Symphony for the City of the Dead

by M. T. Anderson

  Ukrainians and Cossacks came out of their villages to welcome the Fascists with traditional gifts of bread and salt. They believed that the long horror of Soviet rule was over. Their churches, which the Communists had closed or turned into movie theaters or museums of atheism, would soon be opened again for worship. Peasants thought that the Nazis would dismantle the collective farms and drop the heavy government grain quotas that forced farmers to starve.

  If the Nazis had simply been invaders, no more genocidal than any other conquering force, they probably could have held on to a lot of their captured territory without much trouble.

  They believed, however, that they were dealing with subhumans. No sooner had they moved in than they began to slaughter the inhabitants and ship hundreds of thousands off to Germany as industrial slave labor. They did not dissolve the collective farms. Instead, they brutally demanded even more grain out of the peasantry. People starved. Himmler’s SS tortured and shot their way through eastern Europe and Ukraine. In no time at all, the locals hated their new German overlords with a passion. They began an insistent, ceaseless guerrilla war, running through the woods and hiding in holes in the ground to harry the Wehrmacht.

  If Germany had not worked so hard to make itself hated, it could perhaps have conquered whole Soviet territories without a fight.

  This suggests the power of narratives and of philosophies.

  Shostakovich’s symphony was born amid this struggle of ideas and hopes and fears. Hearing about it, people around Shostakovich buzzed with stories about him, some true, some reasonably true, and some far, far less true; to make things more complicated, Shostakovich himself occasionally also liked a good story. For this reason, who knows whether we can trust any given detail?

  In later years, Shostakovich often told this story about the siege:

  He was walking down one of the shell-pitted streets of the city. There was a funeral procession in front of him. (This was when there still were funerals for the dead, because death was still unusual in Leningrad. A few weeks later, no one would have bothered to bid the dead good-bye.) A band played Chopin’s famous funeral march while a flatbed truck bumped along the road with the open coffin in the back. The mourners paced along behind.

  Then came the shock: the corpse sat up.

  People shrieked and fainted away.

  “Can you imagine,” Shostakovich said, “it wasn’t a corpse they were going to bury, but someone who was in a state of lethargic sleep.” The deceased was just fine.

  The band, apparently more alert than the rest of the family, stopped playing the funeral march and swung into a lively rendition of the “Internationale,” the Communist national anthem. The procession rejoiced, like some kind of Bolshevik New Orleans funeral party.

  “Yes,” Shostakovich claimed, “I saw this with my very own eyes.”

  One of his best friends, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, recorded this story. He said Shostakovich often told it. But Rostropovich didn’t believe a word of it.

  In the latter part of September, Shostakovich worked on the third movement — the Adagio — of his new symphony. During breaks, he’d go out into the streets for fresh air and inspiration. “Sometimes I’d wander off quite a distance from home, forgetting that I was in a city under siege that was regularly fired at and bombed.

  “I looked at my beloved city with pain and pride. It stood singed in fires and tempered in battles. It had suffered the deepest anguish of the war and it was even more glorious now in its stern grandeur.”

  The bombings and shellings continued. On September 19, the Luftwaffe launched one of the most devastating air raids of the whole siege. Six waves of bombers, 264 aircraft in all, blasted at the city for more than seven hours. They dropped 528 high-explosive bombs and almost fifteen hundred incendiaries. Between air assaults, the German guns fired a hundred artillery shells into the belly of the city. Iconic buildings had holes smashed right through them: Gostiny Dvor, the old marketplace; the Engineers’ Castle; the Russian Museum; and the Church of the Spilled Blood, with its gaudy onion spires. When the bombs were not actually falling, people in the city could hear a dull roar as crippled buildings collapsed. Gostiny Dvor burned quietly for more than a week.

  The death toll was huge.

  The Germans dropped leaflets over the city. They said, “We’re giving you a respite until the 21st. If you do not surrender, we will grind you to a pulp.” As one woman commented sharply, “It’s unclear whom they were addressing. We common people are [insignificant]. As for Stalin, he has been grinding us to a pulp for the past twenty years.”

  What did Shostakovich write while the Germans battered the city in those late September days?

  The third movement of the Seventh Symphony is slow, a long meditation or outcry punctuated with repetitions and transformations of a stark fanfare. He originally called it “Native Expanses,” and perhaps that is what it depicts: pride in Russia’s vastness, the dark taiga woodlands of Siberia, the lonely birch forests, the lapping shores of Lake Ladoga, the rich fields of Ukraine; to the north the tundra, to the east the desert, and to the south the grassy hills of Turkmenistan. It is filled with longing. It is suffused with a terrible tenderness.

  His earlier symphonies — such as the suppressed Fourth — had been masterpieces of experiment and brittle irony. Now he allowed his music to sound painfully direct and vulnerable.

  Shostakovich eventually removed the titles of his movements. When the piece was first performed and published, this third movement was no longer called “Native Expanses.” What would it sound like if we didn’t know that early title? Would it sound the same? Would we still hear evocations of gorgeous landscapes and beloved Russian wilderness? Or would we instead hear mourning and remembrance? Is the melody lyrical or tragic? Is it about love or loss? At one point, a savage march even stomps through the exquisite soliloquy. In some ways, this Adagio sounds more like a requiem for the dead than passages in the first movement that Shostakovich specifically described as a requiem. So how should we understand his own title — and how should we read its deletion? Every conductor, every listener, can ask themselves what the balance is between pride, tenderness, and loss, between love and lamentation.

  Some love is so powerful, after all, that it must always include sadness, because encrypted within it is the knowledge that someday it will come to an end.

  This is the music Shostakovich wrote as hundreds of bombers filled Leningrad with smoke, dust, and the cries of the dying.

  On September 25, Dmitri Shostakovich turned thirty-five. For most of the day, he worked on his Adagio. In the evening, his family had a quiet little celebration. They had almost no food to eat. Some friends, however, “unearthed” a bottle of vodka. Another friend brought some crusts of black bread. The Shostakoviches were lucky enough to still have a store of potatoes. They broke bread with their friends. Perhaps Shostakovich’s mother, Sofia, was there. Perhaps the children were allowed to stay up late. His sister Maria and her son, Dmitri, probably came. Outside the apartment was the blackened hulk of the building that had burned a few weeks before, a reminder of destruction, a memento mori.

  Shostakovich had been born thirty-five years earlier in St. Petersburg. He had seen revolution in the same city, then called Petrograd. Now he faced the possible destruction of Leningrad.

  Was this still the city he was born in? Or had he in some sense gone into exile while only moving a few blocks away?

  “I kept working day and night. There were times when the anti-aircraft guns were in action and bombs were falling, but I kept working.”

  He was done with the third movement, the Adagio, on September 29.

  According to one story, he arranged for the three movements he had already written to be flown out of the city to safety that day.

  If we are to believe this story, the poet Anna Akhmatova was being evacuated by plane to Tashkent. She had met Shostakovich at parties when he was only a boy in a sailor suit. During the years of the Great Terror,
she had written a heartrending series of poems about the arrest of her son. They were too dangerous to be written down. She had circulated them by word of mouth: friends met to whisper them to each other, committing them to memory. (Similarly, Shostakovich later would write works that could not be performed in public, but only in secret, in apartments, when it was confirmed that no one present would snitch. And both of them learned to write things that could contain many meanings, as Akhmatova said: “I confess that I used / Invisible ink . . . / I write in mirror writing, / There’s no other road open to me.”)

  Anna Akhmatova later claimed she had carried a manuscript of the Shostakovich Seventh on her lap when she was flown out of Leningrad to the east. We know he kept the full score, written out for full orchestra, with him; perhaps it was the piano version that she took.

  Is this simply one of the stories people told about Shostakovich’s Seventh, or did Akhmatova actually clutch the scribbled score on her knees as she soared out of the city? We don’t know.

  Later, when writing about that flight from the besieged city, she removed the part of the poem (“Poem Without a Hero”) about the Seventh. She replaced it with a description of what she saw as she lifted above the broken horizon amid the bombardment of antiaircraft fire and soared off to safety.

  It was unusual for the phone to ring in those days. Most of the phones in the city did not work. In mid-September, people all over the city had gotten calls from perky operators announcing, “This telephone is disconnected until the end of the war.”

  (Some were not disconnected fast enough. One day a blacksmith at the Kirov Tank Works picked up a ringing phone at the factory. The speaker on the other end spoke Russian with a heavy German accent. “Leningrad?” the voice quacked. “Very good! We will come tomorrow to visit the Winter Palace and the Hermitage.” A menacing prank call: those were two of the great tourist attractions at the center of the city.)

  Shostakovich must have been startled when his phone rang at eleven o’clock at night.

  It was a call from a woman named Comrade Kalinnikova. She was phoning from Communist Party Headquarters. Shostakovich may have been worried, at least for a moment. The NKVD, even in the midst of war, arrested people in the middle of the night for spreading “defeatism.”

  But Comrade Kalinnikova was calling with good news. Shostakovich and his family needed to pack. They were going to be evacuated from Leningrad the next day. They would be flown to Moscow.

  His whole family? No, only Nina and the children could come with him.

  That meant that his mother, Sofia; his sister Maria; and his nephew, Dmitri, would be left behind.

  Shostakovich made the arrangements for his family’s flight. He was relieved that Galina and Maxim would no longer be in the besieged city. Surprisingly, he was still not ready to leave the city himself. He even asked if he could be flown back to Leningrad once the children were safe, so he could continue to work there.

  He was leaving his “beloved home town”— but he hoped that they were all being flown to freedom.

  SOURCES

  On the afternoon of October 1, Shostakovich and his family loaded into his long black Emka automobile to go to the airport. The Germans were shelling the city. The guns were firing on the Pulkova Heights. As little Maxim got into the car, he asked his father what would happen if the Germans crashed into them.

  Shostakovich was startled: it was the first time young Maxim had ever pronounced his r’s correctly.

  They arrived at the airfield. Shostakovich apparently asked about the fate of his mother, his sister, and his nephew. He received assurances that they would be airlifted out soon.

  It is unclear whether the Party just lost track of this promise or whether they were lying to the composer to get him on the plane. Regardless, Sofia, Maria, and her son remained trapped in Leningrad, as did Nina’s family. The city officials had countless other things to worry about.

  Dmitri, Nina, Maxim, and Galina were led out onto the airfield. They were taken to a transport plane. It was a small aircraft, and the Shostakoviches were the only passengers. Inside the hold, there were no seats, just crates of cargo; they were not allowed to sit on the crates. The family settled themselves on top of their luggage. The plane had a glass turret, and a pilot positioned himself there to keep watch. He warned the family that if he gave a signal, they all had to flatten themselves on the wooden floor.

  We do not know what time they took off, but we do know that there was a Luftwaffe air raid that evening. The pilots must have waited until the bombs stopped falling.

  Finally, they taxied and lifted off over the city. The streets and buildings would have been dark beneath them. There was a blackout in effect to confuse German bombers.

  They flew over the Wehrmacht’s lines: first, the forward entrenchments — ditches where soldiers crouched — then, farther back, the German troops’ bunkers and living quarters. Beyond that lay a flattened, devastated countryside with a new system of roads and ammunition depots created to supply armaments and food to the Wehrmacht on the front.

  Maxim, craning his neck to look out the window, saw bright flashes popping in the darkness beneath them. He asked a pilot what the lights were.

  “Someone explained to me that the Germans had opened fire on our aeroplane.”

  They were not hit. They flew over the ghostly landscape of occupied territory.

  Early in the morning, they landed at a remote field in the forests near Moscow. The family clambered out of the plane with their luggage. They were taken to a nearby hut where they bedded down.

  Behind them, the pilots dragged tree limbs out of the woods to hide the plane.

  The next morning, they were driven into Moscow. It must have been a relief to be out of the line of fire.

  Unfortunately, they had unwittingly left one theater of war for another. By terrible coincidence, Hitler, in the midst of a squabble with his generals, was turning his attention from Leningrad to Moscow. He launched a major attack on the Russian capital on the very day the Shostakoviches, tired and disoriented, arrived.

  The Wehrmacht called its assault on Moscow Operation Typhoon. Colonel General Heinz Guderian and the Second Panzer Group had swerved north a few days earlier, and, on October 2, they began a steady, deadly crawl toward Moscow. Though Shostakovich probably did not know it, the Germans were closing in from both the west and the south.

  The Shostakoviches were put up at the Moskva Hotel. They were promised an apartment sometime soon.

  At first, the Shostakoviches found life much easier in Moscow than in Leningrad. They even took Maxim and Galina to a toy store so they’d have something to play with at the hotel.

  Food, however, was still hard to come by. The shelves of grocery stores were empty of almost everything that hadn’t been jarred and pickled. Milk was ten times as expensive as usual. Butter was even worse. There was no meat whatsoever.

  Air raids on Moscow were frequent and devastating. The Soviet air force struggled to stop the waves of aerial assault, but they had lost too many planes to be effective. To confuse bombers, the medieval walls of the Kremlin were draped in huge canvases painted with rows of fake houses.

  At first, the NKVD had discouraged evacuation from the city. Now it was letting people leave with signed permission. Certain government departments were being evacuated east to the city of Kuibyshev, modern-day Samara. They took all their files and records with them. Perhaps the most striking evacuee was the corpse of Vladimir Lenin. His preserved body was loaded into a specially built refrigerated freight car and taken off to Siberia over the Ural Mountains. The corpse of the grand statesman would be safer than most living Muscovites.

  When the air-raid alarms sounded, Shostakovich and his family retreated to the basement of their hotel. It was cold and damp. The noise and violence of attack was every bit as bad as in Leningrad. During one bombardment, a conductor stumbled upon Shostakovich and his family there. The composer was pacing back and forth nervously, muttering to himself
, “Oh, Wright brothers, Wright brothers . . . What have you wrought?”

  On October 5, a Soviet Pe-2 light bomber flying a routine reconnaissance route spied a column of German tanks twelve miles long rolling up the Moscow-Warsaw highway unopposed and unnoticed. The German force was only eighty miles from the capital.

  When the pilot returned to base and reported what he’d seen, no one believed him. In time-honored Soviet tradition, he was arrested for “provocation.”

  Soon enough, it became clear that he had not been lying: By five thirty the next morning, the German Tenth Panzer Division had captured Yukhnov. At the same time, the Seventeenth Panzer Division, rolling up from the south, took Bryansk. The Soviet general in the area did not know the region was under attack until the Panzers actually began firing at his headquarters.

  On tactical maps, the German approach looked like clean arrows driving in from the south and west. On the ground, however, nothing was clean, and every inch of those abstract lines signified an unmeasurable gulf of suffering. Villages and fields were in flames. When Russians heard of the German approach, they were under orders to set their own property on fire before they fled. When they did not hear of the German approach in advance, they were often slaughtered and their towns torched in the assault. Millions lost their homes and everything they owned.

  After the Germans took the city of Orel on October 3, journalist Vasily Grossman wrote about the chaos of mass evacuation:

  I thought I’d seen retreat, but I’ve never seen anything like what I’m seeing now. . . . Exodus! Biblical exodus! Vehicles are moving in eight columns, there’s the violent roaring of dozens of trucks trying simultaneously to tear their wheels out of the mud. Huge herds of sheep and cows are driven through the fields. They are followed by trains of horse-drawn carts, there are thousands of wagons covered with colored sackcloth, veneer, tin. . . . There are also crowds of pedestrians with sacks, bundles, suitcases. This isn’t a flood, this isn’t a river, it’s the slow movement of a flowing ocean . . . hundreds of meters wide.