Symphony for the City of the Dead
Page 38
“Comrade Stalin is not a traitor . . . been created”: On October 3, 1941. Service, History, 263.
Recently, his secret plans have come to light . . . : Adrian Blomfield, “Stalin Planned to Destroy Moscow if the Nazis Moved In,” The Telegraph, December 5, 2008.
Shostakovich’s colleague composer Lev Knipper . . . : Beevor, loc. 2577.
On October 11, Shostakovich went into the offices . . . : Brown, 159; Shostakovich, Facsimile, 8.
“Shostakovich takes a monotonous . . . German Nazism”: Brown, 159.
“The situation around Moscow has deteriorated”: Braithwaite, 245.
Shostakovich and his family were told . . . : Fay (Life, 126) puts the date of his evacuation on October 15; Wilson (149) on October 16.
bolshoi drap: G. Roberts, 108.
“their rubber plants and chests of drawers”: Braithwaite, 249.
People blocked exits so the Party elite . . . : Ibid., 247–248.
Government officials were destroying . . . : Montefiore, 395.
“Black snow flew . . . the Apocalypse”: Volkov, Stalin, 6–7.
“Inside the station writers . . . Bolshoi Theatre”: Wilson, 150.
“He looked completely bereft . . . by their owners”: Ibid.
“Allow Shostakovich and his children to pass”: Ibid.
It was holding more than one hundred: Khentova, Zhizn, 41–42; Ardov, 19.
At ten at night, the train set off: Fay, Life, 126. Sokolov appears to suggest that it left in the morning (Wilson, 151).
“It travelled very slowly . . . soften and show kindness”: Wilson, 151.
RAILWAY CAR NO. 7
“A wet snow . . . for reassurance”: Wilson, 151.
Two of Shostakovich’s suitcases had disappeared . . . : Wilson, 151; confirmed by a letter from Shostakovich (Glikman, 3) and Galina’s memory of the trip (Ardov, 18). Maxim Shostakovich was told a slightly different story (Ardov, 19), but his account was based on the memories of Aram Khachaturian some years later.
Even worse, he now discovered that the score . . . : Khentova, Zhizn, 41–42.
“I saw Shostakovich getting out . . . a state of great agitation”: Wilson, 151.
Dmitri and Nina worked out a system . . . : Sollertinskys, 104.
The train did not move quickly . . . : Sollertinskys, 104; Gruliow and Lederer, 3.
“There was almost . . . a spirit of defeatism”: Gruliow and Lederer, 3.
Stalin assembled a temporary office . . . : Service, Stalin, 438; but cf. Montefiore, 399.
“People are saying things . . . where such moods prevail”: Braithwaite, 250.
On the fourth day of the clattering voyage east . . . : Nina recalled, “The blanket, resting in the puddle, was in such a shape you’d be afraid to touch it. I’ll spare you further details.” Daniil Zhitomirsky, “Shostakovich,” Muzïkal’naya akademiya 3 (1993): 27. Translation by Ellen Litman. Note that biographer Sofia Khentova tells two contradictory stories about the loss of the manuscript of the Seventh, neither of which involves the bathroom. In one (Zhizn, 41–42), she wrote that the manuscript was found after four days, when the train stopped in Ruzayevka — though Nina seems to imply that it was found earlier. In another version (Voynï, 58), Khentova says that when the train got to Kuibyshev, the family found the manuscript stacked with cargo to be sent off to Siberia. As Shostakovich’s official biographer, Khentova might have been euphemizing the story to avoid discussing one of Russia’s great masterpieces floating in toilet water. Nina’s own narrative obviously takes precedence.
“Why not continue . . . how about . . . ?”: Wilson, 152.
“The impression when the train . . . foam far below”: Sollertinskys, 104.
KUIBYSHEV AND LENINGRAD
The lampposts were plastered with desperate notes . . . : Beevor, loc. 2692.
Description of Kuibyshev and Nameless: Chris Bellamy, Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War (New York: Knopf, 2007), 296–298.
Shostakovich and many other refugees on Railway Car No. 7 . . . : The details of this incident are from Wilson, 152–153.
It appears that after a few days, the Shostakoviches . . . : Khentova, Zhizn, 42.
“You know, as soon as I got on that train . . . losing their lives”: Wilson, 153.
the temperature dropped below zero: Fahrenheit. Jones, 162.
Even if trains had been able to get through . . . : Braithwaite, 234.
People blocked up the empty window frames . . . : Adamovich and Granin, 9, 73.
“The temperature is really dropping . . . dying from malnutrition”: Jones, 133.
“From one point of view . . . even three times”: Adamovich and Granin, 122.
The Leningrad authorities were running out . . . : Jones, 142; Reid, 164; Salisbury, 370.
By November 20, the bread ration had been reduced . . . : Reid, 168.
“In those days . . . have seen those eyes”: Adamovich and Granin, 17.
“Finish your bread; you’ll soon be dead”: Ibid., 65.
“There have been cases . . . Petersburg”: Reid, 191.
“As everybody knows . . . Then you let it cool”: Fadeyev, 36.
Some people garnished it with bay leaves: Jones, 4.
A mother, desperate to feed her family . . . : Ibid., 210.
“I witnessed a scene . . . looked like executioners”: Ibid., 169.
One man rapturously remembered the day . . . : Adamovich and Granin, 90.
“Protein — meat — we hardly see at all . . . ‘We eat them’”: Inber, 34.
“Before the war, people adorned . . . wanted to seem”: Reid, 185.
“The city is literally flooded with corpses . . . not firewood”: Skrjabina, 41.
And around the same time, she noted . . . : Ibid., 38.
“You know, Nikolai . . . unfortunately I can’t work.”: Wilson, 153.
At the beginning of December, their living arrangements . . . : Ibid., 155–156.
“Today (2 December) I heard the piano . . . three jolly friends”: Ibid., 156.
AN OPTIMISTIC SHOSTAKOVICH
As the Germans prepared to snap . . . : Braithwaite, 304.
It was so cold that when a man spat . . . : Hastings, 162.
Winter clothing had been issued . . . : Forczyk, Moscow, 23.
“We have blundered . . . against us”: Hastings, 176.
“The frontal attacks puzzled me . . . flank attacks”: Ibid., 370.
When the Germans were within seven miles . . . : Braithwaite, 297–298.
Slowly, painfully, with the loss of more than a third . . . : Forczyk, Moscow, 89.
“The Collapse of . . . German Forces”: Braithwaite, 309.
During a devastating air raid . . . : Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942 (New York: Norton, 2012), 159.
Roughly a thousand German tanks . . . Almost half of them . . . : Hastings, 157; Forczyk, Moscow, 89.
Twenty-four thousand Wehrmacht soldiers . . . : Forczyk, Moscow, 89.
“As soon as the news came . . . energy and excitement”: Wilson, 154.
“He was very distraught . . . go and fetch her”: Ibid., 169.
“He never asked for anything for himself . . . of doing so”: Glikman, 27.
The composer almost fell to pieces with gratitude . . . : Wilson, 182.
While he wrote the fourth and final movement . . . : Ibid., 171.
“We took pencils from our father’s table . . . stick there”: Ardov, 24.
“What we need is an optimistic Shostakovich”: Wilson, 171.
“In the finale . . . been defeated”: Fay, Life, 127.
“There is only good vodka . . . bad vodka”: Ardov, 134.
They were eating some sausages . . . : Wilson, 156–158.
“And, d’you know. . . my Seventh”: Ibid, 158.
Even more astonishingly, he had written . . . : Siegmeister, 622.
“Everybody spoke at once . . . a great success”: Wilson, 158
.
“Of course . . . the bondage of spirit”: Ibid., 158–159.
“The Seventh Symphony had been planned . . . finished off”: Volkov, Testimony, 155–156.
“I wrote my Seventh Symphony . . . Victory Over the Enemy”: Ibid., 154.
“the ‘invasion’ episode”: Shostakovich, Facsimile, 8.
“‘theme of evil,’ which was absolutely . . . definitions”: Novyi Mir 3 (1990): 267.
But Shostakovich himself does not seem to have restricted . . . : See, for example, Flora Litvinova’s revelation that when Shostakovich got to know her and trust her, he told her the Seventh was about “any form of totalitarian regime” (Wilson, 159).
“All that I wrote into it . . . against fascist oppressors”: Schwarz, 177.
“Things are not good with me . . . directly from here”: Glikman, 8.
One day he got a smudged, rumpled letter . . . : Feuchtner, 142.
THE CITY OF THE DEAD
“The city was quiet and empty . . . realm of some sea king”: Adamovich and Granin, 69.
“The city of death greeted me . . . strength to write”: Ibid., 200.
“dirt, snowdrifts, snow, cold, darkness, starvation, death”: Ibid.
“Kholod, golod, snaryady, pozhary”: Reid, 234.
“At present our nights are indescribably quiet . . . never wake up”: Inber, 42 (slightly altered for clarity).
Just within the limits of besieged Leningrad . . . : Amery and Curran, 200.
“We are all ill . . . for a dead body”: Reid, 232–233.
often down to twenty below zero . . . : Ibid., 208.
“and the frost, the cold, were frightful”: Adamovich and Granin, 79.
“Yes. I came home . . . go to work”: Ibid., 80.
“was wrapped in a white shroud . . . a man or a woman”: Reid, 189.
“I recall one truck that was loaded . . . glassy eyes”: Jones, 241.
“[At first] I was afraid of dead bodies . . . our turn, perhaps”: Adamovich and Granin, 102.
At the entrance to one cemetery, some comic gravedigger . . . : Jones, 242.
“Within a single family . . . children last”: Reid, 212.
In the case of the family Shostakovich left behind . . . : Glikman, 11.
“Hunger changes the appearance . . . swollen”: Skrjabina, 63.
“hunger tan”: Reid, 213.
“People were discovering . . . bone”: Ginzburg, 9.
“It was roughly the feeling . . . you’ve no voice”: Adamovich and Granin, 37.
“Everybody is now walking . . . here starving”: Jones, 206.
“There is much that is revolting . . . three children”: Adamovich and Granin, 201.
“The brain is devoured by the stomach”: Ibid., 32.
“Human beings showed . . . on the other”: Fadeyev, 59.
Corpse-eating was far more common . . . : Salisbury, 478.
The NKVD files are unspeakably macabre . . . : Reid, 289.
The criminal profile of corpse-eaters was surprising . . . : Ibid., 290. We should remember, however, that these are the demographics of those who were caught, and it is unclear whether the figures are therefore accurately representative. People with a fixed address would have had an easier time hiding their crime. Cf. Salisbury, 447.
“felt that something was horribly wrong . . . what a fatty child”: Jones, 216.
“looked like a beast”: Ibid., 218.
A woman named Vera Lyudyno recorded . . . : Ibid., 4.
a mother whose child disappeared went to the police . . . : Ibid., 218.
A young couple, for example, went to the Haymarket . . . : Salisbury, 480–481.
“Wait for me here . . . blue veins”: Ibid., 480.
there really were a few organized cannibal bands . . . : Jones, 216; Reid, 288. Reid appears to think that the first example was actually one of theft, not of cannibalism.
There were nine arrests for cannibalism . . . : Jones, 217.
A year later, the final figure . . . : Reid, 288.
“After the blockade . . . morbid depression”: Adamovich and Granin, 341.
The Nazis asked carefully about when precisely . . . : Jones, 185.
“Countless tragedies are taking place . . . with cold curiosity”: Ibid., 175.
“A kind of polarization seemed . . . stiff test”: Adamovich and Granin, 148.
“We moved . . . helping others”: Jones, 200.
A young nurse named Marina Yerukhmanova . . . : Reid, 217–218.
Brigades of factory workers . . . : Simmons and Perlina, xvii.
A group of schoolteachers took it upon themselves . . . : Jones, 170.
“Everyone had a savior”: Adamovich and Granin, 148.
“Helping others was crucial . . . gave strength to people”: Jones, 5.
“People came to the library . . . left in the snow”: Ibid., 247.
The building itself had been seriously damaged . . . : Simmons and Perlina, 168. All of the following description comes from the memoirs of librarian Lilia Solomonovna Frankfurt (Simmons and Perlina, 163ff).
practical questions posed by the city government . . . : Salisbury, 508.
A Red Army lieutenant reading an early sci-fi novel . . . : Reid, 244.
“We warm ourselves . . . to make our tea”: Ibid., 245.
In the vaults and crypts beneath the Hermitage Museum . . . : Salisbury, 431–434.
During the day, some of them walked the nearly ten miles . . . : Jones, 247; Adamovich and Granin, 62.
For a while, they even managed to arrange for a fluctuating flow . . . : Salisbury, 433; Overy, 108–109. N.b.: Jones (182) claims the power source was a naval submarine.
“Here, the Muses speak together with the guns”: “Shostakovich and the Guns,” Time, July 20, 1942, 53.
Leningrad’s Musical Comedy Theater remained open . . . : Jones, 178.
Leningrad’s radio station also kept broadcasting . . . : Reid, 256; Jones, 233.
“Through the hallucinations . . . everything herself”: Adamovich and Granin, 23.
One night, faint with hunger, Berggolts . . . : Salisbury, 466–467.
“Why spread such doom . . . some music”: Fadeyev, 32.
“Is it possible . . . Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony?”: Ibid.
“By any means . . . as soon as possible”: Vulliamy, 2.
“The first violin is dying . . . near death”: Salisbury, 462.
“Just think . . . sing our Russian songs”: Fadeyev, 15.
“But Mother . . . need less food”: Adamovich and Granin, 169.
“Not counting the old people . . . long for this world”: Maria Konstantinova Tikhonov, quoted in Fadeyev, 14.
“I found in my work . . . morale”: Jones, 232.
“Something else . . . we don’t understand”: Ibid., 236.
“What saved us all . . . how we survived”: Zoya Yershova, quoted in Adamovich and Granin, 148.
“The hatred felt . . . defense”: Adamovich and Granin, 218.
“If anyone . . . labor of their hands”: Fadeyev, 64.
On the artillery shells produced in Leningrad . . . : Jones, 284.
“However did you hold out . . . ration”: Adamovich and Granin, 39–40.
“talked of faith . . . ‘research’”: Ibid., 42.
“Our life here . . . giving way to my tears”: Glikman, 7.
MY MUSIC IS MY WEAPON
It took the orchestra in Kuibyshev . . . : Weintraub Papers, “Some Notes on the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony,” 4.
“the musicians . . . would be fed better”: Geoffrey Norris, “Symphony in Shorthand: Geoffrey Norris Talks to Vasily Petrenko about Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony,” Gramophone 91 (June 2013).
“There they sat . . . taken home”: Seroff, 240; cf. Ardov, 21.
“The word ‘America’ . . . ever-falling shares”: Ilf and Petrov, 15.
“the most advanced . . . social order”: Ibid., 127.
“Stop acting like .
. . Stalin in return”: Herring, 85.
“They simply walked . . . to it”: Ibid., 37.
“Surly, snarly . . . their own lives”: Reid, 313.
They eventually suffered . . . : Hastings, 427, 316. Roughly five million German soldiers died in the war; of these, about 4.5 million were killed by the Russians (Hastings, 427).
“God knows we paid . . . in Russian lives”: Ibid., 287.
“We’ve lost millions . . . send us Spam”: Herring, 95.
“one hell of a people . . . like Americans”: Ibid., 94.
“He was in and out . . . get her in”: Seroff, 240.
“He’s always like . . . a flop”: Wilson, 159.
“He seemed . . . rigid and unsmiling”: Seroff, 241.
“My music is my weapon”: Weintraub Papers, f. 2.8, telegram from Vladimir Bazykin to Am-Rus Music Corp., July 18, 1942; cf. Lind, 16–17.
“We are struggling for . . . Leningrad”: Fay, Life, 131. This statement originally appeared in Pravda but was also translated and adapted for the American premiere of the work several months later.
it is at this point that the symphony itself is “invaded”: Shostakovich literally sets up an “invasion” of traditional symphonic form. The first movement begins in an absolutely routine sonata-allegro design, with an exposition of two themes, the first of which is even in a traditional C major. Just at the moment, however, when a symphony would normally transition into the development section, Shostakovich drops this material entirely. Instead of a development, we get a non-development: the obnoxious repetitions of the so-called invasion theme. It is quite literally as if a structure had been set up that would have gone on its own way happily — if its whole course and purpose hadn’t been utterly trampled by that march.
“War and Hitlerism . . . down upon you”: “Shostakovich’s Seventh, Symphony of War in Russia: Muscovite Reporter Tells His Impressions of Work at Rehearsal,” Boston Globe, April 4, 1942. Yevgeni Petrov was half of the Ilf and Petrov duo, two of Shostakovich’s favorite comic writers.
“I kept on hearing . . . getting louder and louder”: Ardov, 22.
a trumpet playing . . . offstage: Weintraub Papers, “Some Notes,” 4.
“Never in my . . . verging on tears”: Ibid.
“Nobody who saw . . . his movements”: Wilson, 169.
Perhaps more important to Shostakovich was some good news . . . : Shostakovich heard about this development at a rehearsal on February 14 (Fay, Life, 130).