Oh, yes, oh, oh, yes, I’ve heard that on the radio. There seems to be quite a demand for it.
Or Pokrass’s ditty—you know, “The Red Army Is Most Powerful of All.”
Perhaps Dmitri Dmitriyevich should also pay more attention to the heroic epics of oppressed Slavic peoples.
We already told him that, comrade. And, to give him his due, that Seventh Symphony does, after all—
Thank you, thank you!
We’re all in favor of internationalism, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, but there’s a difference between internationalism and cosmopolitanism, if you see what I’m saying. You’re playing into the hands of the Zionists!
The Zionists! But I never—I mean, in that case what a terrible, er, error I’ve committed!
He sat there at the piano bench, smiling at them over his shoulder, and his fidgety hands trembled over the keys with the fingers dangling down, each hand like the burned half-skeleton of a warstruck bridge, until Nikolayeva finally laid her hand on him and whispered in his ear. He leapt gratefully up and found a chair in the corner of the stage.
And he keeps himself aloof from us. He won’t apply to the Party—
Succeeding at last in lighting a cigarette, Shostakovich admitted the absolute justice of all their criticisms. Then he went home with Nikolayeva.
She said to him: How are you feeling, Dmitri Dmitriyevich?
Agitato, he laughed, writhing his fingers.
When no one could see, she took his face in her hands and kissed him, affettuoso. But it wasn’t, you know.
Nearly despairing of his unteachability, they nonetheless assigned him an old tutor to come to his home and quiz him on his knowledge of the works of Comrade Stalin. The tutor was horrified to find no portrait of Comrade Stalin in his study. Shostakovich stammered and apologized, behind his back all ten fingers lashing like the tentacles of a fresh-caught cuttlefish; beneath the flurry, with a cool cruel humorousness, his defensive apparatus was already preparing sentences of insidiously mocking abnegation: To be sure, Comrade Ivanov, I must have been asleep all these years, but it’s only because I, well, you see, I knew that Comrade Stalin had worked everything out, so I thought that he, I mean, I suppose I’ve been lazy (if I could simply make it up to him and be his, his—ha, ha, ha! percussion instrument!), so now it’s time for this old fool to learn; and since everything has been analyzed for all time by Comrade Stalin’s genius, perhaps if you taught me the high points, I could, so to speak, take three steps forward instead of two steps back, because it’s all a question of time and manpower, and then once I understand the subtleties my music will doubtless attain, um, perfect melodiousness.
Glikman prepared cribs of the odious volumes, so he didn’t have to read them. The tutor was astounded at his progress. He promised to hang a portrait of Comrade Stalin just as soon as he found the right one, to hang him, I said, he whispered that night to Ninusha, chuckling so helplessly that she feared he might choke. Oh, that, that murdering bastard.
He wanted the whole cycle to be played together—everything from scherzo to sarabande—but didn’t dare to do it himself. The devoted Nikolayeva did. He dreamed that she was summoning him to her side.
In 1952, the year of Roman Karmen’s classic “Aerial Parade,” he won another Stalin Prize, category two, for his choral work “Ten Poems on Texts by Revolutionary Poets” (Opus 88). Meanwhile he finished his Fifth Quartet, wearing his heart on his musical sleeve by quoting from the Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano of his beloved Galina Ustvolskaya.
What are you dreaming about now? asked his wife.
You might better ask me what I’m hearing. I can’t get the third movement of my Seventh out of my head. Well, well, excuse me, my dear, take no notice…
It’s those pastoral passages that you’re ashamed of listening to on the sly—
How on earth did you know?
Because you have to compose them to keep the apparatchiks off your back and so you write ugly music all the time just to protest, but deep down you’d rather—
Untrue, untrue, he sighed, lighting up a “Kazbek” cigarette. I always preferred ugly music! Even “Lady Macbeth” wasn’t diatonic at all, and that was before I felt compelled to be anything in particular—
Then why do you hear that third movement now? You told me at the time that you wrote it just so the masses would—
And that’s why I can’t bear to listen to it now, don’t you see? I’m getting tired of—
Oh, I think you rather like it.
In 1953, the Jewish composer Weinberg was arrested. With almost suicidal courage, Shostakovich opened his desk, withdrew a single sheet of music-paper as thin as that with which we blacked out windows back in Leningrad, turned it over and wrote a letter directly to Comrade Beria on his colleague’s behalf. Something sealed off the tunnel between face and soul—something did, surely, like an impermeable steel cofferdam on a petroleum freighter. Because the spouse of an enemy of the people automatically became an enemy, too, Weinberg’s wife Natalya would be arrested next—at dawn, no doubt; Lebedinsky whispered to him that that was the fashion now.—I’m sure that he’ll take a “camp wife,” sobbed poor Natalya; he’d gotten her drunk, not knowing what else to do for her.—Of course not, my dear lady. You’re far too beautiful for him ever to, you know. Don’t worry, don’t worry…—And probably all this time he was on a slave ship bound for, say, Kolyma. Or had they shut down Kolyma?—Shostakovich made quiet arrangements to adopt the couple’s seven-year-old daughter Vitosha. A man in raspberry-colored boots advised him to let the matter go, and he said: Oh, me! What a, a preposterous error I’ve just committed!—at which the apparatchik understood all too well that this unmanageable Shostakovich would never alter, would never stop doing whatever he could to save Vitosha.
No wonder it was so cold in here! The paper around the windows had started to crack. I’ll have to be sure and remind dear Ninusha to glue down some new strips of Isvestiya; that hot air should keep us warm! And if not, let’s send for Rostropovich and his cello. Now they will start sawing up boxes for firewood again. What a joke—oh, me! Have I already told Mstislav Leopoldovich? Nina thought it was stupid. Nina’s ready, thank God; she’s always been brave. Let them open up with their eighty-eights!
Then, trembling with terror (he wouldn’t have felt alive without that), he began to make, so to speak, inquiries, very tactfully, of course, so that they wouldn’t, I think you understand, and Comrade Alexandrov dropped by to inform him with an evil smile that that shit he’d interested himself in was still in transfer prison, Nizhnegorodsky Prison it turned out to be, not Lefortovo, thank God, Who according to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia is an imaginary figure of a powerful supernatural being; Nizhnegorodsky is not as bad as, say, Kresti in Leningrad; and Comrade Alexandrov even explained how Natalya could send parcels.—If I had my way, he added, I’d give him nine grams of lead, right in the kisser! As for you, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, guess what color your file is now? Want a hint? Try shit-brown. As for that Zionist scum, he’ll never, ever get out. If you really want to help that kike family, tell Natalya to divorce him and change her name. She’ll pull through; she’s not bad looking, for an old bitch. In your opinion, are women sufficiently intelligent to play chess? Because if she isn’t, she’s going to be checkmated! I don’t mind telling you that you’ve made a serious mistake this time. The only reason I’m sticking my neck out for you is that you were in Leningrad when it mattered…