Transient Moments

By Yuri Kholodov

The book includes selected stories connected with the memories of exciting transient moments of the writers life. These works, basically, have an autobiographic character and are often penetrated by romantic perception of events. They also mention both the eternal subjects of human life and the most sensitive issues of the present. The authors favorite thoughts about the peculiarity of musicians lives are originally fit in his short stories.
The name of the book has something in common with the name of a piano cycle Visions fugitives written by Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev. The title of the cycle was derived from Konstantin Balmonts poem, and one line was taken as epigraph: In every fugitive vision I see worlds, full of the changing play of rainbow hues As the author of the book notices, the musicians life, being sifted through time sieve, often leaves in memory something fleeting, transient, fugitive. But if you select a right key to these events, they play by all rainbow hues, and it awakens an emotional response in soul of the reader.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503529373

Yuri Kholodov

Ukrainian-born violist Yuri Kholodov happily combines the high music professionalism - he is the Prize Winner of the International Chamber Music Competition, People’s Artist of Ukraine, awarded the State T. Shevchenko Prize (the highest recognition for cultural achievement in Ukraine) - and undoubted writing gift. Performing as violist of famous Lysenko string quartet the extensive repertoire, including hundreds of compositions of different styles and epochs, Yuri Kholodov has imbibed all of the richest shades of chamber composers’ heritage. Imaginative world of the prominent artists enriched his own artistic world, contributed to his artistic perception of reality, and was reflected in his literature works. His books - “Inness”, 2001, “Solo for viola”, 2006, “Quiet music”, 2010, “Melodies of Love”, 2011, “Savannah Revelations”, 2012, “Revelations of the misanthrope”, 2012,“These strange musicians”, 2013, published in Russian, attract readers by their special tune, musical sounding, psychological details, gentle humor, and wonderful ability of author to reincarnate and lead life of the very different his personages. Now he lives and works in USA, Savannah, Georgia. His website www.booksofmusicians.info tells about his creative work in details.

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Copyright © 2015 by Yuri Kholodov.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2014922660

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-5035-2936-6

   Softcover   978-1-5035-2938-0

   eBook   978-1-5035-2937-3

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Rev. date: 01/22/2015

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Contents

Personal Truth Of Yuri Kholodov

The Sixth Sense

An August Motive

Dimka’s Love

One Summer In Hydropark

An Encounter

Quiet Music

Elegy

Where It Is Light…

Sad Story

Matvey, Matyusha…

Paris, Paris…

Caravan

A Goner

Translated from Russian by Elena Mordovina. Edited by Joseph Birch.

Illustrations – by artist Vladimir Isupov.

On cover- the painting of artist Oleg Tatarov from the collection of Antonovs’ family.

PERSONAL TRUTH

OF YURI KHOLODOV

Prose written by Yuri Kholodov is most interesting because it is created by a first-class musician who is aware of all the subtleties of his performing art. He was the laureate at the International Competition and the State Prize in the name of Taras Shevchenko. He also won a prestigious award known as the People’s Artist of Ukraine. His literary art is uniquely connected with the personality of the author and reflects his outlook on life and music. His prose is merged with his perception of life, and his work manifests his personal truth without which, according to Ivan Turgenev, everything in art is negligible.

The worldview perspective the writer maintains was formed and highly influenced by a mystical communication with nature as well as from features of national Ukrainian life. His painting style developed by emerging metaphysical and soulful excitement at the sight of seductive beauty of Ukrainian landscapes. His childhood was spent in a quiet provincial backwater town of forest-steppe zone of Ukraine, in Poltava, in blessed region where the Ukrainian writer Gogol once lived. There he learned to absorb and work with bright, ever-preserved impressions of charming and in a way, ancient Ukrainian landscapes. As a teenager, Yuri wandered alone just before dawn to hear the sounds of triumphant life, multiplying by the voices of birds singing to celebrate the new day, which was a blissful experience to him that influenced his art. As a young man, he became interested in hunting which took him into spectacular woodland groves, lakes and meadows where the corncrake creaked out its song and quails called asking to join them in the celebration of the day and life itself! They called out… Drink - sing - go, drink - sing - go! Yuri saw them in the Kiev region when he attended a special school for music at the insistence of his powerful grandmother who was once a church choir singer. She had her back up, refused to hear any objections, and demanded Yuri to study music at this special metropolitan school.

This life-experience was reflected in his early works that were filled with romantic overtones of the world and life itself: A Country Etude, An August Tune, Variations on an old theme, One Summer in Hydropark, Dimka’s love. A captivating freshness blows from these pages. These works cannot be read without warm and pleasant feelings, and the very nature of his images causes his romantic heroes to possess a regal beauty. The pathetic convict Trophim was the host of an island lodge that gave shelter to wounded and lost souls. Another character, old man Vsevolod, was a craftsman and a connoisseur of folk songs who became a hermit and gave up on creating his own righteous laws. The author’s rich imagination allowed his characters to come from the wind that rustled in feathered grassy steppes and carried a free and pure spirit in itself. It was a rural matron Nastya Arhipovna with an amazing degree of humility who resigned herself to her ungainly appearance, and she held her life with few expectations. Another character was a young man with a mysterious passion for witchy, rustic beauty. The other one, a sufferer Grisha the Small, fancied the intricacies of fishing and caused envy and admiration from the inhabitants of the coastal community. It seems the author lives with his heroes within a mutual and dual life. He is a passionate fisherman and hunter himself, and possesses the life values of a hunter and a fisherman and their typical commitment to noble ideals and justice.

When a person is in a romantic mood, he is incapable of being false or cruel. The author departs from his hunting passions, from the dark ancestral spirits within the confines of his soul. With bitter resentment he recollects the last ecstatic cry of a snipe racing on sun beams on a clear August morning, a ruby drops on the delicate plumage of long-nosed lumps, still warm, or a beautiful wounded hawk whose look is full of horror and surprise.

The time for conservatory rehearsals arrives, and music takes possession of the young romantic man. He has become familiar with the composer’s intentions. How he can penetrate and pass the subtle shades of creative thought of the great dissemblers whose only recourse is within the souls of the listeners? Now they become his teachers, institutions and mentors. He seeks to penetrate deeper into the musical narrative in order to extract hints that transmit the thoughts of their creators. Often he reads a promise of something special in musical compositions, something inscrutable, some insane delight, embarrassing him, forcing to perceive the world through his artistic sense. Under the influence of communication with the great composer’s legacy, his sense of beauty continues to form. The world of images of outstanding musicians enriches his own artistic world. All this gives rise to the musical fabric of his prose with its special musical rhythm that captivates the reader. A looped back plot of his Elegy or Da capo in the first edition (Da Capo is a musical term in Italian, meaning from the beginning (literally from the head), is a composer directive to repeat the prior music) tells about love and creative work. These amazing soulful events excite agitation, dramatics and torment. Imbued with dramatism, the story of love and life is so different in outlook physic and lyric – StoryCorps (an American non-profit project whose mission is to record, preserve and share the stories of Americans from all backgrounds and beliefs). The Sixth Sense, according to the author, has been inspirational to bring forth a vague delight and a special scenic state of mind that can suddenly cause a departure from normal life and cause the perceiver to live quivering and full of love within the sounds of a musical instrument. These autobiographical stories provide the reader a unique opportunity to trace the genesis of the artist’s personality.

The first stories by Yuri Kholodov about musicians reveal their quarrelsome dispositions with harsh reality of egoistic absurdity. They often clash with life’s collisions, and they cannot overcome them. These are the heroes of autobiographical stories including A Chance Encounter, Romanov, Kirusha, stories about the unsuccessful fate of his colleagues – Strange people, Inessa. The motive behind creating a rift replete within external conditions of the interior existence of various people who are gifted with creative energy and acute sensitiveness is fairly obvious. It appears many times in the works of such masters as E.T.A. Hoffman (as well as the author, musician and writer), Ivan Bunin, and Vladimir Nabokov. The reality surrounding the heroes destroys their dream, their faith in goodness, and bright ideals.

As Yuri matures and begins to reach a high level of competence as an artist, he expands his circle of communication and begins to develop an ironic tone within his writings. The author combines a high transcendence of his soul and the ordinary everyday life which he finds both mystical and beautiful, and never does he show mediocrity or, in any way, vulgarity. The combination of the sublime and the mundane, the ideal and the real, in the thought of Boris Pasternak, is like major and minor in music, harmoniously for the writer. Stories including This string quartet, Quiet Music, A Conductor, Paris, Paris…, It’s okay! attract by comic touches when the author describes the characters and situations in life generated by customs and orders (ways and behaviors) of their environment. However, this misanthropy manifests an intimacy with his heroic characters, and his ironic tone is perceived by the reader with a smile of recognition. Yuri gives his characters a gentle humor, which is easy for him because he is endowed with a sense of proportion and balance. He avoids rigid satire, but at the same time, his penetrating gaze covers the range of actual human relationships and this ability manifests the truth about the times and the people living within these times. His commitment to reality does not allow him to enter a discussion of the socio-political events that occur or to show a mental asceticism leading to avoiding the issues that normally affect modern people.

Yuri has a great ability to create a special inner world in his heroes. He is especially focused on immigrants in some of his books that he wrote after he moved to the U.S. to be with his wife who worked in an American University, and where he continued his performing activities. They stand before us as life-like portraits, and the author does this in a very skillful manner. He creates various characters, like cheery Roy in The End of July in Salt Lake City who adapts himself to his new life keeping his independent personality. Author also creates a very humorous family of immigrants for the story Fine Rosemary. They perceive delicate psyche of wealthy and educated American inhabitants first with fear and distrust, and then with a humorous undertone. Requiem is a story about elderly residents compelled to live in homes for the poor. These characters remain in our memory because of the enduring depth and humanity of their experiences. This book was written with deep emotion as Yuri shared with the characters vivid memories of arduous life as an adult living in Soviet times. The heroines of the story In the backyard draw attention to the experience of starting a new life. The author transcends the primitive pastoral life he once knew, and his stories now involve the acute social problems of our time particularly in America. The next story Look here! provokes deep sympathy from the reader. The story’s about a successful businessman and city guide who is constantly burdened with worries about his foster children. He is warmly caressed by tourists from Odessa, and Yuri gives these characters a special earthy Odessa’s humor which captures the reader’s heart.

Within Yuri’s stories, there is always a subtext, which is invariably captured by the shrewd reader. He deals with the difficulty of hereditary intelligentsia, who doesn’t understand the requirements of business, and Yuri imbues these characters with excellent craftsmanship and has them penetrate into the minds of the readers, and he does this competently in the story A castle for a business diva. This hidden mockery of numerous tourism fanciers who, as noted by IvanTurgenev once in his letters From abroad, are not able to travel with use and sense, and as a prisoner in Dead Souls satisfied with the remark that in Vesyegonsk prison is cleaner, and Tsarevokokshaisk prison is much cleaner, in the same way our tourists can only say that the city of Frankfurt is bigger than Nuremberg, and Berlin is even much bigger. The same thing we find in the story of The Restless, although the heroine is sympathetic to the author and he participates willingly in her most difficult and ascetic life. This also is pernicious influence of money power and amenities to the artist transforming him in the pursuit of the benefits into a craftsman, and then leading him to a gradual degradation of his personality, in the story Strange people. In the story One Summer in Hydropark Yuri creates an allusion to the prolonged, dysfunctional illness that plagues Ukraine. In this story a talented professional of fishing craft is stricken by destroying internal ailment. Other stories are also poignant. In the story A Goner Yuri creates a documentary dedicated to the memory of his father who experienced the madness and starvation in the Nazi death camps and then the tragedy of forced immigration. His father somehow survived. Even in his old age when his memory lapses often occur, he still remembers the loss of human dignity which became trampled. He remains within a mental trauma that is apparently incurable, yet his insanity is a final refuge for a fading soul.

Devoting most of his life to elite chamber genre and brought up on classic examples of the quartet art - one of the absolute peaks of world music, Yuri Kholodov will always remain within his literary creativity, which vaguely can be defined as a classical style. He believes that dignity and spiritual values of the previous centuries should be preserved in contemporary art. He is aware, however, that the modern art is often penetrated with commerce or ideology. Vestigia semper adora (Latin) – Always be in awe of traces of the past.

Yuri’s prose is based on human principles of spirituality. This is contrasted against the lack of spirituality within our cruel world. But the redeeming grace that stays with those who have eyes to see is the overwhelming beauty that can be found if one is looking for it (The Artist, Where the Light Is, Houses and People). This creativity is the driving force that artists like Yuri strive to attain in order to seek perfection in their writing and in their works of art.

Yuliana Danilova

THE SIXTH SENSE

Under the scalpel of the art and nature

Our spirit cries and flesh breaks down

Giving the birth to our Sixth Sense organ.

N. Gumilev, 1921 (translated by Elena Mordovina)

A putana from next door who was, for us, boys, the object of admiration and worship, lived that peculiar, imagination-firing, mysterious life which both I and Kolyan wanted so much to look into, at least to steal a glimpse of it. But through the gap between always loosely closed shutters, we couldn’t distinguish what was happening in there, behind the thin curtains trembling at the touch of light shadows. In the evenings, we often hid under an elderberry bush and pulled a thread we had tied to a potato to knock on the shutter’s panel, and waited until the door burst open, and SHE walked onto the porch while throwing a shawl over her shoulders, wearing something transparent and foamy. Who is there? she will summon softly, pick the potato, throw it in a bush, Damn little bustards! And will dissolve into the pink light with laughter, having given us a sweet moment. You’ll just have a chance to touch her queenly breasts within your mind, to feel the flutter of wide hips and to complete the picture with what we have seen on Svetka, but it must have been something else with HER because adult men were always hovering at her porch like flies.

It was Kolyan, my kindergarten-friend in those days, who decided it would be fun to play choo-choo with Svetka. We crawled behind her along the top of a wide stone wall on all fours and pushed each other struggling to occupy the sacred place where the movements of all her secret bodily places were visible through a small tear. Maybe it was because her mother was the very same putana who grabbed our attention so much, she loved this game. When one day our imaginary train was derailed on the curve with shouting Shameless! I’ll tweak your ears!, Svetka ran with us to the ravine behind her house, and there, squatting down in the grass, sweet-scented from the heat and spreading her raw-boned scratched knees apart, allowed us not only to watch, but to touch her swellings, thereby we blushed to the tips of our ears and tried not to look into each other’s eyes.

Many things are erased from a person’s memory with the passing of time, but that particular moment will remain forever. And let me tell some more.

In 1943, the war swept through our town. I remember bare-chested cheerful German soldiers washing horses in our yard. Gunther, the youngest of them, handed out sweets to children who gathered around and invited them to ride with him around the town. After a horse was hitched up to a cart, Svetka was the first to climb up and into the cart as the other children followed. I remember shocked grandmothers and mothers anxiously running up to the cart to take the children home. Svetka and some older boys remained sitting as they swung their legs joyfully and stuffed pieces of chocolate into their mouths. I will never forget how much I wanted to go with them!

The adults in our town were fearful of most everything in those days. They kept watch over us, refused to allow us to leave the yard, constantly whispering something to one other. Svetka was no longer a play fellow, and the beast, awakened in me, still blind, but hungry, tossed within and woke me up at night.

Gunther, in a natty officer’s uniform, brought a new kindergarten teacher. He introduced her, Nature will have its course – our Frau Glasha is now yours.

He laughed snapping his fingers and even kissed her hand. Everybody was happy. No one liked the former kindergarten teacher, we were afraid of her. But Frau Glasha for the first few days tried to be strict with us as well and explained to us about our dear God, about angels and the Virgin Mary living in heaven and taking away all the naughty children there for punishment. After snacking, we took our afternoon nap, I remember, I pretended to be sleeping and watched the clouds through the squint of my left eye, how they drifted by crossing the wide window, I perceived each of them as angel’s wings, or a child’s leg, or the fearsome face of God. And between narrow rows of our beds, protecting our sleep, drifted Glasha, all soft and fragrant, and I froze in fear of being caught in disobedience when she suddenly leaned over to fix a blanket or pillow, and her hand touched my cheek.

Kolyan at once mused that she thought up everything about God. No one there puts children in the corner when they are misbehaving – there are no corners in heaven. And those who get there – just play football with angels most of the day and eat as much French bread as they desire. He always knew it. Even swore to make me believe, Then I’ll never see my mom and dad again! But nobody except him ever knew that Frau Glasha wore nothing under her skirt. Nothing at all? I asked, having a quick sense that the germ of filial love for her, just hatched in my heart, faded away. Wanna bet?! He got me cornered. A slingshot…

Something was swelling, growling and meowing in my stomach. Cowering under a sheet, I waited as my heart fluttered when that fermentation would subside. For the third time Glasha approached my bed clinging with the hem of her long skirt to the arms and legs sticking out in the narrow gangway. I knew that soon she would sit on the chair near the door, and then nothing would work out. It wasn’t that I was so much worried about the slingshot, but I simply did not want to appear a coward in Kolyan’s eyes. The moment when the rustling wave of her dress touched my hand, I finally decided and ducked my head right under her skirt. I probably would have seen something there if the mattress lying on slippery springs hadn’t fallen off on the floor along with me.

Everybody hit the pillows! ordered Glasha as she returned me to my bed. She did not laugh, like everyone around, she just stroked my head while muttering some tender words, which made things even worse, and I became terribly ashamed and felt like crying. I had been at odds with Kolyan for a long time then.

Once, I remember, Gunter came to us before we took our naps. He arrived with two soldiers. They dismissed us and sent us home, and in the evening the neighbors gathered in the yard and began talking in a low voice among them. They didn’t break up for a long time while watching how our kindergarten was gaily burning behind the stone wall where Kolyan and I had recently driven our choo-choo train. The last wall, falling, covered the sandbox, the wooden earless rocking horses and a leaky rubber ball we used to play football…

Frau Glasha. Gunther. How long ago was that? Night bombings. A narrow trench in the courtyard where we had almost no air to breathe. We used to find parachutes from flares in the grass, and shiny, bizarre metal splinters scattered everywhere. Moreover, we kept them for a long time as a reliable exchange fund. The wave of war began to recede leaving much more than that. Those of us who were older ran two blocks to the main street, where in the burnt boxes of houses they found patrons and whole shells, hiding all those not children’s toys in the ravine and staging real fireworks in the evening. They did not admit us, but once Kolyan found a large piece of sulfur that he threw into the fire which burned for a very long time illuminating everyone who sat around the fire, and I remember it cast unearthly light which appeared almost frightening to our young eyes.

It was rumored that on every lamppost of Central Street a German officer was hung, and that they had been hanging there for several days so everyone could see. My mother refused to go, and I appreciated it so much. My greatest fear was that Gunter could be among those officers. I wanted to believe that he had managed to escape and took Glasha with him.

I attended music classes in my fifth grade when the boxes of ruined houses still enriched the streets of our city, and every time my way to school ran past those ruins gaping with their empty eye sockets. Once, having happened along to one of those houses out of curiosity, I was struck by what I saw: from a plastered wall, all scorched black, with unbraided hair and the eyes depressed modestly, Glasha smiled at me, as if she was alive. I have kept this vision of her in my eyes even now, though many decades have elapsed. She was squatting and seemed not to notice that her skirt had ridden up, and in a deep alignment of her bared knees there was seen a dark curtain weaved of rings, and behind it – I could not believe it – was a slightly open pink miracle. Later, when I came to myself a little, I distinguished that the picture affected me so much was not Glasha, and that there were some other art pieces of that kind on the wall - a whole gallery of not as that bright and perfect, but even more indecent pictures. Every time afterwards, returning from my lesson, I entered the familiar wreck with secret trembling and immersed in sweet contemplation of these masterpieces forgetting everything. I don’t know how long it would have lasted, if one day during my next visit I hadn’t met their creator there. Having pressed his nudie against a rusty barrel in the corner of the room, drunkenly lurching, he awkwardly fitted his rod into a woman’s broad rump incredibly enlarged into a frightening dimension.

Here is the music! He shouted gaily holding his slipped pants and waved to me. Come on, kid, don’t be afraid, play something cheerful for us.

In fear, experiencing burning shame and disgust, I jumped out and ran, but after some time, passing that place again, I felt that something unknown painfully pushed and pulled me there. In a school exercise book hidden behind a couch that I didn’t even show to Kolyan, I sometimes tried to depict such scenes, but the primitivism of those drawings only strengthened the nagging hunger of incomprehensible, being rapidly growing in me and already making its way out with the coarse bristles of hair on my face or with the pluck of bass notes of the voice when I sang in the school choir. Plunging into a painful state of trance, I felt like crossing into another dimension where the lines become plastic while acquiring an erotic charge, and even, for example, a simple plum or an apple are perceived by you as a cast of secret female forms. In constant anticipation of something unattainable, unable to get rid of screaming power of the flesh, I hated those rough adult guys who seemed to me to have never experienced such a debilitating sense of fear and shame. Sometimes you drag yourself to school with the instrument under your arm, and HE goes in front of you, with his bulldog gait, with folds of fat on his neck and a red blaze upon his head. And something forces me to pick up a stone and flatten his skull.

Somebody will be lucky. Someday Glasha, Zina, or Zoe, knowing about your suffering, out of pity or just tempting to try unfretted wine, will pass with you the initial steps in this forbidden game. I was not so lucky probably because Zoe, the first one who showed me her feminine conciliate, lived far away from us in a village. She often came from