Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  It’s almost finished, he told his wife.

  Then you’ll have accomplished a great thing. And you’ll tell me everything you’ve been thinking, or at least your music will tell me. You have so much to tell me and you never say anything.

  But it’s the war, Ninochka, just the war. And Maxim never lets go of you—

  I know, darling. After the war we’ll be freer—

  Don’t create illusions.

  Leaning out the window, he heard two drunken Red Army men bellowing Blanter’s song “In the Frontline Forest.”

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  At the beginning of December, the defenders of Moscow regained the offensive and began to drive the enemy back; but the siege of Leningrad went on and on. Thirty degrees of frost was as warm as it got there; so he heard. He tried not to, to, you know. In his heart he could see the Philharmonic’s raspberry, gilt and white. That was where his symphony must be performed, for his sake and he hoped for theirs. Screaming patriotic slogans, wounded Red Army men crouched in their spider-holes, hoping to kill just one more German Fascist. He wrote that into the third movement, beneath the floor, so to speak, where his chords took snipers’ aim and fired before the ear knew they were even there. Cossacks with upcurved sabers threw themselves at bullet-rain. Homes became stage-sets more avant-garde than the long-suppressed theatrical productions of Meyerhold and Shostakovich, walls and bodies getting slashed away from bedrooms in which every knickknack remained in place; women and children hunkered there, waiting for the iron frost to fall on them. (Their men were at the front.) Bundled-up women belly-crawled through the snow between frozen tramcars, hoping to find a frozen rat or a scrap of oilcake which would give them the strength to rise. Shostakovich had nothing to give them except his symphony, whose fourth movement glittered as brilliantly as the nickel-plated door handles of the late Marshal Tukhachevsky’s automobile.

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  The last note of the Seventh Symphony was written on 29 December 1941, in tired, crowded Kuibyshev. On the radio, Comrade Stalin said slowly: Death to the German Fascist invaders. Death, death, death. And Shostakovich arose from the music bench. A number of his well-wishers, the same who wondered why he hadn’t yet hung Comrade Stalin’s portrait above the piano, advised various mutually contradictory alterations to the finale, all of which he promised to insert in the Eighth Symphony. Nina had to run to the toilet to conceal her laughter; he heard the water come on. Again they urged him to join the Party, because doing so would help the Seventh to be more widely understood. And Comrade Alexandrov said . . . He agreed to take that under advisement. Maybe after he’d achieved a better comprehension of, of, you know, Leninism . . . He was a bigshot again; he could stall them forever! Anyhow, they owned a more important triumph to report: The bread ration in Leningrad had just been doubled.

  On 5 March 1942 the first performance was broadcast by radio. Although the concert took place in Kuibyshev, the announcer followed orders and pretended to be at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. (Other sources claim that this first performance took place in Novosibirsk.) We see Shostakovich cross-legged and nervous in the sixth row, with his arms tightly folded in, his suit wrapped tight around him, his dark necktie almost hidden. Nothing but reflections can be seen within the lenses of his round spectacles. The music stands of the orchestra appear as dazzling squares of blankness in this photograph; they might as well be bomb-flashes. At home, number 2a Vilonov-sky Street, Nina sits with the children and the neighbors, listening in utter silence. She knows that Glikman and the other members of the Leningrad Conservatory are listening in Tashkent. She supposes that Elena Konstantinovskaya is listening, too. Now here comes the Rat Theme; at the fifth iteration she hears Panzer IIIs surging up riverbanks. Strange to say, on most days, and even most nights, she bears the other woman no ill will. Didn’t she make Mitya happy, and even inspire his music?

  Nina knows her husband better than Elena ever could. She knows his selfishness, his ugly spitefulness, his narcissism. Elena only knows his penis. She may believe she knows his genius, but no one does, not even Mitya himself; he doesn’t even know what makes him happy! He’s not very self-aware, actually. (Now he lights up another “Kazbek” cigarette.) For instance, when he used to come home with Elena’s perfume all over him, he had no clue that she noticed anything. And when Nina herself steps out, he doesn’t catch a thing! Once he wore a purple lovebite on the side of his neck; for days he kept scratching at it. Mitya, you idiot child, if only I could keep you safe . . . In short, he needs her far more than he knows, and that’s why she’s ready for anything. Of course Mitya—for this would be the duty of everyone to society, for the sake of art—disregarding all personal feeling. Then there are the children to consider.

  Akhmatova is also tuned in; she’s sure of it. Akhmatova’s sweet on Mitya. Well, what woman wouldn’t be? And Nina’s got him, lucky Nina! His grip on her life is clammy. Maybe his soccer player pals from the Dynamos have tuned in, too, if any are still alive. And of course, who knows what Comrade Stalin hears? Two violinists, seen in profile, grip the bows of their instruments determinedly, pointing them outward like bayonets. It’s a grey and dreary picture.

  In Leningrad, the poetess Olga Berggolts, who in due time would find herself reciting Stalin odes to her fellow prisoners, proclaimed of Shostakovich: This man is stronger than Hitler!—Stalin himself is said to have commented that the Seventh was of as great striking power as a squadron of bombers. Pravda called it the creation of the conscience of the Russian people. Shostakovich’s fame was as blinding as the snowdrifts iced over against Leningrad walls. (I seem to see his whitish, half-boyish face blazing awfully close to pretty B. Dulova’s, both of them rapt in their concert seats in 1942.) Toscanini conducted the Seventh in Radio City, New York. The director of the Boston Symphony proclaimed: Never has there been a composer since Beethoven with such tremendous appeal to the masses. The émigré Seroff, who seems never to have met him, rushed out a biography, which begins with this justification: Today the “average” American can not only pronounce that name but even spell it. Bartók parodied the Seventh with bitter disgust—a compliment of sorts. The British Dictionary of Musical Themes quoted no less than eleven of its motifs. The bourgeois critic Layton denounced the Rat Theme, insisting that this naive stroke of pictorialism reduces the Seventh to the impotence of topical art. In the postwar era, other intellectuals who’d never been compelled to pitch their tents in necessity’s winds would soon disdain the Seventh Symphony more loudly, hearing in it a musical battleground occupied by two utterly irreconcilable antagonists: Shostakovich’s desire to express reality, and his need to please his masters. Reader, which would you choose?

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  Although D. D. Shostakovich was neither a Jew nor a Pole, Comrade Stalin himself has stated that the very concept of nationality is but a smokescreen used by the capitalists to prevent us from seeing class differences. As for the Party’s dictum that art must be national in form, socialist in content, that’s a mere transition scheme to wean the people gently from their hidebound categories. Therefore, I make no apologies for ending this fable with an extract from the sixteenth-century musings of a Warsaw Kabbalist named Moses Cordovero. In his Tomer Devorah, commonly translated as The Palm Tree of Deborah, it is written: God does not behave as a human being behaves. If one person angers another, even after they are reconciled the latter cannot bring himself to love the one who offended him as he loved him before. Yet if you sin and then return to God, your status is higher. As the saying goes, “Those who return to God occupy a place where even the completely righteous cannot stand.” And so it came to pass that on 11 April 1942, Shostakovich received the Stalin Prize, First Class.

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  At seven-o’-clock in the evening of 9 August 1942—the day that we lost the battle of Maikop—the Seventh Symphony was performed in Leningrad. How should I tell that tale? Adoring Glikman has left us a full account of his ten-day train journey from Tashkent to Kuibyshev, subsisting all the way on twenty ins
ect-ridden meat pies; apparently there was no easier way for the refugees from the Leningrad Conservatory to obtain a copy of the score than to send him personally. Shostakovich met him at the station and then they walked home because the trams were infested with typhus. To Glikman, it was all, as usual, perfect, right down to the decent-sized divan on which I slept very comfortably for a month . . . I was happy just to be sitting near him and to be able to shoot covert glances at his handsome, animated face. Several days later, his hero played the Seventh on the piano, just for him, then said: You know, Isaak Davidovich, to be sure, on the whole, I, I’m happy with this symphony, but . . .—Glikman gazed at him in astonishment. Clearing his throat, the host refilled both glasses and murmured (Nina and the children had already withdrawn behind their curtain for the night): I believe that Elena Konstantinovskaya has been, you know, evacuated to Tashkent. Perhaps you could greet her for me. Sometimes her, um, friends call her Lyalya. Perhaps you also—no, forgive me, forgive me; that would have been personal. But do send her my respects, you understand. Just my . . . Actually, on second thought, it might be better not to. You’re very . . . But do send everyone my best wishes, and express my, um, apologies for the fact that this symphony isn’t more, you know, optimistic . . .—By the middle of May, the score was safely in Tashkent. (That was when Shostakovich was finally beginning to hear which of his colleagues in Leningrad had died.) In June, while the German Fascists launched Operation Blau (Kharkov had already fallen), our countervailing musicians learned their parts.

  They arrived in Leningrad just as the first assault on Stalingrad began. In fact, the news could hardly have been worse. During rehearsals the audience-seats had been empty like rows of tombstones, because who could possibly be excused from digging antitank ditches? Secondary musicians were now brought back from the front, and the score (hand-copied by Glikman, runs the legend) flown in by an Li-2 airplane from Vnukovo Airport. High-ranking Party members began to appear, in obedience to the will of Comrade Stalin. Radio broadcasters ran their cables between the bas-reliefed pillars. This was by no means our first such spectacle. To celebrate the anniversary of the October Revolution we’d held a military parade in Moscow in the darkest moments of that city’s siege. Such spectacles educated the world, said Comrade Stalin, who as always proved to be correct; even the Americans were impressed. Why not repeat the lesson in Leningrad? Still and all, how strange it was that our slender, treacherously brilliant Mitya, whose fingers never stopped trembling like jellyfish tentacles, whose wife refused to sleep with him, whose mistress had married someone else and whose outlook had been convicted of the crime of formalism, should have been thus elevated, when we’d all long since agreed that his destiny was as worn as the Conservatory’s tiled floors, that his next premiere would take place in the Lubyanka’s cellars, that his so-called “musical voice” meant no more than the echoing farting of a tuba down the corridor! And it seemed stranger still that Leningrad, that city as mysterious, subtle and narcissistic, hence as distrusted, as her own poet, Anna Akhmatova, should be allowed so much radio time! But this only confirms our faith in Comrade Stalin, whose genius can build socialism out of the most unlikely bricks. (The reactionary critic Wolfgang Dömling has remarked, apologetically in my view, that it is because of this historic aura and the immense moral stature of the work that discussions about its aesthetic value appear of secondary significance.) Anyhow, for reasons best known to the “organs” Mitya did not attend his own performance.

  The German Fascist High Command now stripped away most of Eleventh Army from an attack upon the Caucasian oil fields and sent it north to break Leningrad. Field-Marshal von Manstein himself was coming—a sure sign that the sleepwalker in Berlin had actually started to wake up. Field-Marshal Ritter Wilhelm von Leeb had resigned seven months ago; he’d been unable to raze the city as ordered, and our counteroffensive had neutralized a hundred thousand of his men. Three years from now this old gentleman would be squatting in the Mannheim prison yard, tracing in the dirt each bygone trench and disposition to prove to his fellow Field-Marshals, Vlasovites and-men that in 1941 he could have rolled into Leningrad with ease, had it not been for Hitler’s dilettantish meddling. That might have been true. Anyhow, he’d been replaced first by Field-Marshal Busch, then by Colonel-General von Küchler, neither of whom was in von Manstein’s class, although the latter seemed to be a fair enough conductor, beating out many a military tattoo upon the half-broken city, which nonetheless stood firm. As our new slogan went: Leningrad is not afraid of death; death is afraid of Leningrad! All the more reason for us to shake Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony in their faces!

  Artillery pieces on loan from Moscow (oriented at forty-five-degree angles like bassoons) would hold the Fascists in check for the duration, so that they couldn’t destroy the Great Philharmonic Hall. This proved to be a useful precaution, because General Friedrich Ferch, Chief of Staff of Eighteenth German Army, actually ordered a cannonade when he found his men listening on the radio; the cannonade failed, thanks to us. I’ve read that General Ferch also listened to the radio, sitting quite still as if he were awaiting some announcement. Von Küchler for his part grew very melancholy on that day, and the remainder of his war, not to mention his life, would not be happy, either. And so the Fascists hunched down in their trenches beneath the golden grass, with tiny sun-glitters adorning their dark helmets as they watched the sky blacken with smoke from the Soviet tanks they’d killed. Their mortars fell silent; they were low on ammunition.

  And it came out of Leningrad, spiraling out and out, our transmitters artificially increasing its inductance to decrease the attenuation, transforming it into pure electricity so that it might as well have been a single human voice (for instance, Comrade Stalin’s) whose harmonic components had been entirely converted to analogue signals, dominating over all enemy cross-talk by thirty-five decibels or more! The Great Hall Philharmonic, that dull yellow, not particularly ornate building, with its white-on-yellow rococo decorations sparse and faded, this was now the brain of our national telephone; and Shostakovich had braided the sub-waves of his immense signal so as to most beautifully and loudly carry the commands of the automatic central office in a rhythm as reassuringly steady as Red Army men with up-pointed rifles filing past our trapezoidal shelter for the Bronze Horseman. The first movement, which is rather idyllic and slight until the Rat Theme, with here and there a reverie which recalls for me Novgorod’s ancient towers silhouetted against the evening sky, reminded the German Fascists of their own landscapes, since after all it was meant to speak to them, its softness being akin to the silence on the telephone after it has rung late at night—Elena, is it you?—No, that pealing shrillness within the telephone’s black face means that the secret police are verifying one’s presence preparatory to making an arrest. It’s already too late.

  Shostakovich sat in Kuibyshev listening to the broadcast. Nina was holding his hand. His silent tears were heavier than bullets. On the floor, their children played very, very quietly. In his heart he felt a crushing dissonance, or as I should say an acciaccatura.

  The announcer crooned: Listen, comrades . . .

  Many wept. Leningrad was transformed into gold.

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  The grim, stern fanfares of the fourth movement (which is called “Victory”) gave way first to a requiem, then bits of sunshine flickered through the clouds, like earth beginning to appear beneath melting snow. It faded back into the Easter theme of loss and resurrection, returning full-fledged in strings; then, as so often happens with Shostakovich, it greyed and dulled back to the beginning major theme, again brightened and dulled until the attacca into the finale.

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  On 23.8.42, Hitler the Liberator sent out new orders from Headquarters Werewolf: STAGE 1, MAKE A JUNCTION WITH THE FINNS. STAGE 2, OCCUPY LENINGRAD AND RAZE IT TO THE GROUND. But on the morning of 2 January 1943, our Red Army launched Operation Iskra. Six days later the Nazi blockade had been penetrated five miles to the southeast of Petrokrep
ost. On 27 January the siege was lifted, the Nine Hundred Days ended. Now that city which Dostoyevsky likens to a consumptive girl blushing into beauty briefly and inexplicably was free again, free to devour herself in secret claustrophobic maelstroms of fear.

  As for the secret German military maps, they found themselves compelled to sing: Dislokation Heeresgruppe Nord nach Lage Ost Gen St d H OpAbt/IIIb. Those crisp black pen-lines superimposed on the map of the Russian landscape which in its faint grey rivers, place-names and junctions over whiteness most resembled traceries of dirt on snow on a dreary winter’s dawn, these lines could not be made to lie outright to the Führer, but the Heeresgruppe flags andpennants which once had massed together in baying chords of hunting-horn themes were now bleeding pale, black notes fading self-evidently into weary white quarter-rests which clung in frozen weariness to the music-staves within their trenches until Soviet scouts came creeping with wirecutters and Operation Iskra blared.

  On 31 January, the Fascists surrendered at Stalingrad. Even von Manstein couldn’t turn our magic back. Hitler the Liberator kept chanting: The Russians are dead! but all that summer and much of the next, his soldiers kept running away through sunflower-fields, hunched low. And then they had run entirely out of our Soviet land—those who lived. By the middle of ’44, we’d established a solid national-democratic bloc in Romania . . .