The Big Green Tent (33 page)

On that very first evening, Sanya started preparing for the Conservatory entrance exam. He wished to enter the department of music theory. Yury Andreevich taught his student in the way a carpenter teaches an apprentice to drive in a nail with a single blow, a chef to slice onions and carrots with a precision measured in millimeters, or a surgeon to wield a scalpel lightly and with the utmost skill. He taught him the craft.

And it wasn't just the explanations themselves—what tone must be doubled when resolving a dominant seventh chord into the tonic chord, how to harmonize a tritone modulation, the interplay of corresponding registers of the extreme voicings at the golden-section point, and so on. The fact was that Kolosov taught with the same enjoyment as Sanya learned.

“You don't understand how lucky you were with your hand. A true musician is not a performer, but a composer, a theoretician. Above all a theoretician. Music is the quintessence, an infinitely compressed message; it's what exists outside the range of our hearing, our perception, our consciousness. It is the highest form of Platonism,
eidos
descended from the heavens in its purest form. Can you grasp that?”

Sanya didn't understand it; rather, he felt it. But he suspected that his teacher was getting a bit carried away. He remembered too well his childhood joy when music was born under his very fingers.

Nevertheless, this was the happiest year in Sanya's life. The shell of the coarse and dirty world split open, and fresh new air gushed in through the gap. It was the only kind of air his soul needed to breathe. It was the same kind of upheaval that the sixth-graders had undergone ten years earlier, when Victor Yulievich arrived at their school and began showering the class with verse. The difference was that Sanya was now an adult, and, having overcome the devastating experience of parting with music forever, had discovered that his love had become even more profound. His gift, slumbering in the deepest part of him, had awakened and surfaced after a ten-year hibernation. The tedium of the solfeggio he had learned as a child was transformed into fascination with the science of musical structure. Several years later Sanya would become certain that solfeggio explained, in the simplest terms, as a rough approximation, the structure of the world itself.

Twice a week Sanya spent an hour and a half at Yury Andreevich's. He did complex dictations and countless ear-training exercises. Yury Andreevich played the piano, and Sanya tried to identify the various intervals and chords, progressions, and modulations.

Sanya's former piano teacher, Evgenia Danilovna, was summoned again. She was able to squeeze out two hours a week for Sanya from her tightly packed schedule (at that time she was training
Wunderkinder
, no fewer than ten of whom brought subsequent fame to the Central Music School). The well-known teacher, bent on producing superperformers, was only wasting her time with Sanya and his crippled hand; but she was a close friend of Anna Alexandrovna's, and for someone of her generation it was unthinkable to refuse a friend such a request, although the child had no prospects whatsoever. Finally, with a new fingering that took into consideration his two crippled fingers, Sanya managed to master a very cleverly selected program, crowned by a performance of the Bach Chaconne in a transposition for the left hand only by Brahms. Anna Alexandrovna sold the remains of her jewelry that year—diamond earrings and a pendant—to pay for the lessons.

Sanya flew to his lessons with Yury Andreevich as though to a lovers' rendezvous. Yury Andreevich was no less taken with his new student, who could grasp everything on the fly, sometimes posing questions that far outstripped the material they were covering. Yury Andreevich would then bloom, and break into a smile, before immediately recovering his usual composure and severity of expression. He didn't believe in indulging his students. The lessons ended precisely when they were scheduled to end. Once, when Sanya was fifteen minutes late because a bus had broken down, his teacher refused to extend the lesson to make up for the time lost.

In addition to solfeggio, harmony, and the history of music, Sanya had to take exams in other subjects: writing, a foreign language, and the history of the USSR. He wasn't in the least worried about these exams. The most challenging one for him was “general piano.” He would have to play a prepared program, as well as sight-read another piece. Naturally, students of music theory were not expected to master an instrument on a professional level, but Sanya was nervous nevertheless. From the time his tendon had been ruined by Murygin's knife, he had lost the boldness of spirit necessary for performing.

Sanya passed the theoretical subjects easily. Even “general piano” was quite satisfactory; Evgenia Danilovna had not spent her precious time in vain. But the most remarkable thing was that no one on the admissions committee had even noticed that two fingers of his right hand were crippled. This was his chief victory.

In the autumn, when his fellow students at the Institute of Foreign Languages were beginning their fifth and final year of studies, Sanya began his first year in the theory department of the Conservatory. Anna Alexandrovna was happy, Evgenia Danilovna even more so. To mark the occasion, she gave Sanya some sheet music autographed by Scriabin himself. But by this time Sanya already had his doubts about Scriabin.

*   *   *

Victor Yulievich had been right a thousand times over—and Sanya agreed—when he said that finding the right teacher is like being reborn. Only now it was not Victor Yulievich, but another teacher, who introduced him to a new system of coordinates, who showed him new meanings and expanded his conceptions of the world. His brightest students discovered, with shivers that traveled up and down their spines, that they were dealing not only with music, but with the structure of the entire universe, with the laws of atomic physics, molecular biology, falling stars, and the rustling of leaves. It was a commingling of science, all of poetry, and every kind of art.

“Form is what transforms the content of a work into its essence. Do you understand? The character of music arises out of its form like steam from hot water,” Yury Andreevich said. “With a solid understanding of the general laws of form, which encompass all that is amenable to formulation, one can, by groping further, perceive the individual, the particular. Then, subtracting the general, one can sense a residue where wonder lurks in its purest, most undiluted form. Herein lies the goal of theory: the more fully one grasps what is available for comprehension, the more intensely the ineffable shines. Listen, and try to grasp it!” He put a black disk on the record player. The needle drew out sounds that were not perfect in themselves; but by looking at the notes while he listened, absorbing them with his eyes, and through his eyes with his ears and brain, Sanya discovered a new conception of the world, and his thoughts were drawn into unknown spaces and dimensions.

At the same time, his teacher scorned pathos, elevated words and expressions, and verbiage. He cut short any attempt to discuss music by resorting to literary devices and conceits.

“We're not applying algebra to harmony. We're studying harmony! It's an exact science, just as algebra is. And for the time being, we're putting poetry aside!” He spoke passionately, as though he were disputing with an invisible opponent.

His students adored him; the administration, always wary, regarded him with suspicion. There was something potentially anti-Soviet about him.

Yury Andreevich Kolosov was a structuralist at a time when the term had not yet been established. And the powers that be, in all eras, are particularly wary about what they don't understand.

Kolosov expanded the horizons of the courses in harmony, the history of music and musical theory systems. He immersed the students in ancient history, and also exposed them to the newest, most innovative music, the second avant-garde, which had just begun to take hold in the USSR—spiritual heirs of Webern: Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono. And side by side with them, through the corridors of the Conservatory, walked their local avant-garde counterparts: Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina, Alfred Schnittke …

All of this was still in its infancy, tentative and tremulous. Even the music of Schoenberg was still novel.

Sanya's head was awhirl with a powerful wave of myriad sounds: Baroque, early classical, the ubiquitous Bach, romantic music, overthrown, and then welcomed again with the passage of years, the later music of Beethoven, which approached the final threshold, it would seem, of classical music—and now all these new composers, with their new sounds and new ideas …

In the world outside the rains came down, snows fell, the poplar trees released their summer fluff, and the unbearable political blather about achievements and victories—that soon we would catch up with America—continued unabated. People drank tea and vodka in their kitchens, illegal pages of paper rustled, and tape recordings of Galich and the young Vysotsky, who gave birth to more new sounds and ideas, whirred. But Sanya hardly noticed any of this. This all happened in the world of Ilya and Mikha, his friends from his school days, who were drifting further and further away from him.

Khrushchev's thaw was still under way, but Khrushchev himself had exited out the back door. At some Party powwow, he was heard to say: “The notion of some sort of thaw was just an invention of that shifty rascal Ehrenburg!”

Thus, a signal was given, and received. The cold had set in again.

At this historical juncture, the government music experts traded places with the government visual arts experts. Sanya only caught the tail end of rumors about a battle in the halls of the Manezh exhibition center, primarily through Ilya.

Mikha seemed to have disappeared for good after he went to live and work in a school for children with special needs, outside of town. Anna Alexandrovna saw him more often than anyone else did. She was the one he confided in about his experiences working with the deaf-mute children, who had won his incautiously open heart. But his heart did not belong in its entirety to this younger tribe; the other half beat for Alyona, who had a habit of returning his affections, then vanishing like the Snow Queen in the rain. She was the living embodiment of this fairy-tale creature: icy, fluid, and volatile, she seemed to crystallize, flare, and fade at will.

Mikha introduced Sanya to Alyona. Sanya, conscious of her charm, felt a sense of alarm: a dangerous girl. Mikha's anxious, nervous loving was not something he had any desire to try on for size. But Ilya's easy confidence and success with women, which smacked of the dreadful storeroom, failed to inspire envy in him either. He was afraid of the female sex. At the Conservatory he socialized more often with the male students, although he never grew really close to anyone. Sanya was no less wary of the boys who looked meaningfully at him than of the women who threw themselves at him and reeked of the yardkeeper's storeroom on Potapovsky Lane. The musical milieu that seethed behind the bronze back of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was predisposed to the sin eschewed in the Bible. For that matter, it was even more inclined to the sins of envy and vanity. But they didn't throw you in prison for those.

Sanya was not affected by Conservatory passions. He was even more oblivious to what was going on outside it, in the larger world. Neither the Thaw, nor the new cold snap, had anything to do with him.

Somewhere at the top, the powers-that-be had the jitters; but, luckily, Khrushchev had no interest in music, whether “sublime and superhuman” or “muddled and confused.” He was completely happy with the straightforward tune of “In the park, or in the garden.” Primitive, poorly educated, and drunk on power, he ruled the huge country as he saw fit. He raised his fist at Stalin, kicked his corpse out of the Mausoleum, released prisoners, cultivated virgin soil, sowed the Vologda region with corn, threw underground knitwear manufacturers, satirists, and parasites into prison, one after another, strangled Hungary, launched a satellite, and brought glory to the USSR through Gagarin. He destroyed churches and built Machine-Tractor Stations, merged some things, dismantled others, augmented this, downsized that. He inadvertently gave Crimea to Ukraine.

He set the creative intelligentsia straight with language of the gutter, and almost barely learned to pronounce that strange foreign word
intelligentsia
, which twisted the tongue without mercy. At the same time, radio announcers changed their pronunciation to reflect Khrushchev's—“communism” and “Communists” becoming “commonism” and “Commonists,” for example. Sensing degeneration, deception, and bourgeois influences everywhere, Khrushchev promoted Lysenko, with his easily accessible theories, and shunted aside geneticists, cyberneticists, and all those who fell outside the scope of his limited intelligence. An enemy of culture and freedom, religion and talent, he suppressed all those his ignorant, myopic vision could discern. He couldn't discern his primary enemies, however: neither great literature, nor philosophy, nor art. He couldn't touch Beethoven, Bach was beyond his reach, even Mozart slipped out of his grasp—his simplicity of soul prevented him from understanding that they were the ones who should have been banned!

In 1964, Brezhnev came to power. The upper echelons of government were rearranged; one group of vampires changed places with another. Their mediocrity in matters of culture set a precedent for the entire country; it was dangerous to try to rise above the lowest common denominator. This diet of literary and artistic pablum was profoundly depressing. A handful of people, insignificant in all respects—surviving eggheads holed up in math and biology departments, some of them true scholars and respected academics, but far more of them marginals and eccentrics vegetating in low-level positions or languishing in third-rate research institutes, and one or two truly brilliant students of chemistry or physics or musical theory—these invisible, impractical people with spiritual needs existed illegally, outside the system.