All of this speculation is fitting in assessing the life of a composer whose music seems to demand interpretation but resists it, a man who learned to live behind a mask, a father who realized that, in order to keep his children safe, he had to create speech that was silent, and silence that spoke.
Speaking of language, I am hugely indebted to Alina Ryabovolova, who acted as a translator and research assistant for this project, chasing down obscure sources in the archives of Moscow. I’m also grateful to novelist Ellen Litman for additional translation help. For aid and encouragement in the complicated maze of Shostakovich scholarship, thanks particularly to David Fanning, Ludmila Stern, and Christopher Gibbs, all of whom pointed me toward useful sources. Any blunders that may have followed are, of course, my own. Thanks to Jim Nolte and Taylor Davis-Van Atta of the Vermont College of Fine Arts Library, who fetched material, English and Russian, for me from across the globe. A particular thanks is also due to Timothy Nenninger, chief of modern military records at the United States National Archives and Records Administration. Thanks to Olga Prutt of the Museum “The Muses Were Not Silent” in St. Petersburg and Tatiana Shavlyuk, who kindly acted as interpreter there; thanks also to Lidia Ader of the Rimsky-Korsakov Apartment and Museum.
Thanks to all the people at Candlewick Press whose enthusiasm and hard work made this project possible — in particular my editor, Liz Bicknell; designer Sherry Fatla; associate editor Carter Hasegawa; and copyeditor Hannah Mahoney. Your efforts were, as the Soviets would say, Stakhanovite.
I’m grateful to the many people who talked to me about this book through the years, but particularly to N. Griffin, as well as letters T., D., and L. — all of whom had to hear me whistling the “invasion” theme from Dmitri Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, op. 60, for four years solid.
PROLOGUE
An American agent . . . : Anderson.
First the American agent stopped for lunch . . . : It seems likely this agent of the Am-Rus Music Corporation was David Grunes, but the records are insufficient to confirm this.
More than a million . . . : Inber, 5.
“The Führer has decided . . . defeat of Soviet Russia”: Amery and Curran, 197.
Men inspected it with magnifying glasses: Anderson.
“Dedicated to the city of Leningrad”: Volkov, Shostakovich, 179.
The day of his radio broadcast . . . : Sollertinskys, 101.
“This is the local defense headquarters! . . . Air raid!”: Simmons and Perlina, 144.
“An hour ago I finished scoring . . . orchestral composition”: Sollertinskys, 101.
“In spite of the war and the danger . . . enrich the fruits of culture”: Ibid.
We still have the piece of paper . . . : Salisbury, 284.
“the Leningrad that Stalin . . . finished off”: Volkov, Testimony, 156.
For much of the war . . . : From the reminiscences of Arnold Ferkelman, Wilson, 105.
PART ONE
THE DEATH OF YESTERDAY
“the Window on the West”: This oft-repeated phrase is originally from Pushkin’s poem “The Bronze Horseman.” Alexander Pushkin, Collected Narrative and Lyrical Poetry, ed. and trans. Walter Arndt (Woodstock and New York: Ardis, 2002), 426.
“In Russia there is no elective government . . . can never obtain justice”: Lenin, 2.
In 1905, the year before Dimitri Shostakovich’s birth . . . : Shostakovich’s aunt Nadejda Galli-Shohat made the claim that Dmitri Shostakovich Sr. was present at the march on “Bloody Sunday” (Seroff, 34). As noted, her garrulousness both provides us with much of our information about Shostakovich’s childhood and calls into question the veracity of her revelations.
When it was over, the bodies of hundreds lay bloodied in the snow: Accounts range from an official estimate of just over a hundred dead to accusations of thousands. Modern historians estimate the death toll to have been in the region of 800 to 1,000 (e.g., Shukman, 105).
Shostakovich’s mother, Sofia, sheltered Jews . . . : Wilson, 6.
One night the tsar’s secret police . . . : Seroff, 35.
As Shostakovich’s father told the little boy . . . : Volkov, Testimony, 8; Seroff, 77.
The builder had mistaken the measurements . . . : According to Zoya Shostakovich, in Wilson, 5.
“He never seemed to take anything seriously . . . on the floor around him”: Seroff, 56.
“I think you would say . . . the one to eat them”: Selby, 13.
“The nine-year-old boy . . . his inner hearing”: Wilson, 12.
“He was somewhat absent-minded”: Ibid., 5.
“Yet he was a wonderfully kind . . . the fun out of him”: Ibid.
The young composer preferred blocks: Fay, Life, 8–9.
The next day . . . : Seroff, 59; Blokker and Dearling, 17.
In the first year and a half . . . : Gleason, 270.
In February 1917: By the Old Style calendar. According to the modern calendar, this uprising took place in March.
On the morning of February 27, 1917: Old Style date.
Sofia Shostakovich was eating breakfast . . . : The details about the Shostakovich family and their reaction to the February Revolution are taken from Seroff, 68 and following, except where noted.
The Cossack horsemen rode along . . . : Viktor Shklovsky, A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917–1922, trans. Richard Sheldon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 10; Russian Diary of an Englishman, 101, 105; Houghteling, 66n.
Soldiers told to take up arms . . . guns to the Revolutionaries: Service, History, 32; Houghteling, 64.
“Let’s denounce the old world . . . Forward!”: The so-called “Workers’ Marseillaise,” or, in Russian, “Rabochaya Marselyeza.” Lyrics by Pyotr Lavrov. http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/worker’s_marseillaise. Eyewitnesses testify to the ubiquity of this anthem in the early days of the Revolution. It was eventually replaced by the Communist “Internationale.”
“Children — Freedom!”: As quoted by Zoya Shostakovich, in Wilson, 6.
On March 2, 1917, Nicholas II . . . : Though Nicholas II abdicated on March 2 (Old Style), officially the dynasty did not end until the third, when the tsar’s brother Grand Duke Mikhail turned down the offer of the succession (White, 80–81). For a timeline of the February Revolution, see Shukman, 124.
The tsar and his family were exiled . . . : For the story of the tsar and his family, see Candace Fleming’s The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (New York: Schwartz & Wade, 2014).
The red flag of the Revolution was hoisted . . . : Russian Diary of an Englishman, 116, 121.
“Arise, arise, working people! Forward! Forward!”: Ibid., 137–138.
His older sister, Maria, and her classmates . . . : The first conductor of Shostakovich’s Second Symphony (To October) claimed that Dmitri’s memory of the boy slain for the apple was represented in one section of that piece by a fiddle jig that leads the listener by the hand into a shrieking fugue. Shostakovich’s supposed memoir, Testimony, recalls the story without mention of an apple (Volkov, Testimony, 7). For details and a debate about the credibility of this episode, see Wilson, 18–20.
“filled with soldiers . . . in those days”: Volkov, Testimony, 7.
“You fell victims in the fatal struggle . . . great, mighty, and free”: https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/sounds/lyrics/vy-zhertvoiu.htm.
The Shostakovich children climbed . . . : Seroff, 72–73.
“a concluding chord in the symphony”: Trotsky, History I, 17.
We are told that when young Mitya . . . : Seroff, 73.
“The funeral procession . . . symphony of the [February Revolution]”: Trotsky, History 1, 17.
He would use them in symphonies . . . : Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony (The Year 1905) and Twelfth (The Year 1917) both rely heavily on Revolutionary tunes to tell their stories. The tune “You Fell Victims in the Fatal Struggle” and fragments of his own “Funeral March for the Victims of the Revolution” are used in
the second movement of the Eleventh Symphony, lamenting the dead killed at the Winter Palace, and in the second movement of the Twelfth Symphony, which supposedly depicts Lenin brooding about the past and the future in the summer of 1917. Critics still argue about whether these two symphonies are tinny propaganda, sincere Leninism, or secret critiques of Soviet power (which is not impossible, particularly in the case of the Eleventh — see Wilson, 320; Volkov, Stalin, 40, 42; and Bartlett, 5). Whichever one believes, the West’s impatient dismissal of these works as empty exercises is unfair: these Revolutionary experiences were very real and visceral in Shostakovich’s personal memory and in the history of his family. He cannot be blamed for finding in them an emotional charge that Western audiences may not understand or share.
One diarist talks about the surprise . . . : Houghteling, 77.
Cars also rattled down the street . . . : Ibid., 82; Seroff, 75.
Mitya Shostakovich and his friends . . . : Sollertinskys, 9.
“The only way to put an end . . . all the workers”: Lenin, 2.
“The world-wide Socialist revolution . . . socialist revolution”: Ronald W. Clark, Lenin: The Man Behind the Mask (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 210–211.
they had nothing to lose but their chains: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/61/pg61.html.
“The spectacle of a billowing sea . . . symphonic canvases”: Sollertinskys, 9.
Shostakovich’s biographers write that Lenin’s . . . : Wilson, 6. His son, Maxim, also claims to have heard the story (MacDonald, 16).
“They say that the major event . . . I don’t remember a thing”: Volkov, Testimony, 7.
Or was this story of him viewing . . . : See Fay, Life, 12–13.
Moreover, Shostakovich’s parents . . . : They were supposedly Narodniks (Volkov, Testimony, 7–8; MacDonald, 19n) — a leftist group that had radical ties in the nineteenth century but that, by 1917, had reassembled as a much more moderate party, voting against the Bolshevik takeover.
Many of the details of Shostakovich’s youth . . . : Shostakovich was furious with Galli-Shohat for publishing material from private letters (Khentova, Voynï, 171).
“one of those wonderfully frank . . . into the subway”: Selby, 13.
In the summer of the Revolutionary year 1917 . . . : E.g., Wilson, 16.
On October 25, 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks . . . : Old Style date. For the events of the October Revolution, see, for example, White, chapter 8.
Bolshevik forces attacked the palace . . . : Trotsky, History III, 45.
Still, when elections for the nation’s legislative body . . . : White, 174–176.
“not popular”: “The masses . . . bewilderment”: Conquest, 4–5.
Immediately after the Bolsheviks . . . : Shukman, 28–29; White, 189–191.
Bolshevik thugs killed two of the previous members . . . : Andrei Shingarev and Fyodor Kokoshkin were killed by Baltic sailors in concert with Lenin’s Red Guard. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (New York: Penguin, 1988), 536n.
Dmitri Shostakovich was asked to play . . . : Wilson, 12; Fay, Life, 12.
THE BIRTH OF TOMORROW
“Despite all the difficulties . . . warm feeling”: Fay, Life, 8. He’s speaking here of his years in the Petrograd Conservatory.
Workers and peasants would walk the streets . . . : Fitzpatrick, 18.
“Man in Socialist societies . . . lay down rules for oceans”: Gleason, 271.
“We invited up to thirty people” and “There was nothing much . . . miss out on the dancing either”: Wilson, 7–8.
“It was wonderful to be among the guests” and “when the bony boy . . . her wordless son”: Sollertinskys, 12.
The classrooms were freezing . . . : Ibid., 18.
One of Shostakovich’s friends, Leo Arnshtam . . . : Film director Leo Arnshtam’s wonderful memoir of Conservatory life in that period is in Wilson, 20–23.
“The Conservatoire of my youth . . . it breathed inspiration!”: Ibid., 21.
“hungry, but nevertheless happy” and “This thin and apparently fragile . . . point of numbness”: Ibid., 23.
“An excellent musician . . . development is remarkable”: Sollertinskys, 20.
“Music triumphed . . . the music of the revolution”: Wilson, 22.
“Art belongs to the people . . . education and culture”: Schwarz, 3.
“The streets are our brushes . . . Drag the pianos out onto the streets”: Mayakovsky in his “Orders to the Army of the Arts” (1918), quoted in Wilson, 22.
Lenin needed word of Communism . . . : Fueloep-Miller, 138–139.
On the anniversary of the October Revolution . . . : Barron and Tuchman, 68.
The Futurist Mayakovsky created bizarre propaganda . . . : Haas, 185; cf. Jangfeldt, 157–158. This play was directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold (discussed later) and had sets by the great Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich (Gleason, 289).
“The thunder of the October cannons . . . mildew of the past”: Kovtun, 11 (translation modified for clarity).
“Blow up, destroy . . . the new man not dream of this”: Volkov, Stalin, 54.
“Inside us we had youth and joy . . . times of hope and fantasy”: Maria Siniakova, quoted in Barron and Tuchman, 73.
They talked about achieving weightlessness . . . : Kovtun, 23.
They wanted to leave the earth behind . . . : Barron and Tuchman, 212.
Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin designed a flying machine . . . : Kovtun, 193.
Vasily Kamensky’s career as a painter . . . : Barron and Tuchman, 160.
Composers, too, wanted to celebrate Russia’s new modernity . . . : E.g., the work of composers such as Alexander Mosolov, Nikolai Roslavets, Samuil Feinberg, Sergei Protopopov, and, finally, Arthur Lourié, who was not only important in the arts administration of Leningrad, but also the poet Anna Akhmatova’s lover.
The names of these pieces suggest their brutal, mechanical energy . . . : This trend of machine-related music was popular all over the globe in the 1920s and included pieces such as Honegger’s Pacific 231; Milhaud’s Agricultural Machinery; Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique, “Airplane” Sonata, and “Death of the Machines”; and Szpilman’s “The Life of the Machines.” What we might think of as Soviet-style pieces in praise of factory work were also joyfully produced in a consumer capitalist context, most notably Frederick Converse’s “Flivver Ten Million,” a light epic ode in praise of the “birth of a hero”: the ten millionth midprice Ford auto to roll off the assembly line.
Prokofiev’s Leap of Steel . . . and Ornstein’s Suicide in an Airplane: Both Leo Ornstein and Sergei Prokofiev had studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory like Shostakovich, though both of them, by this time, were living abroad.
“The orchestra must become like a factory”: Tassie, 105.
In the city of Baku . . . : Fueloep-Miller, 183–184.
Industrial output in 1921 was only a fifth . . . : Service, History, 109.
“Spit on rhymes and arias . . . Give us new forms!”: “Order No. 2 to the Army of the Arts,” Mayakovsky, 147, 149.
Now he stood before young Mitya . . . : Ibid., 18.
“No gray hairs streak my soul . . . might of my voice!”: Ibid.
He did not imagine he would soon be working . . . : These descriptions of Mayakovsky are from Marina Tsvetaeva’s poem “To Mayakovsky.” Marina Tsvetaeva, Selected Poems, trans. Elaine Feinstein (New York: Penguin, 1993).
“The state is an instrument of coercion . . . the interests of our workers”: Pravda, November 22, 1917, quoted in Shukman, 182.
In the cities, workers discovered that they did not . . . : While one of the first things Lenin did when he came into power was decree that factories belonged to their workers, he quickly reversed this policy and replaced workers’ boards with state managers. See Shukman, 28–29.
The bodies of Orthodox Christian saints . . . : Fueloep-Mille
r, 186.
“It makes me want to say kind things . . . beat them without mercy”: Patrick Lloyd Hatcher, North Atlantic Civilization at War: The World War II Battles of Sky, Sand, Snow, Sea, and Shore (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 67. Cf. the more brutal translation in Fueloep-Miller, 176.
The teenage Shostakovich did not take politics very seriously: He seems, in this period, to have been, like many of the intelligentsia, a casual Marxist, though not necessarily a Party supporter. See Fay, Life, 36.
“to explain the difference . . . work of Chopin and Liszt”: Ibid.
“We are living now on our grand piano . . . old watch”: Seroff, 82.
In the winter, these trains could be frigid . . . : This version of his death is recorded by Boris Lossky (Wilson, 30). Shostakovich’s aunt claimed that Dmitri senior died of a heart ailment (Seroff, 84–85). Scholarship tends toward the pneumonia explanation (for example, Fay, Life, 20).
six monks came to sing the coffin on its way . . . : Wilson, 31.
“Mitya and Zoya stood a little off to one side . . . go to him with condolences”: Elena Trusova, quoted in Sollertinskys, 26–27.
“Now I feel like a stone”: Wilson, 31.
He and Maria played it for salons of musicians: Fay, Life, 21.
Mitya offered to drop his studies . . . : Seroff, 120, 125–126.
a man followed her home from work . . . : Wilson, 27.
The family rented out four of their apartment’s seven rooms: Seroff, 87, 99; Khentova, Mire, 49–50.
Symphony for the City of the Dead Page 33