Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  21

  On 20 August, the Germans closed the ring around their flank objective, Leningrad. On 4 September, Field-Marshal von Leeb raised his baton: Air raids and bombardments began.—Don’t worry, comrades, said our radio, we’ve halted them at the Ligovo-Pulkovo Line . . .—On 6 September, an enemy communiqué announced that encirclement was “progressing” toward a victory, and two days later Leningrad’s last railway connection was lost. On 22 September, Hitler the Liberator with his usual kindness issued the following “Directive on the Future of the City of Petersburg”: The Führer has decided to wipe the city of Petersburg off the face of the earth . . . After the defeat of Soviet Russia, there is no interest in the further existence of this large inhabited area. (In his favor, we ought to note that he was worried about exposing his soldiers to epidemics.)

  Within this killing-zone remained two hundred thousand ill-equipped Red Army men, and three hundred thousand citizens hardly trained or armed at all, but gloriously enrolled in the People’s Militia. Pale, weary women toiled with their hair tucked up, packing explosives into the shell casings which stood in rows before them like immense metal bottles. Their counterparts in Moscow were doing the same. Everyone was ready for the future, for death.

  Comrade Zhdanov summoned the activists to a meeting and announced with his usual melodrama: Either the working class of Leningrad will be turned into slaves, and the best among them exterminated, or we shall turn Leningrad into the Fascists’ grave.

  The Party promised to be merciless against deserters. The Party warned that no selfish individualism would be tolerated. Shostakovich had heard it all before.

  22

  His Seventh or so-called “Leningrad” Symphony was by some accounts already underway before the invasion. In August 1939, when the faithful demanded to know why in defiance of all his promises that undistinguished Sixth Symphony had failed to memorialize Lenin, Shostakovich twitched, slid his spectacles up his nose, smiled to the utmost of his cunningly hidden spite, and announced poker-faced that the Seventh would be program music of a wisely sycophantic species at last: First movement—Lenin’s youth. Second movement—Lenin leading the October storm . . . These words got eagerly reproduced in Leningradskaya Pravda, Moskovskii Bolshevik and suchlike organs of our trusting Soviet press.

  The joke went further: The capitalist publication Current Biography proclaims in its last number to be published before the Hitlerites attacked Russia that early in 1941, Shostakovich completed his Seventh Symphony, dedicated to the memory of Lenin.

  I’ve also read that it was not until July, by which time Army Group North had already overrun all the pillboxes of the Stalin Line, that the actual composition commenced. (The Fascists are cutting all the wires! cried his colleague Yudina, but when he asked which wires and with what result, she wasn’t sure; she’d heard it from a loudspeaker.) Meanwhile, a certain Comrade Alexandrov has assured me that Shostakovich accomplished nothing before August.—The more one studies these various assertions, the more peculiar they become; it’s as if on a summer’s night the many canals of Leningrad were to join together and rearrange themselves into a spiral!—According to the next revision of his biography, by the end of July he’d completed only the first movement, which he provisionally re-entitled “War.”

  Does it matter which version is true? Musicologists tell me that it does. What, then, do we mean by “already underway?” I myself credit the formulation of that sad and angry torchbearer N. Mandelstam, based on what she’d learned from her martyred poet-husband and his muse, her rival, A. Akhmatova, that the whole process of composition is one of straining to catch and record something compounded of harmony and sense as it is relayed from an unknown source . . . Let’s suppose that her description applies to music as well as it does to poetry. Whom did Shostakovich hear calling him? A certain woman with long dark hair comes to mind (you’re so lucky you didn’t marry me), but I ought to suppress this fantasy, which shows utopian individualism at its worst. The allegation that during this period he was wounded by a German shell fragment which, taking up residence within his brain, gifted him with sublime melodies whenever he tilted his head, is an equally colorful falsification.—Why not grant that harmony and sense descended upon him by grace alone? The pen flickered down the staves of his score-sheets, vivifying everything. Behind the blackout curtains, the candle kept shining every night in Shostakovich’s study. Chords and motifs trolled between his ears like tank-silhouettes probing the dark teeth of antitank concrete.

  Establishing the date of inspiration for the first movement is particularly crucial, since its infamous Rat Theme, the marionette in eleven variations, evokes the madness of German Fascism. What indeed might it represent, had its conception occurred while we were still friends with Hitler the Liberator? (Here’s a hint: In the Rat Theme some critics claim to find a mixture of “Deutschland über Alles” and the “Merry Widow”; but there may also be a trace of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth.24)

  Whatever conclusion we penetrate to, there will always remain deeper levels of meaning, undiscovered bunkers, within the Seventh Symphony. Shostakovich escapes us; he’ll die free. The conductor Mravinsky once wrote of him that everything has been heard in advance, lived through, thought out and calculated.

  23

  He dreamed that a bomb was singing to him. From far away, the bomb was coming to marry him. The bomb was his destiny, falling on him, screaming.

  24

  In August, the leaflets raining out of enemy airplanes advised women to wear white so that they’d be recognized as noncombatants. In spite of our loudspeakers, some of them believed. Their white dresses as they shoveled in the brown antitank trenches made them perfect targets. But then, so did the any-colored dresses of the housewives, who got blown to bits while they waited in bread queues. Fortunately, his wife had paid attention when he’d warned her: Ninotchka, their promises may be new, but their tricks are old. They’re Fascists!—And Nina, wearing earth-brown, got passed over, although she came creeping home that night with her face spattered with other women’s blood. History repeats itself. For instance, Comrade Stalin promised me the moon, but right after that he kicked me, metaphorically, you know, on my ass! Wasn’t that a joke? And just when Elena finally felt ready to marry me, Nina announced she was pregnant, when actually . . . That was her joke. So that’s how it is. Life calls for the highest order of deafness; then we can be, so to speak, happy. It’s actually almost more than I can take. Why wasn’t I, you know, born deaf? From his rooftop post, Shostakovich could hear the strafing and the screaming, with our loudspeakers trying to shout it out. Crash and crash! The linden trees on Nevsky Prospect were falling. The screaming was new to his experience. Back in peacetime, when he and Nina had sat at home in terror, waiting for the knock on the door, they’d heard the shots across the city, but the screaming had been muffled under stone. It was now that he began to entertain the thought that a ringing shriek was at least more free than murder overmastered by silence. His music, how should I say, developed accordingly.

  The Seventh’s opening movement, which some believe shows indebtedness to Sibelius, does not scream at first. Major-keyed, yet “dramatic,” it resembles a sunny forest dappled with bass motifs. It doesn’t develop a theme as much as gambol in one. All in all, it’s a pleasant, vegetative sort of melody, eminently forgettable. As he explained in a cabled dispatch to New Masses: The first part of the symphony tells of the happy, joyful life of a people confident in themselves and in their future. Elena, you’re so lucky that you didn’t marry me. It is a simple life, such as was enjoyed by thousands of Leningrad’s Popular Guards . . .—Glikman wrote this for him, and he signed it. LIFE HAS BECOME BETTER, COMRADES; LIFE HAS BECOME MORE JOYFUL. (Glikman was extremely useful.) It broke his heart to remember the Leningrad days when Sollertinsky used to ask him what he wanted to be, how he wanted his music to turn out. Because at that time he had, you see, aspirations. Well, well. (Sollertinsky had just been evacuated to Novosibirsk.) Even Stalin li
kes art; he enjoys choral singing. And I, I . . . He contemplated what it meant to be walled in. Elena once whispered in his ear how it had been to be forced into a suffocating little compartment in the back of a Black Maria, with nothing for company but the groans of unseen fellow sufferers, each crouching in a dark and airless room. And then someone would vomit, she said, and it had already been so difficult to breathe. No one knew where the Black Maria was going, whether to another transit prison or to a pit in the forest. He clasped her in his arms and his mouth trembled; he longed to scream. Now he intended to make his symphony scream, because it may be true, even though Nina wouldn’t believe it (let it be true!), that through music one can denounce evil and thereby, so to speak, accomplish something; naturally many people will disagree with me on this point, but the Party’s with me. And so he’d compel brass to howl defiance, woodwinds to sob in despair. Why not? Nothing couldn’t be turned into music! For instance, the sirens of the Stuka divebombers illustrated the concept of portamento, which, as we know, is the glide from one note to another on a woodwind . . . Late at night came the high-pitched insect-songs of approaching bombers, then antiaircraft guns roaring until the apartment trembled, and finally the bombs themselves whistling and exploding, the sounds of breaking glass, the screams, oh, God, Galya and Maxim screaming in Nina’s arms.

  But now Nina was on civil defense duty. His mother was taking care of the children. He wrote seven or eight arrangements for frontline concerts . . .

  25

  He volunteered for the People’s Militia. When Nina heard, she screamed.

  26

  Gazing in bemusement upon those round spectacles, that pale, schoolboy face encircled by dark hair, the tiny, slightly effeminate mouth, our Party activists understood quite well that if they sent him to the front, he’d be dead in a week. Had he been anybody else, any other corpse, they wouldn’t have cared. But even then there was talk of his Seventh Symphony. Capitalist intellectuals liked him. We needed the capitalists now. We needed them to open up the second front.

  Don’t waste time, they said to him. What is it that you want?

  I, I, well, only by fighting can we save humanity from destruction . . .

  Look at him! He even believed it!

  Just as so many “politicals” sentenced under Article 58 were now being let out of Arctic prison camps in order to fight German Fascism, so Shostakovich found his previous artistic mistakes glossed over. They politely told him: You will be called to the front when you’re required.

  Naturally he had to utter a speech expressing gratitude for the forgiveness of his myriad errors. Indeed he did, cocking his head with a curiously mechanical motion. (An unholy light over the Gostinyy Dvor resolved into new corpses and a wall of smoke.) No formalism ever again, he promised. He assured everyone: There can be no music without ideology, comrades! Music is no longer an end in itself, but, how should I say, a vital weapon in the struggle. And I myself, having overcome my, you know, anti-people tendencies . . .

  Having convinced himself that these words were but the tongue-tip’s articulation of lung-pressure in a wind instrument (fluttertongue, they call it), he gave his performance, allegro, and afterward tried to forget about it. Nina was kind or tired enough not to ask him anything. They weren’t at all hard on him. They had far more important things to do than crush a certain D. D. Shostakovich—

  They called him. At first he dug antitank ditches, just as Heidegger would soon be doing in Germany. He was in the Conservatory shovel-brigade. Sometimes he worked in the same trench as the director of the Hermitage. Strung on wires like decapitated heads, the loudspeakers shouted out every clause of the Stalin Constitution. If Gogol were only alive to satirize that! Then the experience would certainly be more, you know. I’m not very heartened. In fact, all this is really, oh, well. Watching his fellow musicians roll up the sleeves and trousers of their suits (the only working clothes they had), then commence with great sweat and impracticality to move dirt, he thought to himself: If they hadn’t shot Tukhachevsky, this would have been done earlier, not to mention more, so to speak, professionally. We ourselves are not professionals. This is absurd.—Trying sincerely (he really did want to do something), he dug as frantically as the others, his wide grey face locked up in smiles. Finally the Party assigned him to a rooftop fire brigade . . .

  A portrait by Sovfoto displays him on the Conservatory roof, dressed in the pale slicker of a fire fighter, his hands mittened in the same shiny material, a double-belted sash around his waist, a shoulder-strap emerging from beneath his collar. Beneath the pale and shiny hat his delicate face half-gazes at us through the round spectacles. The roof has a strangely confused appearance, like the set of a surrealistic ballet. From the roof of the Conservatory he surveys the domes of Saint Nicholas, which were once pale and rare in their gildedness, and are now grey like every muddy day. By then our Alpinists had also ascended the Admiralty Tower and camouflaged it with grey paint. He’d asked Nina where she thought they’d stop. Would they grey down our piano keys next? It certainly seems as if they’re getting, you know, carried away. And here comes another German shell; oh, me, oh, my, they’re playing their études . . .

  Between air raids he sat working on his score. On other roofs he could see the antiaircraft guns vertical like contrebassoons. Leningrad’s streets were now mostly as empty as the music paper on which his notes, conjoining into chords or beats, resembled insects scuttering over the wire. Sometimes these dying bugs possessed but one leg to which a head, a thorax and an abdomen yet clung; sometimes blank stretches of wire emblematized perfect lethality; often he made evil, manyheaded bugs with bristling legs (poco animato). His few friends not yet rendered hostile or absent congratulated him on the important work with which he’d been entrusted. Lowering his head, he replied with his parody of a smile: I, I, I want to write about our time.—Their praise only agitated him all the more, because he’d kept finding out that he was mistaken about people; he’d thought that this friend or that mistress could be trusted, only to learn that nobody was good; he couldn’t rely on anyone except perhaps for Glikman, Sollertinsky, who was far away and who’d soon die in an accident), Lebedinsky, Elena Konstantinovskaya, who liked to be called Lyalya and whom it was best not to see anymore, because . . .

  One day, three well-fed NKVD men in tall shiny boots came to his rooftop to visit. That was fine; he had nothing to do right then but gaze through borrowed field glasses at the approaching bombers. In the streets below he could see people preparing pillboxes in the manholes and corner buildings. It was time for the daily scherzo; the loudspeakers, which were our final defense within the walls of concrete and steel, began to shout out orders to take cover. But the men in raspberry-colored boots didn’t seem at all anxious, for which he admired them. They questioned him about this prospective symphony of his. Where did he keep the score? He told them that it remained in his head, if one didn’t count these scribblings in his pocket, and they threatened him with punishment, at which he almost laughed; they were so, so, well. To be sure, he could increase the tempo of his . . . And now below them the round-faced factory girls with handkerchiefs tied around their heads were running past Lenin’s statue, which they really should have done ninety seconds ago, and the antiaircraft guns began to fire, and one of our boxy-angled tanks, which had been proudly lettered DEATH TO THE GERMAN INVADERS, attempted to upraise its guns in a Hitler salute, but just then the planes were overhead, bombs whistled down, and that tank exploded. Brown smoke! How should I represent that musically? That’s what these bastards want. I’ll just write them a happy, you know, crossword puzzle.—They didn’t act afraid, so neither did he. The planes flew away; from the direction they turned he couldn’t tell if they were going back to Siverskaya or Gatchina, which now were properties of Hitler the Liberator; he would have made small talk about that to the NKVD men, but it never did one any good to make conversation with them and anyhow they started threatening him again, or at least two of them did, and probably th
ey weren’t even threatening, just trying to milk more music out of him in their professional way; meanwhile the third leaned over the roof-edge and spat. People were coming out of their holes now. How many dead? Usually he tried to count, but right now he was, well, distracted. Even when they reminded him that he was a former enemy of the people, he didn’t care, at least not then; every night he faced the same nightmare—a long line of helmeted Germans crawled toward him through a slit they’d made in the earth—so how could he fear these idiots? (But that night he told Nina that he’d been visited, and she trembled.) They “invited” him to play for them downstairs on one of the Conservatory pianos, the implication being that if he hadn’t composed his quota of chords, he could expect the front line, prison or the nearest wall. Well, well; even in his student days he’d never failed an impromptu examination, so to hell with them. They went downstairs, past the broken window which looked out on a half-destroyed wall where a poster said: DEATH TO THE CHILD-KILLERS! They made him go first. Why not? He knew these stairs better than they. Now which piano should he . . . ? Not that one; that was the one on which he’d played Opus 40 for Elena. He’d rather . . . They lit their cigarettes and sat there yawning while he played the first five hundred measures of his Seventh Symphony. Interrupting him, they demanded to know: Was there any residual formalism in it?