Dmitry Vodennikov Golden trumpet of failure On the difficult fate of cows 17.12.2022, 08:04

Mozart is playing. Pressing the scale keys. He puts a match from one side of the piano to the other. On one side there are a lot of matches, on the other the slide just gets bigger.

Of course, Mozart was not taught so little. Certainly not on the piano (it hasn’t been invented yet). And of course there is no match.

Mozart learned to play the harpsichord. Still, maybe the word “reviewed” is not appropriate here? Four times he sat, four years old, several times the bright boy ran his fingers over the keys, understood everything, grasped everything. No sulfur matches (uncomfortable, big, not what we have now).

It is said that Mozart’s father covered the keys of the harpsichord with cloth and taught his son to play blindfolded. That would be a trick, my father thought, dreaming of public concerts. According to other sources, although the father asks the boy to stop playing at least for a while – this is always impossible: all these lullabies, all this in A major.

Then little six-year-old Mozart will independently master the violin.

But the strange thing is: for some reason, the child will be afraid of the sound of the trumpet by the age of ten. Without an orchestra, it’s too harsh and loud. It’s not surprising. After all, the trumpet sound is the sound of destiny.

Ah, nothing always known
our destiny is either a feast or a bullet…
never mind master
Do not take your palms off your forehead.

Okudzhava’s wish will not help: the maestro will still pay attention to the lonely sound of the trumpet.

… December 17, 1974 Nika Turbina was born. Maybe there are those who don’t know this name now, but when his poems were published in Komsomolskaya Pravda in March 1981, everyone was talking about Nick.

my life is a sketch
All the letters on it –
constellations.
pre-numbered.
All the bad days.
My life is a plan.
All my luck, bad luck
stay on it
how tatty
There was a scream.

What can be liked here is not entirely clear at the moment. Except for the first three lines. But they still need to be added later, extended. But “a scream shattered by a shot” is neither a finale nor a verse for this stretch. Too intrusive trumpet, Amadeus, too brash voice. There’s a lot of tragedy in this shot, and yet the “shout” is just here to rhyme.

(The trumpet rings, it falls silent – we can’t breathe.)

Someone said that his mother wrote poetry for Nika. Not only is she a very successful artist who can turn her daughter’s life into a nice white paper. These are “adult poems of a not very talented woman”. (So ​​they were told by an author.)

God knows, maybe it is.

“When you compose the best, how do the poems sound to you?” Asks a male reporter in an old TV commercial. She sits so close, almost so close, to someone else’s child that I’m thinking, “How have times changed” – it seems crazy now.

Nika replies: “The poems seem to me like a fairy tale. Like a little mouse.”

And he takes a quick glance to the side, behind the camera: apparently my mom is sitting there. It is as if the girl is asking: “Am I playing my role right?”.

In television life, everything seems a little “role”. And the lisping talk with the toys is on camera. And running up the stairs with the dog in Yalta. And this hairstyle is in the style of Mireille Mathieu. And this reading style is like Akhmadulina’s. With a protruding throat, with a slightly thrown back head.

For some reason, Nika was even dragged to Brodsky.

(However, perhaps this meeting was half-fiction. I read somewhere that, according to one of Turbina’s biographers, her grandmother Nika mentioned her meeting with Brodsky three times, each time with some variation. On the other hand, as we always retell it, it was either carelessness or we often twist things up a little bit again.)

“Brodsky was nervous and didn’t know how to talk to a child, so he said: “I’m worried because I didn’t have to communicate with a child poet.

However, after overcoming all the understandable awkwardness of the situation (for some reason they brought him a boy to meet him, he is not Yevtushenko, if Yevtushenko is against collective farms, then if Yevtushenko is so patronizing Nika Turbina, then he is on her side. give), Brodsky nevertheless asked which poets he liked. He immediately said that there were Pushkin, Lermontov, Mayakovsky, Lermontov and Whitman.

Nika Turbina was giving interviews so often that she learned long ago which names to call. Looks like Brodsky didn’t like such a quick student response. “He didn’t say anything and there was a long silence.”

My life is a plan. And your life is a sketch. It’s clean. We draft life, we don’t have time to justify it. In the sketch, all the letters are like stars formed in a complex astronomical pattern. Mozart would approve of us being here. He plays over a rag thrown like a canopy covering the starry sky, but he knows where to hit: where the sad key of the Black Moon is hiding and where the sun B-circle sits.

And some just don’t fall on the right keys.

However, we cannot demand that a small but menacingly matured girl give us perfect, real texts and not play hide-and-seek with us and Brodsky.

…At the age of ten he will go to Venice with Yevgeny Yevtushenko, where he will receive the Golden Lion, the main prize of the prestigious poetry festival. Apparently, before that, only Anna Akhmatova received from the Soviet poets. When Nika returns home with this golden “lion”, she will try to cut a claw from him in order to sell it, and give the proceeds to her mother and grandmother. But the “lion” turned out to be plaster.

Poor wonderful kids who have been given such an impossible burden to pay for everything. And you might think Nika Turbina paid for all her words, but no. He didn’t pay for his own words, the words of others, that’s all the pain.

Because poetry is experience. Not technical, not technical experience, just experience. life experience. You cannot learn to play with words. This is not a harpsichord, not a piano, not a violin. You can only grow into poetry. Get old.

By the way (I suddenly remembered), there was also a change in the surname. Actually Nika Turbina (emphasis on the last syllable) is not a Turbine. He is Torbina (first highlighted). The last will be the first and vice versa. “Do you still need me?” “No, we don’t need you anymore.”

The girl is sitting on the windowsill, her legs dangling into space. The girl likes to sit like this. For him, there is a meaning, a challenge, a courage in that. But it seems so. Even falling out of the window twice like this means nothing but a drunken fall. Zero symbolism.

He cuts off the paw of a golden Venetian lion and it turns out to be plaster.