Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  Running along like a musical errand-boy to earn his cash, he winked one owl-eye. He’d fooled the world, and how happily everything rushed on! (Mitya to Glikman, with the radio set to maximum blare so that no one could overhear: So Stalin, the Politburo and all the other brass hats are riding down the Volga in a big, you know, steamship, which suddenly, I suppose on account of, er, Trotskyite saboteurs, starts to sink. If it goes down instantly, who will be saved? Come on, Isaak Davidovich, it’s easy: The people of the USSR!) Germanic oompahs, marches, good feelings all around, swelling heartbeat-drumbeats sped onto the score-sheets with a newness entirely bereft of self-doubt. Our self-satisfied young composer strutted onto the stage of his own dreams even when he was just sitting in the front row with his arms folded, a shy smile on his face. His mother was still proud of him and his biography was clean. Glazunov, Malko and other luminaries assured him of his virtue. Unmolested yet by what for diplomatic reasons we’ll continue to call “the world,” he retained such high purity of intention that his secret bunkers of harmony remained unpoisoned by any stray gas cannister. Boom! Moaning again, Tatyana Glivenko closed her eyes, hoping that her husband wouldn’t find out. As the genius lowered his face onto hers, her long black eyelashes became twelve octaves of piano keys.

  3

  About “New Babylon” he didn’t care, I said. But the following year, his score to the ballet “Dynamiada” suffered an equally premature death. On the verge of exasperation (what an innocent he still was!), he tried to talk back to the activists in their dark, pigsnouted propaganda trucks. Sollertinsky had taught him to smoke fancy “Kazbek” cigarettes. He offered them all around, but the activists frowned and refused to accept them. Why were they like that? He pointed out for the tenth time that his grandfather had been a revolutionist in Siberia, and, moreover, that if his best music was like no one else’s, that was all the more reason for it to be cherished by the State. Unfortunately, Comrade Stalin had directed that only material in explicit conformity to the Party line should be published.

  4

  His friends advised him to safeguard himself. Didn’t he want to continue his ascent? They said to him: Throw something to the wolves, even an old bone! Don’t worry, Dmitri Dmitriyevich; it’ll be a purely rhetorical sacrifice . . .

  His former mentor Malko had now emigrated to the capitalist zone. Accordingly, he was beyond reach of the Party. Moreover, Shostakovich had never respected him. Biting his cheek, he wrote that open letter to Proletarian Musician, denouncing himself for having permitted Malko to conduct a Shostakovich foxtrot. Such light music (he humbly submitted) ought to be liquidated utterly, for it was a dangerous bourgeois infiltration.

  He was ashamed, of course. How could he not be? His well-wishers reminded him that he hadn’t done Malko any harm, that Malko (who never forgave him) could not understand current conditions here, and that by submitting to orthodoxy before submission was demanded, he’d avoided the worst.

  The worst? he inquired, pursing his feminine little lips. And what would that be?

  Don’t even talk about it, Dmitri Dmitriyevich! By the way, is it true that Nina Varzar has been casting her gaze at you? She’s a very determined girl, I hear. Whatever she sets out to get, she . . .

  In spite of such precautions, his Third Symphony, the prudently named “Mayday,” sustained an outright attack. Everybody warned him to be careful, but he ran two fingers through his cowlick and laughed. He still possessed deep echelons of self-faith.

  In 1931 he composed the music for N. P. Akimov’s fast-paced film version of Hamlet, from which most soliloquys had been stripped so as to avoid distracting the masses. They say that it came to him so easily that he composed most of it at halftime at Lenin Stadium. Once, when the Dynamos made some especially spectacular play, he jumped up and down so crazily that the score blew out of his pocket! He wrote it all over again in a twinkling. The phallic satire of the flute scene—a brainchild of the composer, it’s said—became notorious. To amuse himself, he told The New York Times: Thus we regard Scriabin as our bitterest musical enemy. Why? Because Scriabin’s music tends to an unhealthy eroticism. Then he rushed off to bed with Tatyana Glivenko.

  We dynamited the Cathedral of Christ the Savior—another victory against reaction. We put more Mensheviks on trial and demanded that they be shot; it was in all the newspapers. Counterrevolutionaries made confessions in court and then disappeared.—Well, well, said Shostakovich’s friends, maybe they’re guilty after all.

  That same year saw the premiere of his ballet “Bolt,” which dealt with the theme of industrial sabotage. A critic in Rabochii i Teatr wrote that the reaction of the people to such misguided entertainment should serve as a last warning to its composer.

  5

  The most infallible source on this period is of course our Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which states: In the 1930s, Soviet musical culture made notable advances. Its restructuring was essentially completed. Even now, Shostakovich refused to comprehend that he must get restructured. Against the best advice he persisted in pretending that the judgment in Rabochii i Teatr had been only a critic’s grumble, not a hint from the “organs” of the state. After all, how could he bear to go on living, if he couldn’t keep hooting his own owl-songs? (Meanwhile, Akhmatova was writing in her forbidden lyrics that in this place, peerless beauties quarrel / for the privilege of wedding executioners.) Time to nest! At the center of the Conservatory’s square spiral, where in the past he’d studied and in the future he’d teach, our pale grub enthroned himself behind a piano, sheltered on all sides by the barrels of outward-pointing tubas, trumpets, French horns; their practitioners dwelt in turn within the collective porcupine whose quills were the bows of violinists. Then came the grey four-storey walls, decorated with bas-relief wreaths and the occasional lyre. Next, the hedges. Around them, the tilted diamond of Theater Square defined its outline-segments with edifices: the Kirov Theater, of course, where his infamous “Lady Macbeth” would soon premiere; the blocky mazes on the way to Rimsky-Korsakoff Prospect, the canal-curving apartment-fronts, and finally the walled courtyards of the Yusupov Palace, where Rasputin had met his quadruply hideous end. But all these comprised merely the inner defenses of D. D. Shostakovich. Theater Square lies at the southwest extremity of a long island surrounded by the intersections of the Moika River, the Griboedova Canal, and then the Kryukov Canal, which strikes the Moika again. Nor is this all, for the island lies within the greater one formed by the confluence of two watery arcs: the Neva and the Fontanka Canal (the latter of which will take you to Akhmatova’s residence). Here is the center of Leningrad itself. The city encircles and protects us here. Someday there will be still another circle, whose inward-pointing evil causes us to black out our windows. Their four-hundred-and-twenty-millimeter railroad guns will enjoy a range of seventeen miles. They’ll erect posters: HITLER—THE LIBERATOR. The front line will be death’s ballroom, where besiegers and besieged get frozen into a stale contredanse. But these precognitions, which carry with them the sensations of perishing in an airless room, remained beyond the pale to Shostakovich. In other words, both the music which he loved so much and the utilitarian melody-silk which he spun out as easily as a spider still seemed to him to coexist within the same wholeness. In his nightmares he got glimpses of things; and the music itself (the purest music, at least) enkindled itself with sadness. No matter. Such was his nature. Although it got ever more frequently said that this precocious intellectual with his elitist pretensions enjoyed no hope of composing songs with the mass appeal of, for instance, K. Ia. Listov’s “The Machine-Gun Cart,” in 1932 Shostakovich’s “Song of the Counterplan” (Opus 33) sounded continually on the lips of the people. Hearing them hum his melody on the trams made him as happy as if he were rolling his tongue to yell in concert with his cronies at football games. Ponderous, happy, military-march-ish, the “Counterplan” hallooed and hurrahed as if we were all really going somewhere, sentimental woodwinds alternating with delightfully pompous brasses. Th
e same busybodies who were always admonishing him to be careful now told him that he’d scored another victory on the cultural front! Even the capitalists liked it; they appropriated it for a Hollywood movie.21

  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.