<\/p>
It\u2019s an ill wind\u2026 Temporarily prevented from performing in Verbier by tendonitis in his left shoulder, Evgeny Kissin suddenly has time on his hands and is in a mood, I\u2019m told, to give an interview. So I jump straight in, because this is a man who normally does his best to avoid giving any interviews at all. What has triggered this volte-face?<\/p>\n
I get the answer before I\u2019ve had the chance to ask my first question, as he launches into a diatribe, eyes blazing with fury: \u2018We\u2019re here in Switzerland, and this morning I read that this beautiful country has refused to treat wounded Ukrainian soldiers, citing its traditional neutrality.\u2019<\/p>\n
A few hours later it emerges that Switzerland will row back on that prohibition, but Kissin\u2019s rage encompasses all democratic countries which don\u2019t put their shoulder to the wheel in the Ukraine war. He very much approves of Britain\u2019s support for Zelensky, but thinks Britain should press on militarily even harder, until Ukraine wins the war and Putin is defeated.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n He then offers a detailed catalogue of Putin\u2019s crimes, from turning Russia back into a totalitarian state to his nonsensical assertion that Ukraine\u2019s government is undemocratic, and to his claim that that country is a hotbed of Nazism. \u2018Yet since the end of the Gorbachev period,\u2019 says Kissin, \u2018Russia has literally been teeming with fascist organisations and publications. And although the Russian criminal code states that igniting ethnic, racial or religious hatred is punishable by law, no one has been punished.\u2019 Putin\u2019s propaganda, he adds, \u2018involves lying in a special way, best expressed in the Russian saying that the thief shouts \u201cstop thief\u201d more loudly than anybody else.\u2019<\/p>\n Kissin\u2019s fans tend to think of him as a dweller in the serene uplands of musical thought, and they may find this outburst of pugilism surprising, but in the course of our three-hour conversation I come to realise that that pugilism has always been there under the surface, fuelled by everything Kissin experienced in his 20 years\u2019 residence in the Soviet Union, and by everything he\u2019s observed of Russia since leaving it. And if you look at the library on his website, you\u2019ll see that he\u2019s long been a vigorous participant in European and Middle Eastern political debate.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> \u2018I have always hated giving interviews,\u2019 he tells me, \u2018but now I am going to give them, in order to inform as many people in the free world as possible of what I have observed in Russia. And I have to say that although by no means all Russians are anti-Semites, Russia is one of the most anti-Semitic countries in the world.\u2019 Kissin, with many Russian friends, is emphatically no Russophobe, and this comment should be taken in the same sense it would if applied to Victorian England, where Dickens\u2019s Fagin was a popular racial stereotype.<\/p>\n As a voracious reader of classic Russian and European literature, Kissin quotes chapter and verse to prove his point. From among 20th-century authors, he singles out Vladimir Nabokov\u2019s assertion in his novel The Gift<\/i> that most Russians were prejudiced against Jews. He quotes the Russian writer Yuri Nagibin\u2019s pronouncement: \u2018If there is one characteristic which unifies Russia\u2019s population \u2013 I don\u2019t use the word \u201cnation\u201d, because a nation without democracy is a mere rabble \u2013 it is anti-Semitism.\u2019 He adduces the massacre of many thousands of Jews near the Russian village of Zmievka, identified and sent to their deaths by their Russian neighbours. And he stresses the oft-forgotten fact that the Jew-hating Protocols of the elders of Zion \u2013 which strongly influenced Hitler \u2013 were concocted not in Germany, but in Russia. \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n So when was Kissin first aware of his own stigmatisation? \u2018I knew it from my earliest childhood. I felt it constantly on my own skin, when I was a child. I mentioned this briefly in my autobiography, but now I should tell some details. I remember kids of my own age \u2013 and even younger \u2013 harassing me. I remember some of them finding a big stick and saying that they would use it to make me into a Jew kebab. I remember a man in the house where I was living, an old grandfather, telling me, \u201cYou bloody Jew, just take yourself off from here.\u201d My elder sister had the same experience. All the Russian Jews I know have had that experience. And this was not state anti-Semitism. It came from the ordinary people.\u2019<\/p>\n So what nationality does he feel? Witty and well-read, he mocks the banality of the question. \u2018Since early childhood we Jews were always being told that we were not Russian. Consider the Russian literature with which we all grew up \u2013 you\u2019ll find the word \u201cyid\u201d on almost every page.\u2019 Was Turgenev\u2019s writing tainted? \u2018He wrote a short story entitled The Yid<\/i>, whose plot concerned an old Jewish spy who was selling his beautiful daughter to Russian officers.\u2019 And Dostoevsky? Kissin fires straight back. In one of the closing scenes of Crime and Punishment<\/i>, he says, where Svidrigailov commits suicide, he does it in the presence of a Jewish soldier. \u2018And not only does Dostoevsky mock the soldier\u2019s manner of speech, his description of the man\u2019s facial expression reflects the most contemptuous kind of stereotyping: \u201cHis face wore that everlastingly peevish and woebegone look which has been sourly imprinted on all the faces of the Jewish race without exception.\u201d\u2019 OK, QED.<\/p>\n When Kissin does give an answer to the nationality question, it\u2019s oblique but emphatic: \u2018I always felt Jewish. Russian was my first language, and only in that respect am I Russian.\u2019<\/p>\n However, in these matters Kissin is as keen to absolve as to point an accusatory finger. Tikhon Khrennikov, who was Secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers from 1948 to 1991, and who acted first as Stalin\u2019s musical tsar, then as the government\u2019s spokesman on musical taste, is widely regarded as having had a repressively philistine influence on Russian musical life. In 1948 he spearheaded the attacks on Prokofiev and Shostakovich among others, in the Zhdanov purge of unacceptable musical styles. Western musicologists have demonised him.<\/p>\n Kissin was one of this man\u2019s prot\u00e9g\u00e9s, and he subsequently got to know and love him as a friend. Though admitting that he was \u2018no angel\u2019, he regards him as unjustly maligned. \u2018One must distinguish between words and deeds, especially if one has a high position in a totalitarian regime. Inevitably, some people had bad relations with him, but on the whole he was loved for his generosity in using his position to help people. I had nothing but kindness from him, and he particularly helped Jewish composers during Stalin\u2019s anti-Semitic campaign. For some of them he was literally their saviour.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u2018It was in his house, not mine,\u2019 he continues, \u2018that I, as a teenager who had grown up in an assimilated Jewish household, first heard the words \u201cKol Nidrei\u201d, the name of the Jewish prayer. Khrennikov\u2019s wife used them to describe the way a violinist was playing the second movement of Tchaikovsky\u2019s Concerto. Khrennikov also knew those words, and what they meant. His wife was Jewish, and in his family they celebrated all the Jewish holidays.\u2019 Then Kissin adds a clincher: \u2018Unlike in all the other creative unions of the Soviet Union, not one single member of the composers\u2019 union was killed in the purges. Khrennikov protected all his members.\u2019<\/p>\n Politics have occluded the fact that Khrennikov was also a composer. Kissin regards him as a gifted melodist, and has translated some of his song texts into Yiddish; he quotes composer Nino Rota as saying that if Khrennikov had set up in Hollywood, he would have become a millionaire.<\/p>\n Last month Kissin released a CD which represents the opening salvo in a campaign to rehabilitate Khrennikov\u2019s musical reputation. The Salzburg Recital <\/i>(DG) includes a series of short pieces, chosen by Kissin, which Khrennikov composed while in his twenties. Playfully dissonant and possessing a fey charm, they could easily pass for Prokofiev<\/a><\/strong>, and they sit nicely with Kissin\u2019s sly Dodecaphonic Tango<\/i> and the Gershwin<\/a><\/strong> Preludes which follow.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But Chopin<\/a><\/strong> \u2013 Kissin\u2019s great love \u2013 occupies much of the new release, and here too, the current war obtrudes. Kissin points out that Chopin wrote his B minor Scherzo as a reaction to the Russian invasion of Warsaw in 1831, and his A\u00a0flat minor Polonaise to celebrate the victory of the Polish army over the Russians near Groch\u00f3w. \u2018Those pieces are now very relevant,\u2019 he says, \u2018and since the war started, I have always played the A\u00a0flat Polonaise as an encore.\u2019<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section>