THE LIGHT OF A DISTANT ENCOUNTER
How January 1988 Gave Me the Gift of Meeting Georgy Sviridov
Memoirs of Mayer Meir Kaltenbrunner
There are encounters whose significance we understand immediately.
There are others whose true magnitude reveals itself only years later.
And then there are encounters of a special kind: outwardly, they may occupy only a very brief moment in a human life, yet somehow, inexplicably, they remain in our memory forever. Decades pass, countries change, political systems disappear, cities and people and circumstances are transformed, documents vanish, dates fade — and yet, somewhere deep within our memory, the small flame of that distant day continues to burn.
For me, one such flame has always been January 1988.
Almost four decades have passed. The state in which we lived at the time has disappeared. Moscow has become a different city. Its streets, its institutions, its society, even the very pace of human life have changed. Many of the people I knew in those years are long gone. I, too, have changed.
But whenever the music of Georgy Vasilyevich Sviridov begins to play, time suddenly retreats.
And once again, Moscow appears before me.
Winter-bound.
Snow-covered.
Stern.
The Moscow of January 1988.
And with it returns the memory of one of the most remarkable encounters of my youth — my meeting with Georgy Vasilyevich Sviridov.
I. JANUARY 1988
In January 1988, I was twenty-four years old.
Today, looking back from the vantage point of the decades I have lived since then, I understand with particular clarity just how young I was.
At that age, a person feels that infinity lies ahead. He does not yet know how many trials life will prepare for him, which countries he will have to leave behind, whom he will meet, what losses he will endure, or what convictions he will one day have to defend.
I could not then have known what my future would hold.
I could not have imagined either the dramatic political events of the years to come or the disappearance of the Soviet Union, nor could I have foreseen how profoundly the world itself would change.
I was simply living within my own time.
At that period, my professional activities were connected with the Turkmen SSR. I had been sent by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Turkmenistan to Moscow under a personnel rotation programme within the Central Committee of the CPSU.
For a young man, such an assignment meant entering a very particular world.
Moscow was not merely the capital of the Soviet Union.
It was the political, administrative, cultural, and intellectual centre of an immense state stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean, from the northern seas to Central Asia.
Decisions were made in Moscow whose consequences were felt thousands of kilometres away.
Yet Moscow was simultaneously a city of theatres, conservatories, writers, artists, academicians, directors, musicians, and composers.
Therein lay one of the remarkable paradoxes of the Soviet capital.
The world of government offices existed side by side with an entirely different world — the world of culture.
And sometimes those two worlds intersected.
It was precisely such an intersection that occurred in my life in January 1988.
II. MOSCOW ON THE THRESHOLD OF GREAT CHANGE
The year 1988 was an extraordinary time.
Today we know that the Soviet Union had only a few years left to exist. But a person living within a historical era is rarely capable of seeing its endpoint.
History becomes obvious only afterwards.
By January 1988, the country could already feel the approach of change.
Words that only a few years earlier had been uttered much more cautiously were increasingly heard in public life: perestroika, glasnost, renewal, democratisation.
The language of newspapers was changing.
The tone of television was changing.
People were beginning to speak openly about matters that they had previously preferred to discuss only in their kitchens.
A strange combination of hope and anxiety was emerging.
The old order still existed, yet one could already sense that its foundations were no longer absolutely immovable.
Moscow conveyed this feeling with particular intensity.
It lived simultaneously in the past and in the future.
On the one hand, there was strict state ritual, official discipline, the Party hierarchy, countless offices, meetings, and documents.
On the other, there was an extraordinary intellectual awakening within society.
People argued.
They read.
They searched for books that had previously been prohibited.
They discussed history.
They tried to understand what had happened to the country and where it was going.
For a young man, all of this was an immense school of life.
I observed a great deal.
I listened a great deal.
And perhaps it was precisely then that I began to understand with particular clarity that a state cannot be understood through official documents alone.
To understand a country, one must know its culture.
One must listen to its music.
Read its literature.
Know its poetry.
Understand its historical memory.
And fate gave me the gift of meeting a man who knew how to speak about all of this without political declarations.
He spoke through music.
That man was Georgy Vasilyevich Sviridov.
III. THE UNION OF COMPOSERS OF THE USSR
Today, the very words “Union of Composers of the USSR” already belong to history.
But at the time, it was an important part of the country's cultural life.
It brought together people who were creating the music of an immense era.
Composers, musicologists, performers.
People of profoundly different characters, aesthetic views, and creative destinies.
I was fortunate enough to find myself within that environment.
For someone whose professional daily life in Moscow was connected primarily with state and Party work, entering the world of professional musicians made a very special impression.
A different system of coordinates operated there.
In government offices, people spoke about plans, decisions, indicators, instructions, and personnel.
Here, they spoke about music.
About literature.
About Russian culture.
About poetry.
About time.
About the human being.
And it was there that fate allowed me to meet Georgy Vasilyevich Sviridov.
Today I try to be careful with the details of that encounter.
Memory is a remarkable but imperfect guardian of the past.
Over the decades, it can preserve the expression on a face while forgetting the sequence of events.
It can preserve a voice while losing individual words.
It can retain a feeling while erasing everyday details.
That is why, almost forty years later, I do not wish to place words into Georgy Vasilyevich's mouth whose absolute accuracy I cannot guarantee.
Something else matters more to me.
I remember the impression very clearly.
And sometimes an impression is the most honest document of human memory.
IV. THE FIRST IMPRESSION
When we speak of great people, our imagination often constructs an artificial pedestal around them.
It can seem as though a great artist must necessarily enter a room in such a way that everyone immediately senses his greatness.
But life is different.
The true stature of a person is often revealed precisely through the absence of ostentation.
That is how my impression of Georgy Vasilyevich has remained with me.
What struck me above all was his human naturalness.
Before me stood a man of immense creative stature.
A man whose music was already known to millions.
Yet outward greatness did not obscure the human being.
Quite the opposite.
One could sense in him that rare inner culture which cannot be acquired through office, title, or official status.
It either exists within a person or it does not.
It is the culture of how one treats another human being.
How one treats the spoken word.
Art.
One's own fame.
In Georgy Vasilyevich, I sensed the quiet strength of a man who had no need constantly to prove his own importance to those around him.
He had already reached a place to which vanity can never lead a person.
He lived within art itself.
V. THE SIMPLICITY OF A GREAT MAN
As I have grown older, I have increasingly noticed one particular pattern.
The greater a person truly is, the less he needs external confirmation of his own greatness.
And conversely, inner emptiness often requires loud titles, demonstrative gestures, and constant attention.
Sviridov left an entirely different impression.
There was simplicity in him.
But it was not ordinary, everyday simplicity.
It was the simplicity of a great man.
Such simplicity is born, perhaps, when a person has already determined what truly matters and has ceased wasting the strength of his soul on secondary things.
For me, as a young man, this was striking.
At the time, I inhabited a world in which status mattered enormously.
A person's position determined many things.
People were received according to their position.
They were spoken to according to their position.
Doors opened according to their position.
And here before me stood a man whose greatness required neither a position, nor an office, nor administrative confirmation.
His power was of an entirely different kind.
It was the power of art over the human soul.
Such power cannot be bestowed by decree.
It cannot be granted by a decision of a state authority.
It cannot be purchased.
It arises only when what a person has created outlives its creator.
Sviridov already belonged to that rare category of people.
VI. THE MAN WHO HEARD TIME
There are composers who create music.
And there are composers who somehow manage to hear time itself.
It seems to me that Georgy Sviridov belonged to the latter.
His music possesses an extraordinary quality.
It can be historical and deeply personal at the same time.
Within it, one can hear an immense country — and a solitary human being.
The ringing of bells — and silence.
Triumph — and anxiety.
Snow — and the movement of history.
Memory — and the expectation of the future.
That is precisely why his works cannot be reduced to a particular political era.
Systems of government come and go.
Flags change.
Slogans disappear.
Textbooks are rewritten.
But genuine music continues to live.
It no longer belongs to an administration or an ideology.
It belongs to humanity.
When I listen to Sviridov today, what appears before me is not the Soviet Union as a political construction.
I see space.
Winter.
Snow.
Russian literature.
Immense distances.
Human hope.
Solitude.
Historical anxiety.
And the movement of time, which no one can stop.
VII. THE SNOWSTORM AND MEMORY
A special place in the perception of Sviridov's work for generations of listeners belongs to the music associated with Pushkin's The Snowstorm.
It possesses the remarkable ability to transform a literary image into a realm of sound.
Listening to this music, a person seems almost to begin to see.
A road appears.
Snow.
Movement.
Expectation.
Something beautiful and at the same time unsettling.
Sviridov knew how to create music in which landscape became a state of the soul.
And for that reason, my January encounter with him became, in a remarkable way, inseparable from the image of wintertime Moscow.
Perhaps memory itself created this connection.
But now I can no longer separate one from the other.
Moscow.
January.
Snow.
Sviridov.
Music.
All of it has become part of a single picture.
Sometimes it seems to me that this is precisely how genuine culture works.
It ceases to exist separately from our biography.
It enters our life.
It becomes part of our memories.
And then music no longer merely sounds.
It gives time back to us.
VIII. TIME, FORWARD!
There is a title which, over the decades, has acquired for me an almost philosophical meaning:
Time, Forward!
In youth, these words are perceived in an entirely different way.
When you are twenty-four years old, time really does move only forward.
The future seems immense.
There is still too little past behind you to make you constantly look back.
But then ten years pass.
Twenty.
Thirty.
Almost forty.
And suddenly you understand: all this time, time was not simply moving forward somewhere around you.
It was passing through you.
States changed.
People changed.
The world changed.
Those whom you once saw alive departed.
And the title of Sviridov's work acquires an entirely different meaning.
Time truly does move forward.
Relentlessly.
Without asking our permission.
Making exceptions neither for the great nor for the unknown.
Yet there is one way, in a certain sense, to resist disappearance — to leave behind something capable of surviving physical time.
Sviridov succeeded in doing this.
His earthly life ended.
But his time did not.
Because the music continues to sound.
IX. MUSIC AS A FORM OF IMMORTALITY
Human beings are mortal.
This truth is as old as humanity itself.
Yet culture is one of the few forms of human resistance to death.
As long as Pushkin is read, Pushkin's voice continues to exist.
As long as Bach is performed, Bach's world continues to exist.
As long as Sviridov's music is played, a part of Georgy Vasilyevich's spiritual world remains alive.
That is why great works of art belong not only to the era in which they were created.
They travel through time.
There is an extraordinary justice in culture.
A political figure may possess immense power during his lifetime and be almost entirely forgotten several generations later.
A composer may sit alone before a sheet of music, creating a melody, and a hundred years later that melody will be heard by people whom he could never have imagined.
Which of these forms of power is stronger?
For me, the answer has long been clear.
Power over the human soul lasts longer than power over human behaviour.
X. WHAT THAT ENCOUNTER TAUGHT ME
I cannot claim that a single encounter completely changed my life.
That would be a beautiful but excessive literary exaggeration.
A human personality is formed by thousands of events.
Family.
Teachers.
Books.
Profession.
Mistakes.
Losses.
Friendship.
Love.
Trials.
But certain encounters become inner points of reference.
And my meeting with Sviridov was precisely such an encounter.
It showed me once again how conditional the outward signs of human standing truly are.
We are accustomed to measuring people by their positions.
But a position ends.
We measure them by titles.
But titles remain behind in archival documents.
We measure them by their affiliation with institutions.
But institutions disappear.
And what remains?
What a person has created remains.
The way he treated others remains.
Memory remains.
Goodness remains.
Culture remains.
And sometimes, music remains.
XI. TWO WORLDS WITHIN ONE MOSCOW
Today, I find it particularly interesting to recall the contrast between the two worlds in which I found myself at the time.
One was the world of the state system.
The other was the world of art.
In the first, there were instructions.
In the second, inspiration.
In the first, hierarchy was of enormous importance.
In the second, time remained the ultimate judge.
In the first, decisions could be binding upon millions of people.
In the second, one person could write a few pages of musical notation — and those pages could outlive the political decisions of entire eras.
In youth, we rarely notice such paradoxes.
Now they are much clearer.
Documents that once seemed extraordinarily important have long since become archival material.
People whose names appeared in newspapers every day are now known primarily to historians.
But Sviridov's music continues to sound.
And there is a profound lesson in this.
Not everything loud is great.
And not everything great needs to be loud.
XII. SVIRIDOV AND THE RUSSIAN LITERARY TRADITION
It has always seemed to me that Sviridov cannot be fully understood outside the Russian literary tradition.
His musical world is connected in a remarkable way with the written word.
With poetry.
With national historical memory.
His music does not exist in a cultural vacuum.
Behind it one senses an immense literary landscape.
Pushkin.
Gogol.
Yesenin.
Blok.
And with them, an entire tradition of reflection upon the human being, the land, history, and destiny.
Perhaps this is why his music possesses such an unusual literary quality.
It seems to tell a story even when no one utters a single word.
Sometimes music can say more than text.
Words inevitably limit meaning.
Music leaves room for the human soul.
One person hears hope within it.
Another — sorrow.
A third — memory.
A fourth — homeland.
And all of them may be right.
That is the miracle of art.
XIII. HOMELAND IN MUSIC
In Georgy Vasilyevich, one could sense a profound connection with his native land.
But when I speak of this today, I do not mean political rhetoric.
Love of one's homeland is far older than any state ideology.
It can exist without slogans.
It is the memory of childhood.
Language.
Music.
The graves of one's ancestors.
Landscape.
The scent of the earth after rain.
A winter morning.
A mother's speech.
Songs heard in childhood.
It is this kind of connection with the land that I sense in Sviridov's music.
It does not explain the homeland.
It makes one feel it.
And perhaps that is precisely why his music can be understood by someone who was himself born far from the places that inspired the composer.
Because every human being possesses his own landscape of memory.
Sviridov speaks directly to it.
XIV. MY OWN ROAD AFTER 1988
When I remember January 1988, it is impossible not to think about how much happened afterwards.
At that time, an enormous part of my life still lay ahead.
I did not yet know what trials history would bring.
I did not know how dramatically the destinies of millions of people would change after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I did not know how many times I myself would have to reconsider the concepts of the state, law, justice, human dignity, and personal responsibility.
In January 1988, all of this belonged to the future.
Today, it belongs to the past.
And for that reason, my memory of meeting Sviridov has acquired an additional meaning.
It belongs to that period of my life when many roads were only beginning.
I look at that twenty-four-year-old man as though simultaneously from within him and from the outside.
I know what he does not yet know.
I know what trials await him.
And sometimes I want to say to him in my thoughts:
Remember the people.
Remember the voices.
Remember the faces.
Do not hurry.
Because one day all of this will become history.
XV. MEMORY IS NOT A PROTOCOL
While working on these recollections, I repeatedly asked myself a question: how much detail can one truthfully reconstruct about a single encounter after almost four decades?
And I arrived at a simple conclusion.
There is no need to turn memory into a protocol.
Memoirs are different from official documents.
A document requires a date, a signature, a formulation, and precision.
Memory preserves something else.
It preserves the human significance of an event.
I do not wish to invent conversations.
I do not wish to attribute beautiful words to Georgy Vasilyevich merely because they would look good on the page.
That would be unfair to him.
What has remained with certainty is enough for me.
We met.
I saw him.
I heard him.
I observed him.
And I came away from that encounter with an impression of profound human culture, wisdom, inner dignity, and remarkable naturalness.
Is that not enough?
On the contrary.
After all these decades, that is precisely what has proved to matter most.
XVI. WHY SOME PEOPLE NEVER DISAPPEAR
Physically, a human being occupies very little space.
A few decades of life against the background of history are almost an instant.
Yet some people somehow expand the boundaries of their own existence.
A composer continues to exist in sound.
A writer — in words.
An artist — in colour.
A scientist — in an idea.
A teacher — in his students.
A good person — in the grateful memory of those whom he once helped.
Perhaps this is one of the most honest forms of immortality.
Not physical immortality.
Not myth.
But the continuation of one human being within others.
Sviridov continues to exist precisely in this way.
He himself is no longer among us.
But somewhere, a concert hall opens its doors.
A conductor raises his hands.
The orchestra begins to play.
And a man who died many years ago once again enters into conversation with the living.
Is that not a miracle?
XVII. THE MAN AND HIS ERA
Sviridov is often perceived as a man of a particular historical era.
That is natural.
He lived in the Soviet Union.
He worked within Soviet cultural institutions.
He was part of the public and musical life of his time.
But a great artist is always greater than his own era.
Therein lies the paradox.
An era creates the conditions of his life.
But he creates works capable of outliving that era.
Today, the Soviet Union no longer exists.
Many institutions that once appeared eternal have disappeared.
Social values have changed.
New states have emerged.
New generations have arrived.
But the music continues to sound.
Therefore, there was something in it far deeper than belonging to a particular political system.
There was the human being.
And the human soul changes far more slowly than political regimes.
We still love.
We lose.
We hope.
We fear.
We remember.
We grow old.
We say farewell.
And we search for meaning.
That is why genuine music never truly becomes obsolete.
XVIII. GREATNESS WITHOUT A PEDESTAL
There is one more feature of that encounter that I would like to emphasise.
Sviridov's greatness did not require a pedestal.
This is an extraordinarily important quality.
We often construct an artificial ceremony around famous people.
Security.
Titles.
Introductions.
Photographs.
Official speeches.
But all of this disappears at the moment when a person is left alone with himself.
And then only one question remains:
What is this person without a position, without an audience, and without applause?
It is precisely here that the true scale of a personality reveals itself.
That was the essence of my impression of Georgy Vasilyevich.
His stature did not depend upon his surroundings.
It came from within.
And inner greatness always reveals itself quietly.
XIX. ART AND POWER
My professional life repeatedly brought me into contact with state institutions, politics, law, and the mechanisms of power.
For that reason, over time I began to understand particularly acutely the difference between political power and the power of culture.
Political power can compel a person to obey.
Culture can compel a person to think.
Political power can change behaviour.
Art can sometimes change the inner world.
A political order remains in force until it is revoked.
A genuine work of art can exert its influence for centuries.
That is why culture ultimately proves to be one of the most powerful forces of human civilisation.
It does not demand submission.
It offers empathy.
It does not command.
It awakens.
It does not coerce.
It persuades through beauty.
Perhaps my encounter with Sviridov was one of those early episodes in my life that allowed me to feel this distinction with particular clarity.
XX. SOUND AND SILENCE
Music exists through an extraordinary union of sound and silence.
Without silence, music would be impossible.
A pause can sometimes mean no less than a note.
Human memory is constructed in much the same way.
It consists not only of what we remember.
It also consists of immense spaces of what has been forgotten.
Decades lie between the episodes that have survived.
We cannot reconstruct every minute of the past.
Yet sometimes a single image proves stronger than a thousand forgotten days.
For me, my encounter with Sviridov is precisely such an image.
Today I cannot reproduce every minute of it.
But I can reconstruct its inner intonation.
And that has survived.
Calm.
Luminous.
Respectful.
Profoundly human.
XXI. MOSCOW SNOW
There are things that cannot be proven by a document, yet cannot be forgotten.
For me, the memory of that encounter is forever associated with winter.
January.
Moscow.
Snow.
A winter city possesses a special acoustics of its own.
Snow seems to soften the everyday noise.
The city becomes sterner.
Cleaner.
Quieter.
And today, when in my thoughts I return to January 1988, it seems to me that nature itself was creating the setting for an encounter with a composer in whose music winter, space, movement, and historical memory acquired such extraordinary expression.
Of course, this is already the perspective of a man looking back from the future.
My twenty-four-year-old self probably formulated none of these thoughts.
He simply walked through Moscow.
Worked.
Hurried.
Met people.
Lived.
But an older person possesses a strange privilege: he can perceive the hidden meaning of his own youth.
XXII. GRATITUDE TO FATE
As we grow older, we increasingly thank fate not for the things we acquired, but for the people we met.
Things disappear.
People remain within us.
Someone leaves pain behind.
Someone — a lesson.
Someone — disappointment.
Someone — light.
Sviridov left light.
Not because we were close friends.
I would never presume to claim such a status.
Not because there was a long history of communication between us.
There was not.
The value of that encounter lies somewhere entirely different.
I was given the opportunity to see a great artist not in a photograph, not on a screen, and not through the pages of a biography.
I saw a living human being.
And only decades later did I fully understand how precious that opportunity had been.
XXIII. THE RIGHT TO PERSONAL MEMORY
History usually tells the story of great people in broad strokes.
Date of birth.
Education.
Works.
Premieres.
Awards.
Public activity.
Date of death.
This creates the framework of a biography.
But between those dates there lived a human being.
He spoke.
Thought.
Smiled.
Grew tired.
Met people.
Walked along streets.
Listened.
Was silent.
It is precisely the private memories of contemporaries that sometimes allow us to see the human being between the lines of an official biography.
My recollection does not claim to be a musicological study of Sviridov.
I am not a musicologist.
Nor does it claim to offer an exhaustive historical portrait.
It is simply one person's testimony about a distant encounter.
But it is precisely from such small testimonies that the human dimension of history is formed.
XXIV. WHAT REMAINS ALMOST FORTY YEARS LATER
If one were to remove everything secondary and leave only what matters most, what would remain?
January 1988.
Moscow.
The Union of Composers of the USSR.
Georgy Vasilyevich Sviridov.
And a feeling of gratitude.
Perhaps this is the very core of my memory.
Over the decades that followed, I met an enormous number of people.
Some held high positions in government.
Some possessed power.
Some were famous.
Some have long since been forgotten.
But memory has its own process of selection, one that we cannot fully control.
It preserves those who, in some way, touched our soul.
Sviridov remained.
XXV. MUSIC AS THE CONSCIENCE OF CULTURE
The older I become, the less I perceive great music solely as an aesthetic pleasure.
There is a moral dimension within it.
Not in the primitive sense of moral instruction.
True art is under no obligation to lecture a person about morality.
But it reminds us that human beings are capable of feeling more deeply than everyday life demands.
Everyday life forces us to hurry.
Music makes us stop.
Everyday life demands results.
Music restores the experience of feeling.
Everyday life divides people into positions and categories.
Music speaks directly to the human being.
And therefore culture is, in a sense, the conscience of civilisation.
As long as a person remains capable of stopping before beauty, not everything has been lost.
XXVI. PURITY
If I had to choose one word to convey what I associate with the finest pages of Sviridov's music, I would choose the word “purity.”
Not simplicity.
Purity.
Purity of intonation.
Purity of feeling.
Purity of artistic space.
In the modern world, overwhelmed by informational noise, this quality becomes especially precious.
We constantly hear thousands of voices.
Advertising.
Political statements.
News.
Social media.
Arguments.
Accusations.
Appeals.
A person is left almost no silence.
And then music begins.
And suddenly it becomes clear that thousands of words are not required in order to speak about what matters most.
Sometimes a few musical phrases are enough.
XXVII. WHEN A GENERATION DEPARTS
Every person eventually experiences the moment when he begins to notice that the older generation is gradually leaving.
First, grandparents depart.
Then parents.
Teachers.
Mentors.
People who, in our youth, seemed almost eternal.
And one day you discover that you yourself have become a member of the older generation.
It is a strange feeling.
It forces us to think differently about memory.
While witnesses to an era are still alive, it seems that memories can always be written down later.
But sometimes “later” never comes.
That is precisely why I believe it is important to record my memory of January 1988 today.
Not for the sake of my own name.
And not in order artificially to magnify the significance of one episode in my biography.
But because human memory has a duty to bear witness.
I saw this man.
And I want to leave a few pages about the way he has remained in my memory.
XXVIII. WITHOUT IDEALISATION
Any memory of a great person risks turning into hagiography.
I would like to avoid that.
Sviridov was a human being.
And no human being consists solely of virtues.
Everyone has contradictions, convictions, mistakes, and aspects of character that may appeal to some and not to others.
Historical honesty requires us to remember this.
But a memoirist has the right to speak about what he personally saw and felt.
My personal impression was a luminous one.
And I see no reason, decades later, artificially to darken it merely for the sake of appearing critically detached.
At the same time, I do not wish to attribute perfection to a person when I cannot testify to it.
The real memory is enough for me.
Sometimes reality is more beautiful than legend.
XXIX. YOUTH AND GREAT NAMES
At twenty-four, one's attitude towards famous people is different from what it becomes later in life.
Youth still knows how to be amazed.
That is one of its great virtues.
With age, a person becomes accustomed to many things.
To positions.
To famous names.
To celebrity.
But at that time, meeting a person of Sviridov's stature genuinely felt like an event.
And I am glad that this youthful capacity for wonder has remained within me.
Cynicism often disguises itself as maturity.
But true maturity, it seems to me, does not consist in losing the ability to admire.
It consists in understanding what is truly worthy of admiration.
XXX. GENIUS AND HUMANITY
Talent in itself does not make a person moral.
History knows many great artists with difficult characters.
That is why I have always distinguished between creative greatness and one's human impression of a person.
In the case of my meeting with Sviridov, these two dimensions, remarkably, did not come into conflict.
I knew the stature of the composer.
But I saw a man in whom I sensed no need to overwhelm those around him with the weight of his own name.
And this was especially important.
Because for a young person, seeing natural dignity once can sometimes be more valuable than hearing a hundred lectures about humility.
XXXI. IF IT WERE POSSIBLE TO RETURN
Sometimes a person asks himself an impossible question:
If I were allowed to return to the past for just one day, which day would I choose?
I have no single answer.
There are too many people I would like to see once more.
Too much I would like to say to those to whom I did not manage to say it.
Too many people I would like to embrace.
But I know one thing with certainty: January 1988 would be among those times to which I would like to return, even if only for a few minutes.
Not to change history.
Not to warn my younger self about the future.
But simply to look once more.
To listen.
To remember more carefully.
We always begin to value moments most deeply after they have become irretrievable.
XXXII. THE INVISIBLE THREAD
Between the twenty-four-year-old man who was in Moscow in the winter of 1988 and the man writing these lines today lie almost four decades.
But there is an invisible thread.
Memory.
It connects the people we once were with the people we have become.
In a certain sense, all our former ages continue to live within us.
That young man still exists within me.
He looks at Sviridov.
He listens.
He remembers.
He does not yet know the future.
I do.
And so this recollection today becomes a kind of conversation between the two of us.
Between youth and maturity.
Between 1988 and 2026.
Between the expectation of life and the memory of a life already lived.
XXXIII. WHAT I WOULD SAY TO GEORGY VASILYEVICH TODAY
If we were to imagine the impossible and suppose that I were allowed to address Georgy Vasilyevich today, I would not make a long speech.
Perhaps the most important words are always brief.
I would say:
Thank you.
Thank you for the music.
Thank you for that distant encounter.
Thank you because, almost forty years later, it continues to live in my memory.
Thank you for those minutes that proved to be far longer than their own place in calendar time.
And thank you for proving that a human being may depart, while the beauty he created can remain.
XXXIV. THE JANUARY THAT NEVER ENDED
According to the calendar, January 1988 ended a very long time ago.
But there is another calendar — the calendar of the human soul.
Within it, some days never end.
They continue to exist within us.
We return to them through music.
Through a photograph.
Through a scent.
Through a chance word.
Through an old book.
Through a melody unexpectedly heard in the evening.
And for a few seconds, the past ceases to be the past.
It becomes the present again.
That is how that Moscow returns to me.
XXXV. SNOW OVER MOSCOW
Today, I picture it almost like an old film.
Moscow.
January.
1988.
Winter air.
Snow.
People going about their daily lives.
No one yet knows how close immense historical changes are.
The state seems solid.
Institutions — permanent.
Names — eternal.
And somewhere within that immense city, a composer lives and works.
He writes music.
And it turns out that decades later the state will disappear, institutions will change, political slogans will become material for historical research — while the music will remain.
There is something almost biblical in this irony of history.
That which seemed most powerful proved temporary.
That which was created by one man in silence proved enduring.
XXXVI. HISTORY AND THE HUMAN BEING
We are accustomed to thinking of history as a sequence of great events.
Revolutions.
Wars.
The collapse of states.
Political decisions.
But there is another history.
The history of encounters.
The history of friendship.
The history of teachers.
The history of chance conversations.
The history of human influence.
It rarely enters textbooks.
Yet it is precisely from this history that our personal lives are made.
My encounter with Sviridov did not change the political history of the Soviet Union.
It did not become an event of state importance.
But it became an event in my own history.
And that is enough.
Not every important event must be important to millions.
Sometimes it is enough for one person to remember it for an entire lifetime.
XXXVII. THE SVIRIDOV I CARRIED WITH ME
Every listener has his own Sviridov.
For the musicologist — a complex subject of professional analysis.
For the conductor — a score.
For the musician — an interpretative challenge.
For the cultural historian — a figure of an era.
For millions of listeners — beloved music.
For me, one further dimension is added to all of these.
A living human being from the Moscow of January 1988.
That is how I carried him with me through the decades.
Not as a monument.
Not as a portrait.
Not as an entry in an encyclopaedia.
As a human being.
XXXVIII. THE FINAL LESSON OF THAT ENCOUNTER
If I were to formulate the principal lesson that I draw today from this memory, it would be very simple:
Cherish encounters.
We never know which of them will be the last.
We do not know which person we will never see again.
We do not know which conversation, thirty years later, will unexpectedly acquire an entirely different meaning.
That is why we must treat people with greater attentiveness.
Listen to them.
Do not hurry.
Do not take another person's presence for granted.
Perhaps memory is the price we pay for the ability to love people and times that can never be brought back.
IN PLACE OF AN EPILOGUE
THE LIGHT OF A DISTANT ENCOUNTER
Almost forty years have passed.
I am writing these lines in another country, in another century, in an entirely different world.
The Soviet Union has long ceased to exist.
That Moscow no longer exists.
That twenty-four-year-old version of me no longer exists — at least not outwardly.
Georgy Vasilyevich Sviridov is no longer among the living.
But the moment his music begins to play, the boundaries of time suddenly disappear.
Once again, I see January.
Once again, I feel the atmosphere of wintertime Moscow.
Once again, I remember the Union of Composers of the USSR.
And once again, before me appears the man whose encounter with me became one of those quiet gifts of fate whose true value we begin to understand only decades later.
Today, I am especially grateful to fate for that encounter.
It taught me that greatness does not necessarily speak in a loud voice.
That true culture reveals itself above all in human dignity.
That talent requires no administrative confirmation.
That states can disappear while music remains.
That time truly does always move forward.
But memory can sometimes take us back.
And, finally, that human life is measured not only by the number of years we have lived.
It is measured by encounters.
By people.
By moments.
By the light they leave within us.
Georgy Vasilyevich Sviridov left behind an immense musical legacy.
For the world, it is part of a great culture.
For the history of music, it is the legacy of an outstanding composer.
For me, however, there is also one very small and deeply personal fragment of that immense legacy.
Snow-covered Moscow.
January 1988.
A young man of twenty-four.
And an encounter that he does not yet know he will still be remembering almost forty years later.
Time has moved forward.
Very far forward.
But the light of that encounter has remained.
And for as long as I am able to remember it, that January day has not ended for me.
It continues to live somewhere between memory and music, between that distant Moscow winter and the present day.
And whenever Sviridov's music sounds again, I think about the strange and beautiful power of art to overcome the distance between the living and those who have departed.
The composer can no longer be encountered in a Moscow corridor.
His living voice can no longer be heard.
It is impossible to return to January 1988.
But it is possible to play the music.
And then a miracle occurs.
Time retreats.
Snow falls over Moscow once again.
And the man returns.
Not physically.
Not mystically.
He returns in the most dignified way in which an artist can ever return to humanity:
through the beauty he created.
Perhaps this is the immortality available to a human being.
The light of that distant encounter has not gone out.
It has simply become part of my memory.
And the music of Georgy Sviridov continues to move forward with time — now without its creator, yet preserving his voice for generations he never lived to see.
And so, almost four decades later, I return in my thoughts once again to January 1988 and say:
Thank you, Georgy Vasilyevich.
For the music.
For human dignity.
For the memory.
And for that distant Moscow encounter, whose light has reached me across the decades.
