- Статьи
- Culture
- Breakfast under the stamps: Izvestia publishes a fragment of the book "Capote in the USSR"
Breakfast under the stamps: Izvestia publishes a fragment of the book "Capote in the USSR"
In December 1955, the young Truman Capote came to the USSR with the opera company Porgy and Bess. After this trip, the report "The Muses are heard" appeared, which turned American documentary prose upside down. The writer kept silent about some of the events that took place in Moscow, and hid the real characters behind pseudonyms. 70 years later, historian and literary critic Denis Zakharov, after spending 12 years in the archives of Russia and the United States, reconstructed the events, revealed the identities of people and tried to answer the main question: what happened in Moscow and why the author of Breakfast at Tiffany's hid this story all his life. The book "Capote in the USSR" is published on July 10 by the publishing house "Find a lumberjack". In the meantime, Izvestia exclusively publishes an excerpt from it.
Denis Zakharov, "Capote in the USSR: the true Story of a Journey", fragment:
...The trip from Leningrad to Moscow turned out to be unforgettable in its own way. Capote and New York Post columnist Leonard Lyons got a compartment in a sleeping car heated like a Finnish steam room. There was a lamp on the folding table, and blue plush curtains hung on the windows. A samovar was boiling at the end of the car around the clock, and the conductor carried tea in cup holders at any time of the day or night. Looking into the compartment, the woman wondered why the Americans had opened the window, because it was freezing outside and snow was flying.
"Give the Russian winter an inch and you'll spend the night freezing,— Lyons recalled later. "I was a little chilled, but any temptation to indulge in self—pity disappeared at the sight of women clearing snow from railway tracks."
At three twenty-five a.m., the car's loudspeaker suddenly blared with a Russian ensemble, which finally exasperated the dozing Lyons. Nothing surprised Truman anymore.
At dawn, the carriage came to life. Peddlers passed along the corridor with trays: sandwiches with caviar, cheese and salmon, strong tea. The breakfast was unexpectedly generous —the entire bill was about one dollar.
It was snowing when the Krasnaya Strela arrived at the Leningrad Railway Station in the capital on the morning of January 4, 1956. The American journalists were met by a representative of the Ministry of Culture, Heinrich Shvedov. He took them to the National Hotel and reminded them that the Porgy and Bess troupe would arrive in Moscow on the afternoon of January 7.
Capote was assigned to room 129 on the third floor, and Lyons was assigned room 229 directly above him. Both rooms faced Manezhnaya Square and Alexander Garden.
The National was known as the local "Ritz": a pre—revolutionary hotel with a view of the painted domes and golden crosses of St. Basil's Cathedral, as they liked to describe it in guidebooks and intourist brochures. But the first impression was born not from the panorama, but from the lobby: neglected, darkened, with four marble caryatids supporting the gilded ceiling. It was a strange mix of the imperial past and Soviet daily life — what foreigners took to be exotic was everyday work for the staff.
The interior of the room with two single beds preserved the spirit of the pre-revolutionary era. The furniture is massive, dark wood; everything is large, solid, devoid of lightness. The pillows are large and dense, the mattresses are tight but comfortable. There was a large electric lamp with an orange shade on the table, giving the room a thick, almost theatrical glow. Red velvet, fringes, heavy carpets, old-fashioned Empire style are everywhere; as if the hotel was trying to keep the face of ancien régime, having neither the strength nor the right to do so.
Foreigners were usually warned—tacitly, almost confidentially — that it was better to consider the walls in hotel rooms as conventional. A phone, an outlet, a ventilation grate, everything could have ears. He went into the bathroom and turned on the faucet: the plumbing was running noisily, enough to drown out quiet speech. Capote waited until the water drained, washed his hands with Russian soap — it formed a thick foam, but it smelled like a Victorian morgue. Now it was clear why seasoned travelers preferred to bring their own.
Impressions of the life of the "National" receded as soon as the Hood went to the window. There is a street below that can accommodate sixteen lanes of car traffic—eight in each direction. The iconic views turned out to be completely different from what you imagine from photographs and postcards. Everything looked pompous and pretentious. Five sparkling ruby-red stars shone high in the sky on the pointed spires of the Kremlin.
Truman stuck to the glass. He would later write: "Along the wall flooded with yellow light, a whole procession of pilgrims was slowly moving, twisting. Dressed in black and looking like crows, they were heading to Red Square, to the Lenin and Stalin Mausoleum, a low building whose outlines were vaguely outlined against the stone walls, like a military tank carved from marble."
A phone call brought him out of this almost somnambulistic state. A familiar voice invited me to take a walk around the Red Square. UPI's Moscow correspondent Henry Shapiro personally came to the hotel to thank Truman for his help with the Leningrad story about the opening of the Porgy and Bess tour. Capote replied that he would be right down.
Lyons was already standing downstairs with Shapiro and another American, a tall man with neat features and a thin, well—groomed mustache above his upper lip.
—Whitman Basso,— Henry Shapiro introduced his assistant.
Basso stopped for a second at the Intourist counter in the lobby and took four cardboard cards — without them, it was impossible to get beyond the Kremlin walls. Seventy-five cents off the nose, and the Soviet fortress opened its gates even to a foreigner.
A group of four people went to the Red Square.
Lyons was keenly interested in the capital's rules for verifying texts with censors. His Leningrad experience was overshadowed by the confusing order in which the Lion's Den column appeared in the New York Post. He didn't want a repeat of the annoying blunders here.
"It's not easy to pass censorship in Russia,— Basso said. — There is a Central Telegraph office not far from your hotel. Come there by one o'clock in the afternoon. Bring the text in triplicate. A camera girl will receive him through a small window and carry him through a glass door draped with a green curtain. None of us knows who is sitting there—a man or a woman. The manuscript is returned either untouched or covered with bold strokes of a black pencil. Sometimes individual phrases are deleted, sometimes entire paragraphs are deleted, and sometimes the note is not returned at all.
He spoke calmly, without drama, as if he were talking about the weather.
—And don't think there's any logic here,— he added. — What was missed during the day may be delayed in the evening. Sometimes they cross out a word, sometimes half a page. If you want to rewrite something, you start the procedure all over again.
"Information is generally hard to come by in this country," confirmed Henry Shapiro, a burly, balding man with bushy eyebrows and a wide mustache. — We have the same official sources: the Soviet press, TASS, the announcements of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, press conferences. Everything else is conversations, hints, what you can hear between the lines. Oh, yes, there are also diplomatic techniques.
He complained about a recent incident when, contrary to the rules, Soviet officials did not issue an invitation to his Russian wife Lyudmila Nikitina for the annual New Year's Eve party in the Kremlin.
"I had to use only my own ears and eyes,— Henry said.
— And if you dictate the text on the phone? Capote asked.
"The phone is tapped,— Basso shrugged. — If you are calling New York or London, it is better to stick to the approved text. Any improvisation, and the conversation will be interrupted without explanation.
At that moment, the foreigners approached the mausoleum. The silent queue stretched patiently along the wall, despite the cold and falling snow. Shapiro leaned over to the guests and whispered:
— Here are canned food, a sweet couple or sleeping beauties — these definitions were awarded to the guests of the mausoleum in Moscow's diplomatic circles.
"The authorities now allow even foreigners to photograph the mausoleum from the outside," Henry added. — We haven't had time to print postcards with his views yet. I think they will be available by the summer.
The company entered the flat building and began descending the gray marble steps. There was a strange chemical smell in the air. Inside, in the dazzling glare of a garish red spotlight, Lenin and Stalin lay under the glass. Truman and Lyons watched in silence, memorizing the details, but neither described what they saw later.…
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
