It is, I am sure, no aspersion on Mitya to remark that for the sake of financial self-sufficiency, prestige, and above all, the leisure to whirl down within the secret well of his own mind’s ear, hunting for that Beauty which alone defined his life, he’d kept compromising with the world. For example, he now wrote program music on occasion. How was that any different from playing the accompaniments to silent movies at Bright Reel? Besides, as Sollertinsky loyally pointed out, the employment of a motif was not at all inconsistent with sophistication, or even with the outright obscurity which Mitya still found so hilarious. Even Wagner wasn’t bad at times, and if we could take his leitmotifs and run rings around them, maybe play a few ventriloquists’ tricks so that nobody else could even imagine that this could be Wagner, what a laugh! That was how Mitya looked at it. Although it might be irritating to him to do as others told him to do, as long as he could build secret trapdoors and escape hatches into every score, so that the world beneath the piano keys hadn’t been forgotten, he was still living on his own terms. Ancient masons used to wall up a live victim in each temple or bridge they built; when he was much older Mitya would immure himself in just this way in the cornerstone of his Opus 110; but for now there was no need to be as drastic as that. He might not enjoy his audience’s full comprehension; but he still enjoyed its indulgence, which, now that I think of it, is not such a bad thing to have. If I bow to Lenin’s memory and then create what I please, have I been any more constrained than a poet would be by the arbitrariness of rhyme? And so Mitya could still go on thinking rather well of himself. Moreover, pontificated Sollertinsky while he and Mitya stood drunkenly pissing into the Neva, consider M. Tsvetaeva’s “Poem of the End,” whose language wheels round and round variations of the word ruchka, hand. It was the wheeling-around which impressed him, not the ruchka. Didn’t Mitya himself believe that content was irrelevant? Hadn’t everything already been said? Our task was to say it in a new way, that’s all. Now listen! And Sollertinsky recited the first six stanzas, which recapitulated the writer’s feelings about getting jilted by some White Guardist in Prague. Forbidden fruit! thrilled Mitya, because if Tsvetaeva had slept with a class enemy then she was a class enemy, which made her poems all the more secret, illicit, exciting. Anytime she wanted, he’d certainly grant her a visa to come play with him beneath the piano keys… (By the way, she was supposed to be pretty, with half-lesbian tastes.) If it were therefore permissible (I’m speaking in the, the, you know, the highest aesthetic sense) for Tsetaeva to write program music, as Mussorgsky and probably even Shakespeare had also done, then why couldn’t our D. D. Shostakovich pick up a few kopeks composing the odd cinema score, or inject a few bars of the Marseillaise into some piece of orchestral hackwork, especially if during the premiere he whispered biting quips into Sollertinsky’s ear, to prove that he’d mutilated his creations in full knowledge, in which case it wasn’t mutilation at all? Oh, me, oh, dear!
Those nasty fellow pupils who’d baited him in the Conservatory’s hallways, Malko’s well-meaning, pompous obstructionism, these and other quantities which before now he’d only recognized in isolation now thrust themselves upon him as the warp and woof of society itself, weighing him down like so many sheets of fine muslin which kept falling over his face. He brushed them off, and more came swirling down. Had he allowed himself to dwell overmuch on where they came from, he might have panicked. I for one can only pity him. All he wanted was breathing-space. Nobody thinks it reprehensible to lose time in carrying out the excretory functions of the bodies in which our creativity is for the moment nested; nor do we protest the drudgery of breathing which is usually required to sustain our projects. Wasn’t it excusable, then, for Shostakovich to carry out the wishes of others in certain well-delineated respects (especially since he could write music so easily), in order to gain the wherewithal to please himself for the rest of the time? He still believed in himself; indeed, that undistinguished Second Symphony, and the public utterances which it had become advisable to make, testified to his belief: The end justifies the means. Just before he took his bow, he whispered in Sollertinsky’s ear: Ruchka, ruchka. He was really as pleased as could be. After every concert, there’d be a party in his flat on Nikolayevskaya Street, Shostakovich playing the piano, the guests dancing, shouting out toasts and flirting with his mother, breaking glass, arguing over what was truly Russian, how to salvage something from Mussorgsky (at the end of his life, Shostakovich would re-orchestrate that composer’s “Dances of Death”); and while the world whirled on around him, its citizens drinking until the very last tram, Shostakovich arranged a rendezvous with the latest girl, simultaneously trotting out Sollertinsky’s skill at creating trilingual puns on demand; Meyerhold dropped by so that his stuck-up wife Zinaida could show herself off; Rodchenko had an idea about a new photocollage; I. D. Glikman was there to offer his starstruck services in adjusting the composer’s necktie, and I think that Lev Lebedinsky might have been present, too; his sister Mariya cut up the last smoked fish and begged everybody to eat; Zinaida scolded Meyerhold for taking too big a fillet; Sollertinsky told another Akhmatova joke; Shostakovich cocked his head, blinking from behind his crystal-clean spectacles, and finally they were gone, his mother snoring happily in the armchair. He closed the piano silently. Then his long fingers, which unlike the rest of him remained sober, began to spider across the sheets of music paper. Someday he’d compose a passage that was even better than the “Fate” motif in Beethoven’s Fifth; he’d pull himself higher and higher! He didn’t know cold musical tricks in those days; music gushed out of his fingertips in orgasms of joy; what a young artist lacks in craftsmanship he often makes up for in sincerity; even when principle demands that he withhold, he can’t avoid giving of himself. That’s why the early cinema music of Shostakovich often evinces superiority to the later—no matter that neither one achieves parity with the “Fate” motif. In response to the Leninist slogan Fewer but better he infused all the major-keyed hum-alongs now upwelling from his grimaces and grins with over and over, louder and louder.