Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [529]
Russia had risen like a great bear: that was it. There was nothing, it seemed, the mighty bear could not accomplish with its huge strength, if properly directed.
Yet he missed those earlier days. Things had been livelier then. Writers like Bulgakov and Pasternak had been free to say what they liked. Eisenstein had burst upon the world with his astonishing film work. Painting had still been the province of the avant-garde, before the present doctrine of Socialist realism had condemned all painting to a dreary depiction of idealized proletarian life.
Nowadays one had to be more careful. A friend of his who had foolishly recited a poem mocking Stalin back in ’32 – and done so only in the privacy of a friend’s apartment – had disappeared within the week. Eisenstein’s films were made under Stalin’s personal supervision now; all the history books were being rewritten.
‘I can only thank God,’ Dimitri would say to his wife, ‘that no one’s found a way to control music yet.’ His work, like that of Prokofiev and Shostakovich, was not much interfered with.
For several more minutes Dimitri wrote intensely: the coda was taking shape. The apartment was silent as his little family slept. Dimitri completed the first section of the final entrance of the bear.
It was the latest piece of foolish legislation which had really depressed him. To educate children for a Socialist world was one thing. Dimitri would sometimes smile at Stalin’s passion for Peter the Great. Peter, too, had seen all men as nothing more than creatures whose purpose was to serve the state. But even Peter the Great never dreamed of legislation like Stalin’s. To turn ordinary children into enemies of their own parents – everything in him revolted against that. The new Children’s Law was very clear, though. Any child who discovered counter-revolutionary tendencies in either of its parents should report them. He had grinned at the time. ‘Your mother’s a scientist and I’m a musician,’ he had said to young Peter, ‘so I don’t think you need to worry about that.’ And the little boy had laughed. He was only nine but already Dimitri recognized a studious, thoughtful look in his dark eyes. ‘Perhaps you’ll be a scholar, or an artist,’ Dimitri liked to say to him.
In the second section of the Suite, one of the hunters manages to catch the firebird just long enough to pull out one of its feathers, and he brings it to the circus. How the feather sparkles and crackles with light. It is as though the fellow has just discovered the power and wonder of electricity, and the music became charged with chromatic energy as the wondrous feather appeared.
It had been foolish of him, of course, to have made the remarks he had, even in private. Yet how could one not be irritated? The previous year the régime had actually declared that a number of scientific disciplines were to be abolished: paediatrics; genetics; sociology; psychoanalysis. The reason – Stalin’s great Constitution had just been published, which declared Russia to be a perfect democratic state. How then could there be sciences which spoke of poor children, inherited differences, social problems or troubled people?
And one evening, at home with some friends, Dimitri had turned to little Peter and said: ‘You realize, don’t you, that this Constitution is a flagrant lie?’ That was all he had said; but it was enough.
It was a week later that he had known. It was a look in the boy’s eyes that had told him. He had been working at the kitchen table one afternoon and suddenly seen little Peter gazing at him with a steady, accusing stare. Then, when he had instinctively drawn the boy to him, and put his arm round him, he had felt Peter suddenly draw back, then look at him guiltily and in evident confusion. He had known at once, and understood. And the boy guessed he knew. And neither had said a word.
It was a pity, though.
Would they let the Suite be performed? It seemed innocuous enough – just some