740 Von Manstein: “When Hitler called for the swift and ruthless destruction of the Polish Army…”—Von Manstein, p. 190.
740 Von Manstein: The capitulation of Poland “in every way upheld the military honor…”—Ibid., p. 59.
741 Von Manstein: As a result of the impeccable behavior of our troops…”—Ibid., p. 151.
742 Von Manstein: “From now on the weapons would speak.”—Ibid., p. 33.
743 “Lili Marlene”—Mr. Thomas Melle would have me write the German “Lili Marleen,” but I have never seen it this way in any Anglo-American World War II source, so I fear it would look wrong to my readers.
743 Von Manstein on the Soviet troop dispositions—“Deployment against every contingency” —Op. cit., p. 181.
743 Von Manstein: “The Soviet command showed its true face…”—Ibid., p. 180.
After completing this story I discovered the following footnote in Moholy-Nagy (p. 15): “The interplay of various facts has caused our age to shift almost imperceptibly toward colour-lessnessand grey: the grey of the big city, of the black and white newspapers, of the photographic and film services; the colour-eliminating tempo of our life today. Perpetual hurry, fast movement, cause all colours to melt into grey.”
748 Ansel Adams: “…lightly charmed by the passing landscape…”—Ansel Adams, Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs (Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 1983), p. 117 (commentary on his photograph of Jacques Henri Lartigue).
AN IMAGINARY LOVE TRIANGLE: SHOSTAKOVICH, KARMEN, KONSTANTINOVSKAYA
For my own narrative purposes I have invented many of the interrelations between these three individuals.
According to Khentova’s Udivitelyenui Shostakovich, Konstantinovskaya returned from Spain married to Karmen. He was doing documentary work there in 1936 and 1937.
Konstantinovskaya and Shostakovich were intimate for slightly more than a year, from around June 1934 until some time in 1935, probably the late summer or fall, shortly after which she was expelled from the Komsomol and arrested. She seems to have been in prison for a year or less. So I imagine her as having volunteered for duty in Spain in 1936. I have no way of knowing whether she had the gruesome Gulag experiences which I have imputed to her.
It is a fact that she received the Red Star for bravery in Spain. Very likely she was a combatant. Possibly she saw action with a Soviet tank brigade. However, I have been unable to find out any details about her service in Spain. It is the fact of her Red Star which decided me to give her expertise in sharpshooting and first aid while in the Komsomol.
Karmen’s memoir Über die zeit und über mich selbst: Erzählungen über mein Schaffen states that his wife was expecting to give birth on 22 June 1941. The portions of the book which I was able to read in Berlin do not state which wife this was. She might well not have been Elena, because almost immediately after the newlyweds returned to the USSR in 1937 Karmen set out on other long journeys, which doesn’t imply the closest of marriages; on the other hand, good Soviet citizens were accustomed to putting their families second. In Europe Central I have supposed that the expectant mother was Elena.
The International Who’s Who, 1977-78 informs us that in 1962 Karmen married Maya Ovchinnikova. So he and Elena must have divorced before then.
Khentova writes that Elena married a Professor Vigodsky, to whom she bore a daughter, but gives no date. Khentova further states that although Elena kept in touch with some of Shostakovich’s relatives, particularly his sister Mariya, she saw Shostakovich only once more. All the same, she saved his letters to the end of her life, which she could have done for any number of reasons, but why not suppose that she held a torch for him?
It is unlikely that Shostakovich never got over Elena, as has been imagined in this book. There is equally no reason to suppose that Elena’s marriage with Karmen failed because she was still in love with Shostakovich. Moreover, Elena was blonde, not darkhaired, and I have no grounds whatsoever for believing her to have been a bisexual cigarette smoker. Shostakovich held somewhat traditional views about women (for instance, he did not express much respect for female composers, which was a point of contention between him and Galina Ustvolskaya), so I can’t be confident that he could have tolerated a bisexual mistress.
When I think of Shostakovich, and when I listen to his music, I imagine a person consumed by fear and regret, a person who (like Kurt Gerstein) did what litttle he could to uphold the good—in this case, freedom of artistic creation, and the mitigation of other people’s emergencies. He became progressively more beaten down, and certainly experienced difficulty saying no—a character trait which may well have kept him alive in the Stalinist years. In spite of the fact that he joined the Party near the end, to me he is a great hero—a tragic hero, naturally. Richard Taruskin writes in Defining Russia Musically (p. 537) “How pleasant and comforting it is to portray him as we would like to imagine ourselves acting in his shoes”—in other words, as being a member of some fairytale anti-Soviet Resistance, which would have instantly led him to share Vlasov’s fate.
His marriage to Nina Varzar was unhappy in a number of ways, and I wanted to give him, in fiction, at least, a great love—which he might well have experienced with his last wife, Irina. Because in Europe Central his passion for Elena dominates his life to the end, including his years with Irina, I beg her pardon, and likewise his children’s, for any misrepresentations which this book’s objectives required.
Roman Karmen was not a great artist, but he was a brave, adventurous sort whom it would now be all too easy to dismiss as a Stalinist propagandist. He and Käthe Kollwitz may fairly be called fellow propagandists, although to my mind the latter was by far the former’s superior from the “aesthetic” point of view. Karmen’s documentaries deserve more attention than they have received. I imagine him, plausibly I believe, as a passionate “soldier with a camera” who did his best. I suspect that he was also cheerful and likeable. He very well might have tried to assist Shostakovich as I have imagined in “Opus 110,” although here again, by magnifying Shostakovich’s obsession with Elena, I have surely exaggerated the number of thoughts which our composer sent Karmen’s way. In any event, I respect both men’s memories.
What about Elena Konstantinovskaya? She remains an enigma to me. But I certainly love her as much as I can love someone I never knew. I had various reasons for making my version of her to be capable of love for both men and women. One motive was to make her as infinitely lovable as I could. As I’ve written in this book, “above all Europa is Elena.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank my father for our three days in Berlin and Dresden during July 2001. “The Last Field-Marshal,” “Opus 110” and “Woman with Dead Child” were the principal beneficiaries. It was wonderful to see both my parents in Berlin in 2003, when I got to take a few more notes.
The American Academy in Berlin very kindly made me writer-in-residence for September 2003, a highly fortuitous, almost voluptuous circumstance which benefited almost all the German stories. The person who made this happen was George Plimpton of the Paris Review. Mr. Plimpton died before I returned home from Germany; I wish I had been able to thank him at greater length. I also wish to thank my colleagues at the Academy for their friendship. In particular, the eth-nomusicologist Philip Bohlman, professor of music and Jewish studies at the University of Chicago, who was a fellow at the American Academy, helped me considerably, both in translating certain musical terms from East German critical essays on Shostakovich and in answering several of my questions about motif and leitmotiv in music. Juliane Reitzig, an intern at the Academy, answered some questions about growing up in the DDR.