He was completely rehabilitated at the Second All-Union Congress of Soviet Composers in the spring of 1957. Galina Ustvolskaya had just completed her Sonata No. 4, which consisted of four attacca movements, so he’d heard; she hadn’t found time to play it for him, but Glikman, who seemed to get around, had already heard it and pronounced it extremely depressing.
Photographs from this period often show him leaning his hand against his forehead, staring at the whiteness of a score in the recording studio. When he was alone he laughingly choked out: Oh, yes, my tonic must have been D minor! That was perfect! Even Glikman didn’t know what I was…—He continued to be as productive as those Stakhanovite coal mine workers who overfulfill their norms by a factor of fourteen. His chords paraded across each score like some exercise march of suntanned girls in Red Square, each in a white tank top and grey shorts. Sometimes they were even happy; sometimes they resembled rainbow flower-explosions made of arrows. At a gathering of his friends he drank too much and began singing: Burn, candle, burn bright, in Lenin’s little red asshole, which could have gotten him ten years. That fall his Eleventh Symphony, which had already achieved immense success in spite of its secret references to the Soviet tanks now crushing the Hungarian uprising (Maxim had whispered: Papa, what if they hang you for this?), won a Lenin Prize—which after Khruschev’s secret speech could not be called a Stalin Prize anymore, you see. The capitalists dismissed it as program music. Pale cold lights, arising diagonally from the wet pavement, diffused into the darkness like jet trails. Patches of wet light, flat zones and darkness, and then the pallid welcome of lights in the porticoes of official buildings besieged the celebrations. Far, far within, Shostakovich paced tremblingly from handshake to handshake, smiling in a flutter, drinking too much vodka. Oh, what a smile! He hid within it; he actually believed that it protected him. (The Russians, wrote a German, are masters in the construction of shellproof wooden field fortifications.) He smiled. People thought him as stiff as a frozen corpse.
In 1958, when he won the Sibelius Prize, the Central Committee passed a resolution partly denouncing the Zhdanov Decree of 1948, but only partly. They called it the Decree on the Correction of Errors. Shostakovich smiled venomously when he heard. Well, what’s the difference? Not even Nina believed in me, even when I thought that my Seventh Symphony could, you know. Maxim was crying for hunger and I actually thought I could make art out of it! I…
That was the year when Pasternak was forced to decline his Nobel Prize, the year when a Soviet selection of Akhmatova’s verses appeared in print, inscribed to Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich, in whose epoch I dwelled on earth. Oh, I know precisely what you mean, my dear, dear Anna Andreyevna! In my epoch. My stinking epoch of…
We see him pale and weary in a dress shirt and necktie, his arm around A. Mravinsky, who will soon betray him out of fear, and who folds his own arms, as gaunt and indifferent as a wounded soldier. We hear him whispering to his young friend E. Denisov: When I look back on my life, I realize that I’ve been a coward, a coward. But if you’d seen everything I have, Edik, perhaps you too would have become a coward. Can you imagine? To, to, you know, to accept the invitation of a friend, and when you arrive at his flat to discover that he’s disappeared, with all his books and clothes thrown into the street, and some new comrade already living there! I…
The telephone rang. His dear friend Leo Oskarovich, who’d tried to console him after he divorced Margarita, was inviting him to a party at Leningradskoe 44-2, you know, the Kino House; he could bring anyone he liked; Roman Lazarevich was going to be there, and there might be work if our trustworthy Dmitri Dmitriyevich could whip off something anti-formalist in a major key—nothing like your Eleventh Symphony, please forgive me for saying that, but we only want to help you—for the soundtrack of the world’s first Kinopanorama film, “Far and Wide My Country Stretches.” Roman Lazarevich wants you to know, Dmitri Dmitreyevich, that he’s very…
That was the year that they appointed him Chairman of the Organizing Committee for the First International Tchaikovsky Competition (the prize went to a tall young American named Van Cliburn); that was the year that the arthritis or whatever it was began to settle in his wrists, the year that the municipality of Moscow held a special unveiling of memorial plaques to Prokofieff. Plaques and prizes, it’s all so… Take for instance that Order of the Red Star over her right breast; my sister says that she wears it whenever Vigodsky wants to go out in public, and, and you know… Prokofieff’s first wife used the occasion to create a scandal against the second. And why should I even care? It wasn’t as if Prokofieff and I were even, you know; but since I’ve dispensed with feeling certain other feelings, why not gratify my, my ugliness? Because that makes me all the more ready for Opus 110! Will it actually be Opus 110 or Opus 111? I’m shooting for 110, which will be a quartet, something intimate, so that everybody can hear the, the, whatchamacallit. As if Prokofieff’s wife were even a, a… Trembling with rage, Shostakovich inhaled vodka, railing against the foulness of women. When the musicologist M. Sabinina objected in a tentative voice that after all, she herself was a woman, he backed water a trifle, then confessed that, like Prokofieff with the second wife, he himself was now entirely impotent.
Between himself and Galina Ustvolskaya there was no longer a consonance. Mutual friends warned that she tirelessly denounced both his music and his person. (I’ve read that she’d fallen in love with Y. A. Balkashin.) Trying not to think about her, he sat dreaming about the young girls at the Conservatory, with their violin-cases over their shoulders. He muttered to Lebedinsky: Pushkin said it! There’s no escaping one’s destiny!
He had to go to Leningrad for a concert. He dreaded to go. At every street, he was afraid he’d see Ustvolskaya. He dreaded her more than anything, because she had left him and she…
He had a sudden irrational idea (he knew that it was irrational) that if he only killed himself before tomorrow it wouldn’t be too late, and then she’d know he loved her and take him back.
All the while he knew very well that it was Elena Konstantinovskaya whom he loved. Elena, you’re the one for me. Oh, why didn’t I say it? Just as in winter we frontline men dread abandoning our dugouts, because it’s so difficult to dig new ones in the frozen ground, so he did not want to give up Ustvolskaya, especially now that his penis could no longer perform its world-historic task; there was nothing more to it than that. She was his outer perimeter and Elena was the inner. He missed her music, of course.
In 1959, when Lunik landed on the moon (another Soviet victory on the scientific front), his daughter married. Blindly, like a doomed soldier throwing grenades from his foxhole, Shostakovich composed myriad smiles, wishing that he were alone and away; but he pretended that Nina was holding his hand. They’d asked him to play something but his wrists hurt. Galya looked so joyous as she stood beside that new husband of hers, in whose presence he felt awkward, that all he wanted to do was sit in the corner, for fear that he might cast his stinking shadow on her happiness. Solicitously, Glikman filled his vodka glass to the very top and whispered that it was all going well.
As for this music she wants, whispered Shostakovich, instead of me, it should have been the master composer sitting here, the great man himself, you know whom I mean, the, the, that bastard.