Europe Central (26 page)

In 1929 they buried his score for the silent movie “New Babylon” after only a few performances—not for political or artistic reasons, they assured him, but because it had proved too difficult for the unskilled cinema orchestras to perform. Remembering his own unhappy career at the Bright Reel, he could well believe that the standards in the movie houses were low; moreover, his ego required only that he be able to make love to whatever Muse he liked, in whatever way he liked, not that the world adore his offspring. He didn’t care to sell himself. If they didn’t understand him, or even spread, how should I say, false impressions, well, Mitya was still free; Mitya was happy! If they rejected “New Babylon,” that didn’t put him out, because he could have written another score in two hours! Did they want him to do that?—Not exactly, my dear Dmitri Dmitriyevich, because in fact (we’re sorry to tell you this) there’ve been complaints; people prefer N. M. Strelnikov’s operetta “The Peasant Girl.”—Our boy genius didn’t care. To Sollertinsky, who rarely wore a necktie and who was now his best friend, he quipped: Overcoming the resistance of an orchestra is the work of born dictators!—Cocking his cap like a sailor from our Baltic Fleet, Sollertinsky clicked his heels and barked:
Ja, mein Führer!
and then they both got drunk. They agreed to be dictators together; they’d never let anybody change a single note! There was a fifteen-year-old whom Sollertinsky had heard about; she acted older; her name was Elena and she was a real secret weapon, I’m telling you, quiet on the outside and . . .—but just then A. Akhmatova passed by with her nose in the air, and (although they both admired her poems), they had such a fine time making fun of her behind her back that they completely forgot about this Elena.

It is, I am sure, no aspersion on Mitya to remark that for the sake of financial self-sufficiency, prestige, and above all, the leisure to whirl down within the secret well of his own mind’s ear, hunting for that Beauty which alone defined his life, he’d kept compromising with the world. For example, he now wrote program music on occasion. How was that any different from playing the accompaniments to silent movies at Bright Reel? Besides, as Sollertinsky loyally pointed out, the employment of a motif was not at all inconsistent with sophistication, or even with the outright obscurity which Mitya still found so hilarious. Even Wagner wasn’t bad at times, and if we could take his
leitmotifs
and run rings around them, maybe play a few ventriloquists’ tricks so that nobody else could even imagine that this could be Wagner, what a laugh! That was how Mitya looked at it. Although it might be irritating to him to do as others told him to do, as long as he could build secret trapdoors and escape hatches into every score, so that the world beneath the piano keys hadn’t been forgotten, he was still living on his own terms. Ancient masons used to wall up a live victim in each temple or bridge they built; when he was much older Mitya would immure himself in just this way in the cornerstone of his Opus 110; but for now there was no need to be as drastic as that. He might not enjoy his audience’s full comprehension; but he still enjoyed its indulgence, which, now that I think of it, is not such a bad thing to have. If I bow to Lenin’s memory and then create what I please, have I been any more constrained than a poet would be by the arbitrariness of rhyme? And so Mitya could still go on thinking rather well of himself. Moreover, pontificated Sollertinsky while he and Mitya stood drunkenly pissing into the Neva, consider M. Tsvetaeva’s “Poem of the End,” whose language wheels round and round variations of the word
ruchka,
hand. It was the wheeling-around which impressed him, not the
ruchka.
Didn’t Mitya himself believe that content was irrelevant? Hadn’t everything already been said? Our task was to say it in a new way, that’s all. Now listen! And Sollertinsky recited the first six stanzas, which recapitulated the writer’s feelings about getting jilted by some White Guardist in Prague. Forbidden fruit! thrilled Mitya, because if Tsvetaeva had slept with a class enemy then she
was
a class enemy, which made her poems all the more secret, illicit, exciting. Anytime she wanted, he’d certainly grant her a visa to come play with him beneath the piano keys . . . (By the way, she was supposed to be pretty, with half-lesbian tastes.) If it were therefore permissible (I’m speaking in the, the, you know, the highest aesthetic sense) for Tsetaeva to write program music, as Mussorgsky and probably even Shakespeare had also done, then why couldn’t our D. D. Shostakovich pick up a few kopeks composing the odd cinema score, or inject a few bars of the Marseillaise into some piece of orchestral hackwork, especially if during the premiere he whispered biting quips into Sollertinsky’s ear, to prove that he’d mutilated his creations in full knowledge, in which case it wasn’t mutilation at all? Oh, me, oh, dear!

Those nasty fellow pupils who’d baited him in the Conservatory’s hallways, Malko’s well-meaning, pompous obstructionism, these and other quantities which before now he’d only recognized in isolation now thrust themselves upon him as the warp and woof of society itself, weighing him down like so many sheets of fine muslin which kept falling over his face. He brushed them off, and more came swirling down. Had he allowed himself to dwell overmuch on where they came from, he might have panicked. I for one can only pity him. All he wanted was breathing-space. Nobody thinks it reprehensible to lose time in carrying out the excretory functions of the bodies in which our creativity is for the moment nested; nor do we protest the drudgery of breathing which is usually required to sustain our projects. Wasn’t it excusable, then, for Shostakovich to carry out the wishes of others in certain well-delineated respects (especially since he could write music so easily), in order to gain the wherewithal to please himself for the rest of the time? He still believed in himself; indeed, that undistinguished Second Symphony, and the public utterances which it had become advisable to make, testified to his belief: The end justifies the means. Just before he took his bow, he whispered in Sollertinsky’s ear:
Ruchka, ruchka.
He was really as pleased as could be. After every concert, there’d be a party in his flat on Nikolayevskaya Street, Shostakovich playing the piano, the guests dancing, shouting out toasts and flirting with his mother, breaking glass, arguing over what was truly Russian, how to salvage something from Mussorgsky (at the end of his life, Shostakovich would re-orchestrate that composer’s “Dances of Death”); and while the world whirled on around him, its citizens drinking until the very last tram, Shostakovich arranged a rendezvous with the latest girl, simultaneously trotting out Sollertinsky’s skill at creating trilingual puns on demand; Meyerhold dropped by so that his stuck-up wife Zinaida could show herself off; Rodchenko had an idea about a new photocollage; I. D. Glikman was there to offer his starstruck services in adjusting the composer’s necktie, and I think that Lev Lebedinsky might have been present, too; his sister Mariya cut up the last smoked fish and begged everybody to eat; Zinaida scolded Meyerhold for taking too big a fillet; Sollertinsky told another Akhmatova joke; Shostakovich cocked his head, blinking from behind his crystal-clean spectacles, and finally they were gone, his mother snoring happily in the armchair. He closed the piano silently. Then his long fingers, which unlike the rest of him remained sober, began to spider across the sheets of music paper. Someday he’d compose a passage that was even better than the “Fate” motif in Beethoven’s Fifth; he’d pull himself higher and higher! He didn’t know cold musical tricks in those days; music gushed out of his fingertips in orgasms of joy; what a young artist lacks in craftsmanship he often makes up for in sincerity; even when principle demands that he withhold, he can’t avoid giving of himself. That’s why the early cinema music of Shostakovich often evinces superiority to the later—no matter that neither one achieves parity with the “Fate” motif. In response to the Leninist slogan
Fewer but better
he infused all the major-keyed hum-alongs now upwelling from his grimaces and grins with
over and over, louder and louder.

Running along like a musical errand-boy to earn his cash, he winked one owl-eye. He’d fooled the world, and how happily everything rushed on! (Mitya to Glikman, with the radio set to maximum blare so that no one could overhear: So Stalin, the Politburo and all the other brass hats are riding down the Volga in a big, you know, steamship, which suddenly, I suppose on account of, er, Trotskyite saboteurs, starts to sink. If it goes down instantly, who will be saved? Come on, Isaak Davidovich, it’s easy: The people of the USSR!) Germanic oompahs, marches, good feelings all around, swelling heartbeat-drumbeats sped onto the score-sheets with a newness entirely bereft of self-doubt. Our self-satisfied young composer strutted onto the stage of his own dreams even when he was just sitting in the front row with his arms folded, a shy smile on his face. His mother was still proud of him and his biography was clean. Glazunov, Malko and other luminaries assured him of his virtue. Unmolested yet by what for diplomatic reasons we’ll continue to call “the world,” he retained such high purity of intention that his secret bunkers of harmony remained unpoisoned by any stray gas cannister.
Boom!
Moaning again, Tatyana Glivenko closed her eyes, hoping that her husband wouldn’t find out. As the genius lowered his face onto hers, her long black eyelashes became twelve octaves of piano keys.

3

About “New Babylon” he didn’t care, I said. But the following year, his score to the ballet “Dynamiada” suffered an equally premature death. On the verge of exasperation (what an innocent he still was!), he tried to talk back to the activists in their dark, pigsnouted propaganda trucks. Sollertinsky had taught him to smoke fancy “Kazbek” cigarettes. He offered them all around, but the activists frowned and refused to accept them. Why were they like that? He pointed out for the tenth time that his grandfather had been a revolutionist in Siberia, and, moreover, that if his best music was like no one else’s, that was all the more reason for it to be cherished by the State. Unfortunately, Comrade Stalin had directed that only material in explicit conformity to the Party line should be published.

4

His friends advised him to safeguard himself. Didn’t he want to continue his ascent? They said to him: Throw something to the wolves, even an old bone! Don’t worry, Dmitri Dmitriyevich; it’ll be a purely rhetorical sacrifice . . .

His former mentor Malko had now emigrated to the capitalist zone. Accordingly, he was beyond reach of the Party. Moreover, Shostakovich had never respected him. Biting his cheek, he wrote that open letter to
Proletarian Musician,
denouncing himself for having permitted Malko to conduct a Shostakovich foxtrot. Such light music (he humbly submitted) ought to be liquidated utterly, for it was a dangerous bourgeois infiltration.

He was ashamed, of course. How could he not be? His well-wishers reminded him that he hadn’t done Malko any harm, that Malko (who never forgave him) could not understand current conditions here, and that by submitting to orthodoxy before submission was demanded, he’d avoided the worst.

The worst? he inquired, pursing his feminine little lips. And what would that be?

Don’t even talk about it, Dmitri Dmitriyevich! By the way, is it true that Nina Varzar has been casting her gaze at you? She’s a very determined girl, I hear. Whatever she sets out to get, she . . .

In spite of such precautions, his Third Symphony, the prudently named “Mayday,” sustained an outright attack. Everybody warned him to be careful, but he ran two fingers through his cowlick and laughed. He still possessed deep echelons of self-faith.

In 1931 he composed the music for N. P. Akimov’s fast-paced film version of
Hamlet,
from which most soliloquys had been stripped so as to avoid distracting the masses. They say that it came to him so easily that he composed most of it at halftime at Lenin Stadium. Once, when the Dynamos made some especially spectacular play, he jumped up and down so crazily that the score blew out of his pocket! He wrote it all over again in a twinkling. The phallic satire of the flute scene—a brainchild of the composer, it’s said—became notorious. To amuse himself, he told
The New York Times: Thus we regard Scriabin as our bitterest musical enemy. Why? Because Scriabin’s music tends to an unhealthy eroticism.
Then he rushed off to bed with Tatyana Glivenko.

We dynamited the Cathedral of Christ the Savior—another victory against reaction. We put more Mensheviks on trial and demanded that they be shot; it was in all the newspapers. Counterrevolutionaries made confessions in court and then disappeared.—Well, well, said Shostakovich’s friends, maybe they’re guilty after all.

That same year saw the premiere of his ballet “Bolt,” which dealt with the theme of industrial sabotage. A critic in
Rabochii i Teatr
wrote that the reaction of the people to such misguided entertainment
should serve as a last warning to its composer.

5

The most infallible source on this period is of course our
Great Soviet Encyclopedia,
which states:
In the 1930s, Soviet musical culture made notable advances. Its restructuring was essentially completed.
Even now, Shostakovich refused to comprehend that he must get restructured. Against the best advice he persisted in pretending that the judgment in
Rabochii i Teatr
had been only a critic’s grumble, not a hint from the “organs” of the state. After all, how could he bear to go on living, if he couldn’t keep hooting his own owl-songs? (Meanwhile, Akhmatova was writing in her forbidden lyrics that
in this place, peerless beauties quarrel / for the privilege of wedding executioners.)
Time to nest! At the center of the Conservatory’s square spiral, where in the past he’d studied and in the future he’d teach, our pale grub enthroned himself behind a piano, sheltered on all sides by the barrels of outward-pointing tubas, trumpets, French horns; their practitioners dwelt in turn within the collective porcupine whose quills were the bows of violinists. Then came the grey four-storey walls, decorated with bas-relief wreaths and the occasional lyre. Next, the hedges. Around them, the tilted diamond of Theater Square defined its outline-segments with edifices: the Kirov Theater, of course, where his infamous “Lady Macbeth” would soon premiere; the blocky mazes on the way to Rimsky-Korsakoff Prospect, the canal-curving apartment-fronts, and finally the walled courtyards of the Yusupov Palace, where Rasputin had met his quadruply hideous end. But all these comprised merely the inner defenses of D. D. Shostakovich. Theater Square lies at the southwest extremity of a long island surrounded by the intersections of the Moika River, the Griboedova Canal, and then the Kryukov Canal, which strikes the Moika again. Nor is this all, for the island lies within the greater one formed by the confluence of two watery arcs: the Neva and the Fontanka Canal (the latter of which will take you to Akhmatova’s residence). Here is the center of Leningrad itself. The city encircles and protects us here. Someday there will be still another circle, whose inward-pointing evil causes us to black out our windows. Their four-hundred-and-twenty-millimeter railroad guns will enjoy a range of seventeen miles. They’ll erect posters:
HITLER—THE LIBERATOR.
The front line will be death’s ballroom, where besiegers and besieged get frozen into a stale
contredanse.
But these precognitions, which carry with them the sensations of perishing in an airless room, remained beyond the pale to Shostakovich. In other words, both the music which he loved so much and the utilitarian melody-silk which he spun out as easily as a spider still seemed to him to coexist within the same wholeness. In his nightmares he got glimpses of things; and the music itself (the purest music, at least) enkindled itself with sadness. No matter. Such was his nature. Although it got ever more frequently said that this precocious intellectual with his elitist pretensions enjoyed no hope of composing songs with the mass appeal of, for instance, K. Ia. Listov’s “The Machine-Gun Cart,” in 1932 Shostakovich’s “Song of the Counterplan” (Opus 33) sounded continually on the lips of the people. Hearing them hum his melody on the trams made him as happy as if he were rolling his tongue to yell in concert with his cronies at football games. Ponderous, happy, military-march-ish, the “Counterplan” hallooed and hurrahed as if we were all really going somewhere, sentimental woodwinds alternating with delightfully pompous brasses. The same busybodies who were always admonishing him to be careful now told him that he’d scored another victory on the cultural front! Even the capitalists liked it; they appropriated it for a Hollywood movie.
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