We know that Hitler had actually considered sealing off Leningrad with an electric fence. Now the whole country was sealed off, even better than before. Specters whirled through the Summer Garden in ever-narrowing spirals, but it wasn’t summer. And Shostakovich, taking his first breaths of peacetime air, found himself in the situation of the shaggy peasant in his banned opera “Lady Macbeth” who breaks into the cellar in search of wine to steal, and staggers out overcome by the stench of a murdered corpse.
In 1945 we find him writing the popular song “Burn, Burn, Burn” especially for the NKVD Ensemble. Even then he still kept a change of underwear and an extra toothbrush in his briefcase, against the eventuality of arrest. Just for, you know, fun, he liked to imagine that they’d knock on the door in a 5/4 theme, which would be very… Nina likewise had prepared herself. When the children were sleeping he sometimes entered her bed, pressed his lips against her ear and began to whisper curses against Comrade Stalin. Her eyes opened. In a low voice she entreated: My God, what are you saying? Think of what could happen to us!
Could it have always been like this? A nineteenth-century French traveler whose prose was as purple as an NKVD agent’s identification card once declared: The Russians are not ghosts, but specters, walking solemnly beside or behind one another, neither sad nor glad, never letting a word escape their lips. Those words were written when all the six hundred and twenty-six church-bells of Petersburg still rang. Could they have been tuned? He wished he could have, you know. And now, when Petersburg was Leningrad and the noble-born girls of the Smolny Convent were dead, even silence was unsafe. Everybody had to sing hosannas. D-flat-C-D-flat was how he’d sung, ever so nastily, in the allegretto of the Eighth Symphony. At the premiere they’d seemed nervous. He’d wanted to blow them all up! He was a loyal citizen of our great Soviet land; he hummed along. Then he went to sleep in the other room.
In 1946, Stalin’s enthusiastically ruthless shadow Comrade Zhdanov (who was soon to die under peculiar circumstances) announced to the Leningrad Union of Soviet Writers: Leninism proceeds from the fact that our literature cannot be politically indifferent, cannot be “art for art’s sake.” They got quiet then; they knew what was coming. In truth, the only wonder was that it hadn’t come sooner. When the motif has already sounded, how can the opus go on without it? Folding his arms across his massive breast so that he resembled one of our KV tanks, Comrade Zhdanov forthwith demanded that there be no further deviation from the task at hand on the literary front—namely, to create art to light the way ahead with a searchlight.
Reading this directive in the pages of Pravda, Shostakovich understood that it was only a matter of time before they turned their attention back to music. It would be “Lady Macbeth” all over again.
Nina tried to lay her hand on his shoulder, but he shrugged her off in a terrified rage. What a ridiculous man he was! With a searchlight. And in the dark, when everything’s frozen, it’s not so easy to dig down under the snow and hide before the searchlight comes; I’d probably represent it by a B-flat between two C-notes, in a humming, thrumming base, since that would be very, as Elena used to say in her favorite English phrase, creepy.—Oh, dear, oh, me, what brilliant arguments they’ll muster against all of us! he muttered, cocking his head like a wind-up owl, drinking vodka until he turned pale.
Slamming the door, Nina went out to her “special friend,” the physicist A. Alikhanyan.
He lit another “Kazbek” cigarette, his hair rushing carelessly down his face as he played with his children. Galisha was getting spoiled, but he couldn’t bring himself to be firm with the girl; she’d soon enough find out how the world, you know, operated. He remembered her as a baby in Leningrad, hungrily sucking on a piece of oilcake. She used to cry and hide her head in his lap when the Fascists let off their eighty-eights. And Akhmatova had said…—How would they develop the offensive this time? They’d probably use Khrennikov to denounce him on the radio. The man loved that sort of work. He was perfectly adapted to our time, like one of those blowflies which specialize in, no need to spell it out. Why even…? But I saved Galisha from that—Maxim, too, who by the way needs to write something for the wall newspaper of his Pioneer brigade. He’s extremely… And even though Nina won’t forgive me; she says I didn’t do enough for my own family, I never stopped, well, I should have just… And all for nothing! The sincerity of that Seventh Symphony, whenever I hear it I can hardly bear it! I’m so ashamed of it now. With a, a, a searchlight, so to speak; that’s how they’ll… Even though Lebedinsky will say… Leo Oskarovich informs me that wherever Stalin’s daughter goes, she has a bodyguard, of course, and this man especially hates concerts! When she goes to the Conservatory to listen to, for instance, compositions by the former and future enemy of the people Shostakovich, this Mikhail Nikiforovich complains: Begging your pardon, my dear Svetlana Alliluyeva, now they will start sawing up boxes for firewood again. It must be the string instruments that he’s referring to, don’t you think? And then Svetlana Alliluyeva replies—what does she reply? It’s hilarious! I suppose that’s what they all think. Then Khrennikov! He knows how to do it—right in the nape of the neck, they say, so that there’s no… And here come the blowflies. Next they’ll shut me out of the cinema, where I make my money. “Zoya” just won a Stalin Prize, so they’ll regret that I wrote the music for that monstrosity. I’d better compose one more film score while I still can. Roman Lazarevich might help me, out of pity. He gets invitations to drink with Stalin’s children, so I hear. He’s quite the… If not, I could hope that Leo Oskarovich, or perhaps Simonov, to hell with Simonov.
Maxim kept drawing sailing-ships whose outlines he copied from photographs in the newspaper. The father tried to smile. He attached the best drawings to the wall.
Who was the lead actress in “Zoya”? I can almost remember her name. Was it Galina Vodyanischkaya or Galya Vodyanischkaya? That was when Roman Lazarevich affronted me. He told me to, to, actually I forget what he told me. Had I better telephone him? But he’s a good boy. Now that I’m a leper again, he’ll keep his distance. That’s what he did last time. But last time there was a woman, so to speak, between us, and therefore… But she’s still between us. Her voice always sounds so sad! If I could only pick up the telephone and, and, you know, she’d be extremely…
He was, I swear it, almost ready to divorce Nina, I mean, not next year but this year, and ask Elena Konstantinovskaya to marry him; but he had a nightmare that Maxim was struggling to run to him but Nina wouldn’t let the child go; suddenly she became a crocodile who bit off Maxim’s arm and Maxim was screaming! Who else screamed like that? My God, it was only a dream! At least it wasn’t the dream of the red spot. Sometimes one simply has to…
Without warning, his mind rang with a chord as beautiful as a flamethrower’s red river gushing into an enemy dugout! Fourteen years later, that sound, which everybody else would find terrifying, hideous, shrieked out of Opus 110. Well, but what is Opus 110 anyhow? It’s not the, the so-called climax of my life, because that would be very…