Three essays

Requiem for myself

On the Internet I came across a publication where Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet in C minor was called “most brilliant.” I remembered how I attended the first audition of this quartet at the Composers' Union. The date is recorded in my “Stenography”: October 7, 1960. More than half a century ago! My now deceased friend, a wonderful, still underrated composer Mikhail Marutaev, called me. A lot of people gathered in the small hall. Misha said that usually several people come to a section meeting.

Shostakovich made a short introduction. He said that in July of this year he was in Dresden in connection with the filming of the film “Five Days and Five Nights,” for which he wrote the music. This quartet arose there. “I dedicate the quartet to the victims of fascism,” said Shostakovich. - Not just “dedicated”, but “I dedicate.” When the quartet is published, I don’t know if I’ll write it like that; I might be accused of being a fanatic, of individualism. But in my circle I want to express myself this way. Here you can find themes from various of my works. This is a deeply personal piece."

He was worried like a beginner, every now and then he ruffled the hair on the top of his head; it was unexpected to see this. Shostakovich! The quartet had to be played twice: before the end of the fourth, or maybe even the fifth movement, the second violin (Shervinsky, Beethoven Quartet) broke a string, so they decided to repeat everything. It was amazing.

And then a certain Urbach stood up (if I hadn’t written down his name then, who would have remembered him now) and said: comrades, I think there is no need to discuss this wonderful work. Shostakovich stood up, confused, and tried to object, but everyone was already getting up, many, it seemed, in bewilderment. I heard someone nearby say: that’s right, there is music that cannot be described in words.

Misha explained to me: many people still don’t like Shostakovich, but if there is an open discussion, no one will dare to speak out against him. And then, if another resolution comes out in the spirit of 1948, they may say: well, we were not allowed to speak out about Shostakovich. Shostakovich is a great musician, but his character is crippled by time. When, after the decree of 1948, the lights went out in his apartment, he rushed to the phone: “Tell me, will the water be turned off too?” But when he was later offered to take up the post of director of the Leningrad Conservatory again, he took the form that he was asked to fill out and went to the toilet with it...

And now I’m reading a commentary by an unknown musicologist - in those years, it turns out, we really didn’t know anything and couldn’t know for a long time. “The most brilliant Eighth Quartet in C minor was created over three days in July 1960 in Dresden, during one of the worst periods of the composer’s life. Shostakovich was on the verge of suicide; in order to obtain permission to leave, he was forced to join the party. According to the testimony of his friends Isaac Glickman and Lev Lebedinsky, the composer fell into a terrible depression: he drank, cried and gave the impression of a man on the verge of a mental breakdown, or perhaps suicide. It is quite possible that Shostakovich was preparing to die. He wrote this quartet as a requiem for himself. The later designated dedication “To the Memory of the Victims of Fascism” is nothing more than a screen. Shostakovich wrote to Glickman: "I thought that if I ever died, it would be unlikely that anyone would write a work dedicated to my memory. Therefore, I decided to write one myself. It would be possible to write on the cover: 'Dedicated to the memory of the author of this quartet.'"

For many years I assured myself that a work can be fully perceived regardless of the conditions of its origin, the circumstances of the author’s life, his fate, his personality. And now I listened to the brilliant quartet more than fifty years after its first performance - how its sound has been enriched by new time, new knowledge!

Baratynsky's vision

I thought about a new sense of reality, about the temptation to escape from it - and remembered Baratynsky’s old (1827) poem “The Last Death.”

There is being; but what name
Name him? It is neither sleep nor vigil;
Between them it is, and in man it
Reason borders on madness.

……………………………………..

But sometimes, inflamed by a dream,
He sees a light that is not revealed to others.

And so the poet saw “without cover / The final fate of all living things.” At first, the triumph of reason was revealed to him: “There is art everywhere, an abundance of signs.” He even saw flying machines.

What a magnificent feast for the mind!
His enemies are both a shame and a lesson,
This is what enlightenment has reached!

However, “centuries passed”, and another vision opened up:

My eyes did not recognize people;
Accustomed to the abundance of abundant benefits,
They looked at everything calmly,
What created fuss in their fathers...

……………………………………..

And in full possession
Fantasy took over their existence...

Something like the triumph of virtual reality is depicted - although at the time when this was written, such a concept did not exist. Indeed, I read further:

And gave in to mental nature
The bodily nature is between them.
Carried them into the Empyrean and into chaos

A living thought on its wings.
But they walked on the ground with difficulty
And their marriages remained fruitless.

Suddenly I compared it with the judgment of Sergei Khoruzhy, a famous physicist, philosopher, theologian, which I wrote down a while ago: “Going into virtual reality is fraught with a soft death like euthanasia.”

Centuries have passed, and here to my eyes
A terrible picture emerged:
Death walked on land and waters,
The living fate was fulfilled.
Where are the people? Where? hiding in coffins!
Like ancient pillars on the borders
The last families were decaying.

An unexpected roll call, isn't it? “A person does not understand himself, cannot cope with himself. The anthropological situation gravitates toward scenarios of death,” Khoruzhy wrote in one of his articles. Poetic visions of 200 years ago are read differently. Should we call them insights? The poet, ahead of later fantasies (not yet experience), intuitively sensed the danger of leaving reality and replacing it.

Chekhov. Public intellectual and spiritual authority

I remembered the theme of one of A. Arkhangelsky’s programs: “Public intellectual and spiritual authority. Why did this experience stop working in the 90s? From Mamardashvili to Averintsev, from A. Me to Likhachev.”

For some reason, I thought, the names of writers almost never came up in the discussion. But until recently, who in the Russian tradition became public intellectuals and spiritual authorities? Where are they now? I began to go through the names of familiar contemporaries. Of course, someone is still participating in the discussion of topical issues; I will not name names. But how many others, and not the least in literature, have left the public space for various reasons. (I’ll keep quiet about myself now; it was partly life circumstances that worked here, but more my character, the structure of my personality. I became neither one nor the other. After all, I never aspired to this; for my self-realization, something else was more important.)

And suddenly I remembered: what about Chekhov? Here is someone who was neither a public intellectual nor a spiritual authority. I recently re-read his story “My Life”. The characters there do not show any interest in politics, in events in the country, in the world, they do not read newspapers - in general, it seems, nothing, they do not discuss works of literature or art. They take part in some amateur performances, but what they are about, on what topic, doesn’t seem to matter. The narrator only names some of the problems of the time, but they are somewhere on the periphery of his interests, something rather external, insignificant.

“Again, talk about physical labor, about progress, about the mysterious X that awaits humanity in the distant future,” he comments ironically. A. Chudakov writes about this: “Unlike his predecessors, who were absorbed in clarifying the value of ideas and worldviews, Chekhov turned to what lies deeper than any ideas... He was interested in the “general feeling of life.” It, and not characters, not morals, not ideas, is the main subject of depiction in the writer’s work, although both one, and the other, and the third are present in his works.”

“In everyday life, a person does not perceive the world as clear as it appears in realistic novels. Meanwhile, how a person sees the world is just as important to know how to comprehend human types, characters, or the ideas that guide man and society.” “Ultimately, a person’s everyday life sense of self is the basis for comprehending the world around him and the main incentive for his actions.”

Something really close to me. I'll quote a little more. “The Russian writer did not repeat philosophical ideas, did not popularize other people’s ideas, but was a clear forerunner of the philosophical thought of the 20th century, in particular Heidegger’s phenomenology. The latter focused his efforts on understanding human selfhood in everyday life, and this was the sign of the era.”

One should perhaps be more careful about Heidegger. His German-Hellenic “self” led the author himself down dangerous paths and brought him closer to Nazism. Among Chekhov's contemporaries, Gorky can be called a public intellectual, a spiritual authority, not to mention Tolstoy and various others, lesser ones. How their social activity responded is a separate discussion. Elements of educational journalism can only be found in the private letters of Anton Pavlovich. Chekhov did not publish topical articles, did not participate in the discussion of fashionable “spiritual” problems, like the figures of the Silver Age, the later regulars of the “tower” Vyach. Ivanova. He searched until the end for something of his own, even going to Sakhalin. It’s not so easy to formulate for him exactly what.