Although his recordings are now more widely available than ever before, “Slava” Richter himself still seems a mysterious, ambiguous figure of modern music. The hidden aspects of his personality and the reason why he remained a remote figure in modern musical history became clear only after his death, when friends came forward to state what had been whispered for so long: Richter suffered untold miseries in his private life and public career because he was gay, at a time when the Soviet regime considered homosexuality a punishable crime.

Noted piano teacher Paul Moor, who had known Richter for decades, wrote a memorial article for Piano & Keyboard magazine last year in which he recalled the pianist’s battles with depression. In 1958, at the time of Richter’s first trips to the West, he told Moor that he sometimes went months without touching a piano, but could not explain why. Moor writes: “The life which Soviet law, almost as draconian as in Nazi Germany, forced him to lead resulted in Stygian cyclic depressions that literally crippled him, pushing him perilously in the direction of suicide. The Soviet musical world regarded Slava’s homosexuality as common knowledge, and had no problems with it. But those laws deprived him, all his life, of really fulfilled personal happiness.”

Instead of living permanently with a male lover, Richter spent most of his adult life with soprano Nina Dorliak, who was an understanding mother figure as well as a steady friend to him. Dorliak, his elder by some 10 years, provided the stabilizing force and social front that Richter needed. When he began to travel abroad in the late 1950s, he did form romantic attachments, but even these had to be kept secret, as the freedom to travel — even for a virtuoso such as himself — depended on the approval of Soviet authorities. Despite the obvious political pressures, Richter did protest in his own way, refusing to perform in Moscow in the late ’50s.

In 1986, Richter toured throughout Russia for more than six months, playing in remote provincial towns of Siberia, some of which had not seen a pianist for generations. One wonders just how much of this obsessive performing in interior regions was motivated by Richter’s permanent sense of personal exile in his own homeland. Desperately clinging to a land that officially rejected his emotional and sexual identity was his personal alternative to the choice of exile made by other Russian gay artists like Rudolf Nureyev. Not long after the Russian tour, Richter had a total physical breakdown, necessitating a quadruple bypass that permanently weakened him.

More understanding of Richter’s emotional dilemma may be gained by
referring to certain recently released archival performances, like his 1953 reading of the Tchaikovsky Concerto accompanied by the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra led by Karel Ancerl (Supraphon/Qualiton).
This somber reading is one of many Tchaikovsky concertos recorded by Richter that leave the listener with the odd feeling that he never quite identified with the music of the most famously gay Russian composer. By contrast, Richter’s frequent musical collaborations with Benjamin
Britten suggested an element of complicity, and a recent CD
reissue of Britten and Richter at Aldeburgh, England, playing a program of Schubert’s “Grand Duo” and Mozart’s “Sonata K.521 for Four Hands” (on Music and Arts 721, distributed by Koch) reveals something of this shared emotional discourse. Competing massive CD sets from BMG/Melodiya and Philips also spotlight the pianist’s great achievements.

BMG/Melodiya’s massive CD set of Richter’s greatest achievements includes his performance of the usually derided Saint-Saens concerto No. 5, accompanied by the Moscow Youth Orchestra led by Kiril Kondrashin. Whereas the 19th century gay Frenchman’s works are too often presented as kitsch and camp, Richter’s reading is sober, serious and human, inarguably real music performed with sobriety and a direct approach — by refusing to trivialize Saint-Saens, the pianist also refused to trivialize himself. Likewise, Richter’s identification with the song settings by Hugo Wolf to poems by Eduard Morike, a 19th century gay German pastor, may also be linked to his own emotional conflicts. (Richter accompanied baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in 1973 concerts, released on DG, and a fuller program of other Morike/Wolf songs from the same year is on Music and Arts.)

Richter will likely remain for all time one of the definitive performers of Prokofiev (as on DG 15119, where he unforgettably plays Prokofiev’s Fifth Concerto) and Schumann (on DG 47440, he likewise plays the Schumann Concerto). A multitude of other composers, from Grieg (a riveting concerto on EMI 67197) to Debussy (on Orfeo d’or 491 981), not to mention Beethoven and Scriabin, immediately leap to mind whenever Richter’s name is mentioned. To these previously known solid contributions may now be added the knowledge that his achievement came in the face of severe homophobia in Soviet Russia. Some of the great recordings made by one of the century’s mightiest musicians could not help but reflect that experience.

Last August I walked through the political environment out of which Kansi sprang when I went to Pakistan to investigate his life and eventual capture by a team of FBI, CIA and Pakistani commandos. Bumping along a stretch of broken concrete in the broiling heat of central Pakistan, my driver, Ahmad, told me a story.

“You know how Pakistan was listed No. 2 in world corruption last year?” he asked. On the horizon, like a runaway prop from “A Passage to India,” the half-century-old Lahore-Karachi Express chugged by, its passengers hanging from the windows and riding on the roofs.

Yes, I said to Ahmad, I’d heard something about that. Nigeria was the worst, right?

“Actually,” Ahmad said, his eyes dancing and black mustache twitching, “Pakistan was No. 1, but we bribed the Nigerians to go first.”

When they’re not joking, Pakistanis blame the U.S. for this rather dubious achievement. Corruption, along with a flood of heroin and AK-47s, they say, are Pakistan’s principal rewards for collaborating with Washington during the Afghanistan war of 1980-89, when the CIA equipped and quarterbacked a coalition of Islamic fundamentalist rebel groups against the Soviet Red Army. With the Red Army long gone, radical Islam of the most extreme kind has triumphed in Afghanistan. And it is becoming an increasing factor in Pakistani cities, where rival Sunni and Shia extremists battle it out with leftover AK-47s.

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At the same time-anti-government, and anti-American, mullahs are raising the decibel level in the mosques, much like the movement that toppled the Shah of Iran almost 20 years ago. It was out of this maelstrom, rather than an organized terrorist cell, that last week’s deadly attack on four American oil company workers in Karachi most likely came. The murders were claimed by something calling itself the Aimal Secret Committee, in honor of the defendant in Virginia. But intelligence sources know of no such organized group and believe it was almost certainly the work of an ad-hoc gang of Muslim hotheads cashing in on Kansi’s conviction.

As a result of the murders, the Virginia jury was sequestered under armed guard, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright pointedly pressed the Pakistani government to capture the killers — without any evident success so far — and the State Department has issued a traveler’s advisory warning American tourists, business people and soldiers to beware of
“random acts of anti-American violence, such as drive-by shootings, kidnappings or bombings.”

The phrase “random acts” is accurate. Organized international terrorism has been in steep decline over the past decade. Last year there were 296 terrorist attacks, down from 665 in 1987, according to Larry Johnson, a former State Department terrorism specialist. The number of terrorist groups operating now is about half of that in the mid-1980s, down to 40 or so. Four groups are responsible for 90 percent of the casualties — Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, Hamas, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah and Egyptian fundamentalists, who murdered more than 60 foreign tourists and Egyptians last Monday.

“The threat of terrorism is so amorphous and so difficult to pin down that it’s easy to exaggerate it,” says Johnson. There is a terrorist threat to America, Johnson says. It’s just not coming from terrorist groups so much as freelance gunmen like Kansi, or ad hoc groups like the one Ramzi Yousef patched together to bomb the World Trade Center in Manhattan.

Kansi grew up in Quetta, the southern base for the CIA’s war in Afghanistan, and may even have been recruited by the CIA at some point, according to retired Gen. Hamid Gul, Pakistan’s former spy chief, whom I interviewed in Rawalpindi last summer. Kansi has said he was motivated by America’s enmity toward Islam, but
Gul suggested Kansi might have had a personal motive in attacking CIA employees. The CIA flatly denied any association with Kansi.

While the CIA, FBI and Pentagon have recently turned their attention — and millions of dollars — to the threat of state-sponsored nuclear, chemical and biological terrorism, Johnson considers lone actors like Kansi a more lethal threat to American security.

“To an extent that it’s an act of personal vengeance,” Johnson said of Kansi’s assault, “it’s even more dangerous. It de-links politics and violence, and there’s no telling what they’ll do, and no limits on what they’ll do.”

Johnson compares Kansi to American anarchists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — little men who made big statements with guns and bombs. “Politics imposes restraints, because the ultimate goal is to be in control,” Johnson said. “Kansi didn’t care about that … It’s sort of an old form of anarchism.”

And nearly impossible to deter or prevent. Current thinking in counter-terrorism circles is that rewards are the most effective tools to catch fugitives — after the fact. More than $3 million was paid out to snitches and Pakistani officials to get Kansi, according to reports.

Saddam Hussein or Iran’s theocrats, on the other hand, are loathe to sponsor terrorist attacks on U.S. soil that can be traced to them, according to most terrorism specialists. As one former CIA man put it to me, “They’ve got addresses in Baghdad and Tehran where we can hit back.” Not so the wandering man with a grudge.

The teeming slums of Pakistan, like the refugee camps of Gaza or the tenements of Cairo, are breeding grounds for future Aimal Kansis. Just after dawn last August I was driving out of Lahore, capital of the old Punjab. Outside my window scores of families in rags were awakening in the dust and dirt of the city’s parks to another bleak day of hustling for food and water. I turned to Ahmad and asked whether militant Islam held much of an attraction for these homeless, hungry people.

“When the mullahs give their speeches,” Ahmad said, “they show up and listen. They nod their heads and sometimes yell, ‘Death to America!’ with everybody else. But most of them just go home afterward.”

Then his brown eyes fixed on me, seriously. “But Aimal Kansi, you know, he didn’t just go home. And there are many more like him these days. Many more.”

Up above the fast-dissipating fog, the still, steady solstice sky was cloudless, suffused with a light as benign as a saint’s visage. Why not improvise a bit, I thought? According to my atlas, there was another route I could follow that ran parallel to the main highway. When I reached the intersection outside of Velsk, I swung the Niva away from my all-Soviet route, into country I wanted to sample rather than skirt.

Never before in Russia had I experienced this freedom to roam, to turn down a road with careless rather than carefully studied intentions. I had no appointments to keep. Nor was there anyone shadowing me, taking careful note of where I chose to stop and start.

Here in the backwoods of the Arkhangelsk oblast, the forlorn scars of the Soviet era were few and far between. Seventy-five turbulent years had glided by, during which these villages barely caught the eye of the notoriously intrusive Communist Party of the Soviet Union. There were no lamentably ruined factories, no maudlin Lenin statues, no long-idle construction sites littered with broken pipes and cracked cinder block. Where there was decay, it was of a graceful, nostalgic sort, like that of a barn bent over with advancing years: the pardonable type of rural disrepair that, in whatever country, has existed in the past, exists today, and will always exist in the future.

Brightly painted cottages lined the road, along with two-story log houses weathered to the color of charcoal. Fathers split firewood, while sons flew handmade kites; mothers and daughters, their faces wrapped in flowered head scarves, strolled hand in hand. Goats and cows, dogs and cats, populated every yard, every field. Here was the preindustrial, premodern Russia that, however diminished, still filled the soul of this great country with its unenlightened, unromantic, undemocratic — yet undeniably rich and bountiful — outlook.

Even a mere passerby could feel the ancient rhythm of these places: a song of simple means, modest horizons, and a basso profundo inertia that was as immutable as a boulder at the bottom of a river. It was a folk theme made up in equal parts of exuberance, fatalism, equivocation, anarchy.

Village emotions might run high over where a cow was pastured, or how the communal vegetable plots were distributed. Yet no one was in a hurry to raise their voice, to pound a table, to make speeches over something as inherently ephemeral as politics. Therein lay the reason the Russian peasant so frustrated anyone harboring the mad ambition of remaking Russian society, whether misguided Bolshevik or naive promoter of Western capitalism. This Russia was virtually impervious to revolution; it could be ravished and abused, but not remade.

Perhaps the roads were just another reflection of this convoluted mental topography. The pavement shifted from asphalt to concrete, from concrete to hard gravel, then back to asphalt. A few kilometers later, at a clearing in the forest adorned by a long-abandoned rusty steamroller, the highway leapt back down the evolutionary scale to unimproved mud. A cut straight ahead through the trees hinted at wilted human ambition, but otherwise all signs of twentieth-century engineering had petered out. The way, black and glistening, slipped off the manmade grade toward a marshy flat.

Within minutes the Niva was drenched in ooze, not just across the grill and along the doors but all the way up and over its rooftop. Plowing blindly through mudholes the length of bowling alleys, I was never entirely certain I would emerge back into the sunlight at the other end. The faster I accelerated into the liquid stretches, the more violently the jeep was thrown about, with each rough spot spawning its own hurricane of muck and hurtling chassis.

I forged ahead like this for some time before checking the odometer. I had managed a mere fifteen kilometers. On a nearby rise, I spotted a dilapidated wooden church. I drove up to it and turned off the ignition, intending to give myself and my machine a rest while I sized up the situation.

Most of the wooden churches built before the revolution have been lost. Except for a handful that have been moved to museums, the majority succumbed over the years to a combination of neglect, fire and — most tragically — willful destruction. Here, on this knoll, I had happened upon one of the few survivors.

The church was a pint-sized affair, as humble as a worn-out shoe. Yet it mimicked, in microcosm, the conventions of all Orthodox churches. There was the inevitable belfry — before the Bolsheviks, bells were almost a defining feature of Russian faith and identity — and a tiny cupola mounted on a steeple that might have more plausibly topped a doll house. I walked off the length of the church — three lancet windows, twelve paces. Batches of wild yellow violets decorated grass as verdant as Eire.

An elderly man, poking his cane into the soft ground, hobbled up. “So you’re interested in the church?” he asked. “Someone came here three years ago and took pictures, too.” He invited me into his house, a hundred yards back down the hill, for a salad of green onions and sour cream and a steaming pot of tea. He and his wife, a bulldozer-faced old woman with the unsettling habit of belching at the end of her sentences, had lived there together for their entire married lives. She showed me the back room where she was born, on the day the Tsar abdicated in 1917. “Oh, people used to come to the church,” she recalled. “But not anymore. The Reds took away the bells and all the icons. First the church died, then the village. Collectivization, they called it. We’re the only ones left now, and after we’ve come to an end, there won’t be anyone to look after it.”

They expressed more wonderment at my travel plans than at my nationality. To them, America was as remote as Uranus, utterly unattached to their world. The road at the bottom of their hill was another matter. “You should know better than to try to drive this way,” the old lady scolded, “especially now, during the summer.” Her husband, too, looked askance at me. “You have to go when the weather is right,” he emphasized. I looked through their lace curtains at the dizzyingly sunny fields bursting with chloroplastic life, and beyond, to the openpalmed midsummer sky. When the weather was right?

Suddenly the totality of my miscalculation swept over me, and I burst out laughing. My host and hostess joined in, the old man pounding his cane for emphasis against the painted floor beams. “You mean, during the winter, don’t you?” I gasped out. “Yes, yes, after the frost, only after the frost begins,” replied the man. From the top of their hill, my stupidity must have seemed astounding. The woman’s eyes filled with tears of hilarity. I could not catch everything that gurgled out in her thick peasant brogue, but I did make out her giggling “Not through the mud! Not through the gryaz!” repeated over and over. Yes, it was true. Around here, it was snow and ice that made the roads passable, not the tarlike summer slush.

A bit wiser, I was back on the main highway the following day. My rendezvous in Arkhangelsk with Volodiya and his jazz friends loomed nearer; I only had so much time to sniff about the countryside.

With each kilometer, the landscape, the sky, the human spaces became ever more elemental, ever less trampled by the hooves of our fast-galloping era. Even where the earth had been mauled by one or another modern enthusiasm, the unhurried, unheeding configuration of life in old Russia promised its own brand of redemption, the longstanding, outlasting kind of salvation that marks its way, year after year, in frost, in mud, in flowers.

Consider the many lives of the Siski Monastery, the St. Anthony Monastery on the River Sia. For half a millennium an outpost of piety and learning in the vast northern forest, its extraordinary beauty and tranquillity drew pilgrims from near and far. For other travelers, it served as a welcome way station along the arduous sledge route from Vologda to Arkhangelsk. In the years before the revolution, many a famous figure paused at Siski to rest and reflect. Here, Mikhail Lomonosov — the runaway teenage son of an Arkhangelsk fisherman — sought refuge among the monks until he was ready to continue his journey to Moscow. A pioneer of Russian science, the founder of Moscow State University, and a poet of considerable stature, Lomonosov went on to become as seminal a figure in his country’s intellectual development as Isaac Newton was in that of England.

Defiled by the Bolsheviks — who rid the monastery of its monks, then converted the premises into a rest home for the party faithful — Siski was holy ground anew. The previous summer, the Moscow Patriarch had landed in a helicopter to reconsecrate the site, and to pray for a reawakening of the monastery and its sacred mission.

On the day I arrived, the afternoon air was surprisingly sultry. The half-restored monastery was mirrored in triplicate, once for each of the lakes that surrounded it. A sandy-haired boy frolicked in the water with his dog. His barefoot sister stood on a footbridge of rough-hewn planks, carefully angling a homemade fishing rod. A long, splendid procession of billowing clouds paraded over and past the Siski churches, illuminating the still, heathen water with cumulus visions of heaven.

The monks were just completing their midday dinner, but a space was cleared for me on the long table where they had gathered to eat. They were dressed simply, some in loosely cut cotton shirts and trousers and others in Chinese denim work clothes. Without a word, a bearded brother placed before me a bowl of steaming cabbage shchi and a slice of black rye bread. From the rapt attention my every spooning of soup attracted, I guessed that my visit was the most entertainment my hosts had had in quite some time.

The conversation was friendly enough, but rudimentary. It recalled in no way, for instance, a meal in a Jesuit residence. I was struck by how rustic these monks’ gestures were, and by the distinctly circumscribed way they spoke of their lives and their faith. I asked one brother how it was to live at the monastery during the long months of winter. “It’s very gray, very cold,” he replied, unenthusiastically. “But we’re used to it. We hold services; we pray. And we have a lot of work restoring the buildings.”

I was about to hand around a batch of Amerika magazines when the abbot intervened, a bit starchily I thought. “I’ll put those in our monastery library,” he commanded, sweeping up the copies under his arm.

I followed him upstairs to the library, which as it turned out was a bookshelf behind the locked door of his office. For someone with the rank of abbot, Trifon was surprisingly young and vigorous. He faced the world, however, with an expression in the ascetic tradition: lean, alert, and intense. In a more forthcoming manner than he had at first demonstrated, he described the difficulties the monastery faced in making its way in the post-Soviet era. His goal was to bring it back to the self-sufficiency it had enjoyed in the bygone era of a Russia governed by God and Tsar. Pilgrims and tourists, the abbot hoped, would be attracted to the region’s serenity — and generate revenue for the monastery. The lands along the river and the labor of the monks’ hands would provide for the rest of their earthly needs. Then he made the sign of a cross.

There was, however, the matter of the brothers themselves. Life at the monastery was hard, and Trifon feared that few had a true calling for the arduous work and discipline that restoring the Siski complex required. The novices, in particular, were not so different from the St. Petersburg architecture students who were helping during the summer with the reconstruction of one of the monastery’s churches. “A couple of months working in the middle of nowhere suits them fine, but then they become restless,” he observed with a forced sort of smile, “restless for your American television and cinema, restless for their family and friends, restless to do anything but stay here during our long winter.”

The abbot had another struggle on his hands, one that to me was less expected. The local council had vigorously protested Moscow’s decision to return the monastery to the church. The old-time bosses — now convinced followers of Adam Smith — wanted to put the place to more lucrative uses: a cross-country ski resort was one suggestion.

Before long, the affair turned nasty. First the abbot heard complaints, then threats. On the eve of the Patriarch’s visit, one of the monastery’s main churches mysteriously burned down. Even now, the abbot said, the church’s hold on the monastery remained precarious. The former Communist apparatchiki had never really lost control. They were still in charge of their party fiefdoms, still running the sawmills and collective farms that were the region’s economic mainstays. “They want us to fail,” Trifon lamented, “and I fear that they will stop at nothing to see that their wish comes true.”

On the way back out to my Niva, I passed two of the novices returning from the fields, great awkward hoes slung over their backs. They asked me if I had any more magazines. I hesitated for a moment, then had them follow me.

As I pulled away, they were gaping, dumbstruck, at an issue featuring a gyrating Michael Jackson on the back cover. It was an advertisement for the Voice of America. Somehow — across whole oceans and continents of experience — the photograph was already drowning out the gentle lapping of the novices’ evensong prayers.