On Kerzhentsev’s instruction, Zaslavsky denounced Shostakovich’s opera The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and his ballet The Bright Stream, the former a source of pride for the composer, the latter a lesser love and pretext for self-ridicule. The denunciation of the opera was dated January 28, and appeared on page three of Pravda under the title “Sumbur vmesto muzïki,” or, as it is frequently translated, “Muddle instead of music.” The prose is imaginative, a departure from Pravda’s stultifying homogeneousness, and focused on Shostakovich’s desire to titillate the “perverted tastes of bourgeois audiences with twitching, bawling, neurasthenic music.” Little is said about the plot of Lady Macbeth or the impulse behind the chaotic “gnashing and squealing,” because the editorial was meant to frighten. The composer was indulging “abstruseness,” playing a game that “might end badly.”38
The denunciation of the ballet appeared on February 6, also on page three, under the title “Baletnaya fal’sh’” (Balletic falsehood). It targeted Lopukhov more than Shostakovich, with devastating consequences for the choreographer’s career. It was also the beginning of the end for Mutnïkh, who had appointed Lopukhov to the position of artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet. In The Bright Stream, Lopukhov had attempted to hybridize classical and amateur (folk) dances, inserting several sequences with characters from the city and characters from the farm performing the same steps in different styles. The effort was ignored in the Pravda editorial, likewise the entertaining plot—which includes a dancing harvester machine, a man dressed as a dog on a bicycle, and an entire lexicon of sight gags. Zaslavsky first focused on the art of ballet itself, declaring it an outmoded art. It featured “dolls” as opposed to dramatically convincing actors, and dolls, for all their prettiness, could not hope to represent the miracle of forced collectivization. The Stakhanovite Shostakovich was accused of laziness. He should have gone to the Krasnodar region to see for himself the achievement of the crop growers and herd tenders. And both he and Lopukhov should have ennobled the merriment in the scenario, as opposed to trivializing it. “A serious theme demands a serious attitude, conscientiousness in the execution. The rich sources of creativity in the people’s songs, dances, and games should have unfolded before the authors of the ballet, before the composer.”39
Shostakovich interpreted the censure of these works in Pravda as a grave threat to his livelihood and, through Kerzhentsev, reached out to Stalin for advice on how to mend his ways, how to engage in a personal “perestroika,” but the meeting did not happen.40 The fix was in. Shostakovich had been targeted for ideological reeducation by the Central Committee and had to find a path to rehabilitation without the benefit of an audience with the Great Gardener, the Great Leader and Teacher, the Great Everything. He wrote to Sollertinsky on February 29, 1936, “Desperately sitting at home. I’m expecting a call.”41 But the summons to Stalin’s office did not come.
He recovered, but the moment must have been dreadful. The Bolshoi dancers remembered him playing through the score of The Bright Stream, laughing like a child, the merriment in his eyes shining through the thick lenses of his glasses. Following the “newspaper inquisition,” he turned up at the theater again, looking for something in a panic. “His voice trembled, he stammered, his hands were shaking,” and he pledged to be serious, responsive, to do “everything they want me to,” no more fooling around.42 He was frightened, but he also seemed to be off ended, for himself and for Russia, hurt that his art had now to be somehow like Pravda itself—that ballet, opera, and the other arts had to read in black and white.
For Stalin, who caged Soviet artists inside his fantasies of ideological purification, “Muddle instead of music” served its purpose. “Yes, I remember the article in Pravda,” he reportedly remarked. It set the correct policy.”43 These words were transcribed by the cinema-affairs official Boris Shumyatsky, who met with Stalin at night on January 29 to record the fallout from “Muddle instead of music.” Shumyatsky affirmed Stalin’s opinion that “Shostakovich, like most composers, can write good realistic music, provided, however, that they’re led.”44 “That’s the nail,” Stalin answered, before opining at length on the subject in a virtual paraphrase of “Muddle instead of music.”
But they are not led. People toss whatever weirdness they like into the mix. And for this they are praised, glorified. But now that Pravda has clarified things our composers should begin writing clear and comprehensible music, not riddles and puzzles where the meaning of the work dies. And people need melodic skills. Some films, for example, can make you deaf. The orchestra jabbers, squeals, something whistles, something rattles—you can’t follow the visual images. Why is leftism so persistent in music? There’s only one answer. Nobody is keeping track, nobody is giving composers and conductors specific requirements for mass art. The Arts Committee should adopt the Pravda article as a program for music. Otherwise the result will be bad. The experience of film should be taken into account in this regard.45
Henceforth, Shostakovich knew, the fruits of his labors would be inspected, like produce from a collective farm, for any blemishes. But government scrutiny was as inconsistent as the policies it tried to reinforce, placing his career in a state of flux even as his value to the regime increased. The fates of his ballet The Bright Stream, his opera The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, and the less aberrant fare that followed were determined, indeed overdetermined, by bureaucrats and bureaucracies. The stock price of his scores rose and fell as the Kremlin set it, in accord with what the regime needed from its leading artists at any given moment. Shostakovich absorbed political blows, created symphonic and string-quartet masterpieces, and provided service to the regime when called upon, even joining the Communist Party in 1960. Under Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, he lived an elite but cautious life. After the damage inflicted on him in the purge era, he never composed a ballet or an opera again.
ALONGSIDE THE POSITIVE-THEN-NEGATIVE Pravda articles on The Bright Stream, there appeared excited notices of a forthcoming Bolshoi premiere of a ballet by Prokofiev, Romeo and Juliet. But it was not performed as scheduled, owing to politics; several members of the composer’s inner circle were arrested. Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet became a true tale of woe.
The ballet was to be a homecoming of sorts, meant to mark the triumphant conclusion of a multiyear effort, backed by the Central Committee, to repatriate Prokofiev after eighteen years in the United States and Europe. In 1918, Prokofiev had packed his steamer trunk and left Russia with Lunacharsky’s blessing. During his years abroad, he stayed in touch with the commissar and proved reliable in matters of cultural exchange. But the shellacking he received at the Bolshoi for Le pas d’acier, and his knowledge—from colleagues, his exiled cousins, tapped telephones—of the shift to barbarism in matters of law and order, kept the modernist superstar out of the clutches of the regime. Dull-eyed but vulpine diplomats from “Bolshevizia,” as he termed it, turned up at his Paris doorstep with requests for music about the revolution.46 But meeting young, energetic Soviet artists also evoked, within Prokofiev, nostalgia for a Russia he thought still existed. In his diary, he expressed his longing to see his small circle of Russian friends in Moscow; he missed seeing Cyrillic letters on street signs, missed the magical landscape of his spoiled childhood in Ukraine.
He hesitated to return, however, until 1935, when the Mariyinsky–Kirov Theater dangled a commission that he could not refuse for an opera or ballet on the subject of his choice. Prokofiev prided himself as a dramatist, but to bourgeois, imperialist impresarios, he seemed at once too radical and not radical enough, and he never achieved the triumph in the West that he craved. So he took the bait, half thinking that he could simply travel back and forth between Russia and France and so continue to fulfill his international concert engagements.
The regime, as represented by the Bolshoi director Mutnïkh, had other plans and scripted a bucolic summer for him in Polenovo, a Soviet artists’ retreat south of Moscow. Prokofiev settled in a cabin by the O
ka River; he swam and played volleyball and composed, a lot, in the heat of motherland-fueled inspiration. In fewer than four months, he produced an annotated piano score for a ballet “on motives” from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.47
Prokofiev chose this subject in consultation with the dramatist Piotrovsky, whom he knew from an earlier Soviet film project. They settled on Shakespeare’s tale of tragic love as their subject, and ballet as the genre. Input also came from the theater-turned-ballet director Sergey Radlov, who had mounted a street-level, vernacular version of Romeo and Juliet with young actors at his Studio Theater in Leningrad. Prokofiev had seen it and liked it, inspiring him and his team to think that it might be possible to push dance and pantomime to the background of the ballet and instead have real life in the foreground.
But the contract never materialized, the unspoken reason being Radlov’s firing from the Mariyinsky–Kirov in a nasty internal fight. Mutnïkh swooped in to acquire the ballet for the Bolshoi, allowing Piotrovsky to remain involved as scenarist, Radlov as scenarist and director. The Bolshoi director visited Prokofiev in Polenovo to see how he was getting along, and everyone involved, including the dancers who were also spending their summer at the retreat, had great hopes for it. These increased when Mutnïkh invited Prokofiev’s wife to attend the Bolshoi premiere of Shostakovich’s The Bright Stream, which did not impress her. “A cheerful show, in general,” she declared, “but I have a lot of buts and I was disenchanted with the music … listening in on the chatter around me it seemed everyone expected more from Shostakovich.” The dancing was a success only insofar as it was “pulled by the hair,” in her opinion, and compromised by the absence of the injured ballerina Marina Semyonova. Mutnïkh took her under the arm during the entr’actes, fed her tea, and said “no worries, we’ll have a big celebration when Sergey Sergeyevich’s ballet is done.”48 Two months later, when Shostakovich was denounced in Pravda, that celebration seemed all but certain, and Prokofiev deluded himself into thinking that he would be welcomed to permanent residency in the Soviet Union as a savior.
The key to success for Romeo and Juliet resided in drambalet as defined by the orientalist extravaganza The Fountain of Bakhchisarai as well as The Flames of Paris (Plamya Parizha), premiered in Leningrad in 1932 for the fifteenth anniversary of the revolution. The latter, a primitively allegorical ballet on the subject of the French Revolution, became a staple of the Soviet repertoire, traveling from Leningrad to Moscow and then throughout the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. It also received a Stalin Prize. Radlov had been involved in the original production, with music by Boris Asafyev pinched from French sources. Prokofiev had supplied the French melodies to Asafyev from Paris as a favor, and he was not impressed with the plagiarized result. “General rehearsal of The Flames of Paris in the Bolshoi with Semyonova and Chabukiani,” Prokofiev recorded in his diary. “I told Asafyev it was high time he did a proper job of composing this ballet.”49 But Asafyev had done the proper job, in the sense of surrendering his own creative urges to the diktat of Soviet aesthetics. Prokofiev’s fate, in contrast, would be one of trying but failing to sublimate his individual artistry.
Still, he recognized that Asafyev had a pair of successes on his hands. Prokofiev weighed the artistic pros and cons of The Fountain of Bakhchisarai and The Flames of Paris, took the political temperature, and, in collaboration with Piotrovsky and Radlov, came up with what he thought would be a safe plan for Romeo and Juliet. The ballet would respect Shakespeare to a point, but it would also have room for exotica—its own version of the waltz in the harem in The Fountain of Bakhchisarai. (The choreographer of that waltz, Rostislav Zakharov, was enlisted to set Romeo and Juliet.) The greater stretch, but the essential one, was to include, within the familiar tale of star-crossed love, intimations of revolution. Here the trio of scenario writers came up with the perverse but ingenious idea of shifting the focus of the plot from the struggle between the Montague and Capulet clans, with the teenage hero and heroine caught in the middle, into a broader struggle between representatives of the old and new political orders. The move away from feudal thinking and behavior would become the shift from the imperial era to the Soviet one. And the ending of the ballet would be happy, or at least bittersweet, for reasons that were pragmatic for Prokofiev—“living people can dance, the dying cannot”—but political for Piotrovsky and Radlov.50 Mid-1930s aesthetics mandated optimistic tragedies: as Soviet citizens, Romeo and Juliet could not die in so pointless and accidental a fashion as a double suicide.
The drama comes to a close before the ending itself. Friar Laurence stays Romeo’s hand by telling him that the sleeping potion that Juliet has taken to feign death is just that. As the townspeople gather to celebrate her awakening, Romeo bears Juliet from the stage. The couple takes leave of the story. Depending on the design budget, the production might have included a cloud bed for the lovers, or perhaps the happy pair would float free in the stars—an Orphic apotheosis, in essence, in which the consonant C-major music of the cosmos, if not the unstable sonorities of first love, conquers all.
Prokofiev performed the piano score for adjudication at the Bolshoi Theater, receiving criticism from the conductor Yuriy Fayer about the nettlesome musical syntax. Radlov insisted on keeping the unusual ending intact, but Prokofiev signaled a willingness to compromise, to traditionalize the ballet if it would help to get it onto the stage. In January of 1936, Shostakovich’s fateful month, Prokofiev played through the first three acts of the piano score before a group that included Mutnïkh and the litterateur Sergey Dinamov, a member of the Bolshoi’s artistic and political council. Dinamov, a Shakespeare expert, cautiously supported the happy ending. So too did one of the composers in attendance, Alexander Ostretsov, but he also felt that “the life-enhancing tone of Prokofiev’s entire piece, clearly manifest in the culmination, will not be weakened if he follows in Shakespeare’s footsteps in the denouement.”51
But the ballet was doomed. Kerzhentsev, the chairman of the newly formed Committee on Arts Affairs, initiated a cull of the Bolshoi Theater administration as part of an ideological campaign against anti-democratic, “formalist” experimentation in Soviet art. He submitted a memorandum to Stalin reporting his intention to dismiss the conductor Nikolay Golovanov from the Bolshoi Theater and reevaluate the repertoire. The memorandum listed Romeo and Juliet as a prospective production for the 1936–37 season, but preparations were suspended pending the “assessment” of the repertoire “by the theater’s new leadership.”52 Despite Prokofiev’s best efforts to calibrate Romeo and Juliet according to what had already found favor at the Bolshoi, the original version of his ballet went unperformed. It became the first painful lesson for Prokofiev that his careerist decision to relocate to the Soviet Union had been a massive mistake.
The administrative review of the Bolshoi led, on April 20, 1937, to Mutnïkh’s arrest. Three months later, on July 13, he was “deregistered,” officially removed from his posts.53 He was sentenced to death on September 15 and executed on November 11. He was forty-one.
Mutnïkh was gentle-faced, with a fetching mop of brown hair, but he embodied the militarization of culture under Stalin. He came to the directorship of the Bolshoi in 1935 from the Central House of the Red Army, currently known as the Cultural Center of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, and he had championed Romeo and Juliet. Mutnïkh was arrested at almost the same time as Leonid Lyadov, the director of the Malïy Theater next door to the Bolshoi. NKVD agents dragged Lyadov to the Lubyanka prison on suspicion of his planning to blow up the government’s loge at the Malïy Theater when Stalin or another member of the Politburo was in the audience. The Soviet newswire TASS relayed the rumor of the discovery of “several incendiary devices that were supposed to be exploded when the right time presented itself.”54 Stalin declared the story a “ludicrous fabrication” but allowed it to be spread, since the reason for the arrest was irrelevant: the NKVD was filling an arrest quota.55 Lyadov’s liquidation ended any thought of stagin
g Prokofiev’s happy-ending ballet that year, since the reigning practice was to consider everything related to an arrested cultural official contaminated, including unrealized commissions and ballets, films, operas, and plays in progress. Tainted by its association with a disappeared enemy of the people, the plot of Romeo and Juliet, which involved a potion thought to be poison, a stabbing, class conflict, and subversive historical references, could not possibly be produced in 1937, the eve of the Great Terror, and the twentieth anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution.
The scenarist Piotrovsky landed on an arrest order in July of 1937, denounced for his lack of enthusiasm for the new creative strictures. He was convicted of treason and died in prison. The Shakespeare scholar Dinamov, Prokofiev’s advocate to the Central Committee, was sentenced to death in the spring of 1939 for fraternizing with a counterrevolutionary terrorist organization.
The trauma was not confined to the arts, ballet, and the Bolshoi, of course, but affected millions of people. Supposed spies and industrial saboteurs were put to death, likewise pre-1917 landowners (kulaks), Trotskyites, and those disliked enough to be reported on by coworkers, relatives, or neighbors. To furnish their squalid rooms, agents of communal apartments stole tables and chairs, pots and pans from the flats of those who had been arrested; they also had license to stalk the coveted wives and girlfriends of the disappeared, lending petty bourgeois pathos to the communist purges. The cleansing expanded to include entire classes of people: gypsies, homosexuals, Jews, the disabled, the left-handed, and, en masse, the restive folk of the restive towns at the edge of the empire. Second- and third-tier artists suffered much more than elite talents, as Piotrovsky’s arrest confirms, but there were shocking exceptions, the most notable being the detention, torture, and murder by firing squad of the eminent theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold and the killing of his actress wife, Zinaída Raykh. She was stabbed multiple times, even through her eyes, by unidentified assailants. Her death on July 15, 1939, shocked the Moscow theater world, but was ignored by state media, as was Meyerhold’s death on February 2, 1940. The ballerina Marina Semyonova lost her second husband, a diplomat, to the terror. He perished in the Gulag.
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