As for the fire-warden, whose name was D. D. Shostakovich, I can hear him drumming out the Rat Theme on the rim of his helmet. Although he wouldn’t have confessed it, this war arrived none too soon! The explosion of rapture at his First Symphony so long ago should have warned him, for in our Soviet Union as in any besieged zone it’s unwise to stand out despicably or dashingly. But—freakish child molting into feminine-mouthed prodigy, then cigarette-twiddling hero, I mean grain-beetle of subversion—he’d never succeeded in camouflage. (His cue: cymbal-clash—gnash, gnash.) Oh, how many times other children had hurt him! Gawky, pale, wary-eyed behind the round spectacles, he watched encirclers with a melancholy consciousness of his own vulnerability, which they frequently took for submission. Indeed, surrender should have been his policy, for he exuded softness, being the larvum of a grain-beetle, which is to say the proverbially pallid intellectual grub. Girls wanted to pinch his cheeks, while most boys despised him before the second beat of the overture. If one believes, as does any true Bolshevik, that the working class, destined to be the victorious class, can send advance detachments to break through the perimeter of the bourgeoisie, why not grant that doomed systems may in the course of their retreat leave behind counterpoised stragglers whose smooth hands and inward aspirations betray them? They’ll survive for a few measures yet; the composer need not write them out of his score so long as they keep time, but they’re outmoded nonetheless; they’re as prehistoric as the Tauride Palace’s fabled owl of gold, into which some extinct Imperial craftsman by means of clocksprings and prayers once built sentience sufficient for its eyes to roll on state occasions. (They never move anymore. After the Revolution, their mechanism ran down.) As for the boy, he stared owl-eyed at the world. Why did I ever liken him to an insect? He was a bird, now that I come to think of it; or maybe he was a—call him a formalist. He blinked. Then he sat down at the piano. His fingers, which appeared far more fragile than dragonflies or faraway antique biplanes, commenced their beautiful convulsions. Oh, he got attention, all right…—But the music itself? No less a figure than A. K. Glazunov, director of the Leningrad Conservatory, admitted that he couldn’t understand such harmonies, although he offered to stand aside for them. Our Mitya, he opined, was undoubtedly the future’s darling.
(Shostakovich ducked his head.)
Perhaps it’s mere jealousy on my part, Glazunov continued (and the other professors laughed, to imagine that somebody as important as Glazunov could feel jealous of a student), but all the same, I don’t like your latest opus! Ha, ha, what am I saying? I know he’s sincere—you’re not just playing with us, are you, Mitya?—and what he’s attempting is so, let’s say, revolutionary, that it can’t be appreciated in the very first instant…
The pupil smiled, fiddling with his mittens. In his view, which he would have readily defended in less intimidating surroundings, music ought to remain freely undifferentiated from any but emotional content, and perhaps even from that. This notion might not have been as new as it seemed; nor, perhaps, was Glazunov quite as shocked as he pretended to be. (How natural to patronize youth in the guise of meeting it halfway!—Let the boy overvalue his conceptions a trifle, thought Glazunov. Maybe once he matures he’ll come up with something important.) When his teachers cited the program music of Mussorgsky, Wagner, Berlioz and Rimsky-Korsakoff, our tousleheaded young genius argued that these compositions could be peeled away from their supposed subjects without detriment; if they couldn’t, they failed as music. Such being the case, why not construct sequences of notes without thematic pretense? Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich stood ready to improvise using shock units, shock methods!—Still and all, sighed Glazunov, discreetly sucking alcohol through a long rubber tube, you need not be so irreverent, Mitya.—The boy twitched apologetically. Although it made him nervous, he needed to be noticed. One of Glazunov’s agreeable qualities was an easy tolerance of almost anything. On a white summer’s night when the assistant director attacked the boy, Glazunov interposed: Then this is no place for you. Shostakovich is one of the brightest hopes for our art.—Who then dares allege that Mitya’s mentors didn’t want to help him? In the USSR we practice two kinds of criticism: the merciless denunciation of bourgeois ideology, and the coaxing, comradely criticism of our peers. So long as he continued to follow the well-delineated path which Glazunov had named sincerity, he need anticipate only the second variety, which never stings.
Born in the antediluvian time when Leningrad was still the claustrophobic “Petersburg” of the Symbolists, in whose nightmares fallen leaves whirled in ever-narrowing spirals, and the same red dominoes or red-eyed terrorists hounded aristocrats wherever they turned, he dwelled, like all children, at the heart of the world. I prefer not to brand him a narcissist, but people do take on the characteristics of the places where they live, and Petersburg is as labyrinthine, enigmatic and literally self-centered as her own best poet, A. A. Akhmatova. Would you like more adjectives? Simultaneously ornate and impoverished, like the golden-braided droshky-driver who cannot feed his own family (and, come to think of it, like Akhmatova, too), Petersburg infects her most sensitive children with a desperation as noble as it is impractical. In a city whose rich aesthetes can admire the greenish tint of thawing river-snow, while ignoring the same hue in the faces of the starving, we must expect the red dominoes to triumph sooner or later. For Petersburg remains above all the city of Raskolnikov, who exists only in Dostoyevsky’s nightmares but whose crime, murder for the sake of an idea, proves its reality again and again. Faint snare drums sound at the beginning of Mitya’s as yet unwritten Rat Theme. Something is coming closer. Mitya reaches for the whirling leaves, and his mittens fall off. Scoldingly, his mother bends down. Time ticks, and the ticking of revolution’s murder-bomb can scarcely be heard because it hides so cleverly in the minister’s study. Measure by measure, death’s overture pulses like the black arch-mouths of Saint Nicholas’s bell-tower reflected in the Kryukov Canal, formalism’s golden spire swimming like a fishtail, black orifices contracting rapidly and sexually, more alive in their distorted untouchability than the “real” arches which overlook them. The future’s darling gazes down at that trembling goldfish, then reaches. His mother smiles, pulling him away.
He was a year old when Bloody Sunday destroyed the Russian people’s faith in their Tsar. When he was nine, his mother began to teach him piano. I’ve read that she herself had been a credible pianist before her marriage; her shy, skinny son sat down beside her on the mahogany bench reluctantly, if family tradition can be trusted, but—proof that parents always know what’s best for their children—at the end of the third lesson, the mother announced to the family that he had “talent.” The little owl’s eyes rolled.
The actress N. L. Komarovskaya remembers how even when he was “a small pale youth with a disobedient lick of hair on his forehead,” his prankishness went against the grain. They would tell him to play a foxtrot, for example, and although he’d try (unlike generations of Party activists, Komarovskaya herself remained sure that he honestly intended to be agreeable), his fingers would soon begin to gallop into an incessance completely removed from zeal; then alien improvisations kidnapped the melody, leaving harsh crazed chittering behind. Didn’t he understand his errors? Since he remained too young to be guilty of cynicism, nobody knew whether to call him shy, incompetent or merely bewildered.—His compositions are very good, said Cousin Tania. Of course, some of them one cannot understand from the first hearing.—He looked up, as if he heard somebody calling. In truth, whenever his fingertips settled upon a piano, the white keys took on a brilliance as lovely as icicles on a roof when the late-afternoon sun touches them, while the black keys became slits in the whiteness of the world, holes which gaped from meaning all the way down to pure music. What was he to do? Lost, deliciously dazzled, he played the ineffable.