Ovation followed ovation! I don’t know what his mother said, but everybody else was rapturous; they had to encore the scherzo…
After that, Mitya’s harmonic experiments only grew more daring, almost obscene, as was the case with his first opera, “The Nose” (Opus 15)—“no accident” that that got denounced as a piece of formalist decadence. Boom! There’s the Nose himself, wearing a tophat, singing crossed-legged under a Modigliani-like nude.—Tatyana laughed so hard she almost threw up. Then she pulled Mitya into bed, calling him her little genius. Perhaps she wasn’t the only one. But he had to run away now; he had an interview with Proletarian Musician. Could he please explain his intentions to the public?—Well, giggled Mitya, but why shouldn’t I give them a little, you know? I mean, I, I, well, when you consider Rodchenko’s spatial constructions, they’re like, um, plywood robots! So why can’t I get wacky? He didn’t experience any repercussions. Those so-called “non-objective sculptures” are really… There’s one that raises its arm like a railroad signal, which for some reason gives me a, a, so to speak, a hard-on…—Long before dawn on a winter morning, Mitya spied them crowding excitedly beneath the stone awning of the Kirov Theater, although naturally it wasn’t called that yet; Kirov was still alive: old ladies hobbling on aching feet, tall men in fur caps, students, intellectuals. Gazing at the schedules in the glass boxes, they waited to buy their tickets to “The Nose.”—Please forgive me, he said to the activists who tried to point out his errors. “The Nose” was just a, let’s call it a mere prelude! Wait till you see my… I mean, now that you’ve enlightened me, I’ll follow the Party line more closely in all my subsequent operas…—The activists were satisfied. On the other hand, what if he were being sarcastic? Throughout Leningrad (a city riven into semiautonomous zones by its canals) it was said that he and his friends all belonged to that faction which fetishizes the so-called “freedom of the artist.” Those were Akhmatova’s half-wild days; even Mandelstam was still allowed to sing. But Mitya, permeated with restless vulnerability, appeared so unself-reliant, thanks to his awkwardness, that he must be docile. His well-wishers at the Conservatory continued to advise him for his own good, and thought they must be going crazy when each note remained nonetheless his own. Women committed similar errors. Because he loved so passionately, they were sure of bringing him round to fidelity. I’ve read that he often recollected with longing and regret his summer of free love with the nubile Tatyana Glivenko. Stretching out her arms like the double bars which lock ascending notes into a kindred beat, she called him Mitenka. In her orgasms he heard her moaning coloratura. She craved to take him brightly and forever, but, refusing to be trapped in only one key, he equivocated until she’d married somebody else. After that, he kept trying to coax her back. This phase ended only when her husband got her pregnant. Then Mitya tumbled into a confused darkness.
Let’s call him a soloist. If he’d only lived in ancient times (and, of course, been blueblooded), what a life he could have composed! Until the end of the eighteenth century, so I’ve read, any leading symphonist remained free to show off his virtuosity by improvising a cadenza near the end of the last movement. Beethoven became the first composer to abrogate this liberty. He wrote all the cadenzas himself. Lenin and Stalin composed still stricter rules; for in order to safeguard the Revolution, we needed to consolidate, not deviate. Comrade M. Kaganovich sounded the theme: The ground must tremble when the factory director enters the plant. Meanwhile, Proletarian Musician said that if Shostakovich failed to admit that he’d taken a wrong turn, then his work will infallibly reach a dead end. But he wouldn’t understand that, even though in his interviews with the press he dutifully recited: To be sure, I, I, obviously music cannot help possessing a political basis…—Dark hair curled down his brow in a sea-wave. The talent which bubbled so purely from his heart intoxicated him. It gave him such joy that he—poor boy!—thought himself entitled to exercise his genius in his own way. But the black court carriages of the old regime had fled, and their red lanterns were dimmed forever. No dissonance before the common chord!
Looking out the Conservatory window, he saw a troop of gleeful boys come running up Theater Square, flying a kite which some Komsomols had made for them out of Bible pages (confiscated perhaps from the Smolny Convent) whose illuminated majiscules and heavy dark characters in Old Church Slavonic took on a happy rather than ludicrous appearance in the air, larking about high over those young faces. To Mitya, who’d always considered religion a joke, there was something almost inexpressibly pleasing about this spectacle. He could almost imagine that it was one of his own orchestral scores soaring up there, which would have been quite, you know. Not that he wished to be torn, scattered, cut and then glued into diamond-shapes, not by any means! But why couldn’t he compose a diamond-shaped concerto or trio which already flew? Wasn’t this the Country of the Revolution, where not to innovate was to desecrate?
In the years when Stalin’s accolytes were busily exterminating Ukrainian kulaks by the millions, Shostakovich did his stint at the Leningrad Workers’ Youth Theater, trying to create proletarian art. Pale, boyish fingers flowed out of the dark sleeves, touched the piano, and made music happen. He really did mean well. Although he gazed steadily through his round glasses at the score, he never needed it. The musicians around him with their violins wedged like rifle-stocks against their shoulders each gazed into a private pit of suffering, discovery or joy. As for him, he got lost in each world he made. His tuberculosis lasted for a decade, but nobody ever heard him complain. Slender, formal, almost elegant (although he never got the hang of bowing gravefully), he produced his flawless sounds. When others sought to help him, he listened politely.—Dmitri Dimitriyevich, pizzicato might be even more effective here, they’d say.—Yes, yes, yes! he replied with an ingratiating smile. You’re correct! Pizzicato would be a tremendous, um, improvement. But please keep it arco just this once…—Arco was the way he’d written it.
In 1929 they buried his score for the silent movie “New Babylon” after only a few performances—not for political or artistic reasons, they assured him, but because it had proved too difficult for the unskilled cinema orchestras to perform. Remembering his own unhappy career at the Bright Reel, he could well believe that the standards in the movie houses were low; moreover, his ego required only that he be able to make love to whatever Muse he liked, in whatever way he liked, not that the world adore his offspring. He didn’t care to sell himself. If they didn’t understand him, or even spread, how should I say, false impressions, well, Mitya was still free; Mitya was happy! If they rejected “New Babylon,” that didn’t put him out, because he could have written another score in two hours! Did they want him to do that?—Not exactly, my dear Dmitri Dmitriyevich, because in fact (we’re sorry to tell you this) there’ve been complaints; people prefer N. M. Strelnikov’s operetta “The Peasant Girl.”—Our boy genius didn’t care. To Sollertinsky, who rarely wore a necktie and who was now his best friend, he quipped: Overcoming the resistance of an orchestra is the work of born dictators!—Cocking his cap like a sailor from our Baltic Fleet, Sollertinsky clicked his heels and barked: Ja, mein Führer! and then they both got drunk. They agreed to be dictators together; they’d never let anybody change a single note! There was a fifteen-year-old whom Sollertinsky had heard about; she acted older; her name was Elena and she was a real secret weapon, I’m telling you, quiet on the outside and…—but just then A. Akhmatova passed by with her nose in the air, and (although they both admired her poems), they had such a fine time making fun of her behind her back that they completely forgot about this Elena.