707 “Seed corn must not be ground.”—Title of an image by Käthe Kollwitz, 1941-42.
708 The district Party secretary: “This is outrageous! We let Shostakovich join the Party…”—Wilson, p. 359 (Kirill Kondrashin).
708 Tale of Ashkenazi as Shostakovich’s divorce intermediary against Nina—Based on Khentova, p. 130, trans. for WTV by Sergi Mineyev.
708 Date of Roman Karmen’s marriage to Maya Ovchinnikova, his telephone number and his preference for hunting and fast cars—The International Who’s Who, 1977-78 (London: Europa Publications Ltd., 1977), entry on Karmen. The original says “cars,” not “fast cars.” But in Karmen’s “Far and Wide My Country Stretches” there are a huge number of sequences with fast cars in them.
709 Karmen’s private telephone number, ca. 1965—Andrew I. Lebed, Dr. Heinrich E. Schulz and Dr. Stephen S. Taylor, Who’s Who in the USSR 1965-66, 2nd ed. (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1966; printed in Spain; orig. comp. by Institute for the Study of the USSR, Munich), p. 346 entry on Karmen, whose address was then Polyanka 34. The International Who’s Who gives him a different number in 1977-78, so it seemed no invasion to publish this one.
711 Shostakovich to his wife: “It was blackmail, Irinochka… If you love me, you won’t dig that up…”—Loosely after Fay, p. 218.
712 Shostakovich to his wife: “You see, I’m such an insensitive criminal type…”—Loosely after Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 242 (actually said in reference to the criticisms not of Denisov but of Solzhenitsyn).
712 “A great comrade”: “Anyone in this world who does not succeed in being hated…” —Hitler, p. 363.
713 The ditty played by Shostakovich: “Merry singing makes the heart glow…”—Von Geldern and Stites, p. 234 (Vasily Lebedev-Kumach and Isaac Dunaevsky, “March of the Happy-Go-Lucky Guys,” 1934), “retranslated” from the following, which rhymes A B C C in the facing Russian text: “Merry singing fills the heart with joy. / It will never let you be sad. / The countryside and villages love singing, / And big cities love singing, too.”
713 Brezhnev: “Socialist art is profoundly optimistic and life-affirming”—Daniels, p. 282 (Report of the CPSU Central Committee to the 23rd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 29 March 1966).
714 The reunion of Shostakovich and Akhmatova (“eighty-eight”)—After Shostakovich and Volkov, pp. 274-75. So far as I know, their meeting was not filmed and Roman Karmen was not present.
717 The bourgeois critic Layton: “At their best, the symphonies…”—Simpson, op. cit., p. 198.
717 Shostakovich to Glikman: “I am a dull, mediocre composer”—Glikman, p. 140 (letter of 3 February 1967, abridged).
718 Shostakovich to Glikman: “Slowly and with great difficulty…”—Glikman, p. 143 (letter of 8 April 1967).
719 Shostakovich to the orchestra: “On the left and right flanks, the battalion regions are echeloned…”—After Glantz and House, p. 277 (Stavka Front Directive No. 12248, 8 May 1943, 0429 hours).
719 Shostakovich to the audience: “Death is terrifying…”—Wilson, p. 417 (Mark Lubot-sky, unpublished memoir).
719 Shostakovich to his wife: “Unfortunately, Lebedinsky has grown, how shall I put it, old and stupid”—Wilson, p. 352, Shostakovich-ized.
719 Von Manstein: “Consequently it was now necessary for the Germans…”—Op. cit., p. 470.
722 “Our unshakable allies in East Germany” on the Fifteenth: “Strangely reserved and introverted” —Otto-Jürgen Burba, “Repetitio und Memento: Struktur und Bedeutung der Ostinatoformen bei Dmitri Schostakowitsch,” in Schweizer Musikpädagogische Blätter (Switzerland), vol. 85, issue 1 (January 1997), pp. 25-30; trans. for WTV by Yolande Korb; “retrans.” here and there by WTV; original p. 28; Korb, unnumbered p. 5.
723 Glikman’s brother’s idea for Shostakovich’s gravesite, and his recapitulation of Irina’s reaction—G. Glikman, in Schmalenberg, p. 178 (trans. by WTV). In this memoir, Glikman says “Petrograd,” not “Leningrad.”
724 Bely: “All of Petersburg is an infinity of the Prospect…” —Andrei Bely, Petersburg, trans. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 12 (slightly altered).
724 “… and the living faces the color of dirt, and that severed arm which hung from the garden gate…”—Punin, p. 191 (entry for Leningrad, 13 December 1941): “For a long time there hung an arm up to the elbow, attached by someone to the fence of the garden of one of the destroyed buildings. Dark crowds of people walk past with faces swollen and earthlike.”
725 Nadezhda Mandelstam (footnote): “I can testify that nobody I knew fought…”—Mandelstam, p. 307.
727 Non-appearance of Shostakovich’s name in the Urals poll—The Soviet Way of Life, p. 395 (ch. 9: “The Society of Great Culture”).
728 Epigraph—Jakov Lind, Soul of Wood, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964; orig. German ed. 1962), p. 46 (“Soul of Wood”).
730 Professor Svetlana Boym, who happened to be a fellow at the American Academy during my own brief residence there in 2003, proposes that I’ve misconceived the Russians’ anti-American attitude. In her view they wouldn’t have been anti-Cliburn at all. Instead of Cliburn representing something baleful, she says, he would have simply been isolated and forgotten as his Russian colleagues got drunk and chased women.
730 The juror Oborin: “Good, really very good…”—Paperno, p. 209.
731 New York Times: “A big, percussive attack…”—Issue of 11 April 1958, p. 12, col. 5.
732 Sofiya Gubaidulina: “Dmitri Dmitreyvich, you’re the person our generation depends on…”—Very loosely based on her retrospective testimony in Wilson, pp. 304-05.
733 The premiere of “Far and Wide My Country Stretches”—I am taking a liberty here, not knowing exactly when this film of Roman Karmen’s first appeared. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia tells me only that it was released in 1958, the year that Cliburn won the competition.
736 General von Hartmann: “As seen from Sirius, Goethe’s works will be mere dust…” —Craig, p. 373, slightly reworded.
737 Footnote: Great Soviet Encyclopedia: “Spontaneity, straightforward lyricism, exultant sound and impetuous dynamism.”—Vol. 12, p. 121 (entry on Harvey Lavan Cliburn, Jr.).
I would have preferred to set this story in 1958, when “Lost Victories” first appeared, rather than in 1962; then the parallelism with “The Pianist from Kilgore” would have been more exact; unfortunately, the Berlin Wall was not erected until 1961. It seemed best to make the events of the story occur a year later, so that the narrator could consider the Wall a settled injustice rather than a brand new outrage.
738 Epigraph—Von Manstein, p. 29.
739 “Had Paulus only been permitted [by Hitler] to break out and link up with von Manstein’s troops…”—Interestingly enough, Paulus seems to have blamed both Hitler and von Manstein. The ambiguously kidnapped Jahn had an opportunity to speak with him in 1954, in the office of Herr Weidauer, the Bürgermeister of Dresden. Jahn describes him (pp. 258-61) as a broken man, talking pitiably about his decorations.
740 “A great German”: “The strong man is mightiest alone.”—The great German was Schiller, but Hitler loved to quote this aphorism.
740 Speaking of great Germans, here is what the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (vol. 15, p. 436, biographical entry) has to say about von Manstein: “an honorary member of a number of revanchist circles.”49