But at the same time he detected this feeling and expertly reduced it to its component metals, in order to trim it into artful strips and weld it onto the most strategic chord-walls of Opus 110, he couldn’t feel it. It possessed no reality.
Good Communists wrote him letters saying that he ought to be exterminated. Well, weren’t they correct? Wasn’t he a formalist, an American lapdog, a Vlasovite? They mentioned his thick black glasses; they categorized him as a bourgeois decadent aesthete, a Zionist apologist.—He winked at Nina like a sad old crow when he heard this last, and then he whispered in her ear: That makes me, so to speak, proud. Because, you see, do you know what Comrade Hitler said? Conscience is a Jewish creation.—And Nina jerked away from him as if she’d been burned. His suicidal cynicism appalled her.
Comrade Khrennikov had long since labeled him “alien to the Soviet people.” They destroyed his recordings and scores wherever they could…
In that same year, just when Comrade Stalin began sealing off Berlin against the capitalists,41 Shostakovich finished his cycle From Jewish Poetry, which, of course, given that second word, could never be publicly performed so long as Comrade Stalin was alive, and maybe not afterward, either. When his friends expressed determination to find a venue, he said: Why waste our efforts? This is our life…
His besieged hopes, like semi-skeletonized buildings glimpsed through the smoke of burning tanks, secreted themselves deeper and deeper behind his tics and his meaningless murmured assents to everything.
Activists said to him: Dmitri Dmitriyevich, we thought you’d learned your lesson in 1936, when we exposed the errors of “Ledi Makbet.”
Yes, yes, exactly.
But we’d hoped you’d taken your punishment to heart! Certainly in your Seventh Symphony you placed your art in the service of the people.
Thank you, thank you—
It wasn’t meant as a compliment. Frankly, you’re not living up to your own former ideals.
I appreciate your valuable critical observations, he said to them humbly, comforted only by the thought of Nina’s pillow-choked laughter tonight when he whispered all this mummery to her. Oh, he was a clown, wasn’t he? They could never breach his defenses!
Do you understand the sanctions you face?
Naturally, comrades, and I’m sure those sanctions will, mmm, to speak, inspire me to, to (Ninusha will love this!) future creative work and provide, er, insights—
Dmitri Dmitriyevich, you’re in grave danger of becoming an enemy of the people again!
I appreciate the warning, comrades. But don’t worry about me; please don’t worry. Rather than take a step backward I shall take a step, so to speak (Ninotchka will die laughing; actually Ninotchka will be terrified) forward—
Actually he didn’t care anymore; he almost wanted them to shoot him, as long as Nina and the children wouldn’t be harmed. Galina Ustvolskaya, well, she wasn’t as close to him as Elena had been, and… Although her compositions were very… Do you remember Dziga Vertov’s heart of machines sequence in “Stride, Soviet”? That must have been in 1926, because it was right before my Second, you know, Symphony. A fine filmmaker, really, although he was also very, well, like Roman Lazarevich, he was too much the true believer. I wonder if Vertov’s still alive. I suppose he’s disappeared. Roman Lazarevich would know, but I don’t dare ask him. I want a heart of machines for Opus 110. It’ll be a machine for, I don’t know, let’s say for pulverizing human bones; Roman Lazarevich filmed that; I remember that for some reason I was in the Kino Palace with Ninusha, who cried—very unlike her, if I may say so. Give me eight grams! Or is it nine? Then they can pulverize my… He’d never felt that way before! When would he need that underwear in the suitcase? Back in ’37 they liked to leave a disgraced man at liberty for weeks or months, to wear him out with worrying until the Black Maria came. Now life was more confusing, comrades, LIFE HAS BECOME MORE JOYFUL.
But, Mitya, wailed his wife, they’re reaching out their hands to you! Please join them! I’ve never begged anything of you before—
Oh, me, oh, my! But a hand can also, you know, grab you!
There he was, almost rigid in the chair, anchored by his pear-shaped flesh, his white fingers outspread on the piano while G. A. Ilizarova stared worshipfully at him, her dark hair tucked back around her pale face like a helmet of chastity.—Dmitri Dmitriyevich, don’t ever join the Party! she whispered. We’re so proud of you! Keep fighting!
What if someone were listening? Quickly (but winking at Ilizarova) he began praising the ever brilliant victories of our Soviet people.
At this very same moment, his “Song of the Forests” (Opus 81), which celebrated Soviet labor (and incidentally praised Comrade Stalin), resounded in almost every factory of the USSR. Ninusha loved it, she actually loved it! That was the worst. He could hardly… Whereas “Lady Macbeth,” which he’d dedicated to her, well, the point is that Ninusha now got her hair waved and smiled like a chiseled image above her starched white collar, seated compactly in the velvet padded box beside her husband, who might be arrested this very instant and who’d just won the Stalin Prize: ten thousand rubles! Poor woman, didn’t she deserve her moment of fame?
Opus 81 was, from an artistic point of view, the opposite of conspicuous. Don’t you remember how Saint Isaac’s Cathedral used to be visible all the way from Finland, thanks to its golden dome? That was why we’d had to grey it down during the Nine Hundred Days—a very dark grey, as he remembered, which made the victory garden of cabbages all the greener. Opus 81 was good music greyed down for the sake of survival—greyed down to gaudy gold. And Nina didn’t even care. But what was he saying? Nina loved him; she wanted him to succeed and thrive; as for the ten thousand rubles, she knew how to get through those; it’s only a question of time and manpower. Now he could go out, get drunk and, you know. He’d also like to send some money to Elena Konstantinovskaya, who Glikman said had been impoverished ever since she divorced Roman Lazarevich. This Professor Vigodsky didn’t earn much, and they had a daughter now. Elena had a child! Imagine that! How time, you know, flies. He only hoped that she never heard “Song of the Forests.” Oh, me! How could she not hear? And I used to tell her that I’d never… Well, we were young. But it’s really, I mean I’m not too thrilled about this.
After the premiere in Leningrad, he rushed to his hotel room, accompanied by his pupil-mistress Galina Ustvolskaya, and hid his head beneath a pillow. Then he began weeping wretchedly with shame and self-disgust.
Ustvolskaya stood at the side of the bed. She knew him so well. Trying to suppress the loathing which rose up between her ribs like nausea, she said: You’re being unfair to yourself. So what if you have to throw them a bone once in awhile? Don’t forget your genius. You’ve accomplished so very very many of your dreams…
Thank you; thank you. But how can you love me now?
She hesitated.
41
As the