“Pictures in an Unheated Room”
By the time Nikolai Potakov died on a local train between St. Petersburg and Moscow in 1954, his masterpiece had never been performed, and his neighbors were grateful for it. They had heard it enough—filtered through thin walls and played nightly on a balalaika whose strings had seen better czars. For nearly half a century, Potakov had been arranging Pictures at an Exhibition for an instrument he did not own and, some might argue, did not fully understand.
Born in 1881 in a provincial town outside Tula, Potakov entered the Moscow Conservatory at the age of seventeen, when the Tsar still reigned and music students wore stiff collars and hid any revolutionary thoughts under them. His classmates went on to compose symphonies, ballet scores, or at least film music for the emerging Soviet newsreel industry. Potakov’s dream was stranger and smaller: to arrange Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition for the accordion, an instrument he had fallen for during a family trip to Hungary in 1895. “It seemed to breathe,” he wrote in a surviving letter. “Not like a violin sighing, but like an animal—an obedient one, with lungs of leather.”
A Life in Minor Keys
Graduating in 1901 with modest distinction, Potakov found no patronage and little patience from colleagues who regarded the accordion as a village toy. He eked out a living teaching violin and harmonica in St. Petersburg—two instruments, as one student later wrote, that “shared his melancholy.” The Revolution came and went, but Potakov’s fortunes did not. By the late 1920s, he was living in a cold-water flat, where he began sketching his “Accordion Pictures.”
Lacking the instrument itself, he practiced on a balsa-wood mock-accordion of his own making. Each key was hand-painted; each button was labeled in pencil. The neighbors mistook it for a child’s toy until he began producing wheezing imitation sounds through pursed lips—an early and unfortunate attempt at realism. His landlord once complained that “the noises resembled the death of a goat in C major.”
The Long Wait for Copyright to Die
Potakov’s other great obstacle was copyright law. Mussorgsky had died in 1881, but Ravel’s famous orchestration, made in 1922, remained under copyright until 1952—Mussorgsky’s death plus seventy years, under the extended Soviet rule mirroring French statutes. Potakov’s dream, it seemed, was always one bureaucrat away from illegality. “He spoke of 1952,” a neighbor recalled, “as other men speak of spring.”
When the year finally arrived, Potakov—aged seventy-one and arthritic but elated—used savings from decades of frugality and a few lucky Moscow Lottery wins to hire a copyright lawyer. The lawyer, bemused but not ungrateful, drafted the paperwork for a premiere that never happened. Potakov titled the work Kartiny na vystavke: versiya dlya garmon’ (“Pictures at an Exhibition: Version for Accordion”) and solemnly dedicated it to Joseph Stalin, reasoning that the leader, like the accordion, was capable of both thunder and tenderness.
Timing, the Enemy of All Artists
Fate, however, prefers irony to justice. Stalin died in March 1953. Almost overnight, dedications to him became the artistic equivalent of radioactive waste—dangerous to touch, best quietly buried. Potakov’s manuscript, submitted to a cultural committee, was “neither rejected nor acknowledged,” which in Soviet parlance was the same as vanishing. His lawyer stopped answering letters; his students stopped dropping by. He retreated to his balalaika, on which he continued to rehearse his accordion parts—a tragic and comic mismatch, like a violinist bowing through a tuba solo.
By 1954, Potakov’s health was failing. He was last seen boarding the morning train to Moscow, carrying a battered portfolio tied with twine. Fellow passengers later remembered “a quiet old man humming to himself, perhaps counting beats.” Somewhere between stations, he slipped away. The manuscript was recovered from his satchel, its title page spotted with tea stains and optimism.
The Coda
Potakov’s Accordion Pictures have never been performed, though rumors persist that one excerpt—the Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks—was arranged for school ensemble in the 1960s under another name. Musicologists remain divided on whether Potakov was a visionary or merely a man with too much time and not enough instruments. Yet there is something hauntingly modern about his quixotic devotion: an artist trapped between law, politics, and the stubborn love of sound.
He never heard his piece on the accordion, true—but perhaps, as one sympathetic critic wrote decades later, “he heard it in his head so long that it became more real there than in the air.”
__________
prompt
Write a profile of little-known Russian composer Nikolai Potakov (1881-1954). Potakov graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1901, with the dream of arranging Mussourgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition for the accordian, which he fell in love with on a family trip to Hungary in 1895. However, he learns that Pictures at an Exhibition is under copyright to 1952 (Mussourgsky's death plus 70 years). He struggles as a teacher of violin and harmonica in St Petersburg from 1905 to 1952, when he is about 71. Working on his orchestration of the work, for accordian, he has only a well-worn balalaika to practice with. He supplements this with a mock accordian made of balsa wood, to work out the fingering. Through frugality, and a few small but lucky bets on the Moscow Lottery, he has enough rubles to hire a copyright lawyer in early 1953, his piece dedicated to Stalin. Unfortunately, Stalin dies in 1953, and the subsequent battle for succession among Kruschev and others throws artworks dedicated to Stalin into an artistic no-man's land. Potakov dies in 1954, on a local train from St Petersburg to Moscow. He never heard his piece performed on the accordian, as he drived, and he was pretty sick of hearing it on the balalaika, as were his apartment building neighbors. Write a New Yorker style profile of the main and the musical saga, adding details that are german yet interesting and amusing.
