Loyalty to the state now requires me to step back and take the long view. Can we lay bare the context of the Konstantinovskaya Theme? How shall we define the general character of D. D. Shostakovich’s production?
The East German musicologist Ekkehard Ochs, writing after Shostakovich’s death in a spirit of appropriately comradely reverentiality, reminds us of the dialectic process: When the world changes, so does the man, so the composer, and art also. The same source speaks of his symphonies’ dialectic between life and death. In this spirit, we find Shostakovich writing to a certain E. Konstantinovskaya: I try to stop loving you and instead I love you more and more. There is much sadness and disappointment in my love to you. Very complex circumstances (how should I write this, so that she’ll, you know, not hate me?) play a very important role here.
Others—optimistic, public-spirited types—have claimed to find in Opus 40 (probably in the second movement) the smell of flowers at Kirov’s funeral. Who am I to say that I can’t smell flowers? But I can’t. When I inhale Opus 40, I scent woodsmoke, wine and Elena’s hair.
They went to a showing of R. L. Karmen’s “Comrade Dmitrov in Moscow,” because the film sounded so boring that no one they knew would be likely to go, not even Glikman. When the Kino Palace was dark, she held his hand. From this experience derives the third movement, the largo (completed on 13 September), which might sound melancholy to those who don’t know Shostakovich, particularly the later Shostakovich; in fact this is his secret bunker, the deepest of his heart’s four chambers, whose roof is timbered with regular bass-notes of the piano. Here the piano and the cello sing a duet which might sound sad to the rest of the world, or even (here’s Elena’s favorite English word) creepy, but they’ve hidden themselves away so safely that there is no one else to hear them, let alone misjudge them; they have shut the Danube’s gates! In its darkest corners, the room is irregular, its bass roof-timbers as fantastic as the whalebone beams of an ancient Arctic dwelling; and in this darkness, Shostakovich and Elena Konstantinovskaya fall asleep in each other’s arms, her head on his chest, his ankles locked around hers; they’re like two vines grown together in an old graveyard.
On 1 December, the assassin Nikolayev took the life of our beloved Comrade Kirov—a treacherous blow, for which we set out to make the foreign spies and wreckers pay in full. On 4 December the first death sentences were issued. On 29 December we shot Nikolayev, who double-doomed himself by attempting to implicate the highest circles of our Soviet state. By mid-January we were arresting his accomplices by the tens of thousands. Meanwhile, Shostakovich was living with his darling Ninotchka again! When she returned, he cried: Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you very much!—He wrote Elena that he continued to be so busy nursing his Ninusha through a serious illness that he hadn’t found time to telephone her. Please forgive me, my dear Lyalya, because I…
Elena declined to answer.
Then he rang her up in terror, whispering: Lyalya, I have a very strange feeling, a very creepy feeling as you would probably say…
He felt that he was being watched. How ridiculous! Of course he was being watched!
He was still a hero in those days. If I may say so, he didn’t have a clue.
He started taking her out to concerts again. He needed more English lessons. (Sollertinsky had gotten nowhere trying to teach him German.) He went home with her (65 Kirovsky Prospekt, number 20). When they made love they were so noisy that the neighbors pounded on the walls. That’s the second movement for you! The cellist A. Ferkelman, who performed Opus 40 with Shostakovich in 1939, informs us that I never succeeded in getting any other pianist to take such fast tempi. His playing was on the dry side, but on the other hand he played extremely loudly, doubtless on account of his great force of temperament. In short, he still loved her. They played the third movement with diabolical ease; all the same, something wasn’t right in Elena’s song. He wept and said: Lyalka, I don’t believe that I’ll be yours and you’ll be mine. Sometimes I do; sometimes I don’t. Now my mood is such that I find it very difficult to, you know, believe.
Elena was sitting beside him at the Kirov Theater, just before the curtain rose on his new opera “Lady Macbeth.” Wordlessly she slipped her coat over her shoulders, rose up, turned away and walked out.
He rushed after her; he knelt down in the dirty slush and begged. (I was there, trailing A. Akhmatova; I remember snow on the iron fence around the Summer Garden, snow on the Summer Garden’s trees.) And she took him home with her; she knew he loved her! What was he so afraid of? Between the two of them they’d long since determined the way that the second movement begins, with its haunting Russian melody in a minor key, passageways of Rodchenko-like golden scaffolding subsequently connecting it to a merry melody which after a very particular, never to be replicated cello-caress becomes buttery-sweet and brief, because he was on his back and she was astride him, teasing him with the succulent inner lips of her cunt and slowly possessing him, taking orgasm after orgasm, forbidding him to move, pausing whenever she liked, as long as she liked; and all the while he had to keep lying perfectly still like a good boy! Then comes that rocking-horse sequence I’ve mentioned, which transforms itself into another sweet eternity of melting butter: He’d finished, and Elena was back on top of him again, riding him in just the way she liked until she climaxed with the sound of a honeybee, the bow passing smoothly and shrilly across the sounding board. Returning to the Russian melody, Opus 40 then gives the piano another turn at pleasuring itself, so that a second rocking-horse copulation gallops to a happy ejaculation, at which point the piano sparkles and glows; I have it on good authority that at that point they were making love at dawn, and right before they finished, the sounds of morning began as the sun sparkled and glared most busily upon an upturned water-glass, transforming it into an improbable spider-jewel whose legs were beams of white light.
The true story of Opus 40 comes to an end at the end of a certain night in the summer of 1935, when the sleepless woman finally dialed Shostakovich’s number. Nina answered and curtly said: He’s staying with me.
I kept waiting and waiting by the telephone, whispered Elena, just in case he was going to call.
Regarding Opus 40, Shostakovich remained everlastingly coy, no doubt for Nina’s sake, but he did state for the record that a certain great breakthrough (or, as the Germans would say, ein grosser Durchbruch) took place for him that year in the sphere of chamber and concert platform music. (Shostakovich to Konstantinovskaya: Why did I meet you? Why did I fall in love? I could have lived peacefully. My life as it was does not exist anymore.)
The premiere took place on 25 December 1935. Elena Konstantinovskaya was absent. Those who wish us ill would doubtless insist on drawing attention to the fact that, following the line laid down by Comrade Stalin, we’d arrested a few thousand more of those scum by then, including Elena. I’m well aware that in the transit prison she received a postcard from Shostakovich—another black mark against him. Having verified all the documents in this matter, I can assure you that the reorganization of the Komsomol had become urgently necessary by then; every district branch was crawling with class enemies. Nothing definite was ever proved against Elena. All the same, let’s not cry crocodile tears over inconveniences suffered by a person who was, like all persons, the legitimate focus of interest of our Soviet state. Far more germane to this study of Opus 40 is the fact that the concert, as I can personally testify, was a success, I might even say a glittering success. So what if she wasn’t present? After all, the composer had dedicated it not to her but to his friend V. Kubatsky. ‣