Symphony for the City of the Dead

by M. T. Anderson

  Shostakovich wrote the script of the opera, the libretto, with two friends of his. They had to write in the morning, since one of his friends was a night watchman at a candy factory (or, as his Soviet job title read, an “agent in conserving nonliquid property”). Shostakovich’s friend was often tired, slogging to the apartment after a night standing guard at the candy factory, but he quickly woke up and the three of them turned out a fun and energetic script.

  Sitting on Meyerhold’s couch, Shostakovich set their words to music. The opera score is bright and loud, full of pranks, honks, and grotesquerie. By the time the nose’s owner finds the nose, it is grand and condescending; it wears a plumed hat. It’s surrounded by the hymns of an angelic choir. When an old-fashioned opera aria starts to get off the ground and a girl sings about love, she’s smacked down quickly by some squeal or the weird wobbling of a metal saw.

  It is a piece full of anarchic joy.

  Meyerhold had worked before with Shostakovich’s childhood hero the Futurist poet Mayakovsky. (Together, for example, they staged the play about the flood and the workers who find utopia in Machine World.) Now Mayakovsky had written a play called The Bedbug, a satire in which a loud, obnoxious con man is frozen accidentally during his wedding and wakes up generations later — in the far future (1973) — to discover that the world is a sterile, mechanical totalitarian state. There’s no alcohol, there are no cigarettes, and dreams are considered to be a disturbed psychological abnormality.

  Meyerhold wanted Shostakovich to do the music for this odd fable. Shostakovich was excited to be working with the great Mayakovsky, famed Communist playboy and hooligan. From a distance, Mayakovsky had looked to the young Shostakovich like a great man: loud and strong and certain. Their first meeting, unfortunately, did not go well.

  The massive modernist stood, staring down at the shrimpish boy composer in front of him. Shostakovich, at that time, looked “very thin and scrawny, pale, with a thick head of hair; he created the impression of being very modest and shy. His light-colored myopic eyes looked out in bewilderment through his spectacles at all that surrounded him. His gait was nervous and rapid, as were the constant movements of his hands.”

  The Futurist poet was not impressed.

  When they went to shake, Mayakovsky only held out two fingers, as if he couldn’t be bothered to offer the kid a whole hand.

  Meyerhold was embarrassed by Mayakovsky’s behavior. He said quickly to Shostakovich that Mayakovsky had developed pains in his hand.

  Shostakovich nodded. He held out one finger in return. He said, “I’ve developed a pain in my hand, too.”

  Their discussion about the music for the play didn’t go well, either. Shostakovich remembered, “Mayakovsky asked me what I had written, and I told him symphonies, an opera, and a ballet. Then he asked me whether I liked firemen’s bands. I said that sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t. Then Mayakovsky said, ‘I like firemen’s bands the best and I want the music for The Bedbug to be just like the kind they play. I don’t need any symphonies.’ Naturally, I suggested that he get a band and fire me. Meyerhold broke up the argument.”

  In the final scene of The Bedbug, the con man trapped in the future is thrown into a zoo, where he can be observed with disgust by the new world’s shining citizens. For this scene, Mayakovsky asked Shostakovich to write something “as simple as mooing.”

  Shostakovich got to work.

  As Shostakovich shuttled back and forth between Moscow and Leningrad, working on the music for The Bedbug, he liked Mayakovsky less and less.

  The poet was full of himself and very Western. His suits were from Germany, his shoes were from France, and every day, he wore a different American silk tie to rehearsals. It was no secret to Shostakovich or the rest of the cast that the only reason Mayakovsky had written the play was to get money to buy a Renault sports car in Paris. It was one of the only private cars on the streets of Moscow.

  This was an odd motive for a Communist writer, the “drummer of the Revolution.” A friend of Shostakovich’s, the writer Zamyatin (who had created a dystopian world similar to Mayakovsky’s in The Bedbug), said snidely that Mayakovsky “wrote revolutionary verses — not because he truly loves the proletariat and wants revolution, but because he loves and wants a car and public stature. [He] is in my opinion a prostitute.”

  Mayakovsky was clearly getting sick of the Communist government — and of the increasingly drab social scene in Soviet Russia. In Paris, he was dating a counterrevolutionary woman who had fled to the West during the Civil War. He loved fine clothes and nights spent gambling on the French coast. Though he would have denied this, The Bedbug itself seems to be about a refracted version of Mayakovsky, stuck in a dull, strict Communist future he can’t stand.

  Snobbery about the West was not the only thing that was difficult about Mayakovsky. There was his way with women. He had, for example, driven a teenage girl to suicide and then, after her death, had written a film scenario in which he mocked her for killing herself.

  Shostakovich later remembered: “I can readily say that Mayakovsky epitomized all the traits of character I detest: phoniness, love of self-advertisement, lust for the good life, and most important, contempt for the weak and servility before the strong. Power was the great moral law for Mayakovsky.”

  And Shostakovich thought the script for The Bedbug was “fairly lousy.”

  Mayakovsky himself was frightened the play wouldn’t get enough laughs. He came up with a detestable suggestion: a money-grubbing character in the play should speak with a strong Jewish accent. He told the actress to try one on.

  Meyerhold was disgusted by this cheap anti-Semitism. He argued with Mayakovsky. Mayakovsky stayed firm: keep the woman Jewish.

  Director Meyerhold took the actress aside. He told her to keep the accent for the rehearsals but drop it for the performance.

  This ploy worked perfectly. Mayakovsky was so nervous and so wrapped up in worrying about whether the audience was admiring his work (they weren’t) that he didn’t even notice.

  Shostakovich’s music for The Bedbug is energetic and satirical. Though his tunes in the human zoo don’t exactly “moo,” they do capture some of the oom-pah-pah idiocy of Soviet-era parades and celebrations. Some of the audience thought the music was pure, obnoxious noise. Meyerhold was delighted: “That’ll clean out brains!”

  It didn’t matter. Though this play is now considered a classic of the Soviet theater, it did horribly at the time. It flopped. Soviet officials felt they had been mocked by Mayakovsky and Meyerhold.

  And theater critics wrote that the music was not the music of the common man. “We must advise Comrade Shostakovich that he should reflect more seriously on questions of musical culture in the light of the development of our socialist society according to the principles of Marxism.”

  This was a threat.

  Increasingly, there were questions of what kind of music composers should be writing. What music should the working class, the proletariat, be listening to? (There was very little sense that they should just be able to decide for themselves.) Should music for “the people” be complex and experimental — the music for a new world — or should it be as simple as possible?

  Or to put it another way: Should “the people” be raised up through education and literacy so that they were full participants in the Revolutionary experiment? Or should music, writing, painting, and drama be simplified to the point where anyone could understand them?

  An even stranger question came up: Should “the people” be forbidden to listen to the light music they loved? Should jazz (and Shostakovich’s music that imitated jazz) be banned? Should the working citizens of Russia instead be belting out simple mass songs about the motherland and joyful labor? That was the attitude many were taking.

  “The people” themselves were often not particularly enthusiastic about mass songs. Here, for example, from the grumbling diary of a man at a woodworking factory: “The new songs are sung over and over, with great e
nthusiasm: ‘He who Strides Through Life with a Song on His Lips’ and ‘I Know no Other Such Land Where a Man Can Breathe so Free.’ But another question comes up: can it be that people under a different regime don’t sing or breathe? . . . We will continue to stride through life: it’s not that far to the grave.”

  In contrast to The Bedbug, Shostakovich’s opera The Nose opened in Leningrad and played to packed theaters and delighted crowds. Critics, however, were no longer as excited about experiment as they had been a couple of years earlier; now they complained that the crazed music was too bizarre, and even worse, “irrelevant to students [and] metal- and textile-workers.” A survey was taken of workers in the audience — 100 percent of them said they’d enjoyed it. But that made no difference.

  No one knew it yet, but the age of experimentation in Soviet Russia was over. The Bedbug, as it turned out, was one of its last manifestations.

  Experiments of all kinds were coming to an end. Lenin, in his later years, had experimented with freedom of expression and even with a limited form of capitalism. Now he was dead, and all that was at an end.

  At the same time that Meyerhold and Mayakovsky were working on The Bedbug and Shostakovich was scribbling The Nose, the Soviet Politburo was making preparations to stage their own major event. It was called the Five-Year Plan, and it was supposed to complete the work of Russia’s modern industrialization. It was designed to install everyone — from workers in the cities to peasants in the countryside — into one mechanized whole. A new age of regulation and uniformity had begun.

  Mayakovsky’s play imagined a future in which humans acted like cogs, gears, and levers in a cold, totalitarian factory mechanism. At the same time that his ultramodern stage sets were being built, the Politburo was sending armored trains out into the countryside. When the doors slid open, secret-police units marched out into the muddy lanes to bully the peasantry into giving up much of what they owned and joining huge collective farms. Members of the Communist Youth League, dressed in knickers and military tunics, with brown belts strapped across their chests, enthusiastically joined the hunt across the countryside for wealthier peasants, who were to be “liquidated as a class.” Villagers anxious to save themselves accused their personal enemies of hiding money, grain, or a bourgeois past. The accused were stamped as “anti-people.” Some were sent off to concentration camps. Thousands of families guilty of nothing more than owning an extra cow were shipped into the wilderness in cattle cars. Some were shot. Farmers watched their livestock being dragged away to the collective farms. If they resisted, their houses were burned. The government requisitioned millions of tons of grain to sell overseas so they could buy the heavy industrial machinery that would make Soviet Russia hum. Peasants could often not grow enough to eat.

  Even those who had never farmed were forced into farm collectives. Millions of Kazakh nomads were ordered at gunpoint to give up their herding and their ancient way of life and settle down. They were told to grow crops in soil that was too dry to yield much beside rocks and grasses. They had no idea how to farm, and in the course of forced collectivization, about one and a half million of them starved to death.

  Peasants tried to stand up to this farm collectivization. Within a few years, roughly 2,200 small rebellions broke out in villages across the USSR. The peasantry fought with sawed-off shotguns, axes, or whatever came to hand. Farmers hid their grain; they burned down barns that were being taken away from them; they slaughtered their own animals so the government couldn’t get its hands on them. But the Five-Year Plan was relentless.

  In this new age of regulation, factories as well as farms received their orders from the top. The Five-Year Plan specified production goals workers could never meet — and when they fell short of those goals, they were accused of sabotage. Just as wealthy peasants were hunted in the countryside, in the factories, bourgeois employees and experts on factory production were chased out of their jobs because supposedly they were enemies of the common working people. Firing all experts (sometimes even having them arrested or killed) was a disaster for industrial production. It meant more mistakes on the assembly lines, more delays, more lying about the volume of work being done, more accusations of “wrecking,” more arrests, and so, in turn, more mistakes.

  The Five-Year Plan was launched in 1928, just before The Bedbug had its brief run onstage and The Nose took its first bow. The program’s effects were not yet clear. But it was absolutely clear that the thrilling experiments of the twenties were over and a new era had begun.

  The future had just become a lot colder, a lot more like Mayakovsky’s nightmare vision. Lenin had used Mayakovsky’s poetry, but he had never liked it. (“Rubbish, stupid, stupid beyond belief and pretentious.”) Now Mayakovsky’s Communist Party liaison was complaining about the poet’s rampant individualism, his income, and his affair with a tsarist noblewoman. They denied him a travel visa and forced him to tone down his satirical work. The poet was shocked to discover that the Party was watching him as closely as they watched ordinary citizens in the countryside.

  Perhaps the end of the age of Communist experiment was finally signaled this way:

  On April 14, 1930, Mayakovsky spent the morning as he often did, haranguing a girlfriend and trying to convince her to leave her husband. He bickered until she agreed to move in with him later that day. He said he would call her at five. The poet kissed her tenderly and she stepped out of his apartment.

  When she was gone, he picked up a loaded Mauser pistol, aimed it at his chest, and shot himself in the heart.

  Mayakovsky could not stand to live in the world he had helped to create. He was an individualist who had paradoxically fought for a collective, communistic society.

  The rogue in The Bedbug, thawed to live in a cold Soviet society of the future, wails, “What is all this? What did we fight for? Why did we shed our blood, if I can’t dance to my heart’s content — and I’m supposed to be a leader of the new society!”

  These words could have been Mayakovsky’s, astounded that he was not master of the future he had built.

  The writer Boris Pasternak, a friend of the Futurist’s, went to the poet’s apartment to view the body shortly after the suicide:

  Already people from the town and tenants packed all the way up the staircase wept and pressed against each other. . . . A lump rose in my throat. I decided to cross over to [Mayakovsky’s] room . . . to cry my fill. . . . He lay on his side with his face to the wall, sullen and imposing, with a sheet up to his chin, his mouth half open as in sleep. Haughtily turning his back on all, even in this repose, even in this sleep, he was stubbornly straining to go away somewhere. . . . This was an expression with which one begins life but does not end it.

  Even in death, Mayakovsky “was sulking and indignant.”

  The corpse was taken away by the authorities.

  At eight o’clock the evening of his death, the Futurist’s brain was removed surgically from his skull. The State Institute for the Study of the Brain put it on a scale to determine the precise weight of genius. They found that it weighed 1,700 grams, whereas the standard human brain weighed 1,400. They stored the brain near Lenin’s in the Institute’s “Pantheon.”

  The rest of Mayakovsky’s body was placed in a coffin on a red cube. Later it was taken to a cemetery on a flatbed truck. Beside it stood a wreath made of sledgehammers, screws, and gears.

  Everything was calculated and precise, as it should be when the future arrives.

  In late 1923, when Lenin had lain dying, he had looked at the men around him and wondered who would succeed him. He particularly mistrusted the man he had installed as general secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee — an “unpleasant Georgian with . . . wicked yellow eyes.”

  The man called himself Joseph Stalin. His face was pockmarked from smallpox; his mustache was famous; he appeared on posters smoking a pipe like someone’s grandfather. He had risen through the ranks during the Revolution and the Civil War, fighting on the front lines, exe
cuting enemies as he needed.

  After Lenin’s death, Stalin quietly moved to take power.

  By 1930, Stalin’s foes seemed to melt away.

  His name meant “Man of Steel,” and his fist began to close.

  SOURCES

  1 Symphonies traditionally have several movements, each of which typically has its own moods, its own shape, and (most important) its own melodies and musical themes. In the Russia of Shostakovich’s day, there were very traditional expectations about how each of those symphony movements should work, and Shostakovich usually played by those rules. One of the reasons that his Second and Third Symphonies, discussed later, seemed so revolutionary is that they weren’t organized on any expected plan.

  In March 1934, two of Russia’s most famous poets — Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandelstam — ran into each other while crossing a bridge in opposite directions. Mandelstam seized Pasternak’s arm and yanked him close. He apparently told Pasternak that he had just been down to the Ukrainian countryside and had seen with his own eyes the terrifying effects of farm collectivization: unimaginable suffering, mass starvation. He hissed a poem into Pasternak’s ear.

  It was a song of disgust at Stalin’s cruelty:

  His fingers are as fat as grubs

  And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips.

  His cockroach whiskers leer

  And his boot tops gleam. . . .

  And every killing is a treat

  For the broad-chested [Stalin].

  Hearing this whispered, Pasternak reared back. “I didn’t hear this, you didn’t recite it to me,” he snapped. “You know, very strange and terrible things are happening now: they’ve begun to pick people up. I’m afraid the walls have ears, and perhaps even these benches on the boulevard here may be able to listen and tell tales. So let’s make out that I heard nothing.”