“He doesn’t have a lady friend. I have a friend who has it from a reliable source that he has given up music entirely and is busy writing his memoirs now.”
“None of that is true. There was never going to be any concert. The authorities just used the line to weed out the undesirable elements. A friend of mine has a sister who read in a foreign book that seven or eight years ago Selinsky—”
“Wait a moment, wait a moment, I don’t understand… If all of you are so sure there won’t be a concert, what are you still doing here, waiting in this line? What’s this line for?”
“Oh, there’s a rumor going around about a retrospective of Filatov’s paintings, strictly ticketed access, so I thought, Might as well wait a bit, see what happens, maybe they’ll sell the tickets here.”
“Filatov, Filatov—yes, I remember, aren’t his works banned?”
“Sure they are. Times are changing, though.”
“Who told you about him?”
“That woman over there, see?”
“And who told her?”
“Some bearded old fellow in a funny coat. She said he seemed to know what he was talking about.”
“But what does Nadezhda Alekseyevna say?”
“Oh, she’s no use, you know how she is, she says the same thing no matter what you ask her: ‘Will arrive soon, delivery pending, check back tomorrow.’ Like a parrot.”
“Now, don’t be unfair, she’s had a hard life, our Nadenka, four children to take care of, and no husband, and running a kiosk is not easy… Well, I suppose I could spare a bit of time. Who’s last in line?”
They were quiet after that; it was too cold to talk. Many left. At midnight, the fifteen or twenty people who remained waiting before the kiosk, just in case, were surprised to hear a ringing of bells in the abandoned church at the other end of the street, the rising sound playing up and down the transparent silver keyboards of the sonorous skies. When the bells fell silent, the remaining men and women checked their watches, turned down the flaps of their hats, turned up their collars, and went off their separate ways, along darkened alleys, across snow-covered courtyards, calling out to one another: “Happy New Year!” and “See you tomorrow!”
HISTORICAL NOTE
IN 1962, the celebrated Russian composer Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky accepted a Soviet invitation to visit his former country—his first trip to his native land after half a century of absence. He was eighty years old. A historic concert, with Stravinsky himself conducting, was given at the Great Hall of the Philharmonia in Leningrad. The line for tickets began a year before the performance and evolved into a unique and complex social system, with people working together and taking turns standing in line. After a year of waiting, an eighty-four-year-old cousin of Stravinsky was unable to attend, as the tickets had sold out; her number in the line was 5,001.
Although The Concert Ticket is set in a fictionalized version of Soviet Russia, its central premise is inspired by this historical episode. Likewise, while the characters in the book are invented, there are certain parallels with actual persons and events. Most notably, Maya’s ballet world in the Western “city of light” is loosely based on the famous Ballets Russes, a company that was a sensation in Paris in the years before the Revolution and that included the incomparable Vaslav Nijinsky (once described as “the little devil [who] never comes down with the music”) and the beautiful Tamara Karsavina. Among the company’s most groundbreaking productions were ballets written by the then unknown Stravinsky, including The Firebird (L’oiseau de feu, 1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (Le sacre du printemps, 1913).
Finally, a word about chronology. The year in which the novel takes place is identified as the thirty-seventh anniversary of the “Change,” which, of course, mirrors the October Revolution of 1917. This is not, however, intended to imply a temporal setting of 1954. Rather, I have borrowed freely from three different periods of Soviet history: the repression of Stalin’s 1930s, the hopefulness of Khrushchev’s Thaw (late 1950s–early 1960s), and the stagnation of Brezhnev’s 1970s.
The verse about the cuckoo is taken from a 1911 poem by Anna Akhmatova, “I live like a cuckoo in a clock”; the translation is my own.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I WOULD LIKE TO OFFER my thanks to Kate Davis, Lance Fitzgerald, Leigh Butler, and everyone else at the Penguin Group who worked to make this book a reality; my copy editor, Anna Jardine, for her unerring eye; and my wonderful UK editor, Mary Mount, for her astute reading. As ever, I am deeply grateful to Warren Frazier, my agent, for so many things, not least of them honesty, and Marian Wood, my publisher and editor, for her perfect understanding and her friendship. Finally, I would like to thank my family—my brother, Aleksei Kartsev, and my mother, Natalia Kartseva, for always being there during the saddest time in my life, and my husband, Michael Klyce, my first reader and greatest help. Most of all, I want to thank my father, Boris Grushin. Thank you, papa, for everything.
About the Author
Olga Grushin was born in Moscow in 1971. Her novel The Dream Life of Sukhanov was shortlisted for the Orange Award for New Writers 2006 and the LA Times Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction 2006. Grushin was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists 2007. Her writing has appeared in the Guardian, Granta and the Partisan Review. She lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband and two children.
Copyright
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published as The Line in the USA by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2010
First published as The Concert Ticket in Great Britain by Viking 2010
Copyright © Olga Grushin, 2010
The moral right of the author has been asserted
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.