From the memoirs of Karetnikova: Stalin trusted Mikoyan, but when he got angry, he put him in white trousers on tomatoes. They both despised Russians G

Inga Karetnikova. Portraits of different sizes

Inga Karetnikova was born in Moscow in 1931. She graduated from the art history department of Moscow University. She worked as a curator in the Engraving Cabinet of the Pushkin Museum. After graduating from the Higher Script Courses, she wrote scripts for a documentary and popular science film studio. In 1972 she left the Soviet Union. She lived in Italy for a year, where she published a book about Eisenstein in Mexico. Since 1973 she lived in the USA, taught screenwriting at American universities, was invited by film companies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland as a consultant. She was awarded the Guggenheim Prize for her work on painting and film, as well as the Carnegie Mellon and Radcliffe College awards. She has published several books on cinema in the United States, including studies on Fellini's Casanova, Buñuel's Veridian, and Seven Film Masterpieces of the 1940s. A book about screenwriting, How Screenplays Are Made, became widely known in America and Europe. In 2014, her novel Pauline was published in English in Holland. In March 2015, Inga Karetnikova passed away.

Introduction

The rupture of a person who is accustomed not only to speaking, but to writing in his native language, a sharp immersion in a foreign language most often ends with the fact that this person either completely stops writing, or continues his work in the language in which he wrote before, trying not to notice the ambiguity of the created language. provisions. When Inga Karetnikova left Russia, she, like many other people in the humanitarian professions, had to face this catastrophic question: is it possible to continue what she was doing there? Forty-two years of living in America answered this question with the utmost expressiveness: she continued to work in the same professional rhythm, with the same tension and the same brilliance, only the language of her work changed: Karetnikova’s books were not published in translation from Russian, as happens almost always - she wrote them in English. I remember how she once said to me: “You know, baby, I think I did it. Not only do I understand what American children say, but they understand me too.”

"Portraits" is an amazing experience of returning not only to the life lived - it is better to say "fate" - but also to the bosom of the native language, forced out due to the circumstances caused by this fate. Working on "Portraits", she strung human characters on the core of her own biography, with each of them returning back to the cradle of her "mother tongue", which has not cooled down for so many decades, as they say in English, literally - "mother tongue" .

Irina Muravieva

COUNT ALFRED WITTE

Former Count Alfred Karlovich Witte lived in Ufa. All his relatives were shot by the Bolsheviks in the first days of the October Revolution.

It was an aristocratic, close royal family, my mother told me. - One of them, Sergei Witte, was the prime minister. Immediately after the coup, Alfred Karlovich and his wife - it was some kind of insight, there is no other way to explain it - leaving everything, they boarded a train going from St. Petersburg to the depths of Russia, to the Urals, and chose Ufa. This distant provincial town did not attract attention. People fled from the revolution abroad, to the Caucasus, to the Crimea. Nobody was interested in Ufa, and this choice saved the Witte spouses ...

On the way, a few days later, his wife fell ill with typhus. They were dropped off the train a little before reaching Ufa, in a place where there was a hospital. Surprisingly, they let her out there and even gave them some kind of document. In Ufa, Alfred Karlovich got a job cleaning the streets, then paving roads, then doing something else. Over time, he built housing from an old abandoned barn - without electricity, but with insulated walls, a window and even a small stove. His wife, Countess Witte, was hired as a cleaner in the library, so they had something to read. Another luck - no one was interested in them. Currant and raspberry bushes, lilac trees grew around the barn. There was also a small garden.

When the door of our room broke, or rather, almost fell off, our landlady Ivanovna (we were evacuated from Moscow, who rented a room in her apartment) said that she would call Karlych and he would fix it.

One of these - the former, - she chuckled.

The next day, a noble-looking old man came to us with a gray, neatly trimmed beard, a thin face consisting almost only of a profile. He was wearing a shabby red coat made of horseskin, old felt boots with galoshes, and in his hands was a bag with tools. It was Count Witte. Something in him remained of his former bearing - in the figure, in the expression of his face - although he lived for more than twenty years in a strange environment, a foreign language, among the Tatars and Bashkirs, whom he did not understand well, but they did not understand him. He avoided the Russians.

Curious in detail, but rather superficial and unpleasantly dismissive story about Peter Greenaway by art critic and writer Inga Karetnikova.

"GORDON" continues the exclusive series of publications of the memoirs of the Russian art critic and publicist Inga Karetnikova, which were published in 2014 in the book "Portraits of different sizes". Some of these stories will be presented to a wide range of readers for the first time by our publication. As the author wrote in her preface, these are memories of people she was lucky enough to meet - from the eminent Italian director Federico Fellini and the world famous cellist Mstislav Rostropovich to the typist Nadezhda Nikolaevna and the housekeeper Vera. Today's story is about film director, artist and writer Peter Greenaway.

Filmmaker Peter Greenaway

His long office was like a corridor cluttered with unnecessary furniture, broken chairs, a shabby table with blanks on which sat ancient women's hats, a worn poster of some exhibition of the artist Ronald China, his former teacher. Everything is not new, not bourgeois, but somehow special. Even the cups in which Greenaway served me tea were cracked, and the cookies that his secretary Lisa had placed on the edge of the table were broken.

He himself, 50 years old, tall, short-haired, walked straight and energetic, as if he wanted to conquer the world, and the jacket was worn, small, and the striped shirt had not been ironed. He said that, unfortunately, he didn’t have any films here to show me, only his documentary, “26 Lavatory” (also sounded somehow special). And somewhere else there is a film about water: “The basis of movement and transformation,” he said, “And for art, it is a symbol of constant change, play, brilliance, light.” He spoke beautifully and smoothly.

Greenaway was impressed that I had found Eisenstein's Mexican drawings in Moscow and made a book about his stay in Mexico and about these drawings. With interest, he examined them in this book, which I gave him.

He spoke of Eisenstein with reverence: "The great classic and creator of montage - the main lifeblood of cinema." He said that montage is the energy of the new time, a new understanding of space and extension, the main spring of composition in cinema, literature, music, and architecture. How strange that now, 20 years later, he is making a film about Eisenstein in Mexico, but all that now interests him about Eisenstein is that he, a virgin at 32, fell in love with a Spanish translator and had his first sexual relationship in your life. Ten days of love. "Ten Days That Shook Eisenstein" Greenway called his film.

In some interview, he said that Eisenstein's homosexuality should be analyzed. (Mounting forgotten!). And that in general he believes that homosexuality is an integral part of the Trinity of the 21st century, along with abortion and a suicide pill.

Going back, I remember how I said then how impressive his film "The Draftsman's Contract" was, all like a painting (he agreed); and that his "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover" is a truly magnificent film - such a link to Flemish tradition, and such a measure of modernity. But its end disappointed me... on the dinner table with a starched white tablecloth lies the naked, fried corpse of the film's hero. "A man who read books," Greenway laughed. - He is the main dinner dish, he is a still life. What's wrong?"

I said that such a still life is a departure into pathology. And real art and pathology are not very compatible. (He did not agree). I went on to say that the sophistication of pathology would make it extremely interesting only to the psychoanalyst. He laughed and said that my old fashionedness was funny.

Lisa brought more hot tea, we kept talking, discussing one very fashionable artist at that time, and I asked if Greenway saw where the line between art, illness and simple deceit lies. “My advice,” he said, “be an Englishwoman, then you will see in everything only an entertaining game, and nothing will bother you.”

About the connection between painting and cinema - what I was then preparing a program for the BBC, - he spoke with interest, although he often switched - either to birds, which his father was fond of, then to what he himself was fond of - insects and games and numbers. The visual image interests him more than the plot. Rather, the color is the content of the film, and not who loved whom or killed whom. And he would prefer to always show people naked, as ancient sculptors did.

After I made this program for the BBC, I stopped being interested in Greenway. I was particularly repulsed by one of his films, where father and son stand naked in front of a mirror and look at each other ambiguously. His "games" became more and more tasteless.

For a while, he became a very famous leftist, creatively and humanly arrogant, perhaps, more accurately, arrogant. His installations on various topics, his works in museums, which he did, staging and inventing what happens in this or that famous painting ... His statements were repeated, like fashionable wisdom. "There is nothing else in life than sex and death ... Two people have copulated, you are conceived, but, unfortunately, you have to die..." He became a destroyer of cinema.

"Films have to find a way out of the darkness of the cinema... they have to get rid of the screen and even the camera and, of course, actors and literature."

Peter Greenaway recently announced that on the day he turns 80, he will commit suicide.

The stories of Inga Karetnikova were given to our publication by her husband, the American artist Leon Steinmets, and the Ukrainian poet and publicist, former editor-in-chief of Ogonyok Vitaliy Korotich.

The first publication contains Korotich's story about Karetnikova and Steinmetz and Karetnikova's memoirs about a close associate of Joseph Stalin, former First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, former Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union Anastas Mikoyan.

FOREWORD BY VITALY KOROTICH

It is estimated that more than 200 million people live on Earth today outside their countries of birth - these are first-generation emigrants, newcomers. By the middle of the 21st century, there will be over a quarter of a billion of them. People move around the world, customs, psychologies mix up - some adapt to this faster, others may never get used to it, remain a human mixture where you have to look at the constantly changing environment and learn to survive in it.

Harvard University professor Samuel Huntington in 1996 wrote the famous essay "The Clash of Civilizations" (The Clash of Civilizations), prophesying that no one will get used to anyone and the world that survived the Cold War will still die, but not in the class battles promised by Marxists , but in the battles of irreconcilable people united in civilizations that will never understand each other.

Just at that time I was professor at Boston University, and Harvard University was across the Charles River, which separates Boston - just cross the bridge. One of my colleagues, Inga Karetnikova, lived near Harvard, where she also taught from time to time. There were no more Russian-speaking professors in our field of vision, although the universities in Boston are very crowded - we just did not look for excessive communication. Karetnikova emigrated to America back in the early 70s of the last century, her first marriage was to the famous composer Nikolai Karetnikov, from whom she already had an adult son, Mitya. In Boston, Inga became the wife of the artist Leon Steinmetz, a very respected among American and European painters and graphic artists, who constantly exhibited in the most prestigious halls - his works were acquired in the collection of not only the famous Boston Museum, but also the New York Metropolitan Museum, The British Museum and Kensington Palace in London, the Dresden Gallery, Vienna's Albertina, the Moscow Pushkin Museum and many very prestigious private collections.

What I liked is that Leon Steinmetz was really Leon and Steinmetz, this is not a juggling of passport data for American pronunciation, which is popular among emigrants, but his real name and surname, received from parents who ended up in Altai by the will of Soviet fate. However, the German echoes of the surname did not prevent Leon from becoming one of the best graduates of the Moscow School of the Academy of Arts and exhibiting in our former country. In the early 70s, he emigrated from her.

Why did I start by remembering Huntington's article? Because Inga Karetnikova and Leon Steinmets fit into the world around them on an equal footing. They were not suffering immigrants from an incompatible civilization, like typical representatives of Russian-speaking immigration, for a long time, especially at first, telling all sorts of horrors about their former life and wishing sympathetic blessings for these stories. Inga and Leon entered the new world for themselves as equals, like professionals. Karetnikova, a graduate of Moscow State University, was the most famous art critic in Moscow, an employee of the Pushkin Museum and immediately began performing abroad as a professional. Arriving in Rome in 1972, she published a book there about the Mexican years of the work of the film director Eisenstein a year later. In Italy, about a Russian director in Mexico. A clash of civilizations? Nothing like that - mutual penetration. The book was met with interest, and thanks to it, many universities offered contracts to Inge. She taught, among other things, film studies, screenwriting, worked just on the line of contact between cultures and civilizations. Karetnikova has a book published and seen in America, where she analyzes very famous films: Fellini's "The Road", Kurosawa's "Rashomon" and Buñuel's "Viridiana" as almost simultaneous attempts to look at similar phenomena from different angles. Civilizations represented by their brightest filmmakers did not collide, but tried to become mutually more understandable. This is rather not art criticism, but the art of bringing together multilingual storytellers.

Leon Steinmetz told everyone about his love for his favorite writer, Gogol. He considers the Russian classic a forerunner of modern thinking and a surrealist more convincing than Dali, and an existentialist brighter than Sartre. At some point, Steinmetz created a series of works on Gogol's themes, but he did not illustrate the classic - he translated it into the language of his imagination, not depicting Nozdryov, Poprishchin or Chichikov, but creating Gogol's unique world visually.

One can list the awards received by Inga Karetnikova, among them there are such honorary ones as the Guggenheim and Carnegie Mellon, one can talk about Steinmetz's exhibitions, one of which was held with great success several years ago at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. But I'm talking about the main thing, about how great masters translate their thoughts about art, which unites us, into the language of art criticism, graphics, and painting.

Inga and Leon did not know very much about Ukraine, and it was all the more pleasant from the way they became interested in the brilliant translation of "Eugene Onegin", which was once made by Maxim Rylsky. I read them a congenial text and was glad to give it to them at their request.

Karetnikova in the last few years of her life wrote memoirs - very capacious, organized, rather, according to the laws of Western journalism, where the presentation of facts must be separated from the commentary. She simply remembers, leafs through her life, prolonging the lives of others. Inga died in March of this year in Boston, she was 83 years old. Until her last days, she wrote about Fellini, whom she knew, but did not have time to finish. Literally at the end of her days, I received a very interesting novel by Karetnikova, Pauline, published in English in Holland, about the era of the Russian Empress Elizabeth.

Steinmetz showed his new works. His world is both surprisingly diverse and universal. There are the series "Demons of the Flood", and "The Temptations of St. Anthony"; "Reflections on Vanity" and "Memento Mori"; "Omazh Classical Greece" and "Gospel Series"; unique "Drawings of Werther" (that is, what and how would Goethe's Werther draw if he lived now), and many others. He still lives in Cambridge, a Boston area, or suburb, where it is not customary to hang curtains in old houses in old houses. We sometimes walked along these streets, looking at the life of people, which is unusually unconcealed, we went to a cafe where we could sit all evening listening to the pianist translate famous musical classics into the language of jazz.

A remarkable art critic, an outstanding artist who so naturally got used to the region that is called "new England" in America, next to one of the most famous in the world - Harvard - universities, which exhibits a collection of butterflies caught by Vladimir Nabokov - another of the people who came from afar , which has become a classic of several cultures and is never lost in the world's diversity.

Vitaly Korotich

STORY "STALIN'S ALLOY, ANASTAS MIKOYAN" FROM THE BOOK INGI KARETNIKOVA "PORTRAITS OF DIFFERENT SIZES"

"Portraits of different sizes" are stories about people I have met. These people are of very different calibers, from Fellini and Rostropovich to our eccentric housekeeper Vera; from a close associate of Stalin, Mikoyan, to the typist Nadezhda Nikolaevna, who typed for me for many years. These are Russians, Americans, British, Italians, French, Spaniards, Mexicans. Some I knew well. Some just flashed through my life. Many of them are no more, but they all live in my memory.

From the preface to the book "Portraits of different sizes"

The Mexican art exhibit was huge. Half of the halls of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts were vacated for the sculpture of the ancient Indians - Olmecs, Zapotecs, Totanacs, Aztecs, Mayans. The chief curator of the museum was in Italy at that time, his deputy was seriously ill. The only researcher who wrote at least something - two small articles - about the art of Mexico, was me, and the then director of the museum, Zamoshkin, decided to appoint me as the main curator of this exhibition. Responsibility is incredible!

Some time after its opening, I was urgently summoned to the director. The door of his office was opened by a person I did not know, there was another stranger in the office and no one else.

I realized instantly that it was the KGB. Questions began - name, year of birth, position in the museum, marital status, address, and something else and more.

Not a polite word, not a smile. Arrested? They asked me to open my small bag that was with me. One of them dumped everything out of it on the table, examined the notebook, handkerchief, pen, keys, then put everything back. Meanwhile, another ran his hands over my sweatshirt and skirt. Then he asked me to sit down.

Then they explained to me that after some time I would have to show the exhibition to someone - no more than half an hour, walk from his right side, hold nothing in my hands, leave my bag here. Before his arrival, I have to sit in the office without going anywhere, even to the toilet - not now, not later.

They left, turning off the phone and locking me up. My humiliation, resentment, discontent knew no bounds. An hour and a half later, the door was opened by some kind of more important KGB officer than those two, and ordered to urgently go to the entrance to the museum, meet Khrushchev.

But it was not Khrushchev who arrived, but his deputy, Anastas Mikoyan.

Since childhood, I knew his portraits: huge, colored, painted on canvas, they hung on houses or large stands - portraits of leaders and Mikoyan among them. And now he was nearby, alive, and I, as ordered, walked from his right side.

"And this is the jaguar, God of the Night," I said animatedly. - Why nights? He looked at me over his glasses. "The Aztecs believed that the jaguar had spots on its skin, like stars in the sky," I explained. "You have to think of something like that!" Mikoyan chuckled.

When I pointed to the God of Rain, a huge, lying Quetzalcoatl, Mikoyan said with an accent (he generally spoke with a strong Caucasian accent): "What a loafer, please tell me - lies to himself while the poor work!"

Stalin trusted Mikoyan more than others, you can even say he was friends with him, although when he got angry, as Stalin's daughter writes, he planted him in white trousers on ripe tomatoes - the dictator's favorite joke. With Mikoyan, and not with the damned Russians, Stalin liked to eat chanakhi - lamb baked in Caucasian style in vegetables. They both despised Russians.

Stalin entrusted Mikoyan with responsible diplomatic negotiations, but, as far as is known, Mikoyan was not involved in show trials and internal terror. It is possible, however, that he was obliged to sign lists of so-called unnecessary specialists.

After Stalin's death, Mikoyan became Khrushchev's right hand. When Khrushchev was ousted by an internal party coup, Mikoyan's career ended. Everything was taken away from him, including his beloved huge dacha near Moscow - his estate, like those that Russian nobles had before the revolution.

But then at the Mexican Exhibition he was still one of the most important leaders. I told him about the ritual figures of warriors, about the hero Guatemoc, about the Mayans, about the Aztec calendar. At the basalt figure of the goddess of Spring, Mikoyan stopped and turned to the photographer: "And now, near the Mexican goddess, take me off with this goddess of ours." He pointed his finger at me and laughed at his own joke.

"GORDON" will publish memoirs from the series "Portraits of different sizes" on Saturdays and Sundays. The next story - about the Italian film director Federico Fellini - is available on our website tomorrow, October 10th.

They are written by music critics, cultural experts, colleagues, friends and acquaintances, who, although Richter was a reserved person, suddenly turned out to be many. Moreover, any details of his biography became the subject of gossip and gossip. It seems that in the case of Richter, there are no boundaries at all. Everything is here - both the elevation to the saints, and the placement in the kingdom of the devil.

Top surrounded

I do not take on the role of an expert and arbiter, but I also have something to remember. For ten years I was acquainted with Richter's wife Nina Lvovna Dorliak, a chamber singer and professor of vocals, I visited their house and met Svyatoslav Teofilovich. But in relations with him there was always a distance. Therefore, I was surprised by the publication of the authoritative musicologist Georgy Gordon, in which he writes: "Let's recall the names of some people who are part of Richter's environment: Milshtein, Zolotov, Goldin."

Yakov Milshtein, a remarkable connoisseur of the theory and history of musical performance, did communicate a lot with Richter. Andrey Zolotov, a music critic, went on tour with Richter. Of the writers close to Richter were Chemberdzhi, Borisov, Delson, Tsypin, Rabinovich. And, of course, musicians: Kagan, Gutman, Gavrilov, Viardot, Bashmet, Berlinsky. He was friends with Irina Alexandrovna Antonova, the director of the Pushkin Museum, with whom he organized the famous December Evenings festival. There were artists, actors, writers in his environment.

I did not miss Richter's concerts and dreamed of meeting him. I have no musical education, but, while still living in the Soviet Union, I visited the Conservatory every evening. The world of music seemed to be the pinnacle of the universe. And the top of the peaks is Richter.

I did not want to ask my friends to introduce me and found another way. Having met Nina Lvovna at the conservatory, he showed her several of his articles and said that he would like to write about Richter, but not a review, because I am not a critic. Nina Lvovna considered this to be my advantage and soon invited me home. I had long conversations with her, but it was difficult to find a common theme with Richter. I did not dare to talk about music, philosophy seemed more appropriate, but among the friends at home was Valentin Asmus, a famous expert on the history of philosophy, so, for example, talking about Hegel and Kant was excluded.

Especially for meetings with Richter, I went to Leninka to read Theodor Adorno, but Richter did not react to the quote “After Auschwitz, there can be no poetry,” and when I said that Adorno considered Beethoven’s music totalitarian, I left the room. I don't know who he was more dissatisfied with - me or the German philosopher.

Why was a genius expelled?

I recently read in the memoirs of a person close to Richter: “Slava hated everything connected with theorizing on musical themes, he could even push away from himself and forever lose some good and interesting person if he started to theorize.” Much later I learned that Richter had been expelled from the conservatory because he did not want to study social subjects. Neuhaus had to fight for a long time with the party committee in order for Richter to be reinstated. Professors worked at the department of Makrsism-Leninism, who understood who Richter was, and all that was required of him was sometimes to come to classes and bring a record book for the exam. But he would not agree to such a small compromise.

I published in Voprosy Philosophii a long article “Musician of the Century”, the first about a classical music performer in a major academic journal. Nina Lvovna read the manuscript, did not say anything, but I already knew that this meant approval. I brought the magazine to her house, asked her to call after reading. Nina Lvovna did not call, meeting her at the conservatory, I asked about her impression. - "Oh, we are so busy until we read." At this time, Natalya Gutman, a cellist and a close friend of the house, came up: “We all got together and read the article aloud, wonderful.” Not everyone liked it. A popular violinist told me when he met me at the conservatory: “No one has done so much harm to music as Richter.” Only today I understand the meaning of what was said - during the life of Richter and the titans of his time, pop stars from the classics knew their place.

I published in the popular publishing house "Knowledge" "Space and Earth", about Richter. Quotations from the classics and praise of Soviet culture were inevitable here. Nina Lvovna said: “Everything that Richter did was not thanks, but in spite of.” This was the only time she said something about politics, in the Richter house this topic was considered indecent.

Look into the abyss

In Richter's time, the December Evenings were the culmination of the cultural life of Moscow. A high staircase leads to the museum hall. Richter is standing upstairs, surrounded, adjusting paintings on the wall illustrating the theme of the concert. He saw me and said very loudly so that everyone could hear: “This is the philosopher Goldin. He claims that Richter has a philosophy. I protest! Richter has no philosophy, only music.”

Environment in smiles, and I'm ready to fall through the ground. Philosophers are Aristotle and Hegel, a doctoral dissertation and a professorial diploma do not make me a philosopher. After this episode, I continued to go to concerts, but I didn’t talk to Richter anymore. It cannot be proved that the performer's talent is determined primarily by the depth of philosophical interpretation.

In every publication about Richter's life, much attention is paid to his relationship with Nina Dorliak, and more recently to what was outside of this relationship. Gay communities willingly support their fight for rights with great names. And then an avalanche went publications about Richter's sex life. Inga Karetnikova writes in her memoirs that the marriage was fictitious, this statement is also quoted by Wikipedia. Who knows today, in the era of liberalism without shores, the only correct definition of marriage?!

I think that Richter and Dorliak had an ideal marriage - a union of people who perfectly understand each other, connected spiritually, creatively, professionally. Nina Lvovna was a secretary, PR manager, confidant, psychotherapist, housekeeper, freed from distracting worries. The closest analogy to this union is Vladimir and Vera Nabokov. The dream of any creative person is to have such a life friend.

Andrey Gavrilov's book "Teapot, Fira and Andrey" became a sensation. Fira is Richter, he was so called in a narrow circle at the suggestion of Rostropovich. Andrei, a pianist of unique talent, spent many years fighting the KGB and Soviet cultural guardians. I understood the greatness of Tchaikovsky's First Concerto only when performed by Gavrilov. His Chopin is a true revelation, recognizable among a thousand interpretations. We knew a little, more with his mother, a musician who shared with her son all the complexities of his creative and personal destiny. It seems that I was one of the first to write about him in Literaturka after he was excommunicated from the Soviet stage. During our telerecording, a conflict arose (Andrey was right), we did not meet again.

Despite the difference in age, Richter was not in such close spiritual relations with anyone as with Andrei. Since there was no way around this topic, there was no sexual connection between them, there is no doubt in the testimony of Gavrilov. His confession knows no boundaries and fear.

He made me look beyond good and evil - and be horrified. Those who idolize Richter will finish reading the book without letting go, but will not change their attitude. But it would be better if she didn't come across me. As the Americans say, "more than you want to know." Dmitry Bykov says that "this is a story about the terrible underside of beauty - or, if you like, about paying for talent and fame." If, however, after recovering from the shock, re-read what concerns Richter as a musician, then there is a lot of important things that others have not said.

"Gilding remains on the hands"

“Music of Glory,” writes Gavrilov, “despite his technical skill, tortured, prison, Soviet music.” I won't argue, I'll try to understand. I think if you ignore the negative connotation, Andrei means what Adorno called totalitarianism in music - its absolute, inevitable persuasiveness. Richter does not have such doubts, uncertainty, confusion in front of contradictions in man and in the world, so dear to liberalism and postmodernism. It can be recognized that Richter does not invite to dialogue - submission to him is unconditional. He knows and we believe him. You have to trust someone! Perhaps there is more darkness in his music than light, but is it not so in the world?

Here's another from Gavrilov: "He hated everything that the crowd loves, but he did everything possible and impossible to become an idol for dullness." Having specified that Richter was also an idol for the cultural elite, let's put what Gavrilov said not as a reproach, but as a merit. Like Pushkin and Tchaikovsky, Richter became an idol for everyone. None of the current stars has such universal recognition. Reading this confession, one should not miss the testimony of the author: “There is not a day that I do not think about him. He is present at every my concert.” Curse or blessing?!

For many years, great musicians seemed to me the most interesting people, I measured their talent with the scale and dignity of their personality, and was proud of their communication. Relationships have not stood the test of time. Today it makes it very difficult to listen to former acquaintances in concerts, even on recordings. Nothing good is added by the chaos of revelations from the private lives of the celestials. It was once said: "Breaking down the monuments, save the pedestals." But now all foundations are crumbling.

Listen, read, see the creations of geniuses - only this is an inalienable property. It is not necessary to approach, if it is not fate, but an emotional impulse. “Do not touch the monuments, the gilding remains on the hands,” said Flaubert. Communication will not add anything and, very possibly, will prevent you from seeing the main thing.