Then he realized that he was alone, that the rest of the audience was seated, because the music was still on. He had to go back to his seat, his neighbors hissing him as he stepped all over their feet.
Another time Zoshchenko both touched me and distracted me from my worries. It was at the end of 1 937. I came to the Philharmonic Hall for the first performance of my Fifth Symphony. The atmosphere 265
at the premiere was highly charged, the hall was filled-as they say, all the best people were there, and all the worst too. It was definitely a critical situation, and not only for me. Which way would the wind blow? That's what was worrying members of the select audiencepeople in literature, culture, and physical culture. That's what had them in a feverish state. In the first part of the program, Mravinsky played Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet. My Fifth was in the second half of the program. I felt like the gladiator in Spartacus or a fish in a f rypan. I remembered Oleinikov's ditty "Tiny little fishie, fried little smelt, where's your smile from yesterday, remember how you felt?"
Romeo and Juliet was over. Intermission, and Zoshchenko ran in all smiles, dressed nattily as usual. He headed over to me and congratulated me on the success of my composition.
It turned out that Zoshchenko liked my new work, it was melodious. "I just knew that you weren't capable of writing anti-people music," Zoshchenko praised me. I was flattered, of course, and had a good laugh, and even forgot about the second half and the fact that the Fifth was yet to come.
I was always drawn to Zoshchenko, I found him very simpatico. We were very different men, but we had the same point of view on many things. It sometimes seemed that Zoshchenko left all his anger on paper; he liked to appear gentle, he liked to pretend shyness. You see that sometimes, the humorist trying to be sad, a gentle person trying to be cruel. It's easier to live that way.
Zoshchenko tried to create a distance between himself and his works. Actually, he was very good at being mean and ruthless in life, just as in his stories. He was cruel to women, there were many around him, and why not: he was nationally famous, he had money, and he was handsome in a way that women liked.
His good looks always seemed suspect to me. They were too pretty, I guess. If he had behaved more obnoxiously, he could have passed for a pimp. But he was quiet and modest, and he told his passionate and persistent lovers horrible, vile things in a quiet and modest voice.
Zoshchenko didn't have a drop of sentimentality, luckily. We agreed on that. He once told me laughingly that he had to write a paper in high school on "Liza Kalitina as the Ideal Russian Woman." What could be more nauseating than Turgenev? Particularly when on the 266
subject of women? I was happy to hear that Zoshchenko got a 1 [F] for the composition. I told him that Che1chov didn't like Turgenev's maidens either. He said that all those Lizas and Elenas w�re intolerably false, and that they weren't Russian girls at all, but unnatural python-esses with pretensions above their station.
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Zoshchenko wrote marvelously about himself and his relations with women and women in general. This is the final truth, the way he wrote. It's hard to imagine that one could write more truthfully. It is very crude prose. Pornography is often sugary, but there isn't any sugariness here. It's crystalline Zoshchenko. Some pages of Before Sunrise are hard to read, they're so cruel. And most important, there's no fanfare, no cynicism, no pose. Zoshchenko treats women with detachment.
Zoshchenko published Before Sunrise during the war and his selfanalysis drove Stalin mad. He felt that it was wartime and we should be crying "Hurrah!," "Go to hell!," and "Long live!," and here people were publishing God knows what. So the pronouncement was made: Zoshchenko was a vile, lustful animal, just like that, word for word.
Zoshchenko had no shame or conscience.
That's how incensed our leader and teacher was by Zoshchenko's incorrect attitude toward women. And he rushed to women's defense.
It was a topic that interested Stalin deeply. For instance, it was decreed from on high that my Lady Macbeth praised lust among the merchants, which naturally had no place in music. Out with lust.
Now, why would I want to praise merchant lust? But the leader and teacher knew better than we did. "Does Stalin know?" and "Stalin knows" were the two favorite sentences of the Soviet intelligentsia in that period. And I must stress that this wasn't from the lectern, and not at meetings, but at home, with the wife, in the bosom of the Soviet family.
Stalin placed great hopes in the family. At first Stalin tried to destroy it with every means available to him. Son denounced father, wife informed on husband. The papers were full of announcements like "I, So-and-so, announce that I have nothing to do with my father, enemy of the people So-and-so. I broke off with him ten years ago." Everyone had grown accustomed to such announcements, they didn't even pay attention. So you broke off with him. It was like reading "Selling my 267
furniture" or "French lessons, also manicure, pedicure, and electrolysis."
The hero of the era was little Pavlik Morozov, who informed on his father. Pavlik was sung in poetry, prose, and music. Eisenstein took part in the praises, working long and hard on a great art film that glorified the little snitch.
In Lady Macbeth I depicted a quiet Russian family. The members of the family beat and poison one another. If you looked around, you'd see I wasn't exaggerating in the least. It was just a modest picture drawn from nature. The exceptions were rare; one was Tukhachevsky's mother, Mavra Petrovna. She refused to brand her son ar enemy of the people, she was adamant. And she shared his fate.
Having destroyed the family unit, Stalin began resurrecting it, that was his standard pattern. It's called dialectics. He destroyed barbarically, and he resurrected barbarically too. Everyone knows the shameful laws on family and marriage promulgated by Stalin. And it got worse. A ban on marrying foreigners, even Poles and Czechs, who were our own people, after all. Then the law on sexual segregation in schools. Boys and girls separated, in order to maintain morality, and so that they wouldn't ask teachers stupid questions about "things" and
"holes."
We still haven't shaken ourselves free of that struggle for a healthy Soviet family. I was on a suburban train once and my neighbor, a buxom woman, was telling her girlfriend about a film she had seen, Lady with the Dog, based on the Chekhov story. She was incensed. He has a wife, she said, and she has a husband, and you should see what they do. It's too shameful to tell you, she said. It's propaganda of moral decay through films, and they teach Chekhov in the schools, too! Stalin is dead, but his work lives on. When the Dresden Museum exhibit was in Moscow, schoolchildren didn't see it, because it was restricted to those over sixteen to protect that Soviet family. Otherwise the children might see some naked women, by Veronese or Titian. And then they would become incorrigible and move on to really dangerous behavior.