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If a mosquito was the cause of her fingers touching his skin and making him smell of carnations, how could he possibly hold anything against the insect?
But an idyll, by definition, only becomes an idyll once it has ended. He had discovered love; but he had also begun to discover that love, far from making him ‘what he was’, far from spreading deep content all over him like carnation oil, would make him self-conscious and indecisive.
He tried to stir her into jealousy, describing flirtations with other women – even seductions, real or imaginary – but this seemed to make her cross rather than jealous. He had also threatened suicide, more than once. He even announced that he had married a ballet dancer, which might conceivably have been the case. But Tanya had laughed it all off. And then she had got married herself. Which only made him love her the more.
He thought he knew what he wanted, he got what he wanted, he didn’t want it any more, it went away from him, he wanted it back again.
This was how you should love – without fear, without barriers, without thought for the morrow. And then, afterwards, without regret. Fine words. Fine sentiments. Yet such behaviour was beyond him.
Between art and love, between oppressors and oppressed, there were always cigarettes.
They were just the chips that had flown while the wood was being chopped.
But one of life’s many disappointments was that it was never a novel, not by Maupassant or anyone else. Well, perhaps a short satirical tale by Gogol.
‘I am very weak-willed and do not know if I will be able to achieve happiness.’
His First Symphony had set all the neighbourhood dogs barking. The crowd laughed, the orchestra played louder, the dogs yapped all the more, the audience laughed all the more. Now, his music had set bigger dogs barking. History was repeating itself: the first time as farce, the second time as tragedy.
All that striving and idealism and hope and progress and science and art and conscience, and it all ends like this, with a man standing by a lift, at his feet a small case containing cigarettes, underwear and tooth powder; standing there and waiting to be taken away.
What kind of a man buys a scrapbook and then fills it with insulting articles about himself? A madman? An ironist? A Russian? He thought of Gogol, standing in front of a mirror and from time to time calling out his own name, in a tone of revulsion and alienation. This did not seem to him the act of a madman.
He knew he must protect those closest around him, and to do so needed to be calm, but could only be frantic.
They might want to torture him, and he would agree to everything they said immediately, as he had no capacity for bearing pain. Names would be put in front of him, and he would implicate all of them. No, he would say briefly, which would quickly change to Yes, Yes, Yes and Yes. Yes, I was there at the time in the Marshal’s apartment; Yes I heard him say whatever you suggest he might have said; Yes this general and that politician were involved in the plot, I saw and heard it for myself. But there would be no melodramatic cutting-off of his hands, just a businesslike bullet to the back of the
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From now on there would be only two types of composer: those who were alive and frightened; and those who were dead.
He was always punctual, and would go to his death being punctual.
He gazed briefly at the River Neva, which would outlast them all.
The case resting against his calf was there to reassure him, and to reassure others; a practical measure. It made him look as if he were in charge of events rather than a victim of them. Men who left home with a case in their hands traditionally returned.
Still, he used to remind himself that Brahms had played the piano at a sailors’ brothel in Hamburg. Which might have been more fun, admittedly.
He was weary of his own fear.
Let Power have the words, because words cannot stain music. Music escapes from words: that is its purpose, and its majesty.
One fear drives out another, as one nail drives out another. So, as the climbing plane seemed to hit solid ledges of air, he concentrated on the local, immediate fear: of immolation, disintegration, instant oblivion. Fear normally drives out all other emotions as well; but not shame. Fear and shame swilled happily together in his stomach.
Fear: what did those who inflicted it know? They knew that it worked, even how it worked, but not what it felt like. ‘The wolf cannot speak of the fear of the sheep,’ as they say.
Any more than he expected a trumpeted land of freedom – he doubted such a place existed anywhere.
wealth. Ilf and Petrov, after taking a road-trip across the country, had written that thinking about America made them melancholy, while having the opposite effect on Americans themselves.
If at home you were spied on by the men who smoked Belomory, here in America you were spied on by the press.
He was treated well; it was a public success – and also the greatest humiliation of his life.
To be Russian was to be pessimistic; to be Soviet was to be optimistic. That was why the words Soviet Russia were a contradiction in terms.
gymnastics for the intelligentsia.
Besides, the whole country was a punishment cell: why introduce a child so early to what it would see quite enough of in its lifetime?
They huddled together in a masochistic herd, occasionally dropping an ironic remark to one another, but essentially admiring their leader for his nobility and idealism, his sense of purpose, his ability to see more widely than those who just scraped and blew behind their desks. The maestro, harsh though he might of necessity be from time to time, was a great leader who must be followed. Now, who would still deny that an orchestra was a microcosm of society?
Power: ‘Yes, yes, I see your point. I’m sure you’re right. But let’s leave it for now. We’ll make that change next time round.’
Was there a greater portrayal of the shattering of human illusions than King Lear? No, that was not quite right: not shattering, because that implied a single great crisis. Rather, what happened to human illusions was that they crumbled, they withered away. It was a long and wearisome process, like a toothache reaching far into the soul. But you can pull out a tooth and it will be gone. Illusions, however, even when dead, continue to rot and stink within us. We cannot escape their taste and smell. We carry them around with us all the time. He did.
And yet, for all this, for all that he was unparalleled in depicting tyrants knee-deep in blood, Shakespeare was a little naive. Because his monsters had doubts, bad dreams, pangs of conscience, guilt. They saw the spirits of those they had killed rising in front of them. But in real life, under real terror, what guilty conscience? What bad dreams? That was all sentimentality, false optimism, a hope that the world would be as we wanted it to be, rather than as it was. Those who chopped the wood and made the chips fly, those who smoked Belomory behind their desks at the Big House, those who
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that it was impossible in the Soviet Union to buy manuscript paper unless you were a member of the Union of Composers.
‘I am alone; all round me drowns in falsehood.’
And Power itself did not diminish; it just mutated.
How easy it was to be a Communist when you weren’t living under Communism! Picasso had spent a lifetime painting his shit and hailing Soviet power. Yet God forbid that any poor little artist suffering under Soviet power should try to paint like Picasso.
Perhaps this was not, as the writer had first presumed, a heroic tale of love worthy of Homer and the Ancients, but instead some cheap, modern story out of Paul de Kock; and perhaps the commandant was even now boasting to a messful of fellow officers about his melodramatic gesture and its sexual reward. Such contamination of romance was all too likely in the modern world, Maupassant concluded; even if the initial gesture, and the night of love, remained, and had their own purity.
even so, how could men and women fail to hope,
But that was too simple: the idea of a man split into two by a dividing axe. Better: a man crushed into a hundred pieces of rubble, vainly trying to remember how they – he – had once fitted together.
Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised.
A soul could be destroyed in one of three ways: by what others did to you; by what others made you do to yourself; and by what you voluntarily chose to do to yourself. Any single method was sufficient; though if all three were present, the outcome was irresistible.
His brain was stubborn at giving house-room to his failings, his humiliations, his self-disgust, his bad decisions. He would like to remember only the things he chose: music, Tanya, Nina, his parents, true and reliable friends, Galya playing with the pig, Maxim imitating a Bulgarian policeman, a beautiful goal, laughter, joy, the love of his young wife. He did remember all those things, but they were often overlaid and intertwined with everything he wanted not to remember. And this impurity, this corruption of memory, tormented him.
Do not trust what comes out of my mouth, trust only what goes into your ears.
a vast catalogue of little farces adding up to an immense tragedy?
It was this: at what point does pessimism become desolation?
Irony, he had come to realise, was as vulnerable to the accidents of life and time as any other sense. You woke up one morning and no longer knew if your tongue was in your cheek; and even if it was, whether that mattered any more, whether anyone noticed.
If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony which had lost its soul.
The self-doubt of the young is nothing compared to the self-doubt of the old. And this, perhaps, was their final triumph over him. Instead of killing him, they had allowed him to live, and by allowing him to live, they had killed him. This was the final, unanswerable irony to his life: that by allowing him to live, they had killed him.
