The Many Lives of Khrushchev's Thaw: Experience and Memory in Moscow's Arbat

2. A Cult of Personality and a “Rhapsody in Blue”

40 C H A P T E R T W O z A Cult of personality and a “Rhapsody in blue” In 1895, the sisters Evgeniia and Mariia Gnesina, recent graduates of the Moscow Conservatory, opened a children’s music school a few blocks north of the Arbat on Gagarinskii Lane, near Sobachʹe Square. Their idea originated in the social circles of pre-revolutionary Arbat. Evgeniia Gnesina regularly hosted a group of friends that included the composers Alexander Scriabin and Sergei Rachmaninov, and the director of the Moscow Conservatory, Vasilii Safonov. They played chamber music and discussed the latest in culture and politics. With the encouragement of Konstantin Stanislavsky, a lifelong friend who later became the cofounder of the Moscow Art Theater, Evgeniia convinced her younger sisters, Mariia and Elena, to back her plans for a private music school. According to the composer Iulii Veisberg, their undertaking took considerable pluck: “When . . . several young sisters, girls who were fresh from the benches of the conservatory, opened a small music school, their capital consisted solely of their youthfulness, talent, and enthusiasm .” In truth, the Gnesin sisters had more at their disposal than Veisberg let on. During its first years, the school’s faculty included the composers Reinhold Glière and Eduard Langer. Many other prominent musicians and cultural figures lent their support by enrolling their own children.1 1. M. E. Rittikh, Istoriia muzykalʹnykh uchebnykh zavedenii imeni Gnesinykh (Moscow, 1981), 7–11. A Cult of Personality and a “Rhapsody in Blue” 41 The Gnesins built a solidly progressive reputation during the school’s formative years. During the Revolution of 1905, Evgeniia’s younger brother, the composer Mikhail Gnesin, served as a liaison between revolutionary forces in St. Petersburg and the Moscow Conservatory, where discussions about a student strike were underway. In Moscow’s Krasnopresnʹia district, the site of fierce street fighting northwest of the Arbat, Gnesin students helped build barricades, apparently with the tacit approval of teachers. The Gnesins also made certain that their school was accessible to poor students by waiving or reducing tuition for nearly half the student body. The Gnesins’ reputation for progressive , egalitarian education helped the school survive the upheaval of 1917 and prosper in subsequent years. Contrary to many friends who went into emigration after the Bolsheviks seized power, the Gnesins remained in the Arbat. They continued to host “musical evenings” well into the 1930s, until it finally became too dangerous to do so. Their social circle soon encompassed a younger generation of musicians and artists: the pianist Sviatoslav Rikhter, who grew up on the Arbat; his wife, the soprano Nina Dorliak; and her mother, Kseniia Dorliak, who taught with the Gnesins, and who as a young woman sang, in Paris, Prague, and Berlin, the roles of Elsa in Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin and Brünnhilde in the Ring Cycle. The circle also included Rikhter’s teacher, Genrikh Neigaus, who lived on Trubnikovskii Lane; the composer Vissarion Shebalin ; the stage director Ruben Simonov, who would later become the artistic director of the Vakhtangov Theater; the pianist Konstantin Igumnov, who lived on Plotnikov Lane; the writer Boris Pasternak; and many others. In 1977, Vladimir Soloukhin, a writer who figured prominently in the historical preservation movement, wrote that it was impossible to imagine Moscow without the Gnesins. He might have said the same about the Arbat and the Gnesins.2 By 1944, the Gnesin Music Academy comprised three prestigious programs: the original Children’s Music School, a secondary-level Music Gymnasium, and the university-level Music-Pedagogy Institute. In 1946, the latter two programs moved from their crowded quarters on Sobachʹe Square, where one of the Gnesin sisters, Elena, still lived, to a new building on Vorovskii (Povarskaia) Street, a few blocks to the north. By then, the academy had produced a lengthy list of famous alumni, including the composer Aram Khachaturian, and the longtime chief of the Union of 2. Ibid., 107; and Nina Dorliak, “‘Ia ochenʹ liubila Arbat . . . ,’” interview by Sigurd Ottovich Shmidt, in Arbatskii arkhiv, vyp. 1, ed. S. O. Shmidt (Moscow, 1997), 299–300. A Cult of Personality and a “Rhapsody in Blue” 42 Composers, Tikhon Khrennikov.3 Although the university-level Pedagogical Institute was a less glamorous destination than the Moscow and Leningrad Conservatories, where the curriculum was oriented toward performance, the competition for one of its thousand-odd spots was fierce.4 Many of the institute’s...