Nina was useful in these situations. She was always calm and firm. She said no for him because he was incapable of saying it himself. She made sure he got time to work.
While he wrote the fourth and final movement of the symphony, an artist who lived in the apartment above him started sculpting a bust of him. Shostakovich sat uneasily while he was being sculpted. He couldn’t sit still. His fingers kept tapping as he played scales and chords on his cheeks. He slumped over with his head between his knees, covering his head with his hands.
Galina and Maxim secretly collected the clay that fell on the floor and played with it. “We took pencils from our father’s table,” Galina recalled, “and stuck the small bits of clay on the ends of them so that they looked like little sausages or rather chicken legs. In fact that’s what we called them, ‘chicken legs.’ And the next thing we did was to throw them at the wall and try to make them stick there.”
When the sculptor was done with the bust, he submitted it to the chairman of the Committee for the Arts. The chairman was not impressed. The statue did not serve the correct propagandistic purposes. He explained to the artist, “What we need is an optimistic Shostakovich.”
Shostakovich himself was delighted with this response. “What we need is an optimistic Shostakovich,” he would often repeat, in miserable glee. “An optimistic Shostakovich!”
For a brief time, the world actually got an optimistic Shostakovich: he was putting the finishing touches on the last movement of the symphony, originally entitled “Victory.” “In the finale,” he wrote in Soviet Art, “I want to describe a beautiful future time when the enemy will have been defeated.” He now could imagine what triumph might seem like.
On December 27, 1941, the Shostakoviches had a party. They often invited their upstairs neighbors, the Litvinovs and Slonims, down for a drink by tapping out greetings on the water pipes. This party, however, was a larger affair. By the time Flora Litvinova got her son, Pavel, to bed and made it downstairs, guests were already swigging vodka. Shostakovich convinced her to try some. (He was fond of saying, “There is only good vodka or very good vodka. There is no such thing as bad vodka.”) They were eating some sausages that someone, somehow, had discovered. Shostakovich and another composer banged out trashy songs on the piano while people danced in the corridor. He grabbed Nina and joyfully spun her in a dance.
In the midst of the mayhem, Shostakovich mentioned quietly to Flora Litvinova, “And, d’you know, today I finally finished my Seventh.” Even more astonishingly, he had written the final bars as the guests showed up. Nina made small talk while he finished his masterpiece.
It was not long before he played it on his piano for a crowd of musicians and composers. They were particularly struck by the repeated march in the first movement. Litvinova recalled: “Everybody spoke at once about this theme, Fascism, the war and victory. Someone immediately dubbed the theme ‘rat-like.’ [The conductor] Samosud declared that the Symphony was destined to have a great success.”
When all the guests from the listening party had gone home and the apartment was quiet, Flora Litvinova sat with Nina and Dmitri, sipping tea. They talked about the new work and whether it was truly about the Germans. “Of course — Fascism,” said Shostakovich. “But music, real music, can never be literally tied to a theme. [Nazism] is not the only form of Fascism; this music is about all forms of terror, slavery, the bondage of the spirit.”
Soon after this, a rumor started that the rat-like “invasion” theme of the Seventh Symphony was not about invasion at all. Ex-students whispered that Shostakovich had played this theme and its increasingly crazed variations long before the Germans had ever invaded. In fact, this argument runs, the theme encodes the rise of Stalin.
This interpretation became popular many decades later, after the publication of Solomon Volkov’s supposed memoirs of Shostakovich, Testimony. In that book, Volkov has Shostakovich say,
The Seventh Symphony had been planned before the war and consequently it simply cannot be seen as a reaction to Hitler’s attack. The “invasion theme” has nothing to do with the attack. I was thinking of other enemies of humanity when I composed the theme. . . . Hitler is a criminal, that’s clear, but so is Stalin. . . . Actually, I have nothing against calling the Seventh the Leningrad Symphony, but it’s not about Leningrad under siege, it’s about the Leningrad that Stalin destroyed and that Hitler merely finished off.
This seems very clear. Certain musicologists use it as proof that the whole piece is an encoded attack on Stalin. After all, the irritating little march starts cheerful and small. The Germans, on the other hand, attacked suddenly, fortissimo, with fury. Isn’t the theme more like Stalin, then, with its clumsy, kitschy charm, its twinkle in the eye, before it rises up and unleashes its full psychopathic rage?
There are several problems with this passage in the Volkov memoir, though. For one thing, only one page earlier, Volkov has Shostakovich say the opposite: “I wrote my Seventh Symphony, the ‘Leningrad,’ very quickly. I couldn’t not write it. War was all around. . . . I wanted to write about our time, about my contemporaries who spared neither strength nor life in the name of Victory Over the Enemy.” He absolutely contradicts what he says on the very next page.
Years later, Shostakovich, like most others, referred to the theme as “the ‘invasion’ episode.” That also, of course, means little, as it appeared in a magazine, and he often didn’t write his own articles.
So what is the truth? Is it a picture of Hitler or Stalin?
Perhaps the most likely explanation is given by one of Shostakovich’s colleagues, Lev Lebedinsky, who claimed that Shostakovich called the famous march the “Stalin theme” before the war — but then incorporated it into the symphony, at which point its meaning seems to have changed for the composer. He began calling it the “anti-Hitler” theme — and then, even more generally, the “‘theme of evil,’ which was absolutely true, since the theme was just as much anti-Hitler as it was anti-Stalin, even though the world music community fixed on only the first of the two definitions.”
A symphony is built not just by the composer, the conductor, and the musicians, but by the audience. The wartime audience heard the approach of the German Wehrmacht. A more recent post-Soviet audience wants to hear the cruel antics of Stalin and believe that Shostakovich was speaking in code.
But Shostakovich himself does not seem to have restricted the meaning of the piece — hearing in it instead an abstract depiction of “the bondage of the spirit,” all those petty, ugly things that grow disastrously within us and lead us all in a dance of destruction.
The government news outlets were not in doubt about the piece’s meaning; they were anxious to have a musical rallying point to convince the masses of eventual victory.
A first performance, under the baton of Samuil Samosud, was scheduled for early March. It would have to happen in Kuibyshev. Rehearsals started right after the New Year.
Shostakovich announced that the piece was dedicated to Leningrad itself. “All that I wrote into it, all that I expressed in it is tied up with that beloved native city of mine, is connected with the historic days of its defense against fascist oppressors.”
Shostakovich was finally done with his symphony, written in the midst of air raids and evacuation. His sense of triumph did not last, however. He wrote to his friend Glikman:
Things are not good with me. Day and night, I think of my family and loved ones, whom I had to leave behind in Leningrad. I seldom get news of them. There are no more cats and dogs left. Not only that but my mother is short of money, because she cannot rely on what I regularly send her; it often gets delayed or misrouted on the way. [Nina’s father] Vasily Varzar is ill with malnutrition and Nina’s niece Allochka has the same problem. . . . Every day I try to do something about getting my loved ones away from Leningrad, and until I manage to do this I am not going to leave Kuybïshev, because from here I can sometimes manage to get things sent to them from Moscow, even occasionally directly
from here.
One day he got a smudged, rumpled letter from Maria. It said that they had eaten the family dog.
Things had improved for Dmitri Shostakovich. The world was awaiting the premiere of the Seventh, which they now called the Leningrad Symphony.
But things in Leningrad itself were only getting worse.
SOURCES
The city was quiet and empty, wrote a Leningrad girl after taking her mother to be buried. “I couldn’t even describe to you what the city was like. Somehow it always seemed to us like a city at the bottom of the sea, for everything was covered with hoar frost. . . . The trams stood immobile, frozen. It was like a frozen realm of some sea king.”
St. Petersburg had once been a town of fantasy operas about undersea palaces and invisible cities. Now, in midwinter, when the sun set by three, leaving everything in darkness, Leningrad looked like a set from some tale of a nightmare kingdom.
In February 1942, a soldier on the Leningrad Front trudged home to the city to see his family. “The city of death greeted me and took leave of me with corpses, darkness, dirt, and silence, sinister silence.” He discovered that his daughter was dead and his son was swollen with starvation. He took his daughter’s body to be buried in a common grave. “In 4 or 5 days I’ll describe everything, but now I’m in a state of such severe depression that I haven’t the strength to write.” When he did try to write about the city, he just repeated lists of words: “dirt, snowdrifts, snow, cold, darkness, starvation, death.”
Survivors of the siege today describe the conditions in a similar, singsong phrase: “Kholod, golod, snaryady, pozhary” (“cold, hunger, artillery shells, fires”). It is as if there is no syntax, no grammar, that can contain their suffering. Only a list of things perceived.
The “sinister silence” fell over the city because the Luftwaffe had stopped its almost daily air raids. It was too cold for planes to fly. More important, there was no reason for the Nazis to bomb the population. They were dying by themselves, in silence. “At present our nights are indescribably quiet,” wrote diarist Vera Inber. “Not a klaxon, nor the sound of a tram, nor the bark of a dog, nor the mew of a cat. There is no radio. The city falls asleep in dark icy flats, many never wake up.” That far north, the nights were eighteen hours long. In those many hours of obscurity, people passed away without a sound.
Just within the limits of besieged Leningrad, there where days when more than ten thousand people died. Over the course of January and February alone, there were roughly two hundred thousand deaths. We cannot know the numbers exactly. All authority in the city had broken down. No one recorded deaths anymore. No one removed the bodies from the streets.
In December, it had not been uncommon to see people dragging the wrapped dead on sleds. Now bodies often lay wherever the dying fell. Their relatives were too weak with starvation to pull them to mass graves. A woman on the street would feel dizzy and sit; a few minutes later, she would be a corpse freezing to a wall. No one would move her. Nobody had the energy. Perhaps after a few days, her coat would be gone, or her shoes. Gradually, corpses were stripped.
In black, sooty apartments, no warmer than the frozen streets outside, dead friends and relatives lay on beds while families sat at their tables, dining. Descriptions like the following were common:
We are all ill. . . . From room to room [in a communal apartment] there are dead people, a corpse for every family. It has been almost a month since Anna Yakovlevna Zveinek died from starvation. She’s still lying there in her freezing, dirty room — black, dried-up, teeth bared. Nobody is in any hurry to clean her up and bury her; everyone is too weak to care. Two rooms away lies another corpse — her daughter Asya Zveinek, who also died of starvation, outliving her mother by twelve days. Asya died two steps from my bed, and Vsevolod and I dragged her away because it was too warm in our room for a dead body.
The temperatures that winter were often down to twenty below zero, and so the corpses did not decompose. Bodies were usually stacked in apartment courtyards or cellars.
Beyond fatigue, there was another good reason to delay taking the dead out of an apartment: until the death was declared, the family could still collect rations in the name of the deceased.
One woman, Klavdia Dubrovina, described sleeping in an apartment with her friend and with a dead family who were stacked, frozen, around the room. The windows had all been blown out, “and the frost, the cold, were frightful.” One day Dubrovina came home and discovered her friend had died, too, during the day. “Yes. I came home and she was lying there dead. Somehow this was also a matter of indifference to me. People were dying all around. I’d simply get into that burrow [in the bed] — I’d take my coat and boots off — and I’d get into it, for the cold was frightful, and I’d put on an old scarf, too. When I rose in the morning that scarf was frozen to my skin all around my neck. I’d tear it off, get up, put on my coat and go to work.”
Death had lost its dignity. As one man, Dmitri Likhachev, was dragging his father’s corpse to the cemetery, he was passed by a procession of gravediggers’ trucks.
I recall one truck that was loaded with bodies frozen into fantastic positions. They had been petrified, it seemed, in mid-speech, mid-shout, mid-grimace, mid-leap. Hands were raised, eyes open. I remember the body of a woman: naked, brown, thin, upright. . . . The truck was going at speed, leaving her hair streaming in the wind . . . as they went over the potholes in the road. It looked as if she was making a speech — calling out to them, waving her arms — a ghastly, defiled corpse with open, glassy eyes.
A woman who found employment loading those trucks described how she stopped feeling anything at the sight of the dead. “[At first] I was afraid of dead bodies, but I had to load those corpses. We used to sit right there on the trucks with the corpses, and off we’d go. And your heart would seem to switch off. Because we knew that today we were taking them, and tomorrow it would be our turn, perhaps.” Many people similarly described this emotional emptiness, the heart “switching off.”
At the entrance to one cemetery, some comic gravedigger had propped up a frozen corpse with a cigarette in its mouth, pointing the way to the burial pits. Citizens, wrapped head to foot in their winter coats and hats, dragged their mummy-wrapped loved ones past through the brown snow. The ground was frozen, so mass graves had to be excavated with explosives.
Gradually, like the immigration of an insidious, phantom population, Leningrad belonged more to the dead than to the living. The dead watched over streets and sat in snow-swamped buses. Whole apartment buildings were tenanted by them, where in broken rooms, dead families sat waiting at tables. Their dominion spread room by room, like lights going out in evening.
The elderly and the very young tended to succumb to starvation first. Statistically, gender also played a role: “Within a single family . . . the order in which its members typically died was grandfather and infants first, grandmother and father (if not at the front) second, mother and older children last.”
In the case of the family Shostakovich left behind — his mother, Sofia Shostakovich; his sister Maria Frederiks; and his nephew, Dmitri Frederiks — there were no men left. Maria’s husband, the physicist Vsevolod Frederiks, had been off in a prison camp for years. (He would die of starvation there in 1944.) Sofia, apparently, was hardest hit by hunger. She was skeletal.
Shostakovich sent her money. It was often delayed, or disappeared entirely. (Letters were regularly opened and searched by the NKVD.) In any case, paper money was almost valueless in Leningrad by this point. People bartered. They exchanged a gilt clock from some tsarist salon for a few meat patties; an inlaid wood dresser, in the family for generations, for a little cooking oil.
Among the living population, families and coworkers watched one another gradually manifest the symptoms of dystrophy, the malfunctioning of the body as it succumbs to hunger. “Hunger changes the appearance of all,” wrote the diarist Elena Skrjabina. “Everyone now is blue-black, bloodless, swollen.” Leningraders cam
e to call this discoloration of the skin a “hunger tan.” As the weeks went by, “People were discovering bone after bone” jutting just under the skin, another diarist wrote. The gums of the starving receded. It looked as if their teeth grew with hunger, as if the need to devour dominated their faces, kind or cruel. Eventually, their teeth began to fall out.
Their movements became slow and mechanical. Their speech slurred as their vocal cords atrophied. It became difficult to move at all. A survivor recalled, “It was roughly the feeling that your foot wouldn’t leave the ground. Can you understand? The feeling that when you had to put your foot on a step, it just refused to obey. It was like it is in dreams sometimes. It seems you’re just about to run, but your legs won’t work. Or you want to shout out, and you’ve no voice.”
Even though factory employees received more substantial rations than any other group except soldiers, work was grinding to a stop as people on the assembly lines slowed. They moved like broken automatons. At the Izhora Factory, a diarist wrote, “Everybody is now walking very slowly, and some can barely lift their legs. It is hard to imagine such debilitation. We are just sitting here starving.”
The Soviet utopians of the 1920s had fantasized about a mechanized future where people were part of a vast machine. The Cubo-Futurists had painted visions of human cogs and gears, and composers had written clangorous works depicting the vitality of industry.
Now humans were winding down beside their machines. Empty streets echoed with the slow ticking of the metronome through iced loudspeakers. The city, like a giant clockwork mechanism unwound, froze slowly to a stop.
Perhaps the most heartbreaking collapse in this mass starvation was not physical, however, but moral. People were forced to confront nightmare decisions about who they should allow to live or die. As the soldier who returned from the front to find his daughter dead wrote, “There is much that is revolting. But that’s life: a mother of four children takes the baby from her breast in order not to die herself. The baby will die. But then three others will live, who otherwise, without their mother, would die. Was the mother’s decision justified? No doubt about it, it was. When Maria [his daughter] bought a stolen bread ration card, she did right, yes, she saved the lives of three children.”
Symphony for the City of the Dead Page 24
