Andante -- Allegro con moto
How old was Pushkin when he wrote his Ode on Freedom? Right out of school, ridiculously idealistic, he didn't realize that his duty was to regurgitate, not philosophize. But even he was older than I was, when I trotted over to my mother's piano and tinkled out a Hymn to Liberty -- a trained monkey with even less talent than that other monkey of history, the child Mozart. I wonder, did Pushkin ever run through revolution-filled streets, puffed up with the glory of adventure and blind to the death surrounding him? Perhaps this is the unique perspective of an eleven-year-old boy. Only this boy can listen to his revolutionary aunt tell stories of the bloody struggle and not realize that these stories that terrify him now, he has already witnessed in the streets. He will walk right past a policeman beating a boy just about his size, but not until he hears about it the next day in school is he moved to write a Funeral March to accompany his Hymn.
When Mayakovsky bounced up to me with his Bedbug, I had to laugh at seeing this eleven-year-old in him. His request was engaging. I was a Soviet composer, he a Soviet poet -- a Poet of the Revolution! -- what could be a more appropriate collaboration? I took the play home that night and read it at the piano, translating his Prisypkin into a swaggering, lilting melody that made me laugh, letting Rosalie Pavlovna circle his theme with insistent twitters, and giving his Zoya the dramatic flourishes of a workergirl in love. Mayakovsky had given me a simple task: to embody passion, pettiness and greed -- in a word, life -- in music. I considered myself a Proletarian composer, and as such I tried talways to represent life... I spoke to my audience about the familiar, in music they would understand.
At the end of the first act, the poet dismissed fifty years in a single blank page. My fingers faltered, and I could not think how to use music, which I considered the ultimate in continuous, time-dependent art, to represent this leap of fifty years. Should I alert the audience to a signal by letting the conductor wear a sign on his back? "When the tympanist strikes his drum three times, fifty years will pass." Where do I get these stupid ideas? What about fifty seconds of silence? That would be too subtle for the audience to grasp. I decided to leave this problem for later. But what was there to work from in this second section? Mayakovsky had killed off the entire cast with that one blank page; my drumbeats would be as gunshots that transformed the play into a farce of corpses. Even Prisypkin, my drunken, repulsive hero, had lost most of his jauntiness, leaving him muted and pathetic. I found it impossible to make these stiffs speak through the piano, and went to bed.
But that pesky Bedbug followed me there. It wriggled itself between the covers, scuttled up to my pillow and laid its vulgar head by mine. At first I tried to brush it away, but the clever thing jumped at every swipe of my hand, lending safely on my ear, my shoulder, or my nose -- and making a clicking noise that sounded infuriatingly like a chuckle. So that after twenty or so minutes of this, I resigned myself to my new companion and fell asleep.
There was my bedbug again! He was cheerfully hopping from key to key on my piano. I ran to beat him off, but of course had no success. He was growing, too, getting bigger and bigger and heavier and heavier, until his weight was enough to actually depress the ivory keys. He seemed to realize this, gave a gruesome, baggy grin, and jumped high into the air, so that he came down on the piano and hit a key with such force that it sounded a note. He looked over at me and wiggled his antennae. He stretched all the joints in his sticky legs... and began hurling himself at the keys with great speed, banging out my Hymn to Liberty, the Dances I had written for my little ballerina sister -- playful tunes which disgusted me all of a sudden. I looked around for a heavy book or something with which to smash the insect, and then realized that I could not kill him without endangering my piano. So, as I was captive to my dream (and I'm sure we have all been trapped in dreams unwillingly), I had to stay and let myself be mocked and tortured by an oversized bug.
As I grew more and more annoyed, there materialized two of Mayakovsky's corpses, Zoya (so unlike my ballerina sister!) and the doctor. With a blank, impassive face, the doctor reached out his hand, into which Zoya placed a huge wooden club. He swung. I had no idea where the strength for that swing came from, as I saw no bending of the knees, bracing of the feet, or gathering of the shoulders to suggest that any effort had gone into it. It was as if the doctor was a powerful piece of machinery designed to break down walls with the pull of a lever, not a man made of muscle and bone.
The club came down on the keyboard three times: the first two blows coming in quick succession and the third a little later. Ba-ba bam. The bedbug hpopped again: G -- Eb -- B -- Bb ... ba ba bam! Ba-ba bam! Being too stunned to take any action, I was nevertheless relieved to see that the club was having no effect on my piano. Unfortunately, it appeared to have no effect on the bedbug, either. I looked again at the doctor, and saw that his eyes were not on the piano or the bug at all -- he was staring vacantly at the wall behind the instrument and weilding the club blindly. It was no surprise that his blows, though strong (there was no doubt about that!) were missing the quick little insect. Somehow I found the power to move and ran toward the doctor, my hands held out to grasp the club and take my turn in the bug-hunt -- when he (he?) turned toward me, weapon raised. In a moment, I would be the victim of that thudding eighth note. I woke up.
Allegretto
Of course in the end Mayakovsky's music was written, the play was put on, and it was a success. The audience laughed in all the right places, cheered for the right people, booed the others, and got a good wholesome moral in reward. Even Prisypkin's entreaty for sympathy failed to faze them. NEP was far behind them, and they were "on the up-and-up." I sat in a box above the stage on opening night, with a full view of the Moscow theater-going public, and wondered about this public that was so sure of itself. Could I really write music that these people, who would rather identify themselves with corpses than the living, sinning Prisypkin, would understand?
Sollertinsky was waiting for me at my hotel.
"I was there, Mitya -- what a success! They loved it. You've definitely got a knack for the theater... but we already knew that! I ran back here to meet you. Too many people standing around at the Meyerhold. I brought something to show you."
He took off his overcoat and laid it on a chair; from its folds he drew a thin paperback book with a title printed in English on the front.
"He couldn't publish it here. I got a copy -- it practically fell into my hands -- I thought you'd want to look at it."
Ivan wasn't the type to support censored writers -- he didn't have the backbone to stand up against the opinion of anyone more powerful than he -- but I imagined he had stumbled upon a (safe) opportunity to buy a copy of Zamyatin's We and had grabbed it just for sensation's sake. Maybe even to impress me. I picked up the book and asked him if he'd read it.
"I'm not really interested. From what I hear, this Zamyatin's actually anti-Soviet. Some utopian propagandist or something. But you can read it if you want."
I asked him to leave the book with me for a couple of weeks; he assured me he was in no hurry to get it back.
Andante espressivo
The next time I saw Sollertinsky was five years later; family illnesses and hard work had kept me busy. Not only that, but -- well, I saw him as I was leaving the State Court, and he passed by me on the street without looking up. I had just finished defending myself to the state from denunciations based on reviews of my opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Pravda had declared that no one could understand my music; hence, no one did. The same audiences that had applauded me yesterday were silent today. And Sollertinsky didn't even have the nerve to look at me.
I had never returned his book. It was still lying in a narrow hiding place I had built between two drawers of my desk, where I kept my manuscripts, published and otherwise. It had taken me longer than a couple of weeks to get through the book, and it was full of my notes,mostly definitions of English words I'd had to look up. I'd forgotten how much I'd written in the book, and laughed to think of returning something to Sollertinsky that I had already made mine. "All right then," I thought, "it's only right that I give Sollertinsky back his book. But why in English? It wasn't written in English. Why shouldn't Ivan read his book in its original language, and face Zamyatin as one Russian faces another?"
I found the scene I wantd and took out my English dictionary, given to me by my mother (for my American tours). This was to be my first attempt at translation. I was sure it would be slow work, and thus wanted to start with my favorite scene, in case I never reached it. When I finished this scene, I would send it to Ivan. Here was D-503... drawn to the auditorium by a mysterious force, sitting in a lecture with thousands of others just like him... the lecturer appears with a phonograph, and a piano, a Royal Grand, is wheeled onto the stage. The lecturer's voice comes to D-503 from all sides, from speakers hanging from the ceiling, and hardly from the man at all. Words about the beauty of music based on mathematical patterns. Chuckling and self-satisfied, the lecturer decides to illustrate his point, and out comes I-330 (noble heroine!)... she sits herself at the piano, a relic from pre-revolutionary times, places her fingers on the keys, and plays some Shostakovich -- no, Scriabin. Scriabin.
Our struggling D-503 wants to laugh, as the rest of the "numbers" do, at the wild, uncivilized music, but for a minute he can't. He has seen the eyes of the animal -- still living in wild, unorganized nature -- and has wondered if it is happier than he is. He was even wondered why the lecturer is the lecturer. Why he can order the piano wheeled back and forth. Later this wonder and questioning doubt, along with all of his appreciation for passion and beauty, is ripped from his brain by the surgeons of the United State -- but I decided to end my translation here for the time being, where there still remained some hope that the doubt would grow and flourish in his mind. It was so consoling to think that there might be a D-503 out there in the audience, trying to be part of the brain-washed majority but prevented from this by his very humanity.
The translation took me all night. At times I almost felt as though I were at my piano, and the English flowed into me as the Russian flowed out at an equal pace, as comfortably as music from a score becomes the hammering of strings under my fingers. I heard the people's laughter, D-503's anxiety, the music of Scriabin still singing in my mind, and wrote to the accompaniment of these themes/ At other times, though, I was flipping so constantly through thr dictionary that the music couldn't wait for me -- everything became disjointed and the English words were single quarter notes without rhythm that formed no united melody. That morning I finally had a manuscript.
It was hard dor me to let that manuscript go; it had left something of itself in me as it traveled through and was transformed. Still, I had plans for it. I fastened the pages together and added a page on top, which I inscribed:
This entire package I wrapped up and addressed to Sollertinsky.
Lento
Did I speak of bed companions? Was I ungrateful for the bedbug's visit? Please, I take it all back. I hadn't yet learned how dependent I was even in unconsciousness on another presence in bed... how much Nina's warmth, her twitch before falling into sleep, the slight slurping noise she made (even those things I wished she wouldn't do!) held me in the safe space of our room and let me forget my mind. Now -- now I have driven her away -- I lie down and first hear silence. With the occasional rumble of a motor, or drunken banter outside. Then the music floods in: each Petrograd fool I've seen during the day comes piping his own tune, beating his drum, cackling in a chorus of oboes and flutes. I've given up trying to send them away, and give them all audience -- they don't care what I think of their noise-making, as long as they have a chance to make themselves heard.
But eventually the streets of my mind are again clear and the pattern in front of my eyes is blurred, until I almost forget that it is there... when, stubbornly, it resolves itself again into a white vastness. Every night I wait for another metamorphosis, but instead this vision persists, constant and clear, and tells me in an icy voice that it is nothing. "Absolutely nothing, understand? Why do you even bother to think about me? Why not go to sleep? Here, I will be silent to prove to you my nothing-ness." But as much as it is still, it vibrates, and as much as it is meaningless, it is the only profundity.
I can't tell you anything more after that. It seems impossible to go any further -- what is beyond the most soothing feeling possible that is at the same time the most piercing pain? There can be no progression from this, only sinking... into deadly, agitating calm, choking emptiness