Vera
Horrible.
Cold in the evening of 1950, an exhausted woman in a camp quilted jacket and worn boots entered the Nizhny Tagil music school. In a bad Russian, she asked her to lead her to the piano to “play a concert”. She sat down at the tool, looked at the keys for a long time, then raised her hands, and ... from the assembly hall rushed, shaking the old one -story building, powerful, filled with a frantic temperament of chords. Teachers and students, having thrown out classes, rushed into the hall. A strange stranger sat at the piano and arthritis crooked fingers played Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin. Her gaze was fixed in infinity, her face was lit up with inspiration. "Who you are?" - asked the school principal as soon as the stranger finished. “My name is Vera Lotar-Shevchenko,” she answered with a strong foreign accent, “and I played this music on the board for thirteen years!”
Once upon a time, Europe and America applauded her, and Romain Rolan called her "the most outstanding pianist of the 20th century." Vera did not care about fame. The most important thing for her was music. She was her happiness, life, and Vera was given to her without a trace, combining the teacher’s exactingness and the eternal zeal of the student.
Vera Lotar was born on March 10, 1901 in Turin in a family of Italian mathematician and Spanish pianist. Then the father got the professor in the Sorbonne, and the family moved to Paris. At the age of 6, faith was given to a music school, and at 12 she already gave solo concerts. Once she made her way to Tuscanini for the curtains and asked to play in his orchestra. The demanding Toscanini refused. Then Vera sat behind the piano and played a sheet so that the great conductor cried. With his orchestra, Vera traveled the whole world. Two years later, at 18, she began to give solo concerts. Romain Roland, Beethoven's Expert, was shocked by her performance. She played the American president, played in the Buckingham Palace, traveled to Europe and America. The Stanway company gave her a piano and made her a face of its campaign. Ahead is the path strewn with roses. Glory, wealth, fans - in general, everything that can only be wished. But everything prevented everything ... Love.
In the mid-30s, Vera meets Vladimir Shevchenko, a Russian emigrant and violin master, who is called “Russian Stradivari” in Paris. It was love at first sight. Vladimir is older than her, he has two sons, but this does not stop Vera, and in 1936 she marries him. And then he falls in love with a second time - to Russia, about which the husband talks about, and lights up to move to this amazing country where wonderful people live. They write a petition to the embassy. A few months later, Vladimir is allowed to return. Happy spouses move to Leningrad. And on the calendar, meanwhile, the terrible 37th year ...
They live tight. A dorm room, a common toilet and a kitchen, there is not enough money, Vera sells Parisian toilets. But after a couple of months, thanks to the patronage of the pianists, Marina Yudina Vera is arranged in the Leningrad Philharmonic by the soloist. The husband gets a job. It would seem the most difficult behind. But one night, a black funnel drives up to the hostel. Vladimir was arrested by denunciation. He is given 10 years without the right to correspondence.
Vera rushes to protect her husband. With her frantic temperament, she goes from instance to the instance and proves that her husband loved Russia, that he was a patriot, but nothing helps. Then, having lost her patience, she shouted: "So, arrest me!" And, of course, she was immediately arrested for "cooperation with the enemy." The NKVD investigator, on one of the interrogations, slowly, savoring, broke each finger with a pistol handle. So that she could no longer play.
Vera will sit "from call to call." Change six camps. He will bring down the forest, saw firewood, work in the kitchen. The husband will be shot, but she will find out about it in many years. Children will fall into the orphanage, where the elder will die during the bombing, and with the younger she will meet only twenty years later. She will never touch the piano in the camp. But once two convicts will cut a keyboard out of plywood from plywood. And on this “camp, she at night she loses her entire huge repertoire. And, looking at her illuminated face, women in the hut seem to be hearing immortal music.
She freed herself in 1950. She was forbidden to live in large cities. But she only dreamed of sitting down for the piano, and therefore she asks for any city where there is a music school. In the Nizhny Tagil music school, she plays for several hours without stopping. And teachers sob silently in the corridor. They guessed where she came from in this Zekovsky quilted jacket ...
She was taken to school by an illustrator for musical literature lessons. The Tagil students were very lucky - they listened to the illustrious pianist twice a week. But not only they were lucky - the whole city was lucky. Vera gave free concerts at the local House of Culture, got a job at the Drama Theater as a musical designer, and then took the students. But she did not like to teach. At first she listened to how the child plays, then she said: “You have to play like that,” and showed. And the neighbors, throwing things, fled to this improvised concert. One of her students, Tatyana Konstantinovna Guskova, recalls: “... she lived in some special world, was absolutely impractical in the affairs of everyday and everyday life. <...> The music filled it all without a trace, was the meaning of existence, life and happiness. ”
By the way, about concerts. They were extremely rare, and the faith of Augustovna, having restored shape, dreamed of large halls. The nearest large city is Sverdlovsk. But in the Sverdlovsk Philharmonic, she did not linger for a long time - she was extremely suspicious. She was a “stranger”, moreover, the “former convict”, and even played the same as it is customary in a Russian school. She was given little concerts, and if they were given, then mainly in the villages. Unable to withstand the pressure, Vera moved to Barnaul. She gave concerts in half -empty cold halls, was very frozen and suffered from this. But once a correspondent of Komsomolskaya Pravda Simon Soloveikik accidentally entered her concert. He was shocked by her game, and the next day the entire Soviet Union recognized the faith of Lotar-Shevchenko.
The last 16 years of her life, Vera Augustovna gives concerts in Moscow and Leningrad, and no one says that she plays "somehow wrong." Lives in Novosibirsk, in Akademgorodok. The enthusiastic admirers of her talent by hook or by crook turned her two -room apartment, bought food and piano "Becket". The door to the apartment was always half -open, and the neighbors listened to her game, sitting on the stairs.
She was absolutely impractical in everyday life, did not know how to cook, could forget lunch on the stove, sit behind the piano and come to her senses when smoke was already falling from the kitchen. Pupils of the local school installed patronage over her - they cleaned her, bought products, and carried out instructions. At the same time-somewhere in the late 60s-a letter comes from the French embassy: her name is back. They offer to restore concert activities, promise a tour of Europe and America, living conditions and fees that are incomparable with the Soviet ones. But Vera ... refuses. "My departure will be a betrayal in relation to those Soviet women who helped me survive in the camps." No wonder Vera is compared with the biblical Ruth - the homeland, who killed her husband, became her homeland. Tickets for the first rows are never sold to her concerts. Those who passed the camps come to them for free.
Sometimes mischief attacked it. Once, after a concert in Novosibirsk, she wished to go to “wrap” with her friends. She wanted to drink champagne and play the piano. The taxi driver brought them to a shabby glass. Blue smoke, unshaven faces, a conversation at a hairdryer, there are almost no women. “Oh ...” Vera Augustovna was surprised, “there is no piano here?” She took two bottles of vodka and asked the men to bring a tool here. An hour later, half -drunk men brought a concert piano on a truck. And for several hours, alcoholics, thieves and criminals silently, taking off their hats, listened to Mozart, Beethoven and Bach.
Vera Augustovna died on December 10, 1982. They buried her in the cemetery in Novosibirsk. The whole city was walking behind her coffin. A white monument was erected on the grave, on which her own words were knocked out: "Life in which there is a bang is blessed."
Anna Gurina