kept hiding his right hand. He didn't look anything like his numerous portraits.
You know that Stalin was very concerned with his appearance and wanted to look handsome .. He liked watching Unforgettable 1919, where he rides by on the footboard of an armored train with a saber in 254
his hand. This fantastic picture, naturally, had nothing to do with reality. But Stalin watched and exclaimed, "How young and handsome Stalin was. Ah, how handsome Stalin was." He talked about himself in the third person and gave an opinion on his looks. A positive one.
Stalin was very picky about portraits of himself. There's a marvelous Oriental parable about a khan who called for an artist to do his portrait. That seemed to be a simple enough order, but the problem was that the khan was lame and squinted in one eye. The artist depicted him that way and was immediately executed. The khan said, "I don't need slanderers."
They brought a second artist. He decided to be smart and depicted the khan in perfect shape: eagle eyes and matching feet. He was immediately . executed too. The khan said, "I don't need sugar-coaters."
The wisest, as it should be in a parable, was the third artist. He painted the khan hunting. In the painting the khan was shooting a deer with a bow and arrow. His squinty eye was shut, and the lame foot rested on a rock. This artist was awarded a prize.
I have a suspicion that the parable doesn't come from the East, but was written somewhere closer to home, because this khan sounds just like Stalin. In Unforgettable 1919 Stalin was played by the actor Gelovani, who had a personal make-up man who specialized in Stalin make-up and nothing else. And Stalin's famous field jacket that Gelovani wore was kept in a special safe at Mosfilm so that not one mote of dust should fall on it. Heaven forbid that someone should report that Comrade Stalin's field jacket was dusty. That was almost like saying that Comrade Stalin himself was . . . you know, dusty.
Stalin had several painters shot. They were called to the Kremlin to capture the leader and teacher for eternity, and apparently they didn't please him. Stalin wanted to be tall, with powerful hands, and he wanted the hands to be the same. Nalbandian fooled them all. In his portrait Stalin is walking straight at the viewer, his hands folded over his stomach. The view is from below, an angle that would make a Lilliputian look like a giant. Nalbandian followed Mayakovsky's advice: the artist must look at his model as a duck looks at a balcony. And Nalbandian painted Stalin from the duck's point of view. Stalin was very pleased and reproductions of the painting hung in every office, even in barbershops and Turkish baths.
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.And Nalbandian used the money he received to build himself a luxurious dacha near Moscow. A huge place, with cupolas looking at once like a train station and St. Basil's Cathedral. One of my students dubbed it Savior-on-the-Mustache [Spas-na-Usakh, a pun on the church Spas-na-Peskakh, or Savior-on-the-Sands, in Moscow], referring to Stalin's mustache, which Akhmatova called "roach whiskers."
My meeting with Stalin took place under the following circumstances. During the war it was decided that the "Internationale" was not fit to be the Soviet anthem. The words were deemed inappropriate, and really, words like "no one will give us release-not God, not Tsar, not hero,'' were wrong. Stalin was both god and tsar, so the words were ideologically impure. They wrote new lyrics: "Stalin raised us"-you know he was a great gardener. And anyway the "Internationale" is a foreign composition, French. How could Russians have a French anthem? Couldn't we create our own? So they threw together new words and passed them out to composers: write a new national anthem. You had to participate in the contest whether you wanted to or not, otherwise they would make an issue of it, they'd say that you were shirking an important duty. Of course, this was the chance for many composers to stand out, to climb into history, so to speak, on all fours. Some composers tried hard. One of my friends* wrote seven anthems, that's how much he wanted to be the national composer. Actually, this world-famous composer wasn't particularly hard-working, but in this case he manifested wonders of diligence.
All right, I wrote an anthem too. Then began the endless auditions.
Stalin appeared sometimes, and he listened and listened and then commanded that Khachaturian and I write an anthem together. The idea was extremely stupid; Khachaturian and I are very different composers, with different styles and different ways of working. Our temperaments are different too. And anyway, who ever wanted to work in a composers' kolkhoz? But we had· to obey.