The Russian tradition of the yurodivy, the holy fool who speaks truth disguised as madness or nonsense, offers a role under tyranny: by appearing foolish or harmless, one gains license to voice criticism that would destroy an ordinary person. The fool's protection lies precisely in not being taken seriously as a political actor.
The memoir asserts that music composed under Stalinist terror contains deliberate concealed content: ostensibly patriotic or triumphant works are claimed to encode mourning, protest, or irony audible to those who know to listen. On this account a triumphant finale can be a forced celebration, its joy coerced rather than felt, so the public surface and the private meaning diverge.
The narrator describes living through the Stalinist terror by keeping a small bag ready and waiting by the elevator at night, so that an arrest would not wake or endanger his family. He recounts the 1936 Pravda attack 'Muddle Instead of Music' against his opera, after which performances and commissions evaporated and acquaintances crossed the street to avoid him.
The text presents remembering not as neutral record but as a deliberate posthumous reckoning, the survivor's chance to name informers, cowards, and executioners whom silence had protected while they lived. Through this lens a memoir becomes an instrument of delayed justice, its bitterness and score-settling treated as its point rather than a flaw.