Europe Central (27 page)

That was the year he married the physicist Nina Varzar. (Even then he desperately sought to persuade Tatyana Glivenko to run away with him.) To Nina, who tried throughout her life to protect him from the world, he sang a lukewarm Eroticon.

She herself had been an amateur singer. He quickly broke her of the habit of uttering imperfect noises in his presence. They were not happy. His soft, pale face had plumped out a trifle by then, and in it there shone more confidence and purpose than ever. His eyes, magnified by the lenses of the dark round spectacles, absorbed their surroundings with a nervous awareness which sometimes reeked of sadness.

Shortly after the wedding, we find his sister Mariusa writing to their aunt:
Our greatest fault is that we worshiped him. But I don’t regret it. For, after all, he is a really great man now. Frankly speaking, he has a very difficult character
. . .

In 1934 he was elected deputy of the October District of Leningrad. He dreamed that he’d been called to Moscow.

Near the end of that year, Comrade Kirov got assassinated by the internationalist Trotskyite bloc (or, according to capitalist historians, by Comrade Stalin), and the great show trials commenced. Our newlywed still believed that if he only stayed away from politics, nobody would touch him. But in spite of his naive fantasies, Soviet musical culture continued to make notable advances. The poison tide was at his feet.

6

He was marked now, although he could not perceive it. His precious vanity sunken down into a secretive spitefulness, he went on struggling to secure himself. Through his heavy spectacles he watched and watched. I’ve read that his baby fat protected him yet a little longer, mitigating his most sarcastic grimaces into a pallid blur, so that nothing could be proved against him. Beneath that snowy flesh-armor, he further fortified his innocence within the sandcastle walls of dissonant abstractions. With women he continued to (so Sollertinsky phrased it)
play the octave,
meaning that he could sound the same note in the hearts of several conquests, just as a pianist simultaneously touches two F-sharps eight notes apart. But he did that just to, how should I say, get by; because the secret place he lived in chilled him with its loneliness; not even Sollertinsky understood this; Glikman and Lebedinsky, who became his closest friends after Sollertinsky’s death, never even imagined that the world beneath the black keys existed. At one point he tried to make love with as many mezzo-sopranos as he could; their luxuriant moans nourished his music into special richness. How does that Baudelaire poem go? Because I, you know, since Elena and I went our separate ways I couldn’t really, since I can’t read French, while she, anyhow, there was a rhyme, I think it was
measure
and
pleasure,
something very calm, slow, sensuous and, and, I don’t know how to, I guess it was just full of itself, like Elena’s hand gliding slowly down my back.
Calm, luxurious, voluptuous,
I think I remember those words, also, but nowadays it feels too, I mean I’d rather not verify it; I suppose I feel, what’s the right word, disillusioned. In short, Shostakovich fell out of step with the times. His compositions weren’t very, you know. Nina, who for all her violent temper would never give up loving and forgiving him, warned him of the bad impression he made, but he really could not control himself! A melody exploded in his head, you see, and he had to write it down! His reconnaissance-notes of alienness infiltrated the staffs of score-sheets like flat-capped, rifle-pointing silhouettes creeping through gaps in barbed wire. Of the songs which everyone else was being compelled to sing he persisted in retaining only the vaguest idea. Anyway, hadn’t his “Counterplan” won a victory? Surely they’d remember that!

In 1935, when Comrade Stalin made twelve-year-olds subject to the death penalty, and Akhmatova was writing that
without hangman and gallows a poet has no place in this world,
his Cello Sonata in D Minor (Opus 40) provoked the authorities’ wrathful puzzlement. All the same, Glikman’s brother Gavriil was commissioned to sculpt a bust of Shostakovich for the Leningrad Philharmonic. That being the case, the model reasoned, why should he get, you know, especially since it wasn’t as if he’d never experienced insomnia anyhow. They called him music’s Kandinsky; they named him music’s Rodchenko. Nina made a point of withholding from him the most frightening rumors that she heard at work; in too many respects, he’d never grow out of his frail childhood. Sollertinsky warned her that he was drinking heavily, and she said: You’re telling me!

About Opus 40 we might note that it was written during the months of his adulterous passion with the translator E. E. Konstantinovskaya, and that its melodies reflect those emotional and sexual vicissitudes. (She slept in his arms. He lay listening to the wind.) Elena loved him without hope, although he’d already obtained his divorce from Nina. He wavered and trembled. Now for another English lesson; let’s play the kissing game; let’s pick linden leaves on the paths in Tsarkoe Selo. All this is extremely . . . She gazed at him with huge dark eyes. She made him feel, how should I say, anyhow, it was irrelevant; this should never have happened, because . . . The more he saw her, the more painful it became and the more he longed to see her, although of course there would be other women; he had to, so to speak, follow the score. Meanwhile he soon remarried Nina, for the sake of the unborn child.

His music to the ballet “The Limpid Stream” got singled out for denunciation in
Pravda.
By then, forty thousand Leningraders had already been arrested in reprisal for the Kirov affair. Old Bolsheviks, engineers, generals, commissars, peasants, artists, doctors, students, whole families disappeared into the Black Marias. It was better not to ask about them. Glikman took him into the water closet, turned on the taps, and whispered into his ear that he’d seen four Black Marias in a row driving off in the direction of the marshes where Comrade Kirov used to go duck-hunting. The road dead-ended there. Shostakovich cupped his hands around Glikman’s ear and replied: That’s called, you know, dialectics.—Truth to tell, he couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. It didn’t make sense that anybody could be so, you know.

Elena Konstantinovskaya got taken for a ride in a Black Maria, and no one ever knew why. She was fantastically lucky; they released her after a year. In his nightmares, she screamed and screamed, contralto.

7

At the beginning of 1936 he was called to Moscow to appear at a performance of his opera “The Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District.” Such a summons could signify nothing less than the presence of Comrade Stalin. Shostakovich ran two fingers across his cowlick. He kissed his pregnant wife goodbye, took his briefcase and boarded the Moscow Express. Electric wires silhouetted themselves against snowdrifts as the train clanked southeast. The clanking could almost have been represented by padded drumbeats. His mouth twitching with enthusiasm, he thought to himself: What hilarious stupidities I’m going to hear! Those, those
hacks
who name themselves art gods, they . . .—He could hardly wait to be back in Leningrad, telling everything to Sollertinsky. After all, there was every reason to expect his reward at last. Earlier that very month, his colleague I. I. Dzherzhinsky (we needn’t say his rival, for Shostakovich, always generous, had helped with the orchestration) suddenly found himself at Stalin’s side in the middle bars of the decidedly mediocre “Quiet Flows the Don.” Stalin congratulated him. And now nobody dared refrain from giving Dzherzhinsky whatever he wanted! Nina had opined that if Dzherzhinsky had any gratitude at all, he must have put in a good word. And why not? “Lady Macbeth” had premiered in Leningrad two years earlier, to more than half an hour of “hysterical applause”; eighty-three performances had sold out. It had even been performed in capitalist countries. —That means nothing, he’d joked to Nina, they’re just hoping to, to, see if it measures up to my greatest work, “The Song of the Counterplan” . . . The musicologist D. Zhitomirsky, who’d attacked “The Nose,” was compelled to applaud “Lady Macbeth”’s brilliant depiction of “the despair of the lost soul,” although he prudently kept his praises unpublished until 1990.

In fact, our naive, self-satisfied Mitya, finally beginning to realize what we wanted of him, was trying to be a better artisan! That secret world of chromatic dissonance which everybody called “formalism,” he’d always live there and love it; he still didn’t swallow the notion that music must be fettered to any “content,” but since his well-wishers kept reminding him that he didn’t eat the people’s bread merely in order to exist for himself, he sincerely aspired to be ideological, to invest his talent with feeling, and to the very end, or at least until he composed Opus 110, he would remember with haunting vividness the purity of this project: create beauty
and
be useful. Beethoven for the Baltic Fleet, who was anyone to say that that hadn’t helped win the Civil War?

When we first begin to awake from the stupor of youthful egotism, we try to negotiate with the world, trusting that with our health and strength we can do what we wish while carrying out the world’s demands. When will full communion with the world begin? We are ready. Is the world?

Shostakovich had himself already met Comrade Stalin once—just last November, in fact, at the Congress of Stakhanovite Workers. Under the chandelier sat eponymous Stakhanov, that miner who’d overfulfilled his daily quota fourteenfold. Beside him sat Lyudmilla, the champion fish-canner; maybe she deserved to be in an opera. In any case, perhaps she might be willing to, you know. All those heroes and heroines were dressed in white as if to celebrate some bridal, but Comrade Stakhanov appeared particularly snowy. He gave Shostakovich a freckled smile and wished him full glory on the cultural front.—Thank you, thank you, Comrade Stakhanov! That is to say, I’ll do my best.—At the same moment, Comrade Stalin himself, who appeared to be surprisingly short, sent the two of them a darkly complex look from across the hall. Wondering what this might signify, Shostakovich saved himself with the logical thought that, after all, a look meant nothing. Moreover, a brown-eyed young comrade who’d previously crossed and uncrossed her legs for a dazzling multiplicity of music-measures now laid her hand on his and whispered that she’d heard extremely promising gossip about him. When was he going to join the Party? Oh, my, she was quite the . . . And so Shostakovich was in thrall to certain hopes as the eight organ-pipe columns of the Bolshoi Theater loomed before him.

He entered the vestibule in company with several anxious music apparatchiks. (What a great chance for you, Dmitri Dmitriyevich! said the director.—Shostakovich grinned inappropriately and stared away.) Chandeliers glared sickeningly down on the black and white tiles, which glittered with that harsh light, glittering doubly with the melting snow which had slid off people’s boots like dirty tears. They led him past the piano in the main lobby, his footsteps
pianissimo,
then backstage so that he could inspire the orchestra. His mouth was dry; he could scarcely swallow. He peered up at the State Box, which for all the world resembled a gilded four-poster bed; the seats of course were still empty beneath the red canopy. The crowd had begun coming in. The tiers of seats around him, which comprised a curving scarlet cliff, darkened with humanity. Music-loving seagulls, feathered in wool and furs, were settling into their nests. Shostakovich took his own red seat, surrounded by obsequious dignitaries, and awaited the rising of the red curtain.

All went well from the very first. Around him, the audience gazed with titillated horror upon the squalors of pre-Soviet Russia: a rotting house, with the onion domes of reactionary superstition bursting up behind it like toad-stools. He’d refused to compose any overture; in the midst of revolution, who had no time for that? Moreover, revolutionary musicologists kept telling him that overtures, being free of content, were but formalism, which the people would not understand. He didn’t want to be a formalist, did he? And so the soprano began to sing, and Shostakovich’s music fell down upon everyone’s shoulders like a snowstorm of gloom.

All his life, he retained an empathy for the situation of women. This Russian Lady Macbeth of his—really, I should say, of the nineteenth-century fabulist N. Leskov’s—had been an adulteress, thrice a murderess and finally, spurned by the villain she’d done it all for, a suicide. To Leskov she was a predator. To Shostakovich she was beautiful, intelligent and doomed. In Tsarist times, when girls could be sold to be the toys of brutal old merchants, how could such a person as Katerina Izmailova hope for happiness? This was why the libretto contained scarcely a word that wasn’t vulgar, nasty or bullying. The choruses of the workers had to be melodious and ugly at the same time—for example, in their farewell song to Katerina’s husband, whose cadences he’d composed to convey that their sorrow was the merest pretense, derived from intimidation; how could any of them really miss their dull, cruel master? It was, in short, the opera’s ideological content, not the composer’s soul, which required that “melody” be permitted to shine only briefly, and then only in epiphanies of eroticism dragged down immediately afterward by the piglike gruntings of the brasses. (What a cultural soldier our Shostakovich! Throughout his life, his music would remain admirably
unrelieved.
)

Burning with enthusiastic pity, he’d already planned a cycle of operas about women. (And just what do you know about us? drawled Nina with a kiss and a laugh.) He’d brought his Katerina Izmailova to life and to death. His next heroine would be a brave terrorist of the “People’s Will” movement. (She also must die, he feared.) Then he’d tell the story of a woman in the 1905 Revolution. Would her tale be tragic or not? It all depended. The final opera must of course be set in our Soviet Russia of today, when, as Comrade Stalin so aptly coined it,
LIFE HAS BECOME BETTER, COMRADES; LIFE HAS BECOME MORE
JOYFUL. The heroine of that work would no longer be an individual at all, but a stylized collective female comrade—woman cement worker, woman teacher, woman engineer all rolled into one. (Do those shockworker girls really dance when they jump off their tractors at night? That’s what it says right here in
Izvestiya.
It sounds, so to speak, idiotic. They’d better not make me try to write
that
into my . . . ) He could almost see a stern young Russian girl in red at the wheel of a combine, with yellow wheat all around her. (Better yet, proposed Sollertinsky, how about a parade of female fencers on Red Square, showing
lots
of leg?) To the press he announced: I want to write a Soviet
Ring of the Nibelung
!