The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  After years of collectivization, industrialization, and famine, the Soviet populace was feeling rebellious, and in the early thirties Stalin tried to placate his subjects by promising new comforts and freedoms. Artists were deputized to broadcast the message that “life is getting better,” as Stalin eloquently put it. To this end, artists’ lives were made better, at least in the material sense. The Union of Soviet Composers supplied composers with health plans, sanatoriums, and a cooperative building in Moscow. At an October 1932 gathering at Maxim Gorky’s Moscow mansion, Stalin mused aloud that writers should be “engineers of human souls,” and the writers debated among themselves what he meant. From the meeting emerged the concept of socialist realism, according to which Soviet artists would depict the people’s lives both realistically and heroically, as if from the standpoint of the socialist utopia to come. Established nineteenth-century forms such as the novel, the epic drama, the opera, and the symphony were deemed suitable vehicles of expression, although they required thorough renovation in line with Soviet thought. The Party theorist Nikolai Bukharin, at the Writers’ Congress of 1934, offered a more elaborate definition of socialist realism, calling for stories of “tragedies and conflicts, vacillations, defeats, the struggle of conflicting tendencies.”

  Shostakovich’s first contribution to the new phase in Soviet art was Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. The libretto, based loosely on a story by Nikolai Leskov, tells of Katerina Ismailova, a strong-willed woman in a provincial town in 1860s Russia. Variously bored and oppressed by the men in her life, she finds it convenient to dispose of them. She first kills her father-in-law, Boris, whom Shostakovich identified as a “typical master kulak,” or wealthy landowning peasant, in order to save herself from his repulsive advances. She then connives with her lover, Sergei—a “future kulak”—to kill her jealous, abusive husband, Zinovi. The last act takes place in a Siberian prison camp, to which the lovers have been consigned. When Sergei’s eyes wander to another woman, Katerina drowns herself in a river, taking her rival with her.

  What made this scenario politically timely was that in 1929 Stalin had launched a genocidal campaign of “liquidating the kulaks as a class,” whether by execution, imprisonment, or deportation. Shostakovich himself gestured toward the subtext: “In Lady Macbeth I wanted to unmask reality and to arouse a feeling of hatred for the tyrannical and humiliating atmosphere in a Russian merchant’s household.” These “petty,” “vulgar,” “cruel,” “greedy” merchants are Soviet counterparts to the hook-nosed banker Jews who appeared in Nazi cartoons of the same period. Robert Conquest estimates that three million people died as a result of the “dekulakization” program.

  Seen from one angle, then, Lady Macbeth is nearly an opera in the service of genocide. In other ways, however, it is anything but a propaganda work. The composer called it a “Tragedy-Satire,” and that ambiguity sets the tone; nothing can be taken entirely at face value. Extending Eisenstein’s notion of discord between sound and image, Shostakovich uses cartoonish musical stereotypes to undermine rather than illustrate the action onstage. The attempted rape of Katerina’s cook, Aksinya, for example, plays out against a manic galop worthy of Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies. Boris’s lust for Katerina is represented by a drunken Viennese waltz. As the opera goes on, hard-hearted grotesquerie gives way to spells of confession and lamentation. When Boris is killed in Act II, the musical reaction is at first icily unsympathetic, but after a priest offers to say a requiem for the merchant, the orchestra takes the stage with a grandiose dirge in the form of a passacaglia, rather plainly modeled on the D-minor threnody in Berg’s Wozzeck. The dramatic function of this music is obscure. Is it, unexpectedly, a statement of sympathy for the awful Boris? Does it express internal turmoil on the part of Katerina? The general grinding operation of fate? Whatever it means, it fails to advance the stated program of stirring hatred for the kulaks.

  The opera makes more sense as a fable of the madness of love, of the disorienting power of sexuality. It was written under the spell of the physicist Nina Varzar, whom Shostakovich married in 1932; the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya thought that Katerina was an exaggerated depiction of Nina’s passionate nature. But the madness may really have been Shostakovich’s own; two years later, he would fall in love with the young translator Elena Konstantinovskaya, precipitating a crisis in his marriage, and his romantic life would display tragicomic aspects ever after. The writer Galina Serebryakova recalled: “[Shostakovich] was thirsting to recreate the theme of love in a new way, a love that knew no boundaries, that was willing to perpetrate crimes inspired by the devil himself, as in Goethe’s Faust.” Katerina is too consumed by her desires to register the absolute corruption around her; instead, like Salome, she exposes the insanity of her world by embodying it to excess. In this sense, the opera becomes an altogether darker kind of monument to Stalin’s world.

  Terror

  Shostakovich was not the first Soviet composer to be censured by the state. In 1935, Gavriil Popov, a greatly gifted artist who had studied alongside Shostakovich at the Leningrad Conservatory, unveiled his First Symphony, an immensely forceful hour-long work to which Shostakovich’s subsequent symphonies owe a more than minor debt. After the premiere, a censorship board denounced Popov’s symphony as a work of “class-enemy character” and banned further performances. With Shostakovich’s support, Popov succeeded in having the ruling overturned. But the renewed assault on musical and artistic formalism in 1936 meant that the piece was taken out of circulation again. Popov began a long descent into alcoholism and mediocrity. The difference between his fate and Shostakovich’s says much about the latter’s power of endurance, his ability to preserve his musical self under potentially annihilating pressure.

  Shostakovich’s own crisis did not stem solely from Stalin’s dislike of Lady Macbeth. Certainly, the general secretary had no fun that night at the Bolshoi; at a Kremlin conference on the role of music in film, which was held one day after the publication of “Muddle Instead of Music” in Pravda, the dictator bemoaned Shostakovich’s cacophonies, his “rebuses and riddles.” But the Central Committee had probably already selected Lady Macbeth—it had been playing for two years before Stalin went to see it—as a jumping-off point for a campaign against waywardness in the arts.

  The American Communist sympathizer Joshua Kunitz, who covered Soviet affairs for New Masses magazine, later asked a Pravda editor why the composer had been targeted. “We had to begin with somebody,” the editor told Kunitz. “Shostakovich was the most famous, and a blow against him would create immediate repercussions and would make his imitators in music and elsewhere sit up and take notice. Furthermore, Shostakovich is a real artist, there is the touch of genius in him. A man like that is worth fighting for, is worth saving…We had faith in his essential wholesomeness. We knew that he could stand the shock…Shostakovich knows and everyone else knows that there is no malice in our attack. He knows that there is no desire to destroy him.”

  When the Pravda editorial appeared, Shostakovich had a curious reaction. He rang up his friend Glikman and instructed him to subscribe to a newspaper clipping service, so that he could monitor all mentions of his name. Within three weeks he had accumulated seventy-eight pages of invective, which he studied in silence. Glikman accused him of masochism, but the composer insisted that the exercise had a constructive purpose. “It has to be there, it has to be there,” he said. (Schoenberg, by the way, also kept a scrapbook of critical abuse, recording the malice of the age for posterity.) Among the items in the collection was a second broadside from Pravda, this one accusing his collective-farming ballet, The Limpid Stream, of being too simple.

  The “Shostakovich ‘Affair,’” as Kunitz called it, served mainly as the test run for a new mode of cultural control. Creative artists who displayed too much independence would be subject to vilification and reorientation, with the threat of censorship, imprisonment, or death offered as an incentive. Furthermore, when one artist was criticized, the auth
orities could observe how the others behaved. Around the time of “Muddle Instead of Music,” there was much public discussion of Stalin’s new constitution, which promised a host of personal liberties. Artists were told that they could speak freely on the subject of “formalism” and other matters. Informers for the NKVD monitored the results, and some of their reports have been published in Russia. The following excerpts show that the editorial aroused vigorous opposition, even though Shostakovich himself was not widely liked:

  ISAAC BABEL: There’s no need to make a lot of noise over know-nothings. Why, no one has taken this seriously. The People keeps silent, and, in its soul, quietly chuckles…

  l. SLAVIN: I don’t love S., and don’t know a thing about music, but I’m afraid that the blow to S. is a blow to anyone trying to work outside the template…

  P. ANTOKOLSKY (poet):…Kaverin told me that S.’s mother called Zoshchenko (I think they live near each other) and asked, despairingly, “What, now, will become of my son?” This sounds like a Jewish joke, but it isn’t funny.

  VICTOR SHKLOVSKY (man of letters):…What does it mean to say that we don’t need “petty-bourgeois innovations”? It’s very thoughtlessly written.

  A. LEZHNEV (writer): The horrible thing about any dictatorship is that the dictator does whatever his left leg tells him to do. We are like Don Quixote, always dreaming, until reality tells us otherwise. I view the incident with S. as the advent of the same “order” that burns books in Germany…

  A. GATOV (poet and translator):…I view this attack on S. as a pogrom…

  ANDREI PLATONOV (writer):…It’s clear that someone from the ranks of the strong wandered into the theater, listened for a bit, understood nothing of music, and strongly criticized…

  K. DOBRONITZKY (Party member, man of letters):…I’m not a devotee of S.’s, but he’s searching for something new…

  VS. MEYERHOLD:…S. should have been rewarded, so that he could get down to work, instead of writing whatever it falls to him to write…S. is now in very bad shape. He was called by my theater, to write new music for The Bedbug, but he said he was incapable of doing anything…

  The composer SHAPORIN:…The opinion of “one” person—this isn’t the thing to determine the course of art. S. will be driven to suicide…

  The composer MIASKOVSKY: I’m afraid that music will now be overwhelmed by wretchedness and primitivism.

  The composer KOCHYOTOV V.N.: The last straw—this article kills S.

  Most of the remarks are nonpolitical, simply protesting the imposition of official taste on the artistic sphere. But those of the literary critic Abram Lezhnev take the form of a direct swipe at Stalin. A footnote in the NKVD reports tells us that someone circled Lezhnev’s name and put two check marks next it. On account of various ideological errors, he was shot in 1938.

  Several leaders of Soviet art spoke out on Shostakovich’s behalf. Meyerhold, who, according to one account, had been sitting next to Shostakovich on the night which Stalin attended Lady Macbeth, defended Shostakovich at a lecture in March. Gorky wrote—or perhaps only drafted—a letter to Stalin that said: “All that the Pravda article provided was the opportunity for a pack of mediocrities and hacks to persecute Shostakovich in every possible way.” Stalin, in his much-quoted “Talk with the Metal Producers,” had advised the Party to treat each individual carefully, “as a gardener cultivates a favorite fruit tree.” Gorky threw those words back in Stalin’s face: “What was expressed in Pravda cannot be described as a ‘careful regard.’”

  On February 7, Platon Kerzhentsev, the chairman of the Committee for Artistic Affairs, met with Shostakovich and assured him that he would survive the crisis if he followed certain suggestions. Kerzhentsev reported back to Stalin: “To my question, ‘does he fully accept the criticisms of his works,’ [Shostakovich] said that he accepted most, but not all, of them.” Shostakovich, for his part, asked to speak to Stalin in person. He thus had to perform the familiar ritual of waiting by the phone. On February 29 he wrote to Ivan Sollertinsky: “I am living very quietly here in Moscow, sitting at home and not going anywhere. I am waiting for a phone call. I don’t have much expectation of being received, but have not entirely given up hope.”

  The phone did not ring. Performances dwindled. Shostakovich’s income dried up, just as Nina Shostakovich was bearing their first child. Shostakovich went to see Tukhachevsky, the violin-making Red Army hero, who sat down to write a letter to Stalin on his behalf, sweating profusely as he worked.

  The climate in Stalin’s domain was turning chillier by the day; the commencement of the show trials in August signaled that the campaign against formalism in the arts was widening into purges and Terror. Many close to Shostakovich or favorable to his cause were disappearing. Elena Konstantinovskaya, the translator who had caused a separation in his marriage in 1934, was arrested and briefly imprisoned in 1935. Galina Serebryakova, who had observed Shostakovich at work on Lady Macbeth, was sent into the gulags the following year, not to return for almost two decades. Shostakovich’s brother-in-law, mother-in-law, sister, and uncle were all imprisoned at around this time. Maxim Gorky died mysteriously in June 1936. Bukharin’s name was mentioned many times during the August show trial—a sign that his days were numbered. Isaac Babel, who had advised that “Muddle Instead of Music” shouldn’t be taken seriously, found in 1937 that his books could no longer be published. He had three years to live, as did Meyerhold.

  Most ominous of all was the fate of Tukhachevsky. Despite the sterling work that he had done in liquidating the anti-Bolshevik opposition, Stalin saw him as a dangerous rival—too independent, too charismatic. He was arrested in May 1937, and in the torture chamber he confessed his part in a nonexistent conspiracy to overthrow Stalin, evidence of which Hitler’s SS helped to fabricate. When the text of the confession was retrieved decades later, there were bloodstains on several pages.

  Of the artists and intellectuals who were pilloried as “enemies of the people” in the late thirties—Bukharin, Meyerhold, Mandelstam, Babel—Shostakovich was one of the few who lived to tell the tale. As other members of Tukhachevsky’s circle were rounded up, including the composer Nikolai Zhilyayev, it might have looked to Shostakovich as if people around him were being plucked away in systematic fashion. This was the psychological elegance of the Terror; although it was impersonal, even random, in its logic, it always seemed to be closing in unswervingly on any given individual.

  At the time that Pravda delivered its judgment, Shostakovich was writing his Fourth Symphony, by far the most ambitious of his symphonies to date. In this work he came to terms with the influence of Gustav Mahler, and in particular with Mahler’s conception of the symphony as a form of untrammeled psychological theater. The Mahler symphony that Shostakovich’s work most resembles is the Sixth—both in the militaristic thrust of its opening and in the drawn-out anguish of its close. In later years Shostakovich encouraged the view that the Fourth had in some way been a statement of defiance in the face of what he had undergone in the first months of 1936. “The authorities tried everything they knew to get me to repent and expiate my sin,” he told Glikman. “But I refused. I was young then, and had my physical strength. Instead of repenting, I composed my Fourth Symphony.”

  Yet the chronology doesn’t fit; Shostakovich had already written two of the symphony’s three movements when the edict against him was handed down. As the musicologist Pauline Fairclough points out, for much of its length the Fourth could be considered an energetic realization of socialist realism as articulated by Bukharin—“the struggle of conflicting tendencies.” Scored for a mammoth orchestra of up to 130 players, the symphony begins with intimations of industrial might: a phalanx of fifteen high winds move in lockstep, a squadron of eight horns bear down, an ostinato of lower winds and strings pump like a piston. The Soviet listener of 1936 might have tried to picture—if a performance had taken place—the laborers who built the Dnieper Dam, or the “shock brigaders” of collective farming, or the overach
ieving Stakhanovites.

  After the mighty opening, Bukharin’s vacillations and defeats take over. The first theme fritters away its momentum in overextended transitional passages; the second theme is a slow, pale, lurching string of notes on the bassoon, which wanders here and there, strikes an unconvincing heroic attitude, is blown into jagged fragments, then falls in with a ragtag wind-band version of the first theme. Stranger events ensue, including a madcap fugue and a screaming twelve-note chord. The second movement is a pseudo-Scherzo that supplies little comic relief and ends with a skeletal rattling of percussion. Much of the final movement is given over to a dreamlike succession of genre pieces—puppet-show music, madcap polka, hurdy-gurdy waltz, and so on—which Fairclough hears as a clandestinely nostalgic portrait of prerevolutionary Russia, although there must be characteristic Shostakovichian sarcasm here as well.

  If this were a model socialist realist work, all these conflicts would eventually be resolved in a conclusive affirmation. Toward the end of the third movement, cellos and basses play an excitedly murmuring sequence of notes (as in the finale of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony), the timpani strike up a grandiose pattern along the interval of the fourth, and utopia seems imminent. But the would-be triumph goes haywire, shattering repeatedly against a dissonant chord. A quotation underlines the sense of internal failure: as Richard Taruskin points out, the entire sequence imitates the “Gloria” of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, in which Jocasta is mordantly praised as queen of “pestilentibus Thebis” (“disease-ridden Thebes”). After the crack-up comes a long recessional in the orchestra, taking up 234 hushed, dismal bars. The final chord is marked morendo, dying away—an instruction that appears at the end of at least twenty other Shostakovich scores.