Konstantinovskaya’s work reassures me with its touch of stiltedness: Here is a professional who is more concerned with correctness than with style. Furthermore, she lived the quiet life. I am creditably informed that when Shostakovich uttered rash, irreverent and at times even provocative speeches against Soviet power, she urged him to be more pleasant. She disapproved of his more extremist acquaintances, and in the course of a quarrel informed him: I’m glad that your friends aren’t my friends! which I myself will always count in her favor. Her expressions of support for his formalist-individualist Opus 40 may be excused, since he dedicated it to her. When we sent her north in ’35, it was simply to put pressure on Shostakovich, to remind him. Take it from me: We had nothing against her. We arrested Akhmatova’s son and boyfriend in the same year and for equivalent reasons. It was my pleasure to help her get an early release, not that she ever knew about my help. My work tends to leave me with the worst thoughts about people. I’m left with only good thoughts about Elena Konstantinovskaya.
Nonetheless, and this may have been one of the qualities which attracted Shostakovich, she bore her own not so secret deviation—a harmless one, to be sure. How should I say it? (I’ve said it more bluntly about Akhmatova, but that’s because I never liked that woman.) In 1928, when rocket projectiles were first launched from our Soviet land, Elena was abnormally close to her schoolmate Vera Ivanovna. A report on those two stated that we noticed two black and blue marks on the neck of Elena Konstantinovskaya. First Elena did not want to explain the reason for those marks, but then with embarrassment she said that Vera Ivanova had kissed her in the woods, which resulted in the blue marks on her neck. This incident impels me to reconsider the girl’s relationship with Professor Liadova, who by the way introduced her to the poems of the bisexual Tsvetaeva.
After Vera, a whole year later in fact, the year that Shostakovich married Nina Varzar and Comrade Stalin’s wife shot herself; the year after Hitler’s niece shot herself and the year before Hitler became Chancellor, there would take place a conference in international linguistics, one of whose delegates would be a German comrade named Lina, a woman with brown eyes and brown bangs who that very first time would sit on the soft red armchair of that hotel room in Leningrad, watching Elena and pushing the collar of her sweater up around her throat with both hands; for the previous half hour Lina and Elena would have been engaged in a fervent discussion as to the best Russian rendering of the following thirteenth-century verse: Isolde’s secret song was her marvelous beauty, whose invisible music crept through the windows of the eyes. Aside from the sweater, Lina would be naked with her white knees drawn up almost to her shoulders and her white thighs shining and the long white lips of her vulva as irresistible as candy to Elena, and her anus was a white star. In a moment, Elena was going to kneel down and bury her face in the German girl’s flesh; she knew it and so did Lina. Just before that happened, Lina was going to say: We have almost the same name, don’t we? and Elena, hardly able to bear her desire for the other woman, would nod rapidly while Lina let go of her sweater with her right hand and slowly reached out, rested her fingers in Elena’s hair, twisted it in a knot, and forced her head down; no, no, it wouldn’t be that way at all; Elena, who had won a prize in the Komsomol fencing competition, would be lunging for Lina’s cunt like a pikefish striking at bait; then Lina would be stroking the top of Elena’s head, murmuring: We’re both so white, aren’t we?—And then Lina would wrap her hand in Elena’s hair and pull her head more firmly against her, whispering: Oh, baby, but you’re white like snow and I’m white like a cloud…—and before she’d even finished uttering these words, Elena would begin to melt from the heat of Lina, while Lina would turn to rain in Elena’s mouth. There would be a second time and a third (by which point Elena would be ready to die for Lina), then a fourth and a fifth, all in the space of a long white night. At midmorning Lina would set out sleepless to Berlin and Elena would never even know what happened to her.
Do you want to know the difference between Vera Ivanova and Lina? Elena did the same thing, performed the same sexual act, with both of them. But with Lina, because she was now more adult and more experienced, she did it in much the way that von Karajan conducts Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony: more smooth, rounded, polished, elegant (one hears this especially in the brasses), less harsh and desperate than as André Previn does it. The ferocious second movement especially, although Karajan’s tempo is actually faster than Previn’s, sounds richer, more modulated than his. (I myself prefer Previn’s starkness here.) In the third movement all irony is lost, resulting in what I consider to be a serious misinterpretation of Shostakovich; but in exchange Karajan imparts a haunting sweetness to the music quite unlike what Previn achieved. Uncanny how different the same notes can sound!
(By the way, Karajan got his Nazi Party card in April 1933, less than two months after the sleepwalker became Chancellor.)
By the time she’d become Shostakovich’s mistress, which is to say the muse of his Cello Sonata in D Minor, she’d learned to make love even more smoothly and perfectly than she had with Lina. There was something about her—Akhmatova was correct!—something akin to entering an ancient church. It wasn’t just that she knew how to hold and how to tease vibrato, how to manipulate (thus she later summed up sex for her husband Roman Karmen); there was something about her that made her lovers cry.
But the strangest thing of all about her was that she knew how to disguise herself in plainness (I suppose so that she wouldn’t get hurt). Once she’d put on her round glasses and tied her hair into a bun, hardly anybody looked at her when she walked down the street. And in school she was likewise inconspicuous—a highly adaptive trait in her time and place. I’ve read that those who were lucky enough to see her literally let her hair down could never forget her for the rest of their lives. In 1927, the year of A Ya. Fedorov’s rocket-powered automobile, a girl committed suicide over her.
Shostakovich in a moment of curiosity once asked her whether she might ever stop being attracted to women, and she gravely, proudly replied: I’ll never change.
And why should she? As I said before, why should Elena be compelled to be anything other than Elena? I think that the reason she loved him above all others was that to him, who and what she was was perfect. An E-sharp cannot be improved; nor can it be replaced by a B-flat. It is what it is. She loved women, and he loved her for it.