15
He was now in what might be called his life’s first entr’acte, when the orchestra of compulsion laid down its poisoned violin-bows, and the audience, namely Shostakovich himself and all who cared for him, were momentarily permitted to leave their seats for a moment, descend the marble steps, and stand by the open window smoking cigarettes. What would happen next? Comrade Stalin had written the program, but the program was nowhere distributed. Bribe the usher as many rubles you liked; you still couldn’t get a glimpse of what was coming. The bell rang. Everyone rushed back. The monsters resumed singing.
They arrested his brother-in-law. They carried off his NKVD contact V. Dombrovsky and liquidated him. A Black Maria came for one colleague after the next. They exiled his elder sister in Central Asia. He went to the NKVD office on Liteiny Boulevard to plead for her, but without success. He barely had time to buy her warm felt boots . . .
He toed the line. He went to Lenin Stadium, leaped up and opened his mouth to cheer for the Dynamos, although no sound came out. (What’s that sound? he asked himself. I mean that, that sound that didn’t . . . Where is it? When I hear it will I scream?) Glikman rang him up to invite him to go see R. L. Karmen’s newsreel “On the Events in Spain,” because that might give him ideas. Poor Glikman—which is to say, what a thought! All the same, he went, just to, to, you know. As a direct result, he wrote an uplifting score for the play “Salute, Spain!” He also wrote music for the movie “The Return of Maxim.”
A Black Maria came for Tukhachevsky. They tortured him and put him on trial. (He is said to have asked one of his desperately self-incriminating co-defendants: Are you dreaming?) In the interests of all peace-loving peoples, they liquidated him and buried him in a construction trench. They also shot his wife, his mother, one of his sisters and both of his brothers. His daughter and the remaining three sisters went straight to prison camps.
Not long after these events, Shostakovich was summoned to the offices of the NKVD to inquire into his connection with the traitor Tukhachevsky.
16
Our composer was punctual throughout his life. On the rare occasions when he was a minute late, he apologized in anguish. By the same token, if a singer or musician did not show up on time, he grew enraged. What intimidated him the most, therefore, was the way that the secret police kept him waiting hour after hour. It was a large old prewar office, with rococo walls from the time when Leningrad had still been Petersburg, with papers everywhere, even on the floor, and the smell of freshly oiled boots. All the people who had not yet been called were required to stand. Smiling, he mopped at his forehead.
There was a window through which he gazed, just to look at something, at another demonstration, dark-clad people clumped together in a long rectangle beneath the wires and bullhorns, some banners straight and crisp, some sagging. He was almost in sight of the former Army and Navy Club, where Kussevitsky had conducted Scriabin just before the Revolution; his mother had liked the performance; they’d played the “Extase.” Her tastes were, you know. But then two Chekists shoved him, literally shoved him away from the window, and one of them said: Don’t bother jumping, chum. You kill yourself, and we’ll take it out on Nina. We know just what to do with Nina.
He started to faint, I mean really, so they dragged him into a chair and left him there for four more hours.
All right, Shostakovich, wake up and go in that office. Don’t be slow about it, either.
They wanted to know whether it was true that he’d played violin duets together with the enemy of the people Tukhachevsky. He confessed that it was. They inquired into the matter of musical codes. What messages might be transmitted by a violin? (It’s rumored that at the very end, the condemned man had remarked: I would have been better off as a violinist.) The composer replied: Well, comrades, I, I, which is to say, by training I’m not a cryptographer, you know—
Stick to the point, you shit!
Which favors precisely had that enemy of the people done for Citizen Shostakovich? And why was that enemy of the people’s portrait still hanging on the wall in Citizen Shostakovich’s flat?
They asked him what he knew about Tukhachevsky’s plot to kill Comrade Stalin. He said he didn’t know anything. They said to him: Today is Saturday. We’ll sign your pass and let you go home. But on Monday you’d better be here, and you’d better remember something. This is very serious.
He rushed home. Thank God Nina was at work, because if she could see his face right now she’d, you know . . .
All that saved him was the arrest of his interrogator.
17
He stayed at home until he had stopped vomiting. (To Nina he whispered: No, no, it’s nothing but a mild case of operational shock.) Then, biting his lip, he returned to Liteiny Boulevard.
In the doorway, the two sentries with fixed bayonets sneered and insulted him yet again. Never mind; he wanted to see what he could do to help his exiled sister.
What the hell do you think you’re doing coming back here? shouted the prosecutor. Watch out, or you’ll be next. I don’t give a rat’s ass for your so-called “musical accomplishments”—
Again he requested a meeting with Comrade Stalin, but received no answer.
18
Subtitled “A Soviet artist’s creative reply to just criticism,” and ending as it did fortissimo in a major key, the Fifth Symphony premiered to stormy ovations in 1937, but Party investigators accused him of planting applauding stooges among the audience. In Leningrad, the third movement’s largo literally excited tears. People rushed to the stage like accolytes. The conductor Mravinsky waved the score in the air. Shostakovich grew pallid and weak as the defiant applause continued. Such expressions were an insult to Comrade Stalin . . . In that same year we find him writing a jazz suite part of whose melody was prudently derived from Stalin’s favorite song “Suliko.”
He’d retreated somewhat, to be sure; he’d fallen back to his inner line. If you didn’t know, you might call it, well, an agreeably stereotyped situation: children and all that, I mean. For instance, Galina, Galya, Galotchka, Galisha, what a girl she was! Her second birthday had been a star performance, although for some reason Nina had been very, never mind. From her he learned that to a child all things are pure. He envied her and felt ashamed. As for Maxim, that red-faced creature, nicknamed Opus 2, wasn’t quite six weeks old. Sollertinsky said . . . Shostakovich knew that a father was supposed to get involved with his offspring. Well, why get overly specific? He wasn’t going to wash his hands of anything. As far as his so-called “career” went (don’t make me, you know, laugh), his hope was that he could still write the music he chose, but only on occasion and only if he presented it obsequiously enough. Glikman advised him to write more movie music, with lots and lots of upbeat chorus numbers; we all knew who’d like that! And if he could, so to speak, keep from being affected personally . . .
Although he was now officially known as “the enemy of the people Shostakovich,” the “organs” nonetheless permitted him to rent a dacha near Luga, because it wasn’t their way to strike always the same chord; and it was there that he slept in Elena Konstantinovskaya’s arms for the very last time. It was July, so I’ve been told; he rose in the humid white morning to watch sun-play and leaf-play, which Lebedinsky later claimed to find in his Sixth Symphony; when he came back to bed, she was awake and almost dressed.—Did I tell you, Elena (it’s really quite hilarious) that, that Glikman tried to persuade me to write an opera, well, more likely it would be an operetta, about a Red Army man and a priest’s daughter in Spain? Because Spain, you see, is, well, with the civil war and all, it’s a crucible of world struggle; Glikman hypothesizes that Comrade Stalin might, so to speak, like that. Have you seen “Salute, Spain”? I won’t see it. Sometimes Glikman is very . . . Then I could put “Lady Macbeth” behind me. That’s his notion, and—Elenka dearest, why are you crying?—I’m going to Spain, and I’ll never come back, she said. And I’ve drawn a heart on the wall, behind the head of the bed w
here they’ll never see, and in the heart I wrote our initials. I don’t want you to look at it. And I won’t kiss you again, not ever.
In the autumn of 1938, not long before the first snowfall, he announced that his next symphony would be dedicated to Lenin. Thin, anxious, pale, distinguished by a knife-sharp profile, he promised to include folk songs, too. But at the premiere, not a single reference to Lenin could be found. The critics sneered that the finale of this Sixth so-called Symphony was nothing more than the recapitulation of a football match; he never to the end of his life forgot that humiliation, but at least his life did not feel threatened. For some reason there was a lull in the terror. Indeed, by 1941 his Piano Quintet in G Minor (Opus 57) had in spite of several secret denunciations received a Stalin Prize, category one.
In the press he read that the volume of production in Leningrad was now 12.3 times higher than it had been in 1913. He read that the Kirghiz composer A. Maldybaev’s “Aichviek” (The Lunar Beauty) was now considered “a Soviet classic.” This last item reminded him of his sister Mariya, still languishing in Middle Asia.
He lurked out of sight with his family, which The Soviet Way of Life defines as a socio-biological community of people characterized by matrimonial or kindred relations, living together and having a common budget. He and Nina sat in silence together, reading the Red Evening Gazette. To Glikman, who saved all his letters and from whom he concealed much, his voicelessness was almost literally godlike: Nothing perturbed the great Shostakovich! But they kept the curtains drawn. Whenever anyone knocked on the door, Nina gasped. He tried not to betray any emotion, but his fingers remained uncontrollable. He rose to clasp Nina tight against his terrified heart. He pretended to be kissing her, so that he could whisper in her ear: This is our life . . .—Sometimes late at night they could hear faint volleys from the Peter and Paul Fortress. Who was dying in the cellars? Galisha woke up and tried to hide; Nina worried that she would smother herself beneath the pillows. Oh, what a comic life we lead! I hold Galya in my arms and I feel better; then I’m ashamed of feeling better, because she’s going to grow up alone. Well, well, I love my daughter; no doubt that fact speaks for itself. Shunned by the righteous and the prudent, he expected that midnight knock, followed by the one-way trip in a Black Maria. Elena had told him how it went. No wonder the celebrated “horror” of his Fifth Symphony, which in the words of S. Volkov expressed the feelings of the intellectual who tried in vain to hide from the menacing outside world. And now from that outside world came bombs, murk, lights and tanks.
19
Although it was the program music of the Seventh Symphony which would make him famous, the course of the war is better symbolized by the first three movements of his incomparably greater Eighth Symphony in C Minor (an unwholesome work, to be sure, for its pessimism deviates from the Party line). The opening theme truly does bear comparison with the “Fate” motif of Beethoven’s Fifth, but whereas the urgency of the German melody is tempered by its composer’s autumnal mellowness, Shostakovich’s version strikes us as harshly as a Russian winter. The apples have fallen, snow is here, and destiny holds out no possibility of anything but evil. The deep, thrumming resonance of the very first chord evokes a community united only by sleep. Wickedness hovers outside the frosty windows of Leningrad. This wickedness is on the march; and the Eighth Symphony, compressing time like the walls of a condemned cell, hastens its arrival. In my own dreams on the nights before the anniversaries of bad days, I sometimes see my death as a tall shadow bending over me, warning in a soft baritone voice that I’d better rise up and get ready, for it’s time to leave my warm bed forever. But it’s still night, and it’s so cold outside; I don’t want to wake into that dream! And who is this shadow? It can’t really be death; how could I possibly die? Russia for her part couldn’t perceive even the outlines of the figure which menaced her, thanks to the Nazi-Soviet Pact which Comrade Stalin had so wisely signed in 1939. No longer could we denounce Hitler as a Fascist. We’d united with him against the imperialist Franco-British bloc.22 When Germany swallowed western Poland, the Soviet Union upheld the interests of the oppressed proletariat and overran the east. Now only rivers and barbed wire stood between us. Diplomats called this expedient partition the Ribbentrop-Molotov Line, and in military maps it was black with swastikas and arrows on the left, blood-red with stars and arrows on the right. Every general who dared to warn of militarypreparations on the German side, of tanks and planes massing, got threatened with death.
In Berlin, that other composer, Adolf Hitler, was putting the final dispositions on the score of his Thirteenth Symphony: Skizze B: Heeresgruppe Nord. Eigene Lage am 22.6.1941 abds. Operation “BARBAROSSA.” Roman numerals, an hourglass flag, checkerboard flags, numerals inside circles and semicircles, all of these stood dark upon a pale grey map of western Russia. The plural of staff is staves. His General Staff were all staves and knaves stacked one above another in parallels on the music paper. His score had no end. Shostakovich, it’s said, could write twenty or thirty pages a day when well engaged upon a symphony, and Heeresgruppe Nord, Army Group North, would make similarly rapid progress across the pale grey flatness en route to Leningrad. The other two Army Groups proved equally exemplary. Before their symphony was done, they’d kill almost as many high-ranking Russian officers as had Comrade Stalin himself.
As any Conservatory student is aware, the staves for higher-pitched voices possess the royal privilege of slithering above their lower-pitched kinsfolk on the orchestral score. In Soviet prison camps the same rule gets followed, with our full-voiced thieves occupying the higher, warmer bunks, while the dying “politicals,” almost too weak to utter a sound, stretch themselves out below them on icy planks or, if their voices are really low, on the dirty, frozen floorboards by the piss bucket. The German conductor likewise honored this principle. All of his generals who survived would later remember his shrill abuse, singing unceasingly above them. He, their sleepwalker, was the only soloist. Composer, conductor and mezzo-soprano, he made the music of his dreams.
Needless to say, the pages of a score are subdivided not only horizontally by the staves, but also vertically by the partitions between measures which assure that every voice will sing to the same beat. In the symphony called “Barbarossa,” these bar lines were provided by a double file of tall German executioners aiming their rifles at an evenly spaced line of civilian hostages who stood facing a stone wall.
20
So came the night of 21-22 June 1941, when the stern, dignified melancholy of the Eighth Symphony’s opening rapidly shrills into outright alarm. After a grim stretch of strings, it rises even higher into stridency, this time with a martial component. Drumbeats like distant bursts of machine-guns announce full war, and horns scream like air raid sirens. Barbarossa begins: ten contrabasses, twelve violincelli, twelve violas, thirty violins of two types, four trumpets, four flutes, two oboes, an English horn, two clarinets, bass and piccolo clarinet, and twenty-two other instruments across a front forty-five hundred kilometers long. The Soviet sentries come running from their pillboxes; they’re machine-gunned down. Russia awakens far too early on that black morning, sundering herself into the brassy urgency of multiply solitary fears. A crazy, lumbering, hideous march brings the murderers closer: The Panzergruppen have crossed the bridges. Now here come the planes. In two days, two thousand of our aircraft will be destroyed. In a week, Minsk will surrender (a crime for which Comrade Stalin will shoot eight more of his generals). The symphony wails on. Not a note but reeks of gloom and horror. A terrifyingly idiotic fanfare proclaims an enemy beachhead—they’ve taken Riga—or is this fanfare in fact to be taken literally as a Soviet call to arms?—or does Shostakovich hope that the “organs” will take it literally when it’s actually excoriation of Stalin himself? Well, it’s only music.
Suddenly we’re illuminated by a hauntingly clarion thrill of trumpets. It sounds all the more genuine because it’s so sad, almost hopeless.
The second movement, about
which one critic says that any attempts at jollity are quickly squashed and metamorphosed into irony and causticness, could almost be movie filler music, sarcastically excreted by the young Shostakovich during his stint at the Bright Reel. (Once he’d almost got fired for his deliberately absurd music for the film “Marsh Birds of Sweden.”) Throughout his career, ballet and movie scores were his bread and butter. When it came to his own work, he continued to expressly reject any claim to programmatic representation: Red Army men were not brass instruments, he said.—I do not believe him.—His trademark ambiguity infests this second movement. Does Galisha smile and try to dance? Then I’ve failed. I need her to, to, God forgive me, not that I believe in God! He made it loud; he made it angry, leaving in a half-cheerful bustling quality which alternated with marching dismalness. Then came the snake-rattle of death at the end.
The third movement, the allegro non troppo, begins in flight, the score itself, that pale flat sheet of endlessness called the Ukrainian steppes, being half obscured by burning fields and towns whose doom has been translated musically into low strings. It’s July. Their Panzers will soon be here. Black tank-smoke’s already on the horizon; the hot sky’s black with burning. And we, imprisoned by Shostakovich’s genius within the fear-poisoned heart-thumps of bass viols, must impotently witness all. Children scream like piccolos. That’s also how they’ll scream in Leningrad. I hear us running over the plain, passing abandoned villages whose huts and tractor stations will soon serve enemy battalions. Our footfalls are violas and violins. Burned-out oil lamps hang from whitewashed walls. New fires will come; summer is already scorching the edge of the music paper. Now they’re all gone east, the ones who will get there; the rest of us are dead or hiding. Dimming down into sick expectancy, Shostakovich’s symphony half-illuminates sorrow’s carpet: unburnt earth, which soon will drink in blood and groaning. It’s a near-blank page now, a plain of trodden grass scattered with the clothing of the fled. With evil speed the last rest expires. Then what? Ask D. D. Shostakovich that question, and he’ll drunkenly reply: He who has ears will hear. So wait for death. Horns proclaim that here they are, crawling over a low golden ridge with their guns aimed at us. Run, run, run! Now they see us! Run, run! We hide! They come. We run. They come! Very suddenly, we’re them, and it’s all so cheery like the grin of a corpse.23 We Nazis are rolling forward and shooting. (But call it a Slavic dance if you will; call it Stalin in peacetime, murdering Ukrainian peasants by the millions.) Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Sempre cresc. sin’al. With woodwind flourishes we’re burning every house in Vitebsk; Smolensk lies afire as in Napoleon’s time; smoke the hue of pure light boils out of windows. Their T-34s have all run away. With violin flourishes we speed east-wards through the golden grass. Crossing that same low ridge we’d watched from the far side in that primeval epoch when we’d been us, we spy the Reds fleeing toward the horizon. Never mind; our strafing planes will finish most of them. We’re on the frictionless flatness of the score sheet now; with oompapahs and oompapahs our tanks cavort across this dance floor of gratified ambition, driving toward Moscow and Leningrad as easily as if we were skating. When the Russians do form up their troops at last, they’re as feebly translucent as rainclouds on a horizon of pianissimo violins. Never mind their so-called Stalin Line, or their Luga Line; we’ll grind right through both of those, hardly noticing their defensive drumbeats. We kill everything, machine-gun every last charging wraith. And the Ukrainian steppes roll happily on. A crazy old Cossack comes galloping at us, and we blow his head off! He careens; he’s a fountain of blood, horse-waltzing ludicrously gruesome until he tumbles. Now the music tilts again like the upswung heads of hanged Ukrainians and again we’re us, running, running before those brassy baying horns. But here they come, running us down . . . We should have known that the only reason that Shostakovich’s nightmare restored us to ourselves was so we’d be compelled to drink the cup of anguish. It’s not that we’ve run out of room on the page; we could flee eastward forever, the Soviet Union being infinite, but the Panzers overtake us in less than three dozen measures. Then . . . Victory! Victory! They’re themselves, mercilessly. As gong, snare drum and cymbals sound a triumphal fanfare of evil, they crush us under tank treads; they toast themselves by upraising our decapitated heads . . .
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