Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  723 Glikman’s brother’s idea for Shostakovich’s gravesite, and his recapitulation of Irina’s reaction—G. Glikman, in Schmalenberg, p. 178 (trans. by WTV). In this memoir, Glikman says “Petrograd,” not “Leningrad.”

  724 Bely: “All of Petersburg is an infinity of the Prospect . . .” —Andrei Bely, Petersburg, trans. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 12 (slightly altered).

  724 “. . . and the living faces the color of dirt, and that severed arm which hung from the garden gate . . .”—Punin, p. 191 (entry for Leningrad, 13 December 1941): “For a long time there hung an arm up to the elbow, attached by someone to the fence of the garden of one of the destroyed buildings. Dark crowds of people walk past with faces swollen and earthlike.”

  725 Nadezhda Mandelstam (footnote): “I can testify that nobody I knew fought . . .”—Mandelstam, p. 307.

  727 Non-appearance of Shostakovich’s name in the Urals poll—The Soviet Way of Life, p. 395 (ch. 9: “The Society of Great Culture”).

  A PIANIST FROM KILGORE

  728 Epigraph—Jakov Lind, Soul of Wood, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964; orig. German ed. 1962), p. 46 (“Soul of Wood”).

  730 Professor Svetlana Boym, who happened to be a fellow at the American Academy during my own brief residence there in 2003, proposes that I’ve misconceived the Russians’ anti-American attitude. In her view they wouldn’t have been anti-Cliburn at all. Instead of Cliburn representing something baleful, she says, he would have simply been isolated and forgotten as his Russian colleagues got drunk and chased women.

  730 The juror Oborin: “Good, really very good . . .”—Paperno, p. 209.

  731 New York Times: “A big, percussive attack . . .”—Issue of 11 April 1958, p. 12, col. 5.

  732 Sofiya Gubaidulina: “Dmitri Dmitreyvich, you’re the person our generation depends on . . .”—Very loosely based on her retrospective testimony in Wilson, pp. 304-05.

  733 The premiere of “Far and Wide My Country Stretches”—I am taking a liberty here, not knowing exactly when this film of Roman Karmen’s first appeared. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia tells me only that it was released in 1958, the year that Cliburn won the competition.

  736 General von Hartmann: “As seen from Sirius, Goethe’s works will be mere dust . . .” —Craig, p. 373, slightly reworded.

  737 Footnote: Great Soviet Encyclopedia: “Spontaneity, straightforward lyricism, exultant sound and impetuous dynamism.”—Vol. 12, p. 121 (entry on Harvey Lavan Cliburn, Jr.).

  LOST VICTORIES

  I would have preferred to set this story in 1958, when “Lost Victories” first appeared, rather than in 1962; then the parallelism with “The Pianist from Kilgore” would have been more exact; unfortunately, the Berlin Wall was not erected until 1961. It seemed best to make the events of the story occur a year later, so that the narrator could consider the Wall a settled injustice rather than a brand new outrage.

  738 Epigraph—Von Manstein, p. 29.

  739 “Had Paulus only been permitted [by Hitler] to break out and link up with von Manstein’s troops . . .”—Interestingly enough, Paulus seems to have blamed both Hitler and von Manstein. The ambiguously kidnapped Jahn had an opportunity to speak with him in 1954, in the office of Herr Weidauer, the Bürgermeister of Dresden. Jahn describes him (pp. 258-61) as a broken man, talking pitiably about his decorations.

  740 “A great German”: “The strong man is mightiest alone.”—The great German was Schiller, but Hitler loved to quote this aphorism.

  740 Speaking of great Germans, here is what the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (vol. 15, p. 436, biographical entry) has to say about von Manstein: “an honorary member of a number of revanchist circles.”49

  740 Von Manstein: “When Hitler called for the swift and ruthless destruction of the Polish Army . . .”—Von Manstein, p. 190.

  740 Von Manstein: The capitulation of Poland “in every way upheld the military honor . . .”—Ibid., p. 59.

  741 Von Manstein: As a result of the impeccable behavior of our troops . . .”—Ibid., p. 151.

  742 Von Manstein: “From now on the weapons would speak.”—Ibid., p. 33.

  743 “Lili Marlene”—Mr. Thomas Melle would have me write the German “Lili Marleen,” but I have never seen it this way in any Anglo-American World War II source, so I fear it would look wrong to my readers.

  743 Von Manstein on the Soviet troop dispositions—“Deployment against every contingency” —Op. cit., p. 181.

  743 Von Manstein: “The Soviet command showed its true face . . .”—Ibid., p. 180.

  THE WHITE NIGHTS OF LENINGRAD

  After completing this story I discovered the following footnote in Moholy-Nagy (p. 15): “The interplay of various facts has caused our age to shift almost imperceptibly toward colour-lessnessand grey: the grey of the big city, of the black and white newspapers, of the photographic and film services; the colour-eliminating tempo of our life today. Perpetual hurry, fast movement, cause all colours to melt into grey.”

  748 Ansel Adams: “. . . lightly charmed by the passing landscape . . .”—Ansel Adams, Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs (Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 1983), p. 117 (commentary on his photograph of Jacques Henri Lartigue).

  AN IMAGINARY LOVE TRIANGLE: SHOSTAKOVICH, KARMEN, KONSTANTINOVSKAYA

  For my own narrative purposes I have invented many of the interrelations between these three individuals.

  According to Khentova’s Udivitelyenui Shostakovich, Konstantinovskaya returned from Spain married to Karmen. He was doing documentary work there in 1936 and 1937.

  Konstantinovskaya and Shostakovich were intimate for slightly more than a year, from around June 1934 until some time in 1935, probably the late summer or fall, shortly after which she was expelled from the Komsomol and arrested. She seems to have been in prison for a year or less. So I imagine her as having volunteered for duty in Spain in 1936. I have no way of knowing whether she had the gruesome Gulag experiences which I have imputed to her.

  It is a fact that she received the Red Star for bravery in Spain. Very likely she was a combatant. Possibly she saw action with a Soviet tank brigade. However, I have been unable to find out any details about her service in Spain. It is the fact of her Red Star which decided me to give her expertise in sharpshooting and first aid while in the Komsomol.

  Karmen’s memoir Über die zeit und über mich selbst: Erzählungen über mein Schaffen states that his wife was expecting to give birth on 22 June 1941. The portions of the book which I was able to read in Berlin do not state which wife this was. She might well not have been Elena, because almost immediately after the newlyweds returned to the USSR in 1937 Karmen set out on other long journeys, which doesn’t imply the closest of marriages; on the other hand, good Soviet citizens were accustomed to putting their families second. In Europe Central I have supposed that the expectant mother was Elena.

  The International Who’s Who, 1977-78 informs us that in 1962 Karmen married Maya Ovchinnikova. So he and Elena must have divorced before then.

  Khentova writes that Elena married a Professor Vigodsky, to whom she bore a daughter, but gives no date. Khentova further states that although Elena kept in touch with some of Shostakovich’s relatives, particularly his sister Mariya, she saw Shostakovich only once more. All the same, she saved his letters to the end of her life, which she could have done for any number of reasons, but why not suppose that she held a torch for him?

  It is unlikely that Shostakovich never got over Elena, as has been imagined in this book. There is equally no reason to suppose that Elena’s marriage with Karmen failed because she was still in love with Shostakovich. Moreover, Elena was blonde, not darkhaired, and I have no grounds whatsoever for believing her to have been a bisexual cigarette smoker. Shostakovich held somewhat traditional views about women (for instance, he did not express much respect for female composers, which was a point of contention between him and Galina Ustvolskaya),
so I can’t be confident that he could have tolerated a bisexual mistress.

  When I think of Shostakovich, and when I listen to his music, I imagine a person consumed by fear and regret, a person who (like Kurt Gerstein) did what litttle he could to uphold the good—in this case, freedom of artistic creation, and the mitigation of other people’s emergencies. He became progressively more beaten down, and certainly experienced difficulty saying no—a character trait which may well have kept him alive in the Stalinist years. In spite of the fact that he joined the Party near the end, to me he is a great hero—a tragic hero, naturally. Richard Taruskin writes in Defining Russia Musically (p. 537) “How pleasant and comforting it is to portray him as we would like to imagine ourselves acting in his shoes”—in other words, as being a member of some fairytale anti-Soviet Resistance, which would have instantly led him to share Vlasov’s fate.

  His marriage to Nina Varzar was unhappy in a number of ways, and I wanted to give him, in fiction, at least, a great love—which he might well have experienced with his last wife, Irina. Because in Europe Central his passion for Elena dominates his life to the end, including his years with Irina, I beg her pardon, and likewise his children’s, for any misrepresentations which this book’s objectives required.

  Roman Karmen was not a great artist, but he was a brave, adventurous sort whom it would now be all too easy to dismiss as a Stalinist propagandist. He and Käthe Kollwitz may fairly be called fellow propagandists, although to my mind the latter was by far the former’s superior from the “aesthetic” point of view. Karmen’s documentaries deserve more attention than they have received. I imagine him, plausibly I believe, as a passionate “soldier with a camera” who did his best. I suspect that he was also cheerful and likeable. He very well might have tried to assist Shostakovich as I have imagined in “Opus 110,” although here again, by magnifying Shostakovich’s obsession with Elena, I have surely exaggerated the number of thoughts which our composer sent Karmen’s way. In any event, I respect both men’s memories.

  What about Elena Konstantinovskaya? She remains an enigma to me. But I certainly love her as much as I can love someone I never knew. I had various reasons for making my version of her to be capable of love for both men and women. One motive was to make her as infinitely lovable as I could. As I’ve written in this book, “above all Europa is Elena.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank my father for our three days in Berlin and Dresden during July 2001. “The Last Field-Marshal,” “Opus 110” and “Woman with Dead Child” were the principal beneficiaries. It was wonderful to see both my parents in Berlin in 2003, when I got to take a few more notes.

  The American Academy in Berlin very kindly made me writer-in-residence for September 2003, a highly fortuitous, almost voluptuous circumstance which benefited almost all the German stories. The person who made this happen was George Plimpton of the Paris Review. Mr. Plimpton died before I returned home from Germany; I wish I had been able to thank him at greater length. I also wish to thank my colleagues at the Academy for their friendship. In particular, the eth-nomusicologist Philip Bohlman, professor of music and Jewish studies at the University of Chicago, who was a fellow at the American Academy, helped me considerably, both in translating certain musical terms from East German critical essays on Shostakovich and in answering several of my questions about motif and leitmotiv in music. Juliane Reitzig, an intern at the Academy, answered some questions about growing up in the DDR.

  Although I paid her well, and I am usually too sour to acknowledge people I pay, the more I think about the help she gave this book, the more grateful I am to Fr. Yolande Korb at the Academy. This research assistant and interpreter beyond dreams took me to Ullstein Bilderdienst and to several other places, got me whatever library books I wanted, etcetera. She was also very patient with my stumbling confusion (I was on narcotic painkillers the entire time she knew me, thanks to a broken pelvis).

  The photographic archives of Ullstein Bilderdienst in Berlin proved to be as rich as the Nibelungen hoard. I hereby express my gratitude to that establishment, without which I would never have seen quite so many images of the Condor Legion, Operation Zitadelle, Hilde Benjamin, Fredrich Paulus, Kurt Gerstein, and various German tanks; nor certainly would I have known such splendors as the eyelashes of Lisca Malbran.

  Dr. Gudrun Fritsch, curator at the Käthe-Kollwitz-Museum in Berlin, put up with my poor spoken German and gave me useful references and advice for “Woman with Dead Child.”

  Mr. Thomas Melle, also of Berlin, very kindly and exactly corrected quite a number of mis-Germanisms, mainly of syntax but once or twice of personality as well. He also gathered a heavy load of books about Hilde Benjamin for me when I couldn’t carry much myself, thanks to a broken pelvis. I am extremely grateful to him.

  I appreciate the last-minute help of Nina Bouis; whose advice about vruchka versus ruchka I ultimately followed.

  (Now that I have written the previous paragraph, I hereby double and triple it, for Thomas has since read the entire manuscript, patiently saving me from many more of my multifarious ignorances. Thank you so much, my friend.)

  Chris Chang of Film Comment magazine in New York was very helpful with Roman Karmen contacts and references. He also caught two inconsistencies in my draft of “The White Nights of Leningrad.” Among other favors, he introduced me to University of Chicago film expert Yuri Tsivian, who gave me his views on the professional accomplishments of Roman Karmen, and I have accordingly quoted this verbatim in “Far and Wide My Country Stretches.”

  Mr. Heinz Riedel Lehmann of Berlin told me some interesting stories about Paulus in his Soviet captivity; bits of these found their way into this book. In Berkeley, Kara Platoni, whom I hired to do some research on Elena Konstantinovskaya, was very efficient and nice; through her I certainly ought to thank Alan Mercer, editor of the DSCH Journal.

  Jean Stein was her usual altruistic self with books and introductions.

  David M. Golden was extremely generous with his books, his knowledge about Judaism and the Holocaust, and his time. He even found me three excellent German translators, who were all a pleasure to work with and whom I’d like to thank here: Pastor Andreas Pielhoop, Elsmarie Hau and Tracey Bigelow, the last of whom put me in contact with Sergi Mineyev, whose rapid translation from the Russian of some selections in Khentova’s biography of Shostakovich saved me much worry and strain.

  Meagan Atiyeh said nice things about the stories and encouraged me to keep working on them. I have the happiest memories of our time together. When she praised the stories, that meant the world to me. She kept me company in several European venues. I wish I could better express how kind and calm and steady she was, how pleasant it was for me to rush off another story to her, to share with her my latest Stalinist verbal tic, to search with her for old German newspapers or new Russian books. She will always be special to me.

  Mandy Aftel, Jenny Ankeny, Amel Boussoualim, Moira Brown, Kate Danaher, Jake Dickinson, Takako Kawai, Paula Keyth, Mayumi Kobana, Mechelle Lee, William Linne, Larry McCafferey, Shannon Mullen, Lori Nelson, Ben Pax, Terrie Petree, Vanessa Renwick, Tom Robinson, Deborah Triesman and Becky Wilson were very supportive, both to this book and to me, during a difficult time.

  I would like to thank Paul Slovak, Susan Golomb, Amira Pierce, Kim Goldstein and Sabine Hrechdakian for their work on Europe Central. And I am very lucky that Carla Bolte is the designer for this book. This fine, gentle, intelligent woman has also been a patient friend and confidante for a number of years. Carla, thank you so much for caring about me.

  Lizzy Kate Gray expertly advised me on some matters of musical terminology and instrumentation connected with the Shostakovich stories. I will always be grateful to her for the times we listened together to the selections I was studying of the Seventh, the Eighth, the Fourteenth, Opus 110 and the Preludes and Fugues. Her father Gary and I had a nice chat about the pitch of World War II airplanes.

  1

  If this
organism does in fact reside in Moscow, then I presume that the cranial casing partakes of Soviet duralumin—an excellent variety, called kol’chugaliuminii, which was developed by Iu. G. Muzalevskii and S. M. Voronov.

  2

  Exegesis easily uncovers other ironies: The purple-cloaked priest, it is written, was as exasperated as his victims, because this marriage prevented him from renting the extra room of Lenin’s house which the bride and her mother would now occupy. (Had she remained unmarried, Krupskaya would have been remanded to the locality of Ufa.) And perhaps he scented the godlessness of the convict spouses. What must he have made of Krupskaya’s abashedness, Lenin’s sarcastic smiles? How might he have proceeded, had he understood that this church of his, by sealing the union of these two helpmeets, was hastening its own destruction, and his?

  3

  Upon his own escape from Siberia to England in 1902, Trotsky had likewise found them working in separate quarters. “Nadyezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya . . . was at the very centre of all the organization work,” he writes in his memoirs. “In her room there was always a smell of burned paper from the secret letters she heated over the fire to read.”

  4

  Blind faith, one might say. In Siberia she went literally and mysteriously blind for three years, but upon her blindness was engraved the secret alphabet of her cause. Under the influence of the terrorist Spiridovna, she swore to be patient, and someday to execute justice. And then, as if by magic, the world revealed itself once more to her sight.

  5

  Arguably Fanya Kaplan had, as exegetes like to say, “wrought better than she knew,” since the bullet remaining in Volodya’s neck proved to be a time bomb. Nearly three years later, the doctors finally decided to remove it, and although the operation was a success, scarcely two days later he suffered the first of the cerebral hemorrhages which were to carry him off.