Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  Marry me then, said Elena Konstantinovskaya.

  And why shouldn’t he marry her? She was the only one he ever found who could have dwelled with him in that four-roomed house within his chest, which they were fully capable of connecting, by means of trumpetlike passageways, with the four chambers of her own heart, so that then they would have had quite the castle together, oh, my, sharing refuges and secrets. And on that very first night he took her inside the world beneath the black keys, whispering: My tonic must have been D minor, when you, you know . . . And she understood him. She always did. She smiled and took him in, just the merest half-step, I actually mean a semitone, which is the space between adjacent notes in this diatonic scale we all live by. She was the only one!

  4

  Therefore, Opus 40, and in particular the first movement, composed of fire-light and kisses, remains the most romantic thing that Shostakovich ever wrote. In the recording which he made with D. Shafran ten years later, he played the piano part and Shafran the cello, the cello as vivid as Elena herself, the piano steady and glittery like Shostakovich; even though I have already stated that Elena’s song was more perfectly realized in the recording by E. Ax and Y.-Y. Ma, everything was already there: the piano was the skeleton; the cello was the flesh; he was the knowledge and commemoration; she was the life.

  5

  Elenochka, Lyalya I mean, or better yet my most perfect of all Russian Lyalkas, you possess all the names! You’re my jewel, oh, indeed, and I’m just a, a . . . I want to be a rocket scientist for you; I know you like rockets. Unfortunately, all I can do is, er, you know. This is a very complicated decision for us to make, Elena, with many, many factors, such as, I mean, what if I’m not the one for you? Because if you leave me, I’ll never forgive you. I’d rather be the one to, to—aren’t I contemptible? Lyalochka, I can’t sleep anymore for thinking of you! Please don’t leave me for a rocket scientist! And no heroes, either! You’d better not be attracted to brave individuals who like to go places; I’m only a mollusk; I need to hide forever within your lovely shell . . .

  6

  The red glow of embers seen through her hair as they lay by the hearth in Luga, then her vehement kisses, and his mouth on her cunt (his tongue seeking as tenderly as a true pianist’s fingers, obeying the timbre of her sighs, to give pleasure as exactly as he could: in short, her sighs were the score; his kisses were the performance; which is also to say that his kisses were the score, and her sighs the performance, the music of Opus 40 itself); and his mouth on her mouth when he penetrated her, and the unearthly beauty of her face in orgasm, and the way she held him tight for a long long time until they drowsed with his penis still inside her; they were still literally one flesh—all this seems to be grammatically the subject (but please confirm this with Comrade Academician Alexandrov); the verb comes only here; because these various acts, occurrences and results have become, as were their bodies, one thing, a coherent self-sufficiency of being which, like a noun, simply is; what they did is what they were; they were love; when she sighed, she sighed I love you and then her soft, smooth arms went rigid so that she could brace herself against the warm hearthstones and the sighs became inarticulate expressions of ecstasy, by which I mean again music.

  He said to her: Thank you for all the happiness you’ve given me.

  She kissed him passionately. His music became as heavy-lidded as the eyes of Käthe Kollwitz.

  7

  He could sight-read her, so to speak; he knew how to make her feel as though an orchestra were playing. (Well, wasn’t it?) This facility he lost later in life, around the time that the Berlin Wall went up; women began complaining that this Shostakovich had no erotic empathy—one of the two reasons why G. Ustvolskaya would refuse to marry him in 1954. By then he was talking to himself; after Nina died he used to say, I think to the piano: Oh, me, oh, my, Elena; well, if it’s not working as it is, then maybe we should leave it and, you know, avoid our mistakes next time we’re each with a, a, I’m sorry. That’s just my, how should I say, my personal point of view.—But he hadn’t lost anything in 1934, neither courage nor confidence, let alone integrity; in 1935 he still sparkled with jokes; Elena never stopped laughing! She counted on him to keep her always highspirited; that was one of the myriad ways he cherished her; he remained untouched by what I’ll call history, which is why I assert that foreseeing the future is as worthless as observing that the third theme of Opus 40’s fourth movement appears more uneven on the page than does the second theme of the first movement. But imagining the future, then mistaking imagination for foresight, is one of life’s luxuries; certainly it seemed to him and her (and how could it have been otherwise?) that whenever they kissed they were drinking the future.

  Kissing her again and again, he got drunk. All around them both, the dull grey and pinkish-grey building-fronts of Leningrad angled and articulated in accordance with canal-curves. One more kiss, Lyalochka! When he slowly slid his finger in and out of her, she uttered soft clucking sounds from deep within her throat, her eyes closed in ecstasy.

  8

  The extent of his infatuation with this young woman (who was still, by the way, a member in good standing of the Komsomol—no matter that she smoked cigarettes) may best be conveyed by noting that three weeks into their affair, in June, he had to leave on a concert tour; in July he met Nina in Yalta, then vacationed with her in Polenevo, where the cellist V. Kubatsky, pitying his desperation, implored him to distract himself by composing a new sonata, and the very next month, within a few days of their return to Leningrad, Nina had already moved out, at which her husband burst into tears and said: It’s entirely superfluous to, to, how can I make my point, Ninusha, to take the line of least resistance and . . . Then he rushed off to take Elena Konstantinovskaya to another concert.

  9

  That was on the the thirteenth of August. He walked down the great avenue of trees in Alexander Park, just so he could, you know, think about Elena. On the nineteeth of September, the fourth movement of Opus 40 was already finished, because he couldn’t help, how should I say, bustling about; as a small child he’d never been able to sit still in his chair, so his mother had to, never mind. Elena wept when he played her score on his piano: In affairs of the heart, my friends, considerable weeping tends to go on as part of the, you know, background music. On 10 March 1935, he informed his closest confidant, Sollertinsky, that he might never come back to Leningrad; he could now envision himself in Moscow with Elena, where we’ll have a little, you know, with two sets of four rooms. His mother had never liked Nina anyway—not that she liked Elena much better, but his sister Maryusa adored her. In Moscow the two of us can get away from everything; we’ll start over and I’ll never see Nina again. And indeed it was in Moscow that he showed L. T. Atovmyan his divorce certificate.

  10

  What about Nina? Well, what about her? The late S. Khentova, in whose Udivitelyenui Shostakovich (1993) forty-two of Shostakovich’s letters to Elena are published, although not without the excisions of certain intimacies (I have all that right here, but it’s going to stay in my secret collection), bequeathed us the following summation of the two rivals: In contrast to Nina Vasilievna, who was not interested in fashion, she dressed elegantly, cultivating grace, femininity and sensuality.

  All the same, he did come back to Nina—twice.

  11

  Khentova, whom Shostakovich avoided like death, cannot always be trusted. I’m not saying she was in the hire of any foreign powers; I do maintain that her intelligence service was less reliable than mine. For example, she claims that our composer did not become Elena Konstantinovskaya’s lover until the summer of 1934, when one of the private English classes in his apartment ended with kisses. But Opus 40 itself proves that their love was consummated in the very first movement, the allegro non troppo. No doubt they took precautions on those white nights. He hadn’t yet volunteered to leave Nina; nor had Elena become unshakably certain of her love for him. So they hid within their eight-chamber
ed house where even sharp-eyed Khentova couldn’t see. They fooled Mravinsky, Glikman, Sollertinsky, Nina unquestionably (come to think of it, perhaps they didn’t fool Nina), and most impressively, Shostakovich’s mother, who still read his diary whenever she could. Deep down they went, down to the red core that he’d revisit alone twenty-six years later, when he composed Opus 110.

  A pianist can sometimes resemble a slow underwater swimmer, and a lover likewise swims within the sea of the other, far down where no waves can reach; overhead, the piano’s lid, heavier than a coffin’s, shuts out extraneous vibrations, while simultaneously demarcating the boundary between water and air. It’s too perfect underwater; that’s what kills us, the perfection! (This is not my theory, of course; I don’t believe in perfection.) And the addictive poisonousness of this perfection was what flooded Shostakovich with the joy of something illicit, first when he was a boy playing weirdness on the piano when others expected a foxtrot; and now when he was Nina’s husband and playing out his passion for Elena. Another English lesson, pretty please, Lyalotchka! Elena is to poor Nina as Opus 110, the Eighth String Quartet, will be to the First, which its composer dismisses as a particular exercise in the form of a quartet. Forgive me, Ninusha!

  12

  After the divorce went through, he went to his previous muse, T. Glivenko, and said to her with a sad laugh: I have a very clever wife, oh, yes—very clever . . .

  13

  Because he couldn’t stop kissing her, her delightfully puffy lips were the next parts of her to get translated. In the course of translation, he necessarily sucked on them. Private English lessons, oh, me, oh, my! He couldn’t stop! And so Elena’s lips kiss us all forever in the second movement. Elenka dearest, I’m going to write a, let’s see, a Moscow Concerto, so that you and I can go to Moscow! And there we’ll do it again, oh, yes, Lyalka, we’ll orchestrate something else all over again! Because you’re my . . .

  Then her hair—oh, her, how should I say, her, well, her long, dark hair . . .

  14

  Right here in Sovetskaya Muzika, number three, a certain D. D. Shostakovich denies translation in any specific sense. He’s like one of those wretches I deal with at the office every day; they grovel and admit to being Trotskyites, but then when I demand a detailed confession, with acts and especially names, they try to wriggle out of it. Can you imagine? In that same spirit, Shostakovich says to Sovetskaya Muzika: When a critic for Worker and Theater or for The Evening Red Gazette writes that in such-and-such a symphony Soviet civil servants are represented by the oboe and the clarinet, and Red Army men by the brass section, you want to scream!

  Well, at my office we know what we hear. And if Shostakovich wants to argue with us, we’ll take him down into the cellars and show him what screaming’s all about. He has the impudence to deny her long, dark hair.

  15

  I promise you that from the first time she took his hand—the very first time!—he actually believed; she was ready, lonely, beautiful; she wanted someone to love with all her heart and he was the man; she longed to take care of him, knowing even better than he how much he needed to be taken care of—he still couldn’t knot his necktie by himself, and, well, you know. He believed, because an artist must believe as easily and deeply as a child cries. What’s creation but self-enacted belief?—Now for a cautionary note from E. Mravinsky: Shostakovich’s music is self-ironic, which to me implies insincerity. This masquerade imparts the spurious impression that Shostakovich is being emotional. In reality, his music conceals extremely deep lyric feelings which are carefully protected from the outside world. In other words, is Shostakovich emotional or not? Feelings conceal—feelings! Could it be that this languishing longing I hear in Opus 40 actually masks something else? But didn’t he promise Elena that she was the one for him? And how can love be self-ironic? All right, I do remember the rocking-horse sequence, but isn’t that self-mockery simply self-abnegation, the old lover’s trick? Elena believes in me, I know she does! How ticklishly wonderful! Even Glikman can see it, although perhaps I shouldn’t have told Glikman, because . . . What can love be if not faith? We look into each other’s faces and believe : Here’s the one for me! Lyalya, never forget this, no matter how long you live and whatever happens between us: You will always be the one for me. And in my life I’ll prove it. You’ll see. Sollertinsky claims that Elena’s simply lonely. What if Elena’s simply twenty? Well, I’m lonely, too. Oh, this Moscow-Baku train is so boring. I can’t forgive myself for not kidnapping my golden Elenochka and bringing her to Baku with me. Or does she, how shall I put this, want too much from destiny? My God, destiny is such a ridiculous word. I’ll try not to be too, I mean, why not? It’s still early in my life. That nightmare of the whirling red spot won’t stop me! I could start over with Elena and . . . She loves me. Ninusha loves me, but Elena, oh, my God, she stares at me with hope and longing; her love remains unimpaired, like a child’s. I love children. I want to be a father. I’ll tell Nina it’s because she can’t have children. That won’t hurt her as much as, you know. Actually, it’s true, because Nina . . . Maybe I can inform her by letter, so I don’t have to . . . Ashkenazi will do that for me if I beg him. He’s very kind, very kind. Then it will be over! As soon as I’m back in my Lyalka’s arms I’ll have the strength to resolve everything. If I could only protect that love of hers from ever falling down and skinning its knee, much less from growing up, growing wise and bitter! Then when she’s old she’ll still look at me like that; I’ll still be the one for her.

  It’s true that you didn’t even tell your mother and sisters when you got married?

  My dear Elenochka, that’s true, oh, yes, because, you see, I, I didn’t want to. Let’s go to the Summer Garden and . . .

  You didn’t want to what?

  I didn’t want to marry Nina! But I couldn’t bring myself to hurt her, and she, well.

  And do you want to stay married to her?

  No, he said steadily.

  Whom is it, if anyone, that you want to marry?

  You, Elena!

  Are you sure?

  Yes, I’m sure.

  Then she laughed for joy and pounced on him; that was the genesis of the fourth movement (allegro again); call it a sprightly yet stately dance in a minor key, a dance not of skeletons—they’re too mischievous, too dramatic for that!—although for a moment Opus 40 does lapse into what will become Shostakovich’s signature greyness. The piano brings it back to life: Elena and Shostakovich are stalking each other like cats! A renowned pianist who has performed this composition argues that the brilliance here is sinister rather than exhibitionistic; I disagree; Shostakovich is happy! Here comes the pizzicato: Elena is drawing her long fingernails lightly and lovingly down his belly. Then the piano cascades gleefully into a warm bed of strings, where the young couple’s bright, brisk, expert lovemaking glitters at us. (Why expert? Because they’re expert in each other.—Mitya dear, I’m so happy, I can almost taste gingerbread!) Back to the opening song, the richly Russian tune, which stretches itself in several postcoital variations; then Opus 40 ends in a delicious surprise of snapping teeth: that was when Elena bit him again—a nice mark of ownership, right there on the side of his neck!

  16

  In Baku the sea-wind covered the grand piano with sand. So many people came to his concert that we requested him to perform again the next day, which he did, because he could never say no to anyone who was nice with him; then he went out to the restaurant “New Europe” to hear gypsy songs. Every time the gypsies sang of love he almost cried, but not quite. He knew now that without Elena he would die. And he was meeting Nina in Yalta. He had headaches; it was all Elena’s fault . . .

  That love-bite of Elena’s, it was itching now. He felt happy when he scratched it. How could he represent it musically? He got drunk and showed it off to the gypsies, who applauded. Well, in the fourth movement, at the very end, I’ll, I’ll—just wait and I’ll show you all! I’m going to make her live forever, because . . . Oh, Lyal
ya, oh, God. When he thought of Elena he was sure that he could do anything.

  17

  Since so many souvenirs of her have been found in this sonata—doubtless, many more await the discovery of musicologists—can we speak of a Konstantinovskaya Theme in Opus 40?

  First of all, for the benefit of persons such as my good colleague Pyotr Alexeev, who’s a musical illiterate, allow me to draw three distinctions: Motif is a very nineteenth-century sort of term, which is not the slightest bit applicable to our Soviet music today.15 Leitmotiv, which we most often find applied specifically to Wagner, is a very short passage relating to a character, object or event: for instance, the Magic Fire music. Leave that to the Fascists, I say! Theme, at least in Shostakovich, gets worked out, developed, is longer.

  It’s now widely agreed in progressive social circles that all humankind constitutes a single superorganism. Extending this correct line to culture, why not consider Shostakovich’s body of work as a whole? In that sense, a Konstantinovskaya Theme can be detected from 1934 to 1960. According to Beria, Yagoda and T. N. Khrennikov, its characteristics are rainbow tones oozing unpredictably into puddles of metallic greyness, dance melodies which alternate between ponderous and skeletal, and, most happily, achromatic patterns which soar into regions beyond human comprehension, a perfect example of the latter being the Fugue in A Minor which lives within Opus 87.