Symphony for the City of the Dead

by M. T. Anderson

  The words at that point are a chorus of gleeful paranoia and denunciation:

  Look over here!

  Look over there!

  The enemy is everywhere!

  Look over there!

  Look over here!

  And let the enemy feel fear!

  Early in the morning of March 1, 1953, General Secretary of the Communist Party Joseph Stalin collapsed in his bedroom from a stroke. He lay there alone, semiconscious, drenched in stale urine, for almost a full day. He had ordered his guards never to disturb him, and they were too frightened to take a risk and knock. When members of the Politburo arrived, none of them wanted to call a doctor, since Stalin had recently accused several prominent doctors of murder. (His own doctor was being tortured at the time.)

  Comrade Stalin never regained full consciousness. He died on March 5.

  Lavrentii Beria, the psychopathic head of Stalin’s secret police, was killed soon after. He was dragged out of a meeting of the Presidium and executed; he died, perhaps fittingly, shot point-blank through the forehead, with a towel shoved in his mouth to stifle any screams for mercy.

  In prison, Shostakovich’s friend Weinberg noticed that the guards suddenly got a lot more polite. Soon, he was given papers to sign and sent on his way.

  There was to be no new purge.

  After Stalin’s death, the labor camps began quietly to release their prisoners. About eight million of their twelve million prisoners went free and found themselves wandering through their home cities in the old, stained clothes they had been wearing years before when they were torn from their families. Poet Anna Akhmatova looked forward to the reckoning that was to come: “Now those who have been arrested will return, and two Russias will look each other in the eye — the Russia that sent people to the camps, and the Russia that was sent to the camps.”

  Shostakovich worked hard for the rehabilitation and release of his friends, family, and colleagues. Maxim remembered, “Our home was sometimes like a small hotel for people who came back.”

  Shostakovich’s friend Galina Vishnevskaya sarcastically recalled the bravery of the Soviets once Comrade Stalin was dead: “Bonfires blazed all over the country, burning any and all pictures of Stalin. Heads were hacked off sculptures of the Leader and Teacher of All Times and All Peoples — this took quite a bit of time, since there was not a single factory, school, theater, university, street, square, or park in the country that was not adorned by a likeness of the General Secretary of the Communist Party. And now, in a marvelous display of boldness and heroism, the whole nation could tie a rope to his feet, pull him down from his pedestal, and execute him, pounding the mute, dead mass to their heart’s desire.”

  For his part, Shostakovich wrote his Tenth Symphony, which contains his musical monogram — the letters DSCH — played secretly, yet defiantly, as notes in a tune. At first, he calls out his own name with anxiety, until, late in the symphony, it returns in triumph, as if he is finally able to shout, “I AM DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH! I AM DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH!”

  In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, the new first secretary of the Communist Party, called for a closed meeting of Party delegates. No one knew what to expect. Once the doors were shut, he astounded them all, railing about the brutal excesses of Stalin for four hours as audience members left the room to vomit. The whole nation, he said, had been caught up in a “cult of personality” that had done incredible harm to the interests of the country and the Party. He did not, of course, mention his own role in Stalin’s purges. But suddenly it was legal to speak of what had happened, legal to discuss all the years of silence and torment.

  This speech, “The Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,” was informally called “the Secret Speech,” but it could not remain a secret for long. Within days, copies of it circulated all over the Soviet Union, and people felt that the lengthy winter of Stalinism finally had yielded to thaw. Shortly after, Shostakovich, together with many others, was rehabilitated — there was no longer a ban on his work. For the first time, the world heard his grotesque and furious Fourth Symphony, withdrawn back in 1936.

  Of course, the Soviet Union was still a police state. When Shostakovich went abroad, the authorities still made sure that members of his family remained behind so he could not defect. That did not stop New Yorkers from trying to convince him to flee his handlers and stay in America when he visited. They held up signs reading, SHOSTAKOVICH! JUMP OUT THE WINDOW!

  Still, occasionally, his works were censured or suppressed. In 1960, he was forced to join the Communist Party. He broke down sobbing.

  Was he brave or was he a coward? Or, as the sensationalist tagline of a Shostakovich biography asks: “Loyal Stalinist or Scornful Dissident?” The answer is neither. He kept himself alive.

  On the one hand, he always tried to use his position and influence to help friends. He wrote so many letters to the government that eventually the bureaucrats stopped paying much attention to him. His acts of generosity, however, were often discussed in the musical world. He secretly paid for the son of an executed “Enemy of the People” to be given a conservatory education. When he could, he gave money to friends (like the writer Zoshchenko) who had run afoul of the government. He did everything he could to clear the names of innocents imprisoned or killed during the Great Terror.

  Shostakovich’s compassion in the midst of a traumatized society was unusual. “Kindness is not, after all, an inborn quality,” Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote. “It has to be cultivated, and this only happens when it is in demand. For our generation, kindness was an old-fashioned, vanished quality, and its exponents were as extinct as the mammoth.” Shostakovich had the courage to hold on to his compassion, even when he was suffering blows from all sides.

  On the other hand, as he got older and sicker (he had spent his life smoking cheap Soviet cigarettes), he did not put up much of a fight when he was asked to sign defamatory articles written for him by Party hacks. “I showed lack of courage, was faint-hearted,” he admitted. “I’d sign anything even if they hand it to me upside down. All I want is to be left alone.” He was ashamed when he saw some of the things he signed in print.

  Sometimes he tried to avoid the “pestering officials” sent to get his approval for articles or pronouncements. Once, for example, giving a courier the slip, the composer and his wife rushed off and hid in a movie theater. They spent the day watching old films, one after another. “But their efforts were in vain; shortly after their return home late at night, the door-bell rang and the unwelcome official appeared with the document ready for signature.”

  A new generation was growing up who barely remembered what it was like during Stalin’s Great Terror. They felt things were getting easier in the Soviet Union, and they wanted to agitate for change. They did not understand why Shostakovich was so careful, so jumpy — why he would croak bitterly, “Just be thankful that you’re still allowed to breathe.”

  For his son, Maxim, he wrote a joyous, mischievous piano concerto, full of the boy’s glittering wit and energy. Maxim eventually became a famous pianist and conductor. Galina, inheriting the scientific brilliance of her mother’s side of the family, studied biology and went on to do heart research. Shostakovich loved them both to a fault.

  Over the last years of Shostakovich’s life, his new symphonies (he wrote fifteen in all) still moved people to tears with their compassion and their defiance. At the same time, he was writing his series of string quartets, a “diary” that, according to his wife, spelled out “the story of his soul.” As he grew older, the story told in the quartets grew stranger and more remote. When asked how to play his slow, death-haunted Fifteenth String Quartet (his last), he replied, “Play it so that flies drop dead in mid-air, and the audience start leaving the hall from sheer boredom.” His late quartets do, in fact, seem to be made of small, lonely things like the wings of dead flies, pieces of string, and bits of shell left in drawers.

  The power of his compositional voice was undiminished up until the time of his deat
h. His work was played and respected around the globe — and not simply on the planet’s surface. A piece by Shostakovich was the first human song sung in outer space. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, catching sight of the earth beneath him as he headed home from orbit, was so moved that he burst out into Shostakovich’s song “The Motherland Hears.” By that point, few remembered that the song was written by Shostakovich. But a song sung in space was a fitting tribute to a man who had been friend of the Futurists in his youth.

  He kept composing even when hospitalized and very sick. The rest of the time, he watched soccer on television.

  His final work was a sonata for viola and piano. Its last movement is haunted by the urgent peal of bells he had written into his “Suite for Two Pianos” when he was fifteen, more than fifty years earlier. Then, he had been mourning the death of his father; now, softly, spectrally, he tolls the bells for himself. Their melody grows hazier, weaker, perhaps gentler, and finally fades into an incomprehensible horizon.

  Shostakovich died on August 9, 1975, on the anniversary of the night the Seventh Symphony was played in besieged Leningrad.

  “The majority of my symphonies are tombstones,” Shostakovich is supposed to have said shortly before his death. “Too many of our people died and were buried in places unknown to anyone, not even their relatives. It happened to many of my friends. Where do you put the tombstones for Meyerhold or Tukhachevsky? Only music can do that for them.

  “Looking back, I see nothing but ruins, only mountains of corpses. . . . I’m not exaggerating, I mean mountains. . . . I’m sad, I’m grieving all the time.”

  The philosopher Walter Benjamin (who died tragically while fleeing the Nazis) once famously described a figure he called the Angel of History in terms that recall Shostakovich, chronicler of his people, looking back over his shoulder:

  His face is turned to the past. Where we see a chain of events reaching backward, he sees only a single, great catastrophe which heaps wreckage upon ruin, hurling it all at his feet. He would like to pause, to linger, to awaken the dead and repair all that has been broken. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, and it tears at his wings so fiercely that the angel cannot close them anymore. The winds blast him toward the future, to which his back is turned, while the heaped wreckage mounts up toward the sky. This storm is the thing we call “progress.”

  But for millions of listeners, Shostakovich’s music is not simply a record of death. Conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky proclaimed, “His work is the chronicle of his life. Of the life of his entire people, of his country.”

  There are few composers whose music and whose own lives reflect so exactly the trials and triumphs of a nation. The music of his youth was electric with the boldness and experimentation of Leningrad’s explosive revolutions. With his music of the ’30s, he came to know the grotesque brutality of the Terror. As Stalin closed his fist around Leningrad and the arrests and disappearances began, Shostakovich was in the middle of it. His Fifth Symphony, composed in a time of mute fear, was an answer to the authorities — but, at the same time, it spoke other truths, out of the side of its mouth, to all who had suffered loss and could not speak, could not cry. He gave a voice to the silenced. He showed them that they were not alone.

  When the war came and there was another assault upon Leningrad, Shostakovich gave them an epic piece they could read as a portrait of themselves not simply in battle but in the coming victory.

  His music was at once clear and clever; obvious and obscure; public and private; sorrowful, but full of a fierce joy in living; marked with codes and messages, but famous for its direct and earnest communication. As musicologist Richard Taruskin has said, “What made Shostakovich’s music the secret diary of a nation was not only what he put into it, but what it allowed listeners to draw out.”

  Contemporary composer Sofia Gubaidulina has written, “I believe that Shostakovich’s music reaches such a wide audience because he was able to transform the pain that he so keenly experienced into something exalted and full of light, which transcends all worldly suffering. . . . We listened to Shostakovich’s new works in a kind of exaltation.”

  And Anna Akhmatova, Leningrad poet who suffered through everything with him, wrote about his music:

  It creates miracles. . . .

  It alone talks with me

  when others are afraid to come near,

  when the last friend has turned his eyes away.

  It was with me in my grave

  and sang like the first storm,

  or as though all the flowers had burst into speech.

  Leningrad is now called St. Petersburg again. Once more, it is one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

  The parks are cool and green in summer. Couples walk by the canals and sit side by side on the banks of the wide Neva. In fashionable restaurants, people laugh and talk with a freedom Shostakovich could only imagine. The spires and domes glimmer again in the evening.

  The artists and writers who gather there now depict a new Russia with new challenges.

  A few miles to the north of the city, through Soviet-era suburbs of massive, weather-beaten apartment blocks and cracked car parks, lies Piskarevsky Cemetery, where many of the dead of besieged Leningrad were buried anonymously in ditches.

  It is serene there now. At the entrance, an eternal flame burns. Almost half a million bodies lie under long communal mounds. These mounds were once trenches, blown open with dynamite to crack the frozen earth, then crammed with hundreds of corpses. The mounds lie in orderly, peaceful rows. Each is marked only with a single year carved in stone; no names. In the summer, grass grows over them. In the winter, the bodies sleep under deep snow.

  Above the dead stands a statue of Mother Russia raising her garlanded arms in mourning. Trees whisper in the breeze. Loudspeakers play soft music. It is not Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, but rather music of decorous Baroque sorrow: Purcell, Albinoni, Bach. Inscribed in granite is a poem by Olga Berggolts, which defiantly declares:

  Let no one forget.

  Let nothing be forgotten.

  Old women in head-scarves walk between the mounds. The mounds are soft, even, equal, green.

  History is not simply the great tumults and tragedies but the accumulation of tiny moments and gestures.

  It is after the war is over. Shostakovich and his family have returned to the same cottage on the coast of the Gulf of Finland where they were staying on that bright summer day the Germans first invaded.

  Shostakovich and his daughter are riding their bikes in the forest. Shostakovich is teaching Galina the Highway Code. As they glide through the woodland, he demonstrates how to indicate left and right turns, “although in the empty and twisting forest paths it looked excessively cautious.” The man and the girl act out regulations. He extends a slim pianist’s hand, signaling to no one, preparing his daughter to navigate on her own when they have left the woods.

  They ride down the dirt roads, making their mute signs.

  That far north, in the summer, it seems as if the sun will never go down, as if the night will never fall, as if the forest will never grow dark.

  SOURCES

  Even the basic facts of Dmitri Shostakovich’s life are often contested, as a glance through the end notes of this book attests. How do we reconstruct the story of someone who lived in a period in which everyone had an excuse to lie, evade, accuse, or keep silent?

  The standard biography of the composer is Laurel Fay’s meticulous Shostakovich: A Life. Her work is colorfully supported by Elizabeth Wilson’s English-language collection of memoirs and oral histories, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered.

  The most problematic source is Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, edited (or perhaps written) by Solomon Volkov. As described on page 140, there is a great deal of disagreement about how trustworthy this source really is. When it came out, it revolutionized the way that people saw Shostakovich in the West. It appeared to put to rest any lingering suspicion that he was an enthusiastic, lock-s
tep Soviet citizen, joyfully writing agitprop poster symphonies about Lenin — if, indeed, anyone had ever believed such a thing. In the years that followed, it became the focus of an increasingly ugly academic debate about the meaning of Shostakovich’s music and the shape of his life. People argued not only about whether Testimony was actually Shostakovich’s own memoirs, dictated word for word to young Solomon Volkov, but also about whether the book’s bitter musings were an accurate or useful picture of the composer in any case. As musicologist Richard Taruskin mused, “Testimony may be authentic and true, or inauthentic and false, or authentic but false, or even inauthentic but true.”

  As the years have gone by, the debate has mellowed. One of the main disputants committed suicide. The arguments about the literal authenticity of Testimony seem less important now that more documents and statements have swum to the surface supporting its general depiction of Shostakovich: letters to his friends Isaak Glikman and Ivan Sollertinsky, for example, or the score of his snide, defiant Anti-Formalist Vaudeville, which shows that he did not just sit back and take Party criticism lightly. More and more, we have found individual anecdotes and stories from Testimony hinted at in other sources, recalled by colleagues, or even endorsed by Maxim Shostakovich as things his father genuinely thought and said. In the light of recent scholarship, Shostakovich’s anti-Stalinism no longer seems surprising or controversial, and was not unusual for the intelligentsia of Moscow and (in particular) Leningrad.

  In writing this book, I have approached Testimony cautiously, as if it were an oral history, a possible record of Solomon Volkov’s memories of things told him by Shostakovich. As one Shostakovich biographer put it, “Testimony is a realistic picture of Dmitri Shostakovich. It just isn’t a genuine one.” In my opinion, the book has much the same status as many of the memoirs in Elizabeth Wilson’s Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, in which friends, relations, and colleagues of the composer tell stories and remember dialogue many decades after the fact, after the composer’s death, which therefore may contain any combination of truth, accuracy, error, imaginative expansion, and strategic falsehood. I have used it as a source when what it describes seems noncontroversial.