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Yuri Egorov – The red line of art

2023-03-31 19:09:16Pikëpamje SHKRUAR NGA MONIKA STAFA
Yuri Egorov – The red line of art
Monica Staff

By Monika Stafa

I have always been drawn to historical art. Maybe that's why among them I tried to recognize phenomena, characters, places which I later liked or not. Maybe because they helped me see the world better today. But also that tomorrow.

History used to overwhelm me with as many wars a week as I had to learn. But it seems it was precisely this mess that attracted me the most. Some small, seemingly insignificant events leading me to the event itself, the big one.

When I think about the different nations that participated in World War I and II, I often wonder, who fought in the Cold War?

What happened between the superpowers who emerged victorious from the war?

Why didn't they go to silent war again not long after?

Why is there still war today?

The Cold War was not a real war. Unlike the two world wars, there were no physical battles between the forces. Instead, it was a tense competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, along with their respective allies.

Both of these two superpowers wanted to be the most powerful nation in the world, developing and prospering their country, while simultaneously trying to reduce the power and influence of others.

Washington and Moscow competed in many areas, but especially for money and natural resources.

For allies too. For weapon technology, influence or prestige. For space exploration or ideas.

For art too.

Between the USA and the Soviet Union there was a competition that extended in all fields but in music both superpowers seemed to return the favors to each other by excluding the smaller countries from their struggle for hegemony.

When Bartok went to New York, no one reached out to him. He came from Hungary. Bartoku died in 1945 in a hospital for the poor.

Two years later, in New York, Shostakovich triumphed. To him, the musician of the enemy, the Americans were ready to bow with reverence.

So beautiful was this game between the two superpowers that when Van Cliburn, the American pianist, won the first Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958, the Chairman of the Jury had to first ask Khrushchev if this time the honor should go to the American.

And why was a superpower like the USA brought to its knees to ask the other?

Only a year had passed since the launch of the first Sputnik. Therefore, the American aptly called him that the advantage of the Soviet Union was so great that he could ask him generously if the American pianist was really the best.

Yes of course.

Then give the prize, said Khrushchev.

New winds were blowing across the oceans.

These art stories which seem to attract you for the artistic emotion and the taste they cultivate, are parts that when you follow them in movies or read them in novels, for many, it can end there. But really the event has just started.

Van Cliburn became a hero to youth around the world. For the eastern side of it necessarily. He sympathized with freedom, the modern world and, thanks to his youthful looks, Elvis Presley's America.

Perhaps this was also the reason why another talented Russian artist, Yuri Egorov, who had already escaped from BS, wanted to meet him.

.....

Yuri Egorov, 22, was a Soviet pianist who defected from the Soviet Union to the West in the spring of 1976.

In Rome, he had sought refuge in Amsterdam, not knowing what awaited him, but with the persistent thought that he would enjoy his freedom to the end.

Since you had visited the city of tulips once, you slept and woke up every morning with its familiar sounds; the engines of boats in the canals, the rustling of leaves in the hotel windows, the tinkling of cyclists' bells or the spinning wheels of trams.

Jura, Jurka, Juroshka, Jurinka or simply Juri are described as warm-hearted, cheerful, honest, crazy, shy, and sometimes desperate, rebellious, scared or even evil.

We know that no matter how hard we try to say we live in a free world, it's not true. Freedom is also the escape on the run, not only political. In the most common case without consequence it gives you extreme excitement.

Especially when words are followed by action, run away.

When the miles slide quickly beneath you and you believe you can fly to the moon. Jury probably experienced such a feeling.

He had to go. In Moscow he felt persecuted. It was the time of the informants.

He wanted to announce out loud that he had come to the tip of his nose by pretending to be someone he wasn't. Until one day your patience runs out and another boy, a less talented pianist, confesses to you. But we know that envy drives you to behave inappropriately. And his friend had shot an informant.

When he lived in Kazan, he was convinced that everything beyond Russia was a wasteland. No nation in the world had the immeasurable power, influence, and scope of his country. Only migratory birds know where Russia ends, Chekhov wrote.

When they invited him to Amsterdam one Saturday, he realized that in the West his homosexuality would not bother anyone. From that evening, he always carried a business card with a German-sounding name in gold letters. He kept it like a talisman regardless of the pants he wore.

He had realized that that piece of paper, little bigger than a matchbox, would be his ticket to the West. Within an hour of his escape, he found himself on the outskirts of Rome locked in a cell of an old abbey close to God but far from his family.

….

For the first time the term "Cold War" was used in 1947. Although it sounded contradictory in its meaning, this term meant the struggle for life and death between the USA and the Soviet Union; between capitalism and communism.

Each of the two superpowers was well aware that they were engaged in a long-term war. Convinced that the superiority of the social, political and economic systems they had chosen would ultimately bring victory or defeat only through competition. And only by peaceful means.

But he had done well the big ones their accounts? Sent to prison for life and others who ran away? Rights that were violated in one system to find themselves in the other?

With honor in art that they did to each other while suffering and tyranny was unparalleled on one side of the ocean?

Doesn't this all seem like a game to you?

……

Yuri Egorov became famous in a recital at Alice Tully Hall, USA in 1978. This debut secured his career. This guy would be nothing if he wasn't so romantic, critics said about him. He died of AIDS in 1988. And he was only 33 years old.

His friend Jan Brokken with his novel "In the pianist's house" not only writes about the unknowns of the life of an escaped artist but also about two worlds that separate but suddenly come together for one reason only; on the red line of art.


Në përputhje me standarded JTI

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