Portraits without Frames Read online

  SERGEY SERGEYEVICH PROKOFIEV

  I’m walking up

  Bolshaya Dmitrovka,

  what is now Pushkinskaya—

  walking up from the station

  at Okhotny Ryad—

  and I find myself stopping

  in front of the Operetta Theater,

  stopping and whistling the first few bars

  of the Classical Symphony

  (“Tram-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta . . .”),

  the Visions fugitives, the Sarcasms,

  the entrance of Tybalt.

  On I go, whistling.

  And suddenly—there he is,

  Sergey Sergeyevich Prokofiev.

  His back, his walking stick, his head—

  that big, famous head.

  He’s standing at the crosswalk,

  standing, standing.

  I too am standing.

  He’s waiting for the cars to stop.

  I too am waiting.

  They stop. He doesn’t cross.

  So I don’t cross.

  Another stream of cars.

  They stop. He doesn’t cross.

  So I don’t cross.

  I think, should I go up to him and ask:

  “Sergey Sergeyevich, what’s the matter,

  do you need help?”

  After the third stream

  he starts to cross.

  And I see his leg is dragging

  along the ground behind him.

  I hadn’t known.

  He’s walking slowly—slowly hurrying.

  I look around. I realize something’s wrong.

  And then I see his pallid face.

  He gets across, stops, catches his breath—

  then heads for home.

  High-browed, straight-backed, exact.

  I walk up, say hello.

  He lifts his hat.

  A smile shadows his swollen lips.

  All this was soon after his meeting with Zhdanov.

  That’s when his leg began to drag.

  He fixes me with his eyes:

  “Can you make any sense . . .

  of this . . . of any of this?”

  “No,” I answer helplessly, with sympathy.

  “Neither can I,” he says quietly, helplessly—

  glad, perhaps,

  to have crossed paths

  with a little sympathy.

  He disappears into a doorway.

  How seldom we know

  that we are meeting

  someone for the last time.

  My heart skipped a beat.

  Then cried out.

  Then grew quiet.

  How used we have become

  to strangled cries.

  To souls shrinking in the long chill.

  I don’t know how much time has passed.

  It doesn’t matter.

  Prokofiev’s staccato—

  this Morse code of our century—

  still beats inside me.

  Sharp, harsh, ironic.

  A step, a sigh, a cry, a moan.

  It’s March 1953,

  the afternoon of the fifth.

  The luminary of all sciences,

  inspirer of all victories

  has expired.

  Moscow’s orphans have gathered

  in a great hall:

  What happens now, without him?

  Scary to think: How—without him?

  Half looks, half words,

  a whisper turns into a fluttering of lips

  that eavesdrop on other lips.

  The end of the world.

  Irakly Andronikov,* all in black,

  walks in on tiptoe,

  crouching delicately, musically

  on compass legs,

  a finger pressed to his lips.

  It isn’t clear whether he’s coming closer

  or moving away.

  He stares at me, slyly, sullenly,

  then beckons with a quick nod of his head.

  So I get up, I go.

  Andronikov is there

  beside me; his stubborn glare

  drills into me. We walk

  up Trubnikovsky, delirious, glancing

  from side to side, like two conspirators.

  A minute passes, and in the quietest whisper,

  he slips the news into my ear:

  “Sergey Sergeyevich . . .

  Prokofiev. . .”

  He looks around again: “Died today.”

  He said it—and felt scared to death.

  Not a word more.

  Sullen, dour,

  bereft of thought, we walk on.

  Where to?

  Back to the hall:

  “I told you,

  but, please, don’t

  go telling anyone else . . .”

  It’s half dark.

  We are all heading

  into

  an unknown dark . . .

  Translated by Boris Dralyuk

  *Irakly Andronikov was a Russian literary scholar and television personality famed for his wit.

  DMITRY SHOSTAKOVICH (1906–1975), like Sergey Prokofiev, slipped in and out of the regime’s favor, and came under particularly heavy attack after 1948 as part of Andrey Zhdanov’s campaign against formalism. His health was fragile and he survived a number of heart attacks. Nevertheless, he spoke out against anti-Semitism after the Second World War, when Stalin initiated his campaign against Soviet Jews, and against the persecution of Joseph Brodsky in the 1960s.

  DMITRY DMITRYEVICH SHOSTAKOVICH

  With jerky movements,

  with twitching fingers,

  he touches his spectacles

  as if they were scalding hot,

  and he doesn’t know what to do

  either with them

  or with his constantly twitching hands.

  His thumb and his pinkie

  push the frames back up his nose

  as if he were playing an octave.

  Shostakovich cringes, hunches his shoulders—

  you’d think he was shivering.

  He doesn’t look at us,

  then fearfully looks up,

  and through slitted eyes, through the panes,

  stares at us painfully, probingly,

  as if he can’t quite place us.

  In a quick patter, with strange pauses,

  he addresses his student,

  my friend Igor Boldyrev,*

  a young man from Petersburg

  now living in Moscow,

  who’s gone gray very young indeed:

  “Igor Georgiyevich, it’s all very good.

  Very good.

  Yes. Yes. Yes.

  Some things need work.

  But don’t get carried away—

  working things out. Working things over.

  Otherwise you’ll be writing.

  One. Composition. All your life.

  A waste of your gifts!

  Better to realize

  yourself in your next work.”

  “Yes, Dmitry Dmitryevich.”

  Someone calls Shostakovich to the phone.

  “Interview?

  No! No! No!”

  He likes to repeat

  short words sharply. Three times.

  “Yes, a formalist.

  Yes, muddle instead of music.†

  Yes, the devil knows what . . .

  Yes, write it all down!”

  It’s as if he’s tearing the words from his heart

  and—tossing them aside.

  He hangs up, asks our forgiveness.

  He shakes our hands.

  Good. Good. Good.

  And then he turns his back on us.

  Bending forward, he writes something

  on a scrap of sheet music.

  On the windowsill. For a long time.

  He walks over to the piano.

  What we are hearing has, perhaps,

  just been composed.

  He has retreated into music, into another element— />
  and is now somewhere inside it.

  We sit, holding our breath.

  Shostakovich has forgotten about us.

  How lucky we are to be forgotten.

  If only he wouldn’t remember us

  anytime soon.

  But then—it’s as if he’s waking,

  emerging from a cloud

  or from the sea.

  His brow grows smooth.

  His pupils grow bigger.

  With a confused and guilty smile

  on his wry lips,

  he clasps our hands again

  and shakes them, tugs at them.

  Glad. Glad. Glad.

  Translated by Boris Dralyuk

  *Igor Georgiyevich Boldyrev studied with Shostakovich in both Leningrad and Moscow in the 1930s and ’40s. He went on to have a successful career as the music editor in chief at the USSR Ministry of Cinematography and the RSFSR Ministry of Culture.

  †“Muddle Instead of Music” is the title of an editorial published in Pravda on January 28, 1936, criticizing Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1934). Some thought that Stalin had written it himself; it is more likely that he simply approved it.

  MIKHAIL GNESIN (1883–1957) was a composer and teacher. The son of a rabbi, he was born in Rostov-on-Don. His three elder sisters founded a music school now known as the Gnessin Russian Academy of Music. Gnesin himself studied from 1901 until 1909 in the Saint Petersburg Conservatory; among his teachers was Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov. In 1914, he taught at a small theatrical school run by Vsevolod Meyerhold. Many of Gnesin’s compositions from the 1910s and ’20s make use of Jewish subject matter and show the influence of Jewish traditional music. He wrote one Hebrew-language opera and song cycles with both Yiddish and Russian texts. His Piano Trio, op. 63, “In Memory of Our Perished Children” (1943), is the earliest piece of Soviet music commemorating the Shoah. In 1948 and ’49 Gnesin spoke out against the repression of composers. Though never arrested, he was forced to retire and hand over his position to his pupil, Aram Khachaturian.

  MIKHAIL FABIANOVICH GNESIN

  The tall building on Uprising Square

  is a monument

  to the luminary of all sciences.

  But soar up in the lift,

  enter Gnesin’s apartment—

  and cults and monuments

  slip out of your mind.

  With this tall stone needle

  Stalin may have scratched

  the sky of socialism,

  but the old composer’s apartment

  makes you forget this.

  “These spectacles,” I hear,

  “were worn by Nikolay Andreyevich.”

  (Gnesin is telling me about

  his teacher, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov).

  “And this book,” adds Galina Mavrikiyevna,

  “is a present from him.” A breath

  of the past, of the sea, of the composers

  we call

  the Mighty Handful.*

  Gnesin sits down at the piano.

  He sits there for a long time,

  bowing his head

  with its triangular beard.

  He sits there so long

  I wonder

  if he has dozed off.

  And Galina Mavrikiyevna

  begs him not to play, not

  to remember, not to upset

  himself. But it’s impossible

  not to remember. Not to remember

  hurts. To remember

  hurts still more. But then,

  who really knows, who can say?

  Gnesin looks pale and sad.

  Not long before this, he had suffered

  a stroke—soon after

  an official meeting with Zhdanov.†

  Zhdanov had played the piano

  to the assembled composers;

  cruelty often likes to adopt

  the dress of sentimentality—

  a hatchet beside a curtain of light blue tulle.

  Zhdanov had pounded away at the keys,

  as if pounding his 1946 decree

  into the composers’ skulls.

  Prokofiev, Myaskovsky,

  Shostakovich, Khachaturian, and others

  had listened. Not one of them

  said a thing:

  what could they say?

  Only Gnesin got to his feet

  and, gently as ever,

  said, “And you

  dare

  to teach us

  about music?”

  No answer. The silence

  did not bode well.

  Translated by Robert Chandler

  *Rimsky-Korsakov worked for many years for the Imperial Russian Navy—first as a serving officer, then as the civilian inspector of Naval Bands. The Mighty Handful, or the Five, was a group of iconoclastic nineteenth-century Russian composers—namely, Mily Balakirev, Alexander Borodin, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov—who worked to develop a distinctly Russian musical mode.

  †See the introductory note on Sergey Prokofiev on p. 217.

  EMIL GILELS (1916–1985) was an internationally celebrated pianist born into a lower-middle-class Jewish family in Odessa. He easily won the first All-Union Piano Competition and went on to win almost every competition he took part in, both in the Soviet Union and in the West. He was lionized by the Soviet authorities, who heaped prizes and awards upon him and claimed that he embodied a new and truly Soviet manner of playing. Gilels developed a remarkably varied repertoire and was known for his intense touring schedule. He was the first Soviet artist to be allowed to travel extensively in the West.

  EMIL GRIGORYEVICH GILELS

  This name vibrates

  like a membrane,

  shimmers like crystal.

  It wasn’t a grand piano

  before him, it seemed,

  but an unbridled force of nature—

  the sea or a hurricane.

  But at the end of the recital

  it was as if

  the young pianist

  could have balanced the grand piano

  on his forceful chin.

  When I was young, I wrote of him:

  “His ten fingers slam the keys

  while we sit and gawk.

  Ginger Gilels from Odessa

  is playing us some Bach.”

  He was upset by “ginger”

  though it was God’s honest truth

  (but then again, truth

  is what upsets people most).

  After his first prize

  in an international competition,

  Stalin called him

  “Our ginger gold.”

  No getting upset there!

  Ginger? Ginger it is.

  Gold? Gold indeed.

  We met at the Yampolskys’,

  a dynasty of musicians.

  They had an old Schröder grand.

  (The same as in Odessa—

  in the Moldavanka, on Dalnitskaya Street—

  where a widow and a widower,

  she with three sons,

  he with two daughters,

  married and gave to the world

  Elizabeth and Emil.

  A generous gift!

  The offspring of parents

  who have seen something of life

  usually turn out well—

  and these two

  were certainly not an exception.)

  We would meet at the Yampolskys’,

  on Chisty Lane.

  Emil was the quiet type;

  he seemed stern.

  He spoke through the grand piano;

  his conversation was wordless.

  I was present at his

  morning—afternoon—evening—

  rapt—practice—performance.

  His practice sounded like a recital,

  perfect from beginning to end,

  from the end to the beginning.

  “His ten fingers slam the keys.”

&nbs
p; His lips were shut, his eyes half closed—

  and if they opened,

  I saw neither sadness nor joy;

  they were staring far, far away.

  I did not know where.

  The trees outside the window

  were nodding to him.

  He was practicing at home,

  in the silence of early morning.

  The sounds rolled along like the surf,

  spread out like the wind.

  A sharp bend in the lane

  was framed by the window.

  “You don’t mind my being here?” I asked.

  “Not at all,” he answered.

  He never let anything slip.

  He spoke rarely—

  most often

  about his teachers:

  Tkach—Reingbald—Neuhaus.*

  He took me along to concerts.

  I listened to Beethoven’s Third,

  conducted by Klemperer.

  Back then Emil was studying

  for his master’s.

  His relationship with Neuhaus

  was no idyll—

  a meeting of two personalities

  I shall cautiously call

  in-de-pen-dent.

  Nevertheless,

  when evacuated to Sverdlovsk

  during the war,

  these two would peacefully play

  pieces for four hands.

  After which came an endless road trip:

  Voronezh, Tallin,

  San Francisco, Detroit, Minsk,

  Kyiv, Trieste, Odessa,

  the whole globe,

  which is not so very big,

  but troubled and motley.

  We met in Riga by chance.

  The Riga Cathedral. Morning.

  Gilels was standing in a shaded corner

  listening to the organ, his head

  lifted, his eyes closed.

  It would have been sacrilegious

  to call out to him.

  Let him listen to Bach,

  kapellmeister of St. Thomas in Leipzig.

  Let him be filled with sound,

  worshipful sound

  and rejoicing

  and lofty grief

  and purpose.

  When the organ fell silent,

  Gilels opened his eyes,

  as if emerging from behind a cloud.

  He looked around carefully,

  saw me, and came up to me,

  sensing I understood.

  “We’ll be listening to you