Afterward, Comrade Kabalevsky remarked: In spite of a few pretty passages, and I certainly don’t wish to demean you as a musician, my dear Mitya, it’s still an apology for a debauched murderess!
Comrade Luria was also there, and he gave off a stink of burning. Stroking his beard, he contented himself by reminding us all that even the émigré Martynov had summed up Shostakovich’s opus as a warning of harmful deviation.
Yes, to be sure, my dear friends, because I myself am nothing but a, you know.
And you seriously intended to compose an entire cycle of these so-called “feminist operas,” Dmitri Dmitriyevich?
I’m afraid so, he whispered triumphantly. When you, er, buy little boys in ancient China they’re little hands; little girls are just cocoons. Which makes me feel . . .
What a disgusting piece of nonsense!
Comrade Khubov inserted the third dagger, saying: The real point is that the “Muddle Instead of Music” article in Pravda has never been retracted. Therefore, it’s still in force.
In a rage, Glikman shouted at them: But Stalin is dead!
That’s as may be, Isaak Davidovich. But, when all’s said and done, Comrade Stalin remains a genius. He was the head of the Party at that time. And it’s just not done to go against the Party. Don’t you agree, Mitya?
Correct, correct, correct! cried Shostakovich in a trembling voice. It’s just a question of—I mean, I’ve evidently failed to overcome my age-old errors!
Ah. Well, I’m glad you see that much. Keep toeing the line, Mitya, and we’ll do what we can. Maybe in another ten years the time will be right. As for you, Isaak Davidovich, speaking as your colleague, if not quite your friend, I’d advise you to be very, very careful. Needless to say, nobody’s remarks will go beyond this room. All the same, don’t you see that your misguided counteroffensive could actually hurt Mitya?
Don’t worry, don’t worry, whispered Shostakovich. I’d like to thank you all for your helpful criticisms . . .
Mitya, don’t take this so much to heart! Nobody’s calling you an enemy of the people yet! Just calm down and remember that we’re only interested in your good—
Thank you for that, Comrade Khubov. Thank you, thank you!
And now for a technical question. Don’t worry, Comrade Alexandrov; it won’t be too technical. What I want to know, Mitya, is this: What key is this opera in?
Well, I—
I want you to know that this morning we all listened to your music to “The Fall of Berlin.” Parts of that movie are dated now, obviously, but in my opinion what you did there is your best work.
Thank you, thank you!
It’s what the Americans would call feel-good music, if you follow me, Mitya. It sends us out into the world with a song that we can whistle! In essence, we begin in a major key, then after some dramatic strife, in the course of which we win our victory against international Fascism, we return to the tonic, the harmonic base. We’re back in that same major key, following the correct line. What key is that, by the way?
In fact—
Never mind. Mitya, you obviously understand the concept of the tonic, and in this case you succeed almost as well as Blanter or even Khrennikov.
(Shostakovich ducked and smiled his gratitude, twiddling his fingers as frantically as Scarlatti.)
Unfortunately, this opera of yours lacks a tonic. It’s lost its way. It ventures out behind enemy lines and gets cut off.
Comrade Kabalevsky, you’ve exposed the, the, how should I say, central error of my career. I’m only a . . . Lost, that’s exactly it. You’ve not only exposed me, you’ve, um, lighted the way ahead with a searchlight. You see, I lost the tonic in 1935 or thereabouts. Maybe it was 1934, or 1936. It was . . . Do you believe that each composer’s soul (well, I don’t mean soul, which is, is, let’s say personality, a word more suited to our, so to speak, modern Soviet epoch) is best suited to working in a certain key, or, or, even . . . ? My tonic must have been D minor, which sometimes reminds me of the maples and limes of the Summer Garden, because I . . . But then I, um, misplaced it.
What nonsense!
You see, I’m confused. I confess to that. At least it wasn’t malicious. I’m, I’m, there’s something wrong. And “Lady Macbeth merely reflects . . .
What I can’t imagine is how your poor wife must have felt when you dedicated this obscene trash to her.
She was actually my, so to speak, fiancée at the time, Comrade Alexandrov—
But you did dedicate it to her?
Unfortunately I did; that can’t be washed away, but Nina always had a very healthy proletarian sense. She never liked it—
Where is Nina right now, by the way?
She—
It says right here that you claimed that your opera was about love. Is that true?
It’s about, I, I, how love could have been if the world weren’t full of vile things . . .
Which vile things exactly?
Uh, Hitlerism for instance.
Don’t get smart with us, Mitya! When you signed off on that lump of formalist drivel, the Fascists hadn’t invaded yet.
Well, then, let’s say proto-Hitlerism. Because of course, the Reichstag fire and all that, you know, Dmitroff’s trial . . . And you’re absolutely right; I see now that “Lady Macbeth” is and always will be nothing but a disgusting muddle; thank you for helping me to see that—
They kept talking; their skull-jaws moved; but all he could hear was his own Rat Theme reiterating itself louder and louder.
29
He was completely rehabilitated at the Second All-Union Congress of Soviet Composers in the spring of 1957. Galina Ustvolskaya had just completed her Sonata No. 4, which consisted of four attacca movements, so he’d heard; she hadn’t found time to play it for him, but Glikman, who seemed to get around, had already heard it and pronounced it extremely depressing.
Photographs from this period often show him leaning his hand against his forehead, staring at the whiteness of a score in the recording studio. When he was alone he laughingly choked out: Oh, yes, my tonic must have been D minor! That was perfect! Even Glikman didn’t know what I was . . .—He continued to be as productive as those Stakhanovite coal mine workers who overfulfill their norms by a factor of fourteen. His chords paraded across each score like some exercise march of suntanned girls in Red Square, each in a white tank top and grey shorts. Sometimes they were even happy; sometimes they resembled rainbow flower-explosions made of arrows. At a gathering of his friends he drank too much and began singing: Burn, candle, burn bright, in Lenin’s little red asshole, which could have gotten him ten years. That fall his Eleventh Symphony, which had already achieved immense success in spite of its secret references to the Soviet tanks now crushing the Hungarian uprising (Maxim had whispered: Papa, what if they hang you for this?), won a Lenin Prize—which after Khruschev’s secret speech could not be called a Stalin Prize anymore, you see. The capitalists dismissed it as program music. Pale cold lights, arising diagonally from the wet pavement, diffused into the darkness like jet trails. Patches of wet light, flat zones and darkness, and then the pallid welcome of lights in the porticoes of official buildings besieged the celebrations. Far, far within, Shostakovich paced tremblingly from handshake to handshake, smiling in a flutter, drinking too much vodka. Oh, what a smile! He hid within it; he actually believed that it protected him. (The Russians, wrote a German, are masters in the construction of shellproof wooden field fortifications.) He smiled. People thought him as stiff as a frozen corpse.
In 1958, when he won the Sibelius Prize, the Central Committee passed a resolution partly denouncing the Zhdanov Decree of 1948, but only partly. They called it the Decree on the Correction of Errors. Shostakovich smiled venomously when he heard. Well, what’s the difference? Not even Nina believed in me, even when I thought that my Seventh Symphony could, you know. Maxim was crying for hunger and I actually thought I could make art out of it! I . . .
That was the year when Pasternak was forced
to decline his Nobel Prize, the year when a Soviet selection of Akhmatova’s verses appeared in print, inscribed to Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich, in whose epoch I dwelled on earth. Oh, I know precisely what you mean, my dear, dear Anna Andreyevna! In my epoch. My stinking epoch of . . .
We see him pale and weary in a dress shirt and necktie, his arm around A. Mravinsky, who will soon betray him out of fear, and who folds his own arms, as gaunt and indifferent as a wounded soldier. We hear him whispering to his young friend E. Denisov: When I look back on my life, I realize that I’ve been a coward, a coward. But if you’d seen everything I have, Edik, perhaps you too would have become a coward. Can you imagine? To, to, you know, to accept the invitation of a friend, and when you arrive at his flat to discover that he’s disappeared, with all his books and clothes thrown into the street, and some new comrade already living there! I . . .
The telephone rang. His dear friend Leo Oskarovich, who’d tried to console him after he divorced Margarita, was inviting him to a party at Leningradskoe 44-2, you know, the Kino House; he could bring anyone he liked; Roman Lazarevich was going to be there, and there might be work if our trustworthy Dmitri Dmitriyevich could whip off something anti-formalist in a major key—nothing like your Eleventh Symphony, please forgive me for saying that, but we only want to help you—for the soundtrack of the world’s first Kinopanorama film, “Far and Wide My Country Stretches.” Roman Lazarevich wants you to know, Dmitri Dmitreyevich, that he’s very . . .
That was the year that they appointed him Chairman of the Organizing Committee for the First International Tchaikovsky Competition (the prize went to a tall young American named Van Cliburn); that was the year that the arthritis or whatever it was began to settle in his wrists, the year that the municipality of Moscow held a special unveiling of memorial plaques to Prokofieff. Plaques and prizes, it’s all so . . . Take for instance that Order of the Red Star over her right breast; my sister says that she wears it whenever Vigodsky wants to go out in public, and, and you know . . . Prokofieff’s first wife used the occasion to create a scandal against the second. And why should I even care? It wasn’t as if Prokofieff and I were even, you know; but since I’ve dispensed with feeling certain other feelings, why not gratify my, my ugliness? Because that makes me all the more ready for Opus 110! Will it actually be Opus 110 or Opus 111? I’m shooting for 110, which will be a quartet, something intimate, so that everybody can hear the, the, whatchamacallit. As if Prokofieff’s wife were even a, a . . . Trembling with rage, Shostakovich inhaled vodka, railing against the foulness of women. When the musicologist M. Sabinina objected in a tentative voice that after all, she herself was a woman, he backed water a trifle, then confessed that, like Prokofieff with the second wife, he himself was now entirely impotent.
Between himself and Galina Ustvolskaya there was no longer a consonance. Mutual friends warned that she tirelessly denounced both his music and his person. (I’ve read that she’d fallen in love with Y. A. Balkashin.) Trying not to think about her, he sat dreaming about the young girls at the Conservatory, with their violin-cases over their shoulders. He muttered to Lebedinsky: Pushkin said it! There’s no escaping one’s destiny!
He had to go to Leningrad for a concert. He dreaded to go. At every street, he was afraid he’d see Ustvolskaya. He dreaded her more than anything, because she had left him and she . . .
He had a sudden irrational idea (he knew that it was irrational) that if he only killed himself before tomorrow it wouldn’t be too late, and then she’d know he loved her and take him back.
All the while he knew very well that it was Elena Konstantinovskaya whom he loved. Elena, you’re the one for me. Oh, why didn’t I say it? Just as in winter we frontline men dread abandoning our dugouts, because it’s so difficult to dig new ones in the frozen ground, so he did not want to give up Ustvolskaya, especially now that his penis could no longer perform its world-historic task; there was nothing more to it than that. She was his outer perimeter and Elena was the inner. He missed her music, of course.
In 1959, when Lunik landed on the moon (another Soviet victory on the scientific front), his daughter married. Blindly, like a doomed soldier throwing grenades from his foxhole, Shostakovich composed myriad smiles, wishing that he were alone and away; but he pretended that Nina was holding his hand. They’d asked him to play something but his wrists hurt. Galya looked so joyous as she stood beside that new husband of hers, in whose presence he felt awkward, that all he wanted to do was sit in the corner, for fear that he might cast his stinking shadow on her happiness. Solicitously, Glikman filled his vodka glass to the very top and whispered that it was all going well.
As for this music she wants, whispered Shostakovich, instead of me, it should have been the master composer sitting here, the great man himself, you know whom I mean, the, the, that bastard.
My God, Dmitri Dmitriyevich! I implore you, please be careful! That fellow over there, what’s his name?
Why, that’s our fine, so to speak, friend Comrade Alexandrov. Don’t you admire the sheen of his boots? He always puts the welfare of the proletariat at the very—
Dmitri Dmitriyevich, he’s trying to listen! Shall I take you home?
By no means, my dear Isaak Davidovich. I only wanted to remark that Comrade Stalin was a brilliant composer of orchestral fugues. And you know which instruments he played them on? Why, the, the, the organs, of course! Isaak Davidovich, I’m sorry; I shouldn’t be saying such things; I’m just a sonofabitch—
Elena Konstantinovskaya had told him that during her time “away” her sleep had been continually troubled by the clicking, scraping and shrieking of steel loops along the perimeter-wire as chained watchdogs ran back and forth, lunging at prisoners. He had never been able to forget this detail. It was this which had suddenly invaded his mind as he sat there at Galina’s wedding. Right then he started working out how to transmute it into music, because . . . Well, how could he say why? That clicking, scraping and shrieking, he’d find a way to include them in Opus 110.
Afterwards, half-drunk or perhaps merely quarter-drunk, he approached the elegantly squarish shaft of the Leningradskaya Hotel (built 1948-53), with its belfry on top, and on the steeple no cross, of course, but a star. He paced slowly round and round.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich, so happy you got our invitation! said the men in raspberry-colored boots. Have you met Comrade Alexandrov? We wanted to talk to you about joining the Party.
Ah, to be sure, yes, yes, Shostakovich replied in a voice as waxen as a corpse’s toes, I promise to apply just as soon as I finish my symphony about Lenin. That way I’ll, so to speak, have something to offer. And maybe I ought to compose a few bars about the German-Polish question. Right now I’m only a worm, you know, only a—so to speak—a worm. But . . .
Wasn’t your Seventh Symphony supposed to be about Lenin?
Oh, dear, the Seventh, I mean, but at the time I wasn’t ready. Lenin is, well, I myself intend the fullest preparation, in order to do full justice to this topic. For example, the liquidation of classes ought to be expressed pizzicato—
Let’s quit clowning around. We’re more aware than you might imagine of your real attitude toward Soviet power. All things considered, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, you’ve been lucky. We continue looking into your case. Back in ’36, for instance, the only reason you weren’t dragged down with Tukhachevsky was that your interrogator got arrested. Well, guess what? He’s been rehabilitated!
Posthumously, right? Or have you been, so to speak—
The jokes you allow yourself, Dmitri Dmitriyevich! Really, sometimes it almost makes one believe that somebody’s holding his hand over you! Well, think about what we’ve said. We expect your full collaboration. And remember: The “organs” aren’t going to forget you—
This was the time that his First Cello Concerto in E-flat Major premiered. In the last movement was a parody of Stalin’s favorite tune “Suleiko”—so deeply buried, to be sure, that not even Rostropovich, to whom the concerto ha
d been dedicated, could have ever sniffed it out—no matter what the fellows in raspberry-colored boots said, Shostakovich valued his head, oh, yes, good friends!—but when they were all alone, with vodka in their glasses, the composer hummed it out like a furious hornet, and how could they not all hear it then? Su-lei-ko! Rostropovich burst out laughing, but Shostakovich already felt faint and was biting his nails and peering all around him. Rostropovich poured out vodka. Then Shostakovich set out with the Soviet cultural delegation to tour American cities.
30
In April 1960, when in token of his impending elevation he found himself elected First Secretary to the RSFSR Congress of Composers, Khruschev was there, booming away with his inimitable vulgarity about the good music that any proletarian could hum along with, as opposed to the bad music, the intellectual kind that sounded like “the croaking of crows.” Everyone within reach was compelled to play the sycophant, of course. The luckier ones lurked in darker corners of the reception hall. Shostakovich, of course, clung to that darkness, hiding amongst his colleagues, gazing blankly through his spectacles while a thousand tortured or malignant smiles successively devoured one another upon his lips.
A man in a dark suit was taking photographs. His flash resembled the blinding night-lights of Butyrki Prison. Why not imagine that he resembles this Professor Vigodsky of Elena’s? I must send Glikman over there so that he can tell me what the man, you know. I want to kill him! And they have a daughter now, so it’s . . . Meanwhile, the blackest vacuum must be conquered; the mission of the cosmonauts was to prevent American astronauts from overcoming our leading position. (At that very moment, the Americans were threatening us in Cuba.) While all the opinions on this matter were enthusiastically the same, the cacophony of untuned voices represented the intonation discrepancies of valve instruments. Now they had spied him out and were spiraling in upon him. When they inquired whether he supported the total Sovietization of space, he nodded obediently. Truth to tell, the planets unnerved him. For some reason he was frightened by the Great Red Spot of Jupiter. No doubt we’d get to Jupiter eventually; our cosmonauts would, so to speak, force the Vistula . . . The sad, subtle music of “Lady Macbeth” was sounding between his ears—doubtless the only performance in all Russia. That bully Khruschev, he could see him right now singing the part of those workmen who’d thrown the fat cook in a barrel and were feeling her up, pinching her tits and shouting: Give me a suck . . . ! He’d find a way to concentrate the venom of those measures and inject it into Opus 110. And now Comrade Alexandrov was saying . . .
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