Now here they came, shooting through the door. I was in the cockpit of my rocket by then. As they came bursting in, my antipersonnel mine exploded and Natalka’s teeth killed half a dozen of them! Laughing, I pulled the switch and blasted right through the ceiling.
Shall I tell you how and why I’d won out? Under my tongue (the one place they didn’t search) I kept a splinter of the old Reichscrown, in other words a piece of the True Cross. ‣
OPUS 110
The problem of the “black bread” of culture has now been completely solved, and now is the time to provide society with the “sweet biscuits” of culture.
Best listened to in a windowless room, better than best an airless room—correctly speaking, a bunker sealed forever and enwrapped in tree-roots—the Eighth String Quartet of Shostakovich (Opus 110) is the living corpse of music, perfect in its horror. Call it the simultaneous asphyxiation and bleeding of melody. The soul strips itself of life in a dusty room. When the war’s over, when Stalin’s dead and for cemetery obelisks Europe sports the orphaned chimneys of firebombed Murmansk, the scorched churches of Dresden, politics spares us for a blink or two, nervously gnawing its own claws. The soldier comes home, pulls off his muddy, bloody uniform and becomes a citizen again. So too Shostakovich. Visitors remark on his success: white and black bread both, cheese, butter, even sausage on the table! Nylon stockings for Ninusha! His children love him, Lebedinsky respects him, Glikman reveres him; Ninusha (Nina Vasilyevna to you!) keeps unwanted visitors away; the Party woos him; Galina Ustvolskaya kisses him. Oh, yes, he’s very, how should I say? If I could only… Don’t answer the telephone! Because it’s time to, well, you know. But what’s that sound? It certainly wasn’t in Opus 40. What key most effectively expresses bereavement? In the darkness, a cello saws out a tune as dry as the buzzing of wasps within a skull. He claps his hands to his ears, but what good will that do? It comes from within! What’s that sound? Until now, all that he and we could hear was the patriotic clanking of tanks under Leningrad’s arches, as translated into my Seventh Symphony. And I even believed! I’m not saying that the others weren’t idealists, even fat-chinned Khrennikov, who earned his… not that I’d speak ill of a colleague, oh, no, dear friends! Did you know that Comrade Stalin praises Khrennikov? Count on it! They’re two of a kind. No, it’s not I who should be considered the man of our epoch. I get angry when they kick somebody in the teeth and expect me to set it to music. How strange that Roman Lazarevich wants me to write scores for his so-called “masterpieces,” when Khrennikov would be more, you know. Of course she never slept with Khrennikov, at least not that I… Thank heavens that’s all over. Isaak Davidovich tells me that she divorced him, so he must be very… Not that it’s my business. She’ll probably find another older man. And, yes, the war’s over, too; I wish that Maxim would stop having nightmares about Auschwitz! I mean, in this world we have to… And Galisha tells me that the boy won’t even… Not that she’s so lucky herself, to have me for a father. Oh, my! Now Europe is silent—but what’s that sound?
It’s himself, starved, choking and weeping in an airless room. In the wise judgment of Sovetskaya Musika: It is impossible to forget that Shostakovich’s work has a certain tendency to close in upon itself, that the popular roots of his music are not deep enough. His pale and shining face sinks down toward the music-paper, which he’s anchored to the desk by his suitsleeves, elbows outward; he doesn’t resemble a boy anymore; his hairline’s receding; he needs another cigarette. What ought to cause him agony he no longer feels; he’s but the catalyst of a biochemical reaction which turns pain into music.—What’s that sound? A D-note, probably.—To his right, from the long black jawbone of the best piano, music-teeth grin at him; when the time comes, when Opus 110 is ready for execution, they’ll know what to do! Fuzzy fibrous tree-roots will eat his flesh. Right now they’re neither popular nor deep enough. No fear; they’ll bite deeper. What’s that sound? The mournful, sinister groanings of the strings comprise a largo of suffocation. Less grisly than the allegretto of skeletons when the soul is pursued and caught by death, that sound is sadder: Death having done its work, we must now suffer through the dying. Thus Opus 110.
We might note that this quartet opens with the four-note signature D, E-flat, C, B, which is to say in inappropriately German notation DSCH, and which therefore is also to say Dmitri Shostakovich. Assertion of self-characterized Soviet artists who were persecuted for following their private Muses. In the case of Akhmatova, who was proscribed from publishing for many years and who lost both son and lover to prison camps, not to mention that ex-husband whom we’d shot long before, the shrill I am approaches megalomania. Had she been, say, an Englishwoman, her egocentricity might have proved insufferable. She versifies about the strophes, streets and monuments which posterity will name after her. But she was Russian. She was not free. What could she assert but herself? In the world of we, the failing I repeated her name, defiant. She became a heroine; her poems were memorized secretly in Black Marias and Arctic camps. She wrote I, and Shostakovich wrote DSCH.
Not long before Opus 110, she composed a poem to him. She wrote that his music kept her company in the grave as if every flower burst into words. Then, slowly, she sank into decrepitude, weeping and drinking tea for years in an airless room.
When they heard the hideous news that the Americans had detonated two “atom-bombs” over Japan, killing thousands or hundreds of thousands (as usual, the numbers of the dead varied with the teller), Shostakovich said with a horridly gloomy smile: It’s our task to rejoice.
Younger musicians had begun to draw away, on account of that diabolical cynicism of his, which seemed almost to ape Stalin’s, swelling until it overshadowed Moscow’s new heroic columns; while his own generation, who knew him better, simply worried about his will to live. No need: He’d already survived. To him they were all blue morning shadows on new snow, silhouettehued people gliding cautiously along the icy sidewalks, an occasional camel-brown or blonde-furred coat like a surprise, a bareheaded woman steaming breath ahead of her; he watched them from his redoubt beneath the piano keys. Peering out and up, ready to duck back behind his glasses, he exchanged courtesies even with the ones in raspberry-colored boots—dear Shostakovich! He was as moderate as Comrade Stalin. Those caustic, hideous things that wailed out of his twitching smile with the suddenness of violin-shrieks (it’s our task to rejoice)—well, well…
As early as 1944, the cellist V. Berlinsky, while praising his astounding musical memory, had felt forced to describe him as a lump of nerves. And now, with the Germans crushed under their own rubble, Shostakovich, half-smoothfaced, smoothhanded and perfectly pallid as he sat at the piano with his wrists in corpse-white parallels, listened again and again within his skull-bunker to the Eighth Symphony (soon to be denounced as repulsive, ultra-individualist ); when he’d arrived at that resolute call to arms of the fourth movement, that tense, sweet thrumming of all-sacrificing sincerity, he bit his lips for self-disgust, to think that he could have believed in anything! He’d stood up to be counted. He’d even hoped. Now he composed fugues (and here we might note that the Latin source-word fuga means quite simply flight).