Symphony for the City of the Dead

by M. T. Anderson

  They believed that the Revolution needed them, and it was thrilling. “Inside us we had youth and joy,” wrote one Futurist. “We lived on art. Those were times of hope and fantasy.”

  Gone were the landscape paintings of the past, the pictures of ancient Greek heroes, the portraits of women in their silks and feathers. Painters began to reduce everything to simple squares and circles, the intersection of triangles. They were thrilled by geometry. They talked about achieving weightlessness, of painting pictures that were no longer mired in the world. They wanted to leave the earth behind. (Some of them literally achieved weightlessness: Painter Peter Miturich designed blimps. Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin designed a flying machine named after him, the Letatlin. Vasily Kamensky’s career as a painter started after he stopped working at his previous job: stunt pilot. He crashed into the ground, walked away from the wreckage, and decided he’d better choose a safer profession.)

  Composers, too, wanted to celebrate Russia’s new modernity. The most avant-garde among them now created pieces full of dark, knotted chords and thunderous declarations, or music like sculptures of crystal: sharp, hard structures with jutting spikes and dazzling surfaces. Caught up in the frenzy of Futurism, they also forged many pieces specifically illustrating the roar and repetition of machinery. The names of these pieces suggest their brutal, mechanical energy: Mosolov’s “Iron Foundry” (a hypnotically violent piece in which, eventually, the percussionists start slamming huge pieces of metal with rods), Prokofiev’s Leap of Steel, Deshevov’s Rails, and Ornstein’s Suicide in an Airplane. The Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians demanded, “The orchestra must become like a factory.” To make music even more relevant to the average industrial worker, a manufacturing plant in Petrograd hooted and blasted out a “symphony” on factory whistles and motorized turbines. In the city of Baku, the naval fleet assembled an “orchestra” of artillery, sirens, machine-gun choirs, and, for good measure, a few hydroplanes. The audience sang along.

  Many artists of all kinds wanted to make their artistic work useful to people in everyday life — and so the new, geometrical visual style was turned into plates, clothing, furniture, and, most famous of all, posters that revolutionized the world of art and brought the new art to the people. Russia suddenly was on the forefront of the future.

  This science-fiction emphasis was politically necessary. The present was bleak. The Revolution and Civil War had catastrophically disrupted agriculture and trade. Industrial output in 1921 was only a fifth what it had been in 1913. The economy was in a shambles, despite Lenin’s best efforts to fix it. So the Communist Party demanded that people look forward and remember that their own sacrifices would one day flower in the perfect society for their children or their children’s children.

  Young Mitya went to see the Futurist writer, artist, and actor Vladimir Mayakovsky perform when he was in town. He already admired Mayakovsky’s bizarre and startling verse, his absurdist love poems and declarations with names like “The Spine Flute” and “A Cloud in Trousers.”

  Mayakovsky was quite a figure. He was a tall man, frighteningly handsome, with a deep, braying voice. By the gentle age of twelve, he had already been stealing his father’s sawed-off shotguns to give to Revolutionaries. By the age of sixteen, he had been imprisoned by the tsar’s police. By the time he turned twenty, he and fellow Futurists had published A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, in which they declared that the past should die to make way for the future. Mayakovsky crowed, “Spit on rhymes and arias and the rose bush and other such mawkishness from the arsenal of the arts. . . . Give us new forms!”

  He would yell at his audiences, make fun of them, provoke them, flirt with wives in front of their husbands.

  Now he stood before young Mitya and the rest of the café crowd, dressed (if we can believe contemporary reports) in a top hat and a ragged coat, with a wooden spoon sticking out of his jacket pocket like a boutonniere — and he bellowed his poetry of youth through a megaphone:

  No gray hairs streak my soul,

  no grandfatherly fondness there!

  I shake the world with the might of my voice!

  Young Dmitri was impressed. He did not imagine he would soon be working side by side with this “clumsy-footed angel,” this “singer of gutter miracles,” this “thunderbolt of cobbles,” who acted as the brash bard of the Revolution.

  The conception of art as propaganda was only part of Lenin’s program of control. In the years following the Revolution, he needed every means at his disposal to sway the opinions of the population. He wrote, “The state is an instrument of coercion. . . . We desire to transform the state into an institution for enforcing the will of the people. We want to organize violence in the name of the interests of our workers.”

  “In the name of the interests of our workers”— for Lenin believed that the people themselves often did not understand what they truly needed. As a result, many times in the first years of its history, the Communist government was in conflict with the workers they claimed to serve. In the cities, workers discovered that they did not, as promised, run their own factories — the state soon did. In the countryside, peasants did not always want to give up their grain stores to the Communists. Lenin made an already tense situation worse by condemning all religion as superstition. The far-flung populations of the Soviet republics were often deeply pious and were aghast when their churches, synagogues, and mosques were ransacked, when their mullahs, rabbis, and priests were killed or forced to flee. Ancient church bells were knocked from their steeples and melted down amid the jeers of Communist cadres. The bodies of Orthodox Christian saints were ripped out of their tombs and put on display in the new Museum of National Hygiene. This horrified the peasantry, already often hostile to the Bolsheviks.

  Even after the Civil War was over, there was still violence as the government subdued the uneasy population. There had to be some way to convince the citizens of the good of the Communist cause. The arts were supposed to be part of this coercion. For this reason, Lenin particularly liked film, which he thought had tremendous power to sway the masses.

  He was not very fond of music. Not because it didn’t move him — but because it did. “It makes me want to say kind things, stupid things, and pat the heads of people,” he admitted. “But now you have to beat them on the head, beat them without mercy.”

  The teenage Shostakovich did not take politics very seriously. At one point he had to take an examination in “Marxist methodology.” He and four other students were called into a room and asked questions about politics and music, to determine whether they were counterrevolutionary in their thought.

  The examiners asked one student “to explain the difference, from the sociological and economic standpoints, between the work of Chopin and Liszt,” two composers of the nineteenth century.

  Shostakovich could not keep a straight face. He burst out howling with laughter. He could not stop himself.

  He was sent out of the room.

  Later, he was sorry. He asked to be given another chance to take the test and requested that the student he had interrupted be given another chance, too. This time, they both passed.

  A few years later, to laugh at a test like that would have been fatal. And by then, Shostakovich would be administering those tests himself.

  Though young artists may have been excited by this new world, many people were finding it hard to make ends meet. Most substantial private property had been seized by the government. The value of money fluctuated wildly. People lived by bartering their goods.

  Shostakovich’s aunt recalled people swapping complaints on the street about what they’d sold so they could eat: “We are living now on our grand piano,” and “We are living on the bedroom curtains and father’s old watch!”

  Shostakovich’s father had to sell many of their possessions to keep food on the table. He would take items of furniture, jewelry, or clothing on a freight train that went out to the market towns, where he could barter for milk, eg
gs, and kasha for the family. In the winter, these trains could be frigid, and on one such trip, in February of 1922, he caught a cold.

  He came home complaining of a headache. It did not get better. His lungs filled. He had pneumonia.

  A few days later, Dmitri Boleslavovich Shostakovich died.

  Though the Bolsheviks discouraged religion, six monks came to sing the coffin on its way, and a priest said the ancient rites. Young Mitya and his sisters pressed their faces desperately to the hands of their dead father.

  But according to another onlooker, by the time the lid was on the coffin and the dirt hit the lid, Shostakovich had already started to grip his sorrow inwardly. “Mitya and Zoya stood a little off to one side on a mound of newly dug earth. Zoya’s distraught little face was wet with tears and her coat was unfastened. Mitya stood, his cap crushed under his arm, slowly wiping his spectacles. His eyes looked especially defenseless without them, but his entire face was filled with inward concentration and composure. No need to go to him with condolences!”

  People muttered to Sofia Shostakovich that they were so sorry for her loss.

  She replied, “Now I feel like a stone.”

  Shostakovich left us a document of his mourning: his “Suite for Two Pianos.” It is a set of pieces to be played by him and his sister Maria. Together, they rehearse their sadness. It opens with a dark, relentless tolling of bells, a grief that will not cease. It is as if brother and sister, by playing this piece, find a way to summon the sadness itself to be with them in the family parlor, staring at them, silent and aghast.

  It is a remarkable piece for a fifteen-year-old composer. He and Maria played it for salons of musicians, dedicating their performances to their father.

  One of the pieces in the set, a fantastical dance, may be a morsel for Zoya — she wanted to be a dancer (as well as a painter and, sometimes, a singer). Dmitri often wrote eccentric dances for her, in which one can almost hear her knees and pointy elbows. But even in this light dance, with hints of Zoya’s pranks, there is, woven through it, the echo of the mourning bells.

  That is perhaps the most moving thing of all about the suite: no matter what mood follows, it is occasionally interrupted by those urgent chimes — just as, often, in the wake of a death, at odd moments, when we are thinking about something else entirely, our grieving takes us unawares.

  After the death of Shostakovich’s father, the family had no income. Mitya offered to drop his studies and get a job, but his mother wouldn’t hear of it. Maria, three years older, gave piano lessons. To make ends meet, Sofia Shostakovich got a job as a cashier at the Workers’ Union. She worked from nine in the morning until ten at night.

  One evening, a man followed her home from work, perhaps thinking she was carrying money from the register. He caught up with her on the stairs of their apartment building and hit her over the head with a metal rod or a wrench.

  She saw stars and thought she’d been shot. She screamed and started ringing all the doorbells on the landing. The man ran for it.

  Zoya bounded down the stairs and found her mother splattered with blood. A friend who was a doctor raced over and searched her skull for fractures.

  She was fine, but the experience rattled her. A few weeks later, a hundred rubles were stolen from her register at work. No one blamed her out loud, but she was fired. After that, she got a job as a typist in the Palace of Weights and Measures.

  This income still was not enough. The family rented out four of their apartment’s seven rooms. Shostakovich’s mother insisted on keeping the parlor and two bedrooms, but they shared the kitchen and bathroom with their lodgers, who eventually included Shostakovich’s aunt Nadejda and her new husband.

  This was not unusual in Petrograd. Displaced by the Civil War, at first, and later by the brutal grain requisitions of the Communist government, people were moving in droves into the city to get new manufacturing jobs. Apartments that once had housed a single family and their servants, surrounded by their comfortable settees, their ferns, and their china, now were broken up and subdivided, with each room housing a whole family. Writers of those years often describe the tense unpleasantness of communal living: people sneaking bites of one another’s food in the crowded kitchens, people arguing about who used more electricity, people hanging laundry dripping in the common hallways, people waiting in long lines for the toilet or hammering on the bathroom doors, hollering insults at each other. People also listened through the walls to hear if neighbors they particularly hated were speaking out against the regime. That was an easy way to get rid of a neighbor. In those times, people either shouted or spoke in whispers.

  Things were not easy within the Shostakovich family, either. Dmitri was often silent and sullen. Zoya, on the other hand, was loud and impassioned. She appears to have argued with everyone, principally herself. Reading her letters, it is impossible not to love her feisty proclamations. “My character,” she wrote, “hasn’t got the slightest stability. Let’s take, for instance, art. What haven’t I studied?”

  Her mother and older sister rolled their eyes at her inability to commit to one thing or another. Her mother told her that if the ceiling of the apartment fell in, out of all of them, Dmitri was the one who should be saved; he, after all, was the genius.

  After the family’s setbacks, Sofia Shostakovich sank very deeply into depression. She suggested to the children that she should kill herself. Perhaps, she said, she should kill the three of them, too. “They spoke of it in the calm way one decides to take a trip or a long-wanted rest.”

  We do not know what they said. We only know that they lived.

  In September of 1922, eight months after the death of his father, Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich turned sixteen.

  His mother, determined to make his birthday a happy one, threw a huge party for him. Glazunov, the grand old man of Russian music who had done so much for the boy already, was there to toast him. Sofia found some vodka to serve to the guests, and she asked young Dmitri to serve the drinks.

  Dmitri wanted to try vodka; now that he was the man of the family, perhaps he felt it was time to take up drinking. He hit the bottle hard that night. Every time he poured out a glass for Glazunov, he sneaked some for himself. Glazunov raised a toast to the boy and drank. So did the boy.

  The toasts went on.

  A woman raised her glass toward Glazunov and toasted “to the composer of Scheherazade!”

  Glazunov had not written Scheherazade — a dead man named Rimsky-Korsakov had. But Glazunov didn’t care. He smiled, raised his glass, and drank anyway.

  And so did the boy.

  Glazunov was a pretty heavy drinker.

  That night, so was the boy.

  Eventually, he and his friends ended up in another room, somewhat in a fog, deciding they were all going to start a secret fraternal society. It is unclear what this “united brotherhood” hoped to accomplish. The important thing was the initiation ceremony, which apparently involved them walking past one another in various hieroglyphic poses. Crouched like figures on Assyrian or Egyptian friezes, they paced toward one another, heads turned to the side and arms crooked. They were supposed to do this three times.

  The third time was the charm, as the saying goes; after three mystic passes, Shostakovich reeled, toppled over, and boozily passed out on the floor.

  Sofia Shostakovich charged in and grabbed her son’s friend Boris, glaring at him. Her son could do no wrong; she assumed Boris was responsible for everything. She demanded to know what was going on. Boris tried to explain about the secret society. It suddenly didn’t seem very convincing. Boris was exiled from the Shostakovich house forever.

  Though Shostakovich perhaps did not make it into any Egypto-Assyrian secret societies that night, he was at least initiated into the old Russian mysteries of vodka.

  The family’s condition went from bad to worse. Swellings began to appear on Dmitri’s neck. They took him to the doctor.

  He was suffering from lymphatic tuberculosis. He n
eeded an operation. They sold a piano so he could be treated.

  Sofia Shostakovich, sick with anxiety, having lost her husband and fearing the loss of her son, made things impossible in the overflowing apartment. In a passion, she lashed out at her sister Nadejda, blaming her and the Bolsheviks (Nadejda’s husband was a Bolshevik) for Dmitri senior’s death and Dmitri junior’s illness. “You!” she screamed at her sister. “You and those like you are responsible for the revolution! And your marriage was complete nonsense. You did it only because you don’t love your own family.”

  Nadejda stammered out some response to these unfair accusations, but Sofia demanded sharply, “If both Mitya and your husband were drowning, which one would you save?”

  It was a ridiculous question. Nadejda didn’t know how to answer. She stammered, “I would save them both.”

  “No!” shouted Sofia. “No! Suppose only one could be saved.”

  There was no response that would satisfy Sofia’s rage. Through tears, at a loss for an answer, Nadejda wept that she would just drown herself. Scenes like this became more common as the family grew more miserable.

  Mitya was studying hard for his final piano examinations, but he had to take a break for the removal of a gland infected by the disease. During his recitals — when he had to play the music of Bach and Beethoven before the faculty of the Conservatory — he wore a bandage around his neck where the incisions had been made. He still played well, though, and passed.

  In the summer of 1923, his doctor sent him to a treatment center by the ocean in the sunny south. His sister Maria went with him. They played concerts all along the way to pay for their train fare.

  It is a grim-sounding truth that some of the happiest days of Dmitri Shostakovich’s life were spent in a tuberculosis sanitarium in the Crimea.

  Between arsenic injections, his interest in life was revived. He and Maria swam and played tennis. They enjoyed walks on the grounds. And for the first time, Dmitri fell in love.