Ann Harris and Erwin Glikes of Harper & Row were immediately responsive to the manuscript, and I am grateful to them for their advice and attentiveness. Harry Torczyner, my attorney, gave me invaluable help.
And finally, I thank you, my distant friend who must remain nameless-without your constant involvement and encouragement, this book would not exist.
Solomon Volkov
New York, June 1979
xviii
Introduction
BY SOLOMON VOLKOV
THE figure who lay in the open coffin had a smile on his face.
Many times I had seen him laughing; sometimes he roared with laughter. Often he had snickered or chuckled sarcastically. But I couldn't remember a smile like this: aloof and peaceful. Quiet, blissful, as though he had returned to childhood. As though he had escaped.
He liked to tell a story about one of his literary idols, Nikolai Gogoclass="underline" how he had apparently escaped from his grave. When the grave was dug up (in Leningrad in the 1930s) Gogol's coffin was empty.
Later, of course, the incident was clarified; Gogol's body was found and returned to its assigned place. But the idea itself-hiding after death-was greatly enticing.
He had escaped and could not be affected by the official obituary printed in all the Soviet newspapers after his death on August 9, 1975:
"In his sixty-ninth year, the great composer of our times passed away-Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich, Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R., laureate of the Lenin and State prizes of the U.S.S.R. A faithful son of the Communist Party, an eminent public xix
and state figure, citizen artist D. D. Shostakovich devoted his entire life to the development of Soviet music, reaffirming the ideals of socialist humanism and internationalism . . . . "
And so on and so forth, in cast-iron bureaucratese. The first signature under the obituary was that of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, and then followed, in alphabetical order, the chief of the secret police, the defense minister . . . (The long list of signatures is ended by a. truly minor figure: Vladimir Y agodkin, the Moscow propaganda chief, who will be remembered only because he set bulldozers on an outdoor exhibit of dissident art in September 1974.) At the official funeral, on August 14, the top administrators from the ideological departments crowded around Shostakovich's bier.
Many of them had for years made a career of denouncing his sins.
"The ravens have gathered," a close musician friend of Shostakovich said, turning his pale face to me.
Shostakovich had known all this ahead of time; he had even written music to a poem that described the "honored" funeral of a Russian genius of another era, Alexander Pushkin: "So much honor that there is no room for his closest friends . . . To the right and the left, huge hands at their sides, the chests and crude faces of the gendarmes . . . "
Now none of this mattered: one more grotesque scene, one more contradiction, could not worry him. Shostakovich had been born in the midst of contradictions, on September 25, 1906, in Petersburg, the capital of the Russian empire, which still reverberated from the revolutionary tremors of 1905. The city would have to change its name twice in a decade-in 1914 it became Petrograd and in 1924, Leningrad. The conflict between the rulers and the people never ceased here; it was just less visible from time to time.
Russian poets and writers had long created an evil image of Petersburg, a place of "doubles" and ruined lives. It was the grandiose project of a tyrant, Peter I, who forced its construction in a swamp at a cost of countless lives, the mad dream of a total autocrat. Dostoevsky, too, thought that "this rotten, slimy city would rise with the fog and disappear like smoke."
· · --..,
This Petersburg was the source, and the framework and the setting, of many of Shostakovich's works. It was the site of the premieres of xx
seven symphonies, two operas, three ballets, and most of his quartets.
(They say that Shostakovich had wanted to be buried in Leningrad, but they buried him in Moscow.) In acknowledging Petersburg as his own, Shostakovich doomed himself to an enduring psychological duality.
Another contradiction-between his Polish ancestry and his constant striving to handle in his art, like Dostoevsky or Mussorgsky, the most vital problems of Russian history-came from his heredity. Heritage and history crossed paths. The composer's great-grandfather Pyotr Shostakovich, a young veterinarian, took part in the uprising of 1 830, a desperate attempt to gain Polish independence from Russia.
After the cruel repression of the uprising and the taking of Warsaw, he was sent with thousands of other rebels into exile in the Russian wilderness-first to Perm, then to Ekaterinburg.
Even though the family became Russified, the admixture of "foreign blood" undoubtedly made itself felt. And Shostakovich was reminded of it himself before his trip to Warsaw for the Chopin Competition in 1 927, when the state authorities wondered whether "that Pole" should be permitted to go or not.
Shostakovich's grandfather Boleslav participated in the preparations for another Polish uprising-in 1863-which the Russian Army also routed. Boleslav Shostakovich had close ties to the revolutionary Land and Freedom organization, one of the most radical socialist groups. He was sent to Siberia. In those years in Russia the words "Polish" and
"rebel" and "instigator" were almost synonymous.
The fashionable radicalism of the 1860s in Russia was markedly materialistic. Art was rejected as the pastime of the idle and a popular slogan of the times declared that "A pair of boots is worth more than Shakespeare." This attitude endured. The composer's father, Dmitri Boleslavovich Shostakovich, did not involve himself in politics; he worked with the famous chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev and lived a quiet life as a successful engineer in Petersburg. He married a pianist, Sofia Vasilyevna Kokoulina. Music was a serious interest of the family and they no longer scorned Mozart and Beethoven, but their underlying philosophy still held that art had to be useful.
Young Shostakovich-Mitya-was nine, relatively old, when he be-xxi
gan piano lessons. His first instructor was his mother, who, when she saw his rapid progress, took him to a piano teacher. The following conversation was a favorite family story:
"I've brought you a marvelous pupil!"
"All mothers have marvelous children . . . . "
Within two years he played all the preludes and fugues in Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. It was clear that he was exceptionally gifted.
He did well in general school subjects too. He always wanted to be best at whatever he did. When he began composing, almost simultaneously with his piano lessons, he worked at it seriously; among his earliest compositions is the piano piece "Funeral March in Memory of the Victims of the Revolution." This was an eleven-year-old's reaction to the revolution of February 1917, which overthrew Nicholas II. Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik Party, had returned to Russia from abroad. At the Finland Station in Petrograd, he was greeted by crowds; we would have seen young Mitya among them.