Nina had urged him not to undertake any new friendships, especially with officials, but he already knew that. In her short skirt and rakish hat, she’d looked quite glamorous at his side in Prague. (Comrade Alexandrov’s assessment: A young, pretty blonde woman with gentle brown eyes and a good figure.) When he thought about Nina, he experienced his guilt and compassion at a distance, as why shouldn’t he, because otherwise they couldn’t, you know. When he got sick or sad or, or, that was when he knew that Elena would have been the one. Elena, you’re so lucky you didn’t marry me. Nina slammed down another bowl of her excellent mushroom soup in front of him; he wondered where she’d found the… Maxim was quarreling with Galisha, who said… He wondered if they’d ever have another vacation together. It was impossible to predict who’d turn criminal next. That knocking in a 5/4 theme should have come back in ’36, and his underwear was still packed! That was why he couldn’t stop drinking. It was all part of the, the, you know. Anyhow, he had to; otherwise his colleagues would be, why say it? Apparatchiks, propagandists, chauvinists, functionaries and drones clinked glasses with him; and two bullies of the secret police, languidly unzipping their lambskin-lined jackets, strolled up to the frightened composer and kissed him on both cheeks. The taller one shouted out: Dmitri Dmitriyevich, you’re as Russian as red gold!—Perhaps this was meant to warn him away from straying any farther into the illicit darkness of his new project, the cycle entitled From Jewish Poetry.
What drew Shostakovich to Jewish harmonies? The simplest answer, and the truest, might be their sadness. Leave this aside for the moment. Although I cannot forbear to discern insectoid shapes in musical notation, within a score there dwell many human forms. A treble clef, for example, resembles a Muscovite or Leningrader in a bulky hooded parka. A bass clef bends as simply and painfully as a silhouetted widow in Leningrad drawing water from the whiteness of a frozen canal. I myself can’t explain why this should be so, unless those figures somehow indicate or represent an underlying content, perhaps the Infinite Cause of Causes. Why not? After all, Kabbalists believe that the very letters of the alphabet are emanations of God; and in our Soviet Union we accept the Marxist conception that art, and indeed all culture, comprises a mere superstructure founded on economic realities. What was the content of D. D. Shostakovich? Wherein did his meaning lie? He struggled rhythmically for his freedom, but what would he do with it if he ever got it? Or was there, as the new Existentialist movement implied, no aspect to freedom excepting the struggle itself?
One night, not long after the ruling circles of the reactionary powers set up a separate “West German” state, he had a very strange dream filled with both ominousness and promise. He dreamed that he was once again a pale young student who haunted the halls of the Leningrad Conservatory like his own rapturous ghost. This domain had now become the fabled world within every piano’s black keys, the reverberating refuge into which since childhood his soul had always been able to withdraw. Outside, dark boy-figures in wool caps bowed their faces against the blinding snow they stood on; the dreamer understood that this whiteness was the ostensible world, where his body, his honors and his persecutors dwelled. Within, he was safe. The piquant vibrations of chromaticism which infused those corridors nourished him as if he were still a baby with his head on his mother’s breast, listening to the beating of her heart. Or imagine, if you wish, that these hovering chords resembled dust-motes gilded by a divine tracer-bullet of sunlight, unearthly and untouchable forever. But suddenly it was as if the dust began to whirl about in menacing spirals; the harmonies suffered interruption and distortion, as if someone had clapped a hand upon an ululating mouth for an interval, then released the pent-up sound in a rising while, stopped it again, then freed it, the mufflings of the sound devouring ever longer beats until at last that selfsame choking silence which exists within each note of Opus 110 had conquered the obscurity forever. And in the tunnel, approaching him with a dragging sort of cadence symptomatic of his life’s diminished intervals, he now spied a kindred wraith, a tall, bearlike apparition with the beard and sidelocks of a Hasidic Jew. Somehow he knew that this individual’s name was Comrade Luria, and that Comrade Luria was angry with him.
Because you betrayed all of us with that facile Seventh Symphony of yours, which wears its own meaning on its chest like an idiotic medal…
Well, well, well, then I must beg you to forgive me, replied Shostakovich, almost asphyxiated by dreamy dread. You see, I wanted to inspire people, and—well, I mean to say I thought I could make myself useful—
Useful? said Comrade Luria in a rage. You know all too well that utility’s the merest pimp for whom true art gets prostituted! Moreover…
He took a step closer. Shostakovich trembled.
Moreover, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, it’s high time we talk about form.
Another step. Now Shostakovich was touched by the odor of burned hair.
I’m sure you’ve noticed, continued Comrade Luria, how much aestheticians like to prate about the impotence of form without content, or content without form. But in music, perfect form and content together can remain as stillborn as a law without the seal of Heaven on it. There has to be emotion…
Excuse me, excuse me; but isn’t emotion the same as, er, content in this case? Naturally I understand that it’s not equivalent to form, no matter what our socialist realists preach. For instance, in the right hands an allegro in a major key can convey anything, not just happiness—
Exactly, said Comrade Luria, taking another step. You’ve proved that yourself in “Lady Macbeth.”
Oh, well, thank you for that, yes, thank you. But, if I may ask, what is musical content if not the feeling of the music?
Comrade Luria smiled, took three more rapid steps, outstretched an arm as if in benediction, and touched him.
That touch! It was like entering a darkened room and suddenly getting assaulted by soft, silent, hideous moths whose scales flaked off as they brushed in their dozens across nose, forehead, cheek and eyes, dryly flapping and dying, blindly disintegrating, polluting, attacking, asphyxiating. He reeled. He choked on dust which might have been smoke from all the millions and millions of burned Jews.
Comrade Luria was a charred skeleton. Comrade Luria knowingly said: After somebody’s been cremated (no matter whether he was living or dead), his form’s his image in your memory. His feeling, his emotional value if you will, is nothing more or less than the feeling you have when you remember him. So what’s his content?
I don’t know.
Is it a handful of ash? demanded Comrade Luria, breathing in Shostakovich’s face that terrible breath which stank of roasted flesh.
No, no—
What’s your content?
I… I have no content; I’m empty.
Then say so in your music.
Later, in the course of his Jewish researches, he learned that Isaac Luria had been an eminent Kabbalist.
I’m empty! he crowed to Glikman and Lebedinsky. I have no, how should I say, no content. If I hummed a few bars of “Suleiko” I’d achieve my dream, because—