The memory of this homeland was not yet familiar.

Sergei Rachmaninoff had never been here before.

And yet he must have seen something familiar, something that made him say: "It's good here" - as in one of his songs that sings of the silence in which "only God and I" are "and you, my dream" .

Jan Brachmann

Editor in the features section.

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Was it the view of the Pilatus massif, which is nowhere as mighty as it is here, from Hertenstein, across Lake Lucerne? A majesty directed towards the sky, as it were the stretched expanse of the land around his lost estate Ivanovka? “I'm buying,” he is supposed to have said quietly, on that September day in 1930, when he was standing on the property: twenty thousand square meters of land right on the lake shore, at the foot of the Rigi massif.

Thirteen years of exile lay behind him, his wife and two daughters after they had left Russia in December 1917, and they became madly clairvoyant that they would no longer have a future under the new regime. They had lived in the United States since November 1918, spending the summers partly in Germany and partly in France when he, the highest-paid pianist in the world, did not have to give concerts. With the exception of the fourth piano concerto, Rachmaninoff never came back to compose. Exile had become a burden for him: “It is the awareness that I have no home. The whole world is open to me, only one place is closed to me, and that is my own country, Russia, ”he confessed to the Musical Times.

Unlike Sergei Prokofiev, who fell for Stalin because he was homesick, Rachmaninoff did not bow down. The Bolsheviks remained criminals for him. Four months after the sales contract in Switzerland, he signed a protest note in the New York Times on January 15, 1931 against the glorification of the Soviet Union by intellectuals like Rabindranath Tagore, who, in his opinion, had let themselves be harnessed to the cart of propaganda to “the Horrors of the Soviet State ”to cover up. For Rachmaninoff, "the whole of Russia was under the terrible yoke of a numerically diminishing but perfectly organized gang of communists" who "use the means of red terror to impose their misconduct on the Russian people." On March 20, 1931, in the New York Herald Tribune, he joined the call of 210 Russians in exile,who called on the American government to a strict trade boycott against the USSR, just at the time when George Bernard Shaw was mutating into the Kremlin nightingale and praising the Stalinist cleansing policy.

There were few artists of this incorruptibility and spirit of resistance like Rachmaninoff.

Long before Anne Applebaum's books, he tried to tell the West the truth about Stalin, but the West refused to hear it.

The price of this uncompromising attitude was the drying up of creativity.

Chekhov's close friend, the expert in orthodox bell polyphony, the passionate farmer (who was one of the first to introduce the tractor in Russia) could not write without reference to Russia.

But: “Composition is an essential part of my existence like breathing and eating.

It is one of the necessary functions in life, ”he confessed in his last press interview at the end of 1941.

He must have almost suffocated if he had barely been able to create music after 1917.