Where the mind can breathe

NOh, I am no stranger to the memory of this hometown. Sergei Rachmaninov has never been here before. However, he must have seen something familiar, something that made him say: “It’s good here”-as in one of his songs, “Only God and me” is “and you, my dream.” “.

Is it the view of the Pilatus massif from Hertenstein across Lake Lucerne? A majesty pointing to the sky, because it is the vast land around the Ivanovka Manor he lost? “I want to buy,” it should be that day in September 1930, when he stood on this piece of land, he should say calmly: The 20,000 square meters of land is on the shore of the lake, at the foot of Mount Rigi.

After leaving Russia in December 1917, he, his wife, and two daughters went through 13 years of exile, and they crazily foreseeed that they would no longer have a future under the new regime. They have lived in the United States since November 1918, partly in Germany and partly in France in the summer, when the world’s highest-paid pianist did not have to give concerts. Except for the Fourth Piano Concerto, Rachmaninov never returned to the composer. Exile has become a burden for him: “This is the sense that I don’t have a home. The whole world is open to me, and only one place is closed to me, and that is my own country, Russia,” he confessed to the Music Times.

Unlike Sergei Prokofiev, who fell in love with Stalin because of homesickness, Rachmaninov did not bow his head. The Bolsheviks are still criminals to him.Four months after signing the procurement contract in Switzerland, he New York Times A letter of protest from January 15, 1931, opposed to the beautification of the Soviet Union by intellectuals such as Rabindranath Tagore. In his opinion, Tagore allowed himself to be concealed in order to cover up the “terror of the Soviet state.” Pull up the propaganda car. For Rachmaninov, “the whole of Russia is under the terrible shackles of a declining but well-organized communist group”, who “used the means of red terror to impose their misconduct on the Russian people”. On March 20, 1931, in the New York Herald Tribune, he joined the appeal of 210 Russian exiles who urged the U.S. government to implement a strict trade boycott against the Soviet Union, just as Bernard Shaw was mutating into the Kremlin’s nightingale and praising Stalinism News of the purge policy spread all over the world.