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Slava gave in equal measure. Once he journeyed to the city of Kurgan to visit Shostakovich in the hospital. When Rostropovich saw that there were "thousands of patients" waiting to be admitted to the 40-bed institution, he decided to build a new wing. "I told all the musicians and musical students in the city, 'Come with me.' " Together they labored until they had completed the structure. "I was working honestly," says Rostropovich today, "not for television cameras or photographers." Best of all, he remembers, was the day when he paused to rub his aching back and, looking up, saw Shostakovich watching him from a window.
By the time he was 30, Rostropovich was already a renowned cellist in the U.S.S.R. and Europe. He won prizes in Prague and Budapest. In the Soviet Union, he would amass the highest honors: the Lenin Prize, two Stalin Prizes and the People's Artist of the U.S.S.R. award.
Once in the early '50s, he saw Galina Vishnevskaya, brilliant prima donna of the Bolshoi Opera.
"My God, such a beauty!" he sighed. Then, at a festival in Prague in May 1955, he saw her again. He invited her for a walk, and four days later married her. Why so impetuous? "It was LOFF!" he cries. "An incredible explosion of LOFF! I was happy that I was alive!"
For a while, the twin-starred musical constellation soared freely in the Soviet firmament. Galina continued to play the top roles at the Bolshoi; Slava conducted and played at home and abroad. They toured together, she singing, he providing superb piano accompaniment. Audiences and students adored them; the Kremlin beamed its good will upon them. They kept a grand apartment in Moscow, and in the village of Zhukovka outside the capital, where good and true Soviet superstars live in uncommon luxury, they had a handsome dacha. Slava constructed a third story for the house, and a cottage and a garage. He built a swimming pool and bought three automobiles (including a Mercedes). He and his wife raised two musically gifted daughters, Olga, a cellist, and Elena, a pianist.
But now came the Solzhenitsyn affair.
Slava and the author had met in the '60s. "At that time," says Rostropovich, "he did not have any problems. Pravda and Izvestiya called him second Tolstoy." When Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward and The First Circle were published in the West in 1968, the papers called him "a tool of reactionary Western propaganda." Refused permission to move from Ryazan to Moscow, Solzhenitsyn appealed to Slava. Some friends believe that Rostropovich must have received tacit permission from the authorities to allow Solzhenitsyn to stay at the dacha. In any case, the beleaguered author moved in and remained four years.