 А если так? Да? Хорошо. Значит, я, наверное, буду сидеть. А то эта штука будет. И несколько лет назад я начинал ходить в городе с моей камерой. Это моя камера, прямо здесь. Это всё. И взаимодействовать на статусы, мемориальные плакы, на статусах. Сometimes I would do research and I would find something interesting about a building that nobody else seemed to know. I mean somebody knows it, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to research it. But there was no plaques, no sign, no statues, no nothing saying that something interesting had happened there. And so I started taking pictures of buildings like that too. And at a certain point I began to think, what am I going to do with all these pictures that I'm taking. And a couple of years ago, about three years ago, I guess, I started a blog. And what else do you do this day and age? You start a blog. Everybody tells me that I should turn it into a book and I am not going to turn it into a book because it's not a book, it's a blog. When you write a book you have to answer for what you say. When you write a blog, you can just sit down, hammer something out and just let it go and forget about it. And if there's a mistake in there, somebody writes you a letter and says, hey, you got that wrong and you say thank you very much. I appreciate that and you correct it. I'm not going to write. None of this stuff will ever turn into a book. It will always be a blog. It's a blog I really love. And today we are beginning with a building which is right next to this theater. It's 25 Тверская улица. And there's a good reason that you're seeing photographs run of this building. I just put together all of my photos and I just threw them all on here and I'm just going to let them run. And maybe every once in a while I'll stop and talk about something specific. But there's a real good reason why I want to talk about this building. Not only because it's the next building over from the Stanislavski Electric Theater, which is where we are all located. I should also say in the event that you don't know this, this is being broadcast around the world on a live stream by HowlRoundTV. And so welcome to HowlRound and all of you people who are watching on HowlRound. There were 57 people signed up to come tonight and it's rainy today, so not all 57 made it here, but we're here. And we're here at the Stanislavski Electric Theater. For one of the evenings that there's evenings go on here at the Stanislavski Electric Theater almost every single night. Lectures, talks, concerts, obviously shows. Tonight it's me talking about a building at 25 Тверская St. And as I began to say, I have a particularly interest in this building. Because in this building for about three years, at least three years, I don't know exactly how many years, but I know it was approximately three years and it probably wasn't much more than three years. One of the people that lived there was the guy that I wrote my very first book about. His name is Nikolai Erdman. Nikolai Erdman is, if you don't know it, was a great Soviet Russian writer. Nikolai Erdman, actually you know much more about Nikolai Erdman than you think you do. Because most of you young people who grew up watching cartoons, almost all of the best cartoons you watched were written by Nikolai Erdman. He wrote the scripts. He was one of the best script writers for cartoons. He also wrote the script to Jolly Fellows. Веселый Ребята. It's a film you know as Веселый Ребята. Good evening. Hello. Welcome. He wrote the script to Volga Volga. These are all films that we all watch three times a month on television. They still run today. Jolly Fellows was made in 1933. Actually, in 1934 it came out. 34. And it still runs today on television all the time. It's a cult favorite. It's had films made imitating it and imitations of imitations. It's one of those films that is part of the Russian culture. That was written by Nikolai Erdman, the guy that lived here for several years next door. But the reason that Nikolai Erdman, the reason I wrote a book about Nikolai Erdman is because he is one of the greatest playwrights of the last century. He had a difficult life. He only wrote two major plays. He wrote one play that Seville of Mayer hold staged in 1925, called The Mandate in English or The Warrant. And it was a monstrous success. It was the most popular, the most influential new play written in the Soviet Union since the Soviet Union came into being. And its influence on Soviet literature and particularly Soviet theater and Soviet drama was enormous. And Seville of Mayer hold, who staged it, wanted to get another play from this guy. And so he immediately commissioned another play. This play that he immediately commissioned in 1925, shortly within months after the premiere of The Warrant, this play entered into one of the most difficult fates one could imagine a play could fall into. Because Erdman, as this country changed, the country was becoming much more difficult to live in. Stalin was slowly taking power in the last half of the 20s. There was less and less freedom. There was more and more concern of censorship. Lots and lots and lots of people were leaving the country. Nikolai Erdman actually considered leaving at one point. His father was a Baltic German. And so Erdman could easily have gone to Lithuania or Latvia or someplace like that. He could easily have gotten out and he considered doing so, but decided not to in the end. And in any case, he signed the contract to write this next play in the summer of 1925. The first time that a draft came around was 1928. That's three years later. And that's a long time for a play to gestate. It's a very long time. It's very hard. Plays usually writers like to write plays very quickly. Most of the playwrights I know and I know a lot of them. They usually close all their doors, close all their windows, turn off all their telephones, or they go out to a dacha with no electricity or anything. Well, electricity, they have computer, but no telephones or anything. And they sit down in the course of a couple of weeks, maybe a month, they write a play. The fact that it took Erdman three years to come up with his first draft was a sign of how difficult this play was. And the play, as it turned out, was a play about a young man who is out of work and has no place in the Soviet Union, the new Soviet Union. There is no place for him. And this became a very, this became very controversial. The play was not even finished. It was not staged. But there had been a few readings of it around. And those readings were being attacked in the press. Erdman was being labeled as an anti-revolutionary and anti-Soviet. And the play wasn't even done yet. I mean, it was still being created. This hung on for another four years until 1932, when Erdman finally came up with a version that the Moscow Art Theater wanted to stage and Mayorhold wanted to stage at his theater. And they both rehearsed it, but neither one of the theaters could bring the play to fruition. It was banned. Lazar Kaganovich, who was one of Stalin's right-hand men, came to a nighttime showing at Mayorhold's Theater to pass judgment on the play. And what he saw did not please him. And he went back to Stalin that night and said, you don't want that play to come to fruition. So the suicide, which Erdman, on the peak of success, 1925, huge success with the mandate, the warrant, signs a contract with Mayorhold to write another play. This play finally straggles to a dress rehearsal seven years later in his band. A year later, Erdman is arrested. He was in the town of Gagry, down on the Black Sea. And he was there with his co-writer, a friend of his, by the name of Vladimir Mas. And they were writing the script together. They were doing the script for Visiole Rebeata, for Jolly Fellows, this film that I talked about right at the very beginning. And they were arrested. Mas and Erdman were both arrested right there on the set of the film and taken away. People were absolutely stunned. There's actually, Erdman's father was there. And if you know the film Jolly Fellows, if you've seen it, you've probably seen it a hundred times. But if you remember back, there's an old man in the film. Particularly in the early third half of the film. There's an old man who comes in and out of the scenes from time to time. That is Nikolai Erdman's father. He was a very colorful guy. Everybody loved his accent. He had this very thick German accent. And so all the people in film, actually Buddy's Bodinette, another filmmaker, also filmed Erdman's father in one of his films. So actually Nikolai Erdman's father, Robert Erdman, was in at least two or three major Soviet films with fairly large roles. Anyway, the reason I started talking about him is because there's a fascinating thing that happens with his letters back home. He writes to his very touching letters back to his wife, back to Moscow. Every day he writes back. And he talks about his son Kolya all the time. Kolya this, Kolya that. Kolya came over today for coffee. Kolya was doing this and that and the other thing. Kolya went out to a sunbathe with Valogia Mass, Vladimir Mass. Every single day, every single day he writes a letter back home. Kolya this, Kolya that. And on the night of the 10th of October 1933, letter home, he writes, Kolya went out with somebody today in a big car and he hasn't come back yet. I'm sure he'll be back soon. And for 10 days after that, all of the letters home saying nothing about Kolya. And the reason is because by that time, that night when he was taken away in that car that his father saw him go drive away in, he was arrested. And they sent him back to Moscow, to Lubyanka. He spent three or four nights in Lubyanka in the basement of Lubyanka. And was kept separate from Vladimir Mass, of course, so that they couldn't talk to each other. And they were both sent into exile within three days. Boom. And he was out of there. Four days ago, he was in Gagri, making Jolly Fellows, one of the first great Soviet musical comedies. And within four days he was on a train heading to Siberia as an exile. That's where he was, as those of us who talk about Airdman and talk about those times, that is what we call the incredibly lucky stroke that Airdman had. The fact that he was arrested in 1933 and not in 1937. If he had been arrested in 1937, chances are extremely good that he would have joined Manderstam and Kluyev and Mehrhold and all the others who were murdered, who were killed in the camps or in the Lubyanka. Airdman was fortunate enough, if we can put it that way, and I think we can. Was fortunate enough to be arrested four years, three years before the purges really got going. So he was outside of Moscow, he was in exile, he was in Siberia a long way away. I don't want to turn this into completely an Airdman talk, but I wanted to say all of this because I find it fascinating and I think it's important when we talk about the building next door here at 25 Tverskaya Street, that in this building where there was all of these incredibly famous people that have lived there, the building was built in 1950, I'll talk about the history of the building in a minute. But Maia Ptysetskaya lived there, Alexander Deneke, the artist lived there, several conductors of the Bolshoi Theatre lived there. Сергей Лемешев, whose plaque you can see behind me right now, one of the great singers in all of Soviet history, he lived there, and on and on and on. Choreographers, dancers, lots of people from the Bolshoi Theatre lived there. And the fact that Airdman lived there could strike one as being rather strange. How did Airdman, who was in exile really had no fame anymore and his name of his first play was long gone by this time. And as a screenwriter his name was usually taken out of the credits. So when anybody who watched Jolly Fellows after it came out in 1934, anybody who watched that film after 30, when Airdman was arrested, until the early 1990s Airdman's name was not in the credits of Volga Volga. Another one of... Actually Volga Volga was Joseph Stalin's favorite film. Joseph Stalin used to get up in the middle of the night or before going to bed in the early morning. He would call in his the guy who showed him films and he would watch Volga Volga. He watched it dozens and dozens of times. That's another fascinating story and it actually touches this building right here. You can see it behind me. Again this kind of flesh colored building behind me. I'll talk more about that too because there is a small connection. So how did Airdman get in there, into this building? Well, let's figure out first of all how the building got here because at the time when Airdman was in his beginning part of his career when he was writing his plays and then writing those first film scripts there was no such building here. There was an eye hospital on that spot. At 25 Thirskaya Street. There was an eye hospital. All of you people now you know that you're saying, wait a minute, he's got that wrong. The eye hospital is just down Mamonovsky-Piriulok just a little bit further. Well, you're right that the eye hospital is down there now. But that happened, it was moved. Stalin had that eye hospital which was an old estate built in 1773. It used to stand on Thirskaya Street. And in the early 30s, between 33 and 36 when Stalin widened Thirskaya Street he put that whole hospital on rollers rolled it 50 meters back down the street down Mamonovsky-Piriulok and not only did he do that, but he turned the building around to face the street it was now standing on. So there was this pretty incredible architectural engineering feet to move the old eye hospital off of Thirskaya Street and leave a great big hole. And they started building an apartment building just down the street a little further down Thirskaya or up Thirskaya I should say a little up Thirskaya Street there used to be a church which was destroyed in 1929 and on the place of that church it was the church it's called the church of the assumption that in place of that church an apartment building was erected in the early 30s and the plan was to continue building the apartment building all the way down here to what we now call Mamonovsky-Piriulok which is right here up against the wall of this theater but what happened was that the construction was delayed and they only got the first half of the building built actually it's about two thirds of the building in fact let me stop that baby right there and you can see here the third of the building that third of the building was put in where the church used to be that's where the church of the assumption had originally been located and then this part that's the part that was built in time and when World War II started it was left just left a hole there was just a great big gaping hole there and so it was not until 1949 that after the war that they finally got around to building the rest of this building they brought back in the same architect Andrey Burov Andrey Burov had designed this building originally and he designed that first half and he came back in 1949 and designed the connection of this last third and you can see here three arches and he put those three arches to connect the old part that was built in the 1930s and the newer part which was built in 1949 and so that is how this building came down to Skye Street that's where that building came from two-thirds of it was built in the 1930s in place of a church that had been destroyed and the other third was built in 1949 to replace an eye hospital that had been pushed down the street on Mamomiski Periulok about 50 meters and for those who don't know and for people who are maybe listening in Halround I should point out that this was the case by any stretch of the imagination of buildings being moved in order to widen Ter Skye Street Stalin wanted to widen the entire street it used to be a fairly narrow kind of cozy kind of street with churches sticking out into it and buildings sticking out into it and he wanted to turn it into a more imperial kind of street the main street that goes down to and away from the Kremlin this theater that were located in the Stanislavski Electro Theater was also pushed back 30 or 40 meters and in fact I've seen them downstairs the rails that this building believe it or not this building like the eye hospital was put on rails and rolled back and those rails are still down in the basement of this theater that's kind of cool actually I don't know about the rails Ter Skye Street so that's how the building came into being the next thing about this the building is that it was being built for people who work at the Bolshoi Theater it was a Bolshoi Theater co-op it was a co-operative and anybody in the entertainment business who was a really famous person and get in and be one of those who had received these elite apartments this is why when you look at the memorial plaques on the building they all say this person lived here from 1950 until and then you can pretty much figure out when their death date is because most of them lived here until they died so somebody was here from 1950 until 1964 or until 1977 or until 1969, whenever it was when they died so now I come back to the original question is how does Airdman who was this guy who was in exile is not by any stretch of the imagination a famous person in the Soviet Union at this point how does he get into this place well the fact of the matter is that his wife at the time was a ballerina at the Bolshoi theater Airdman had three wives they were all dancers Airdman liked dancers and his first wife was a variety show dancer that worked at the variety theater his second wife Natalia Cheatson with whom he lived here for several years and his wife was also a dancer they had become involved with one another in the early 40s Airdman and Natalia Cheatson her father was British which is why her name is Cheatson it's not a Russian name and they had just kind of been together for almost a decade when they finally decided in 1950 to get married they decided to get married because it was clear she was going to get an apartment and it seemed like a good time to get married I have no idea I never met Airdman Airdman died in 1970 so it's not possible it was not possible for me to talk to him but I did meet Natalia Cheatson and I spent some time in her apartment here in this building I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute but they were married in 1950 and they moved into this building like everybody else who moved into this building in 1950 everybody moved in in 1950 it's rather interesting that within months of his moving in here one of his most famous films came out so he wouldn't have written the script while living here but while he was living here a film called Courageous People was released in September of 1950 by this time he would already have been in the building and for this film a year later he was awarded a Stalin prize second degree so here's where I come back to Stalin a little bit because everybody who was connected to this film Courageous People said that they it was essentially a request from Stalin that this film be made Stalin wanted this film made about heroic people out in the steppes during the war he wanted it to be made a very kind of human kind of story not the regular heroic story with lots of bombs blowing up and everything but with a bit of humor and a bit of human touch to the whole thing and if you'll remember one of Stalin's most heroic film Volga Volga was written by Nikolai Erdmann he knew that Erdmann would do a good job on this kind of a film and so the word was put out it was not a direct request but it was understood at Mossfilm everybody that knew about the film knew this at the time it was understood that Stalin wanted Erdmann to write the script for Courageous People it is also understood everybody kind of had the sense that this was going if this worked everybody involved meaning this is the kind of film for which someone might receive an award and indeed that did happen Erdmann and his co-author he wrote the script with another guy by the name of Mikhail Volpin both of them were awarded Stalin prizes second class not first class but second class but it's an important thing because this clearly was a this clearly was a case of Stalin saying to Erdmann okay you're forgiven now you haven't stuck your neck out since you were arrested 20 years ago you haven't done anything you've done nothing to raise any questions you've done nothing to raise any suspicions and it was fairly clear that by bestowing the Stalin prize second class on Erdmann he was saying okay you're back into things now this was in then 1951 and so that all happened while Erdmann was here so if you figure when all these famous people are moving into this building in 1950-1951 and Erdmann receives a Stalin prize he all of a sudden has status in the society of the time there is a a slight hitch to all of that however and that is that once to Erdmann at the time his wife was beginning a relationship with another famous person by the name of Leonid my mind just blank I'm sorry the choreographer the choreographer Leonid Lavrovsky and Lavrovsky lived in a building right across probably know this building it's a huge building right across from the old American Embassy on the Ring Road I believe the address is 67 Tchaikovsky street but the fact of the matter is is that Lavrovsky had three Stalin prizes and I don't know whether that is one of the reasons why Natalia Cheetson found him perhaps in the end of more interest Nikolai Erdmann I don't know, but this was all happening about the same time because Lavrovsky's three Stalin prizes came starting in the late 40s up through 1950 and so as Erdmann was winning his measly single second class Stalin prize in 1951 Cheetson might have been looking at him and saying, you know, cool, he's not as great as I once thought he was and I'm gonna jump to one thing because I just love this, I think this is a wonderful letter Erdmann wrote wonderful letters and I'll come back a little bit to their life here in this building but I want to jump to the end right away and in the summer of 1953 Erdmann wrote to his wife and he had now found out that she was having an affair with Lavrovsky this is as I say in the summer of 1953 and Erdmann writes forgive me Natasha forgive me Natasha forgive me Natasha but I have gotten so old he was 53 at the time forgive me Natasha but I have gotten so old and it becomes so sclerotic that I simply cannot remember the name of your choreographer it's a shame that for the longest, latest time you have answered everything I tried to ask you with silence or that you have wrapped your responses in such secrecy что я еще не имею в виду, что твои планы и ценности есть. В любом случае, я бы был в распоряжении, где я неоправданно просил вас менять в любом случае. Я оставу Москва в конце августа или в сентябре. Я вернусь в октябре и потом я вернусь снова. И он пишет немного новостей про друзья и семьи, и он finishes the letter sleep soundly, my sweet. И если я правильный, то вы prefere to live apart, do live at home. Meaning this place right here. Don't forget that we lived together for 12 years and we parted in 5 minutes. You can't make sense of everything in 5 minutes. I kiss you, Nikolai. Answer me please. Her answer was yes, I do want to live apart. And in one of the most deliciously scandalous events of those years, I'm guessing Lavrovsky traded apartments with Airdman. Lavrovsky gave Airdman his apartment across from the American Embassy. Airdman moved there and Lavrovsky moved into this building here. The apartment that Cheatson and Airdman occupied was apartment number 9 on the 6th floor. If you look from this side of the street, you can look up and you can see the windows. And as I said, I spent some time in there. I interviewed Cheatson a couple of times and a couple of times I just went to visit her. I can't say that we became friends, but we became friendly. And it was interesting because she had split from Airdman in 1953. And then when Perestroika happened and all of the changes started to happen in the 1990s, everybody, I shouldn't say everybody, but lots of us came to Russia interested in Nikolai Airdman. There was a woman from Germany, Andrei Gottsis. Andrei, if you happen to be watching, hello. There were other people doing research on Airdman at the time. And everybody, because Airdman was no longer around, many of the people that Airdman had lived with and worked with were no longer living, people descended upon the poor Natasha Cheatson, who had spent 12 years with Airdman, yes, but in the 1940s and early 50s, and this was the 1990s. I mean, she had forgotten about Airdman completely by this time. She had no interest in Nikolai Airdman. And I must say that my impression was always that she really never understood who Nikolai Airdman was. She didn't know anything about the suicide or the mandate. She did know that he'd had some play done by Mayor Hold back in the 20s, but she really didn't know anything about it. She knew nothing about the suicide, and she couldn't have, because the suicide had been banned and nobody had ever seen or heard it here in this country. Only very, very elite writers would get a hold of copies and read it. They read it, writers knew it, but not beyond writers. Film directors would know it. And she knew him as this guy that wrote these film scripts. He wrote scripts for cartoons and he wrote scripts for other films, but she really didn't understand who she had been living with. And she was a little bit taken aback when everybody was descended upon her and wanted to hear stories, and she really didn't remember much. So she would always start by saying, You know, I really can't tell you much, because this was a long time ago and when he left my life, I basically forgot about him. And one of the reasons, Nikolai Airdman liked his cognac. He was not a vodka drinker, like most Russian writers are. He was a cognac drinker, because he wasn't entirely Russian. As I said, his father was of German heritage. So he was half German, and he enjoyed his cognac and he often would get together with other writers. He and La Lesha would get together Platonov. They would hang out, by the way, down at another building at the other end of this, almost at the other end of Tverskaya, the National Hotel. They would get together and hang out. And they would drink and talk. Nobody knows about what, because nobody ever got a chance to ask them. At least nobody, like myself, who would have cared to have written it down and remembered it. Anybody else you ask that knew about it would say, I don't remember. I talked to Yosef Prut, who was a playwright a couple of times, and he was a good friend of Airdman's from his childhood. They grew up together and they used to get in street fights together. But he would be, he was at some of those meetings where La Lesha and Platonov and Airdman would hang out. All he could tell me was... The only thing I can tell you is that they never talked about literature. So beyond that I can't tell you what they would talk about. But some of his other friends were a little more insistent. He was a very good friend of Alexey Diki, the actor and director. And Diki was quite a drinker. And the very last time I spent some time in this building would have been 1995, when Natalia Cheetson was still alive. I went to see her to give her a copy of the book that I'd written based in small part on stuff that she had told me. But she told me that day, as I was leaving, actually, I'd come in and we'd just been chatting. And as I was on my way out, we were standing in the entryway to the apartment and she said, you know, maybe one of the reasons I really don't remember that much about Nikolai is that he really infuriated me sometimes. And his friends would infuriate me because we would be asleep three in the morning and somebody would start banging on the door. And she said, you have to remember, this was in the 1950s, you have to remember, Nikolai had been arrested, Nikolai had been in exile. And when people started banging on your door at two or three in the morning, it could be very frightening. And I would say to Kolya, don't get up, don't get up, don't answer the door. And he would usually get up and he would go and he'd answer the note, it would be Alexi Diki and a couple of other actors who had had too much to drink and they'd come over to Kolya's because they knew that he had cognac, at least he might not have vodka, but he'd have cognac. So they'd come rolling into the apartment. Of course Kolya couldn't kick them out, they'd show them in, they'd sit until the morning. And this may be one of the reasons why Cheatson was so happy. I don't know whether Lavrovsky, to whom she went when she left Airdman, I don't know what kind of a drink or he was, but if you can imagine, if you had to put up with that kind of stuff very long, you might in fact find somebody else to replace this guy and tell him to go home or go somewhere, not home, go somewhere else. Another thing I want to mention, because these are just small little personal touches and they're the kinds of things that, or the reason I write this blog that actually has given rise now to these talks that I'll be doing here at the theater. That last time I was in the apartment that Airdman had been in, Cheatson once again kind of walked me around and she showed me the sofa, there was a very old sofa Very old, very kind of hard, flat, but very stately looking sofa, very wide. Not at all the kind of sofa that we see in houses these days. Certainly you would never find anything like it in A.K.A. And she told me then, and I had known this, that this was Nikolai's father's sofa. I mean it was the sofa they had had when Kolya was a little boy growing up and it came to Kolya, when they moved into this apartment he brought this sofa with him. And that first year that they lived in this building Nikolai's father, Robert, who I'm going to remind you again, who played a fairly large role in The Jolly Fellows and played a very large role, played a leading role in one of Buddy's Baudenet's films in 1932, he died in this room, in this apartment, on that sofa. And so there is this kind of... You stand there in a room and you're looking for reasons. If you're like myself, I'm Nikolai Erdman's biographer. So I'm looking for reasons, not reasons, I'm looking for ways to get inside of this story that I'm trying to tell. You're looking for things that can give you a personal connection that go beyond the dates and go beyond the names. And you stand there and you're looking at this sofa that is really wide and hard and very old and obviously old. And you know that when Kolya was a little kid he probably had trouble jumping up on it because it was his dad's sofa probably brought from the Baltic States and that it came into this place when Erdman moved here in 1950 and then that year when his father died he was lying on this sofa and he died there. And that's one of those moments where there's a little bit of a connection that happens, you know? And it goes beyond the stuff that people tell you and it goes beyond all kinds of things and all of a sudden something happens and you go, hmm, I just kind of made connection with this thing that I'm trying to do. But I must say that the biggest one the biggest, the one that had the biggest effect on me and she had never told me this before when I'd been there she told me just this one time because about the sofa she had talked about that from time to time. She says, look at this plant on the windowsill and there was one of those cactuses that every one of us has. I mean, we all have this cactus, that thing with it, you know, a new thing grows out of the old one and they're in every single house I've ever been in Russia. We have one. And it was this huge cactus on this windowsill that looks out onto the Stanislavski Theatre from the side here and looks out onto Tews, the Moscow Young Spectator Theatre. And she said, that's Kulia's. She said that plant was Kulia's. When Kulia came, he came with the sofa in that plant and if the sofa was cool, I mean, the sofa was cool, but the plant was a living thing, you know? I mean, the plant was still alive when I was standing there in 1995 and it had been alive. Nikolai Erdman had watered that plant, of course, you know, and I was standing there looking at the plant and there were probably cells in that plant that were left over from then. I can't say, it doesn't go as far as, you know, like chills down the spine. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite go that far, but I must say that that's one of those moments when I made a connection, when I felt as though I was connected, really connected to the man about whom I was writing, who I'd written by that time, who I'd written a book about. I will say that I actually felt very strong contact with him when I was reading his works through his literature. I mean, that's where the chills came down the spine. I was sitting up at three or four in the morning with my young, my then new wife and she would be reading this stuff to me and we would be laughing and howling and talking about it and making connections. This incredible writer, that's where the chills came down the spine, but that cactus plant, I'll never forget the cactus plant, the cactus plant was a very cool thing. Some of the other people, does somebody have a watch or a telephone? I turned my phone off because I didn't want it to ring. Of course it's not here. Ребята, скажите пожалуйста, сколько времени сейчас? Скажите сколько времени? It's ten to eight. Okay, thank you, thank you. I just did some writing about Emile Gilles, who also lived here in this building, and I found a couple of interesting things. There was also an interesting personal thing, too, and let me start with the personal thing, a connection to Gilles. It's not a direct connection to Gilles, but Emile Gilles, as you all know, was one of the great musicians of the 20th century, one of the great pianists in the history of the Soviet Union. I didn't know that. I was an American kid. I listened to rock and roll and I didn't know anything about classical music. I'm talking now about back in 1980-1982, back in there, and I lived in Washington D.C., and I had been sneaking copies of Nikolai Erdmann's The Suicide, which was this band play that we've talked about, right? I'd been sneaking copies of that into a friend of mine, who was a theater director, and Lenin grad. The play of Suicide was still unpublished in the Soviet Union at that time. And my friend Volodya wanted to read it. He'd never been able to find it. He'd never read it. So what I did is I Xeroxed the whole play. And then, on the back side of the pages, I would write letters to my friend Volodya, and there would be, and so I'd write him a two-page letter, and so page one and two of The Suicide would be on the back side, and my letters would be on the first side, and then a week or two later, I would write him another letter of a page or two or three, and little by little, basically I was sending The Suicide to my friend Volodya Ferkelmann, who lived in Lenin grad. And I would get letters back, and he was very careful, but he was letting me know. He says, things are working really well. You know, I've read up to page 40. There was 83 pages in this edition that I had. And then, at a certain point, he wrote back and says, hmm, the reading hasn't, the reading has stopped. He said, I haven't been able to get past page 40, and I understood that it had been intercepted, and they had found and they were not letting the letters through. Well, a couple of days later, couple of weeks, maybe weeks, months, shortly after, let's put it that way. I worked in a bookstore, and a couple of months later, a man came into the bookstore looking for a map of Moscow. It was a very strange thing to come into a bookstore in Washington D.C. for, I'm gonna make a very long story short because we're talking about the building at 25 Turtle Sky Street, but this is, there's a connection with Gabriel's here you see. This guy turned out to be a KGB agent who found me because I was sending all of these letters from the bookstore where I worked. So the return address, the return address of where I worked was on every single letter I sent. So it was pretty clear how they found where to find me, and they just came looking for me, not looking for a map of the Moscow Metro, of course, although I didn't realize that quite at first. It was when the FBI began contacting me that they explained to me what was going on. This was a crazy time of my life. For two years I had the KGB on one side and the FBI on the other. I must tell you, I don't care really very much for either one of them. But in any case, we were talking one day, I was talking one day to this guy, the KGB agent, and he was telling me about having just accompanied Emil Gilius on a tour, and clearly my face was blank. Emil Gilius didn't mean anything to me. If he'd said Bob Dylan, or if he'd said The Rolling Stones, I would have gone, wow, really? I would have done that. But he said Emil Gilius, and I thought, I don't know who Emil Gilius is. And he says, Emil Gilius is one of the great pianists of all time. He said he's my favorite pianist and I want you to remember that. Actually, I was very good friends with this guy. He was a nice enough guy. We'll talk about him some other time. Emil Gilius he was the favorite pianist of the KGB agent who found me in Washington D.C., because I was sending copies of The Suicide from my place of work at the bookstore in Washington D.C. to my friend in Leningrad. And when I came to, it was still the Soviet Union when I came here in the late 80s, and I went to find this building where Nikolai Erdman had lived, and on the walls is a plaque where he had lived in this building. I thought, oh no, you can't do this to me. It's way too much. The connections of life and the way things happen is just a little bit too strange. But anyway, so there's my little story of not connecting me to Emil Gilius, but connecting a person I once knew to him and a very strange convoluted connection back to Erdman and they both come together at this building. Emil Gilius also moved into this building in 1950 and he lived here he lived here until he died in 1985. But there's a couple of really interesting connections in terms of years. I talked about the fact that part of the building, the northern part of the building, two thirds of it, were built in place of a church that had been torn down in 1929. Okay, 1929. Well, Emil Gilius made his very first public appearance as a pianist in 1929. So Emil Gilius was down in his hometown of Odessa and for his very first time he walked out on a professional stage and gave his very first performance in 1929 just as part of the building that he would end up living in 20-some years later was actually being prepared because one part was being torn down, so they could build another part. He won his very first award Gilius won his very first award as a pianist in 1933. Well, 1933 was the year that they began to widen Tverskaya Street and of course by widening Tverskaya Street they had to go through all the convolutions that I told you about which bring us to the building that stands there today. Just a small connection He moved into the building in 1950. And in that very year in 1950 he formed a trio with Leonid Kogan and Mr. Slava Rastropovich which is considered one of the great classical trios ever to have existed. The recordings of these three men together are absolute gold. I did a little bit of research I mean it's armchair research I did a little bit of armchair research and I found one western critic who said that he'd probably never heard any three musicians play together better than these three did together. They didn't state, well they stayed together almost a decade and they ended up breaking up apparently at least one of the reasons for it was that Leonid Kogan was a more conservative politically conservative Mr. Slava Rastropovich was more, shall we say, progressive and Mr. Slava Rastropovich and Kogan simply could not get along and so they ended up breaking up the trio. But while Gilius was living here he was the very first Soviet musician ever to play the Zal Playel the famous Zal Playel in Paris it's one of the great concert halls of the world now as a resident of this street, of this as a neighbor of ours here at the Stanislavsky Electro Theater Gilius went and performed Zal Playel in 54 the next year in 1955 Gilius became the very first Soviet musician ever to tour the United States he played Carnegie Hall and he played with the Philadelphia Philharmonic with Eugene Ormandy but of that was taking place while he lived here at this building at 25 Tverskaya Street a couple of other people who I'll just kind of mention a few and then we can talk if you have questions about anything about this topic or anything else we can pick them up but as I pointed out Sergei Lemeshev was one of the great Soviet tenors in fact he's considered a lyric tenor I thought that was interesting frankly I didn't know that as a term but when I was looking up some information about him I found that he's Sergei Lemeshev he's considered a lyric tenor and I asked my wife about him my wife Oksana Muysina about him this morning and she says oh my god because I really I told you if you talked about Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones I know a lot if you talk about classical music and Oksana I jotted down a couple of her comments first of all she says oh my god John you have to know Sergei Lemeshev that was the first thing she said second was she says oh of course he was one of the greatest Shalyapin Lemeshev he was handsome this is my wife responding immediately to things that are important he was handsome, blonde, women went crazy over him he had a very thin high voice she said very emotional for Oksana to be interested in you he was as popular in opera as Lenny Uchosev was in jazz she said now this is not encyclopedia stuff but this is the reaction of my wife who is a very cultured person she's a very good actress herself she knows music she studied violin at the Gnesin College and so she knows what she's talking about so that's her stamp of approval on Sergei Lemeshev while Lemeshev lived here at this building he taught Moscow Conservatory he debuted as an opera director in 1951 a year after he came here he staged Traviata in Leningrad and in 1957 while still living here he directed at the Bolshoi Theatre that was his debut as a director of opera that all happened here Alexander Deneke one of the great Soviet painters and artists lived here from 1951 he moved in a year late I don't know what happened everybody else moved in in 1950 he came in in 1951 1959 when he died he is known of course as a monumental artist monstrous paintings of industrial often industrial or military topics but not only some of his most famous paintings were painted while he was here Fishermen by the Sea in 1956 Military Moscow in 1959 the painting in Sevastopol in 1959 they were all done while he was living here in this building right next to us which I think is very cool another person that I found out just recently who lived here was Maia Plisetskaya who died a year ago and I found out about this because somebody saw a German having lived at this building no, actually I wrote a blog about Deneke no I didn't it was the Emil Gilils one it was the Emil Gilils blog just recently somebody saw it on the internet and they wrote me on Facebook and said my husband was born there and grew up there he can tell you all kinds of things about this building and I think I may actually contact this guy and try to get some more information about it I am now very interested in this building but among other things she said one of the people was Maia Plisetskaya and I did not know that there is no plaque there of course yet I would presume that there will be one day but there is not yet she's only left us about a year ago but I did find this little tidbit which connects her to Cheatson Erdman's second wife from her from Plisetskaya's memoirs and I didn't translate this so you hear me I am just going to kind of translate as I go but she was writing about the other dancers at the Bolshoi Theatre and she said that Galina Ulanova and Olga Lipichinskaya of course two great dancers you know that anybody watching on camera may not know that so let me say that Galina Ulanova and Olga Lipichinskaya are two of the great soviet ballerinas Galina Ulanova and Olga Lipichinskaya would get dressed in their very large spacious dressing room in the Benoit aside from them that room was occupied by Tina Galetskaya Cheatson she just says Cheatson Julia Cherkasova and Yelena Mikhailovna Ilyushinka throughout the theatre this dressing room was called the snake pit this is where people went to have evil done and we'll just leave it at that so Plesetskaya's attitude towards this dressing room at least at the Bolshoi which was occupied in part by Natalia Cheatson who lived here with Nikolay Erdman and then later with Leonid Lavrovsky she was part of what Maya Plesetskaya in any case called the snake pit at the Bolshoi theatre another little very small connection I wrote a play a couple of years ago in which Maya Plesetskaya was a character who kind of she's not actually a character in the play but she is a figure in the play who figures from the beginning all the way through to the end when I wrote that play and used Plesetskaya as a figure in the play I had no idea that she had lived in the building that Nikolay Erdman lived in where Gilels lived and all of these things that once again seemed to connect us Plesetskaya lived basically towards the end of her life after 1990 she essentially left Russia she lived mostly in Germany she lived in Vilnius in Lithuania in any case but she always kept the apartment here and whenever she would come back to Moscow she would stay at this apartment here and she was in apartment number 31 Nikolay Erdman and his wife Natalia Cheatsen occupied apartment number 9 so those are a few little details connected with the building at 25 Tverskaya street and I would like to have you asked any questions you would have I hope I'm going to repeat once again that I'm not standing here as an expert I'm standing here as an interested person so I do not have a whole bunch of answers about 25 Tverskaya street but I'm willing to try to answer any questions if you have any and if you have questions about anything else I'd be willing to answer questions about that too Does anybody have any connection with this no no I want to point out for people once again this is something you all know and nobody else really does who is watching on camera at this point but I've talked several times this evening about how Stalin widened Tverskaya street between 1933 and 1936 and of course our marvelous mayor Sergei Sabianin now is destroying Tverskaya street entirely and narrowing it back down it's sometimes one wonders how decisions are made, why they're made and one wonders why anyone ever bothers to make a decision when 60 years later somebody is just going to turn it around and do the opposite anyway so I understand that Sabianin's idea is to make the sidewalks very large and to have places for bicycle lanes and to have benches and trees and one does hope that Tverskaya will look better than it does right now but I do find it ironic that Stalin ripped this place to shreds in order to widen the street and Sergei Sabianin 70, 85 years later comes along and he tears everything and he does in order to narrow the street back down so there you have a little bit that's even a little bit of wisdom somehow I haven't come up with anything wise to say it tonight but I think there was a little bit of wisdom in that things that go around come around there's a phrase in English like that that fits no questions? in that case, yes please why did I decide to write a book question let's try to make this answer as short as possible and as entertaining as possible the way I tell the story is this I had just graduated from college this was in 1980 I graduated from college the University of California at Irvine and as I like I graduated with a degree in Russian literature so I had this piece of paper called a diploma on which it was written that John Friedman knows everything there is to know about Russian theater because John Friedman has just been issued a baccalaureate award you know blah blah blah so there I was knowing everything there was to know about Russian literature and I was in Boston at the time and I pick up the newspaper and there is a review of this unbelievable new play by this Soviet playwright Nikolay Erdman and it says this guy is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century and his play is one of the masterpieces of the 20th century did that review and I've never heard of Nikolay Erdman how could he be so great because I know everything there is to know about Russian literature so I went and I bought myself a ticket to this show which was in Providence Rhode Island it was about an hours drive from Boston and I drove down to Providence Rhode Island it was the Trinity Square Repertory Company it was the name of the theater for the people interested in connections a very good friend of mine is now the artistic director at the Trinity Square Repertory Company a guy I met in Chicago many years ago I find this incredible but went to the Trinity Square Repertory Company and I sat down front row center to watch this production of the Suicide by Nikolay Erdman about whom I'd never heard anything staged by a guy knew nothing about Jonas Yurashis Jonas Yurashis is a fascinating guy in himself he had staged a version of Macbeth at the Sovrimennik Theater in the 70s around 76 and it had been banned they shut it down and he went into exile and this was one of his first productions after having gone into exile in the west and he staged the suicide and I don't remember ever laughing so hard you know for three hours I sat there and I am the rest of the people in the audience however many there were we just howled and howled and howled for three hours and I drove home to Boston feeling I could sense it you sense things in your life I drove home with this sense that something in my life had changed I had something was different I mean I really did feel that and the next very next day I went to the library I mean I was just working I was working in a basement in a store I wasn't I was just a kid I didn't have any idea what I was going to do with myself but when I wasn't working in the store I would go into these libraries and I would look for stuff about Nicolay Erdman I could find nothing about Nicolay Erdman there was nothing there I got married and we went to Washington my wife my first wife worked at the Library of Congress in Washington DC which meant I was able to get into the stacks I was able to get back into the library at the Library of Congress which is like one of the two or three greatest libraries on planet Earth and I could just go nobody else you can't just go into the Library of Congress you have to get a card and you have to order books and they bring them to you and look through the books I because I had a wife who worked there was able to get back there and I would walk I would just go down the line pulling book after book after book out and I've gotten to the point where now I can pick up a book and I can just flip through it and I will see everywhere where Erdman shows up because that the letter E for Erdman is really fat and it sticks out and you can see it and so I just started I was just working in DC I was working at the bookstore that I talked about and I just became very interested in this guy and at a certain point I thought somebody has to write about this guy this guy is incredibly good and somebody has to write about him and what you do in life you do a couple of times it happens three or four or five times in your life when you say somebody has to do that and you think well who could do that and all of a sudden you go oh I could do that and so I went back I enrolled in graduate school in Washington at George Washington University and I did research on Erdman and wrote a master's thesis and I applied to graduate school at Harvard I went to do my PhD my doctorate at Harvard and I wrote my dissertation about Erdman at Harvard and when I came here to do research for my dissertation and I met the woman who became my second wife and I stayed and I wrote the book about Erdman and I wrote the first dissertation and then I wrote the book about him so he was very stupid didn't know anything and I read a review in a newspaper and I thought gosh I have to go see what that's about that's how it started oh absolutely absolutely there's two reasons I live there's three reasons I live in Moscow there's three reasons one is Leo Tolstoy the other is Nikolai Erdman and the other is Aksana Meysina there's no other reason for me to be in this city but those are three really good reasons I read Leo Tolstoy I read War and Peace when I was in high school and that changed my life forever the way my life changed going home after having seen the suicide my life was changed by War and Peace I read that book and realized I have to have more of that I have to have more of that I read Tolstoy, I read all of Tolstoy and then I read all of Dostoevsky and I read all of Gogol Nikolai Shevnishchevsky I read everything again I thought at a certain point I have to do something with this I'm reading these things all the time for years and years I spent years reading all these things just reading them and then I decided well I have to go do something with that so I went to school I enrolled in college and I got that piece of paper that told me that I know everything there is to know about Russian literature that I mentioned five minutes ago Tolstoy, Nikolai Erdman and Aksana Moissina the three reasons I live in Moscow Any other questions? Comments? Anybody know any good stories about the building here? Sure, go ahead The book about Erdman is the only book about him in English It was the first book about him The book I wrote was published in 1992 and it was the first book about him After that Andrei Gotzis my colleague from Germany published what is essentially a book it's a dissertation but German dissertations are printed and sold as books too so it's kind of a combination came out about a year or two after no actually it was three or four years after mine did and there have been several books written about him in Russian now but they're all scholarly books they're not biographies they're analyses of style my book is a kind of a general book it's a book about it's a book about his literature about his writing, about his art but it's also a book about his life so it's essentially is the only book to this date it is the only book about him that covers kind of all of those topics I must say it's a really bad book it's like anybody if anybody has written books here you know I don't know how to say that the first pancake you make always comes out all smushed well it's like that for writers too your first book is a mess and it's the one I love I mean I really love it I have one copy I have one copy left and it sits there on my shelf and I love it because it's an incredibly important part of my life but God I wish I could do it again I wish I could do it again with what I know now and it's too late for me to do it now because so much has come out so much has happened, so much has been written so much has been discovered that for me to go back and write a book about him I have to go back and just redo the whole thing again and I can't do that I'm in a whole different place now so it's my book about Airdman which is called Silences Roar The Life and Drama of Nicola Airdman is a marvelous part of my life I love it, it's one of the great successes and great failures of my life all in one and maybe that's the way things happen too there's a really bizarre to my knowledge all of the copies have been sold the publisher doesn't have any more obviously there's copies out there in places if you go on Amazon and try to find it you can find copies between $100 $500 I don't know who in the hell these people are I never received a penny for the book the publisher never paid me anything and Mosaic Press Canada by the way if you're watching you guys never paid me and you never even sent me the author's copies I had to buy copies to get copies I went on the net about a year ago and I bought 4 copies for $12 a piece and I quickly bought them so if you go on the internet from time to time depending on what used bookstore gets some in somebody may sell them for cheap and then somebody else who thinks that it's a really rare book and doesn't really know what they're talking about they'll try to charge you $150 I don't know what that's all about it has nothing to do with me of course so there are copies out there but hard to find there's a copy I donated a copy to the theater library there is a copy here at the theater library and I also donated a copy to the mayorhold museum on Brussef Lane Brussef Pirulik so there's two copies in Moscow there's one in my house there's one at the theater library here there's one at the mayorhold museum I think that's it so there's three in Moscow a holy trinity certainly, please do yes I did see it the question was about a production of the suicide at the Yermolov theater which is here on Firskaya street it's just down at the very beginning right next to the Kremlin actually