Running along like a musical errand-boy to earn his cash, he winked one owl-eye. He’d fooled the world, and how happily everything rushed on! (Mitya to Glikman, with the radio set to maximum blare so that no one could overhear: So Stalin, the Politburo and all the other brass hats are riding down the Volga in a big, you know, steamship, which suddenly, I suppose on account of, er, Trotskyite saboteurs, starts to sink. If it goes down instantly, who will be saved? Come on, Isaak Davidovich, it’s easy: The people of the USSR!) Germanic oompahs, marches, good feelings all around, swelling heartbeat-drumbeats sped onto the score-sheets with a newness entirely bereft of self-doubt. Our self-satisfied young composer strutted onto the stage of his own dreams even when he was just sitting in the front row with his arms folded, a shy smile on his face. His mother was still proud of him and his biography was clean. Glazunov, Malko and other luminaries assured him of his virtue. Unmolested yet by what for diplomatic reasons we’ll continue to call “the world,” he retained such high purity of intention that his secret bunkers of harmony remained unpoisoned by any stray gas cannister. Boom! Moaning again, Tatyana Glivenko closed her eyes, hoping that her husband wouldn’t find out. As the genius lowered his face onto hers, her long black eyelashes became twelve octaves of piano keys.
About “New Babylon” he didn’t care, I said. But the following year, his score to the ballet “Dynamiada” suffered an equally premature death. On the verge of exasperation (what an innocent he still was!), he tried to talk back to the activists in their dark, pigsnouted propaganda trucks. Sollertinsky had taught him to smoke fancy “Kazbek” cigarettes. He offered them all around, but the activists frowned and refused to accept them. Why were they like that? He pointed out for the tenth time that his grandfather had been a revolutionist in Siberia, and, moreover, that if his best music was like no one else’s, that was all the more reason for it to be cherished by the State. Unfortunately, Comrade Stalin had directed that only material in explicit conformity to the Party line should be published.
His friends advised him to safeguard himself. Didn’t he want to continue his ascent? They said to him: Throw something to the wolves, even an old bone! Don’t worry, Dmitri Dmitriyevich; it’ll be a purely rhetorical sacrifice…
His former mentor Malko had now emigrated to the capitalist zone. Accordingly, he was beyond reach of the Party. Moreover, Shostakovich had never respected him. Biting his cheek, he wrote that open letter to Proletarian Musician, denouncing himself for having permitted Malko to conduct a Shostakovich foxtrot. Such light music (he humbly submitted) ought to be liquidated utterly, for it was a dangerous bourgeois infiltration.
He was ashamed, of course. How could he not be? His well-wishers reminded him that he hadn’t done Malko any harm, that Malko (who never forgave him) could not understand current conditions here, and that by submitting to orthodoxy before submission was demanded, he’d avoided the worst.
The worst? he inquired, pursing his feminine little lips. And what would that be?
Don’t even talk about it, Dmitri Dmitriyevich! By the way, is it true that Nina Varzar has been casting her gaze at you? She’s a very determined girl, I hear. Whatever she sets out to get, she…
In spite of such precautions, his Third Symphony, the prudently named “Mayday,” sustained an outright attack. Everybody warned him to be careful, but he ran two fingers through his cowlick and laughed. He still possessed deep echelons of self-faith.
In 1931 he composed the music for N. P. Akimov’s fast-paced film version of Hamlet, from which most soliloquys had been stripped so as to avoid distracting the masses. They say that it came to him so easily that he composed most of it at halftime at Lenin Stadium. Once, when the Dynamos made some especially spectacular play, he jumped up and down so crazily that the score blew out of his pocket! He wrote it all over again in a twinkling. The phallic satire of the flute scene—a brainchild of the composer, it’s said—became notorious. To amuse himself, he told The New York Times: Thus we regard Scriabin as our bitterest musical enemy. Why? Because Scriabin’s music tends to an unhealthy eroticism. Then he rushed off to bed with Tatyana Glivenko.
We dynamited the Cathedral of Christ the Savior—another victory against reaction. We put more Mensheviks on trial and demanded that they be shot; it was in all the newspapers. Counterrevolutionaries made confessions in court and then disappeared.—Well, well, said Shostakovich’s friends, maybe they’re guilty after all.
That same year saw the premiere of his ballet “Bolt,” which dealt with the theme of industrial sabotage. A critic in Rabochii i Teatr wrote that the reaction of the people to such misguided entertainment should serve as a last warning to its composer.
The most infallible source on this period is of course our Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which states: In the 1930s, Soviet musical culture made notable advances. Its restructuring was essentially completed. Even now, Shostakovich refused to comprehend that he must get restructured. Against the best advice he persisted in pretending that the judgment in Rabochii i Teatr had been only a critic’s grumble, not a hint from the “organs” of the state. After all, how could he bear to go on living, if he couldn’t keep hooting his own owl-songs? (Meanwhile, Akhmatova was writing in her forbidden lyrics that in this place, peerless beauties quarrel / for the privilege of wedding executioners.) Time to nest! At the center of the Conservatory’s square spiral, where in the past he’d studied and in the future he’d teach, our pale grub enthroned himself behind a piano, sheltered on all sides by the barrels of outward-pointing tubas, trumpets, French horns; their practitioners dwelt in turn within the collective porcupine whose quills were the bows of violinists. Then came the grey four-storey walls, decorated with bas-relief wreaths and the occasional lyre. Next, the hedges. Around them, the tilted diamond of Theater Square defined its outline-segments with edifices: the Kirov Theater, of course, where his infamous “Lady Macbeth” would soon premiere; the blocky mazes on the way to Rimsky-Korsakoff Prospect, the canal-curving apartment-fronts, and finally the walled courtyards of the Yusupov Palace, where Rasputin had met his quadruply hideous end. But all these comprised merely the inner defenses of D. D. Shostakovich. Theater Square lies at the southwest extremity of a long island surrounded by the intersections of the Moika River, the Griboedova Canal, and then the Kryukov Canal, which strikes the Moika again. Nor is this all, for the island lies within the greater one formed by the confluence of two watery arcs: the Neva and the Fontanka Canal (the latter of which will take you to Akhmatova’s residence). Here is the center of Leningrad itself. The city encircles and protects us here. Someday there will be still another circle, whose inward-pointing evil causes us to black out our windows. Their four-hundred-and-twenty-millimeter railroad guns will enjoy a range of seventeen miles. They’ll erect posters: HITLER—THE LIBERATOR. The front line will be death’s ballroom, where besiegers and besieged get frozen into a stale contredanse. But these precognitions, which carry with them the sensations of perishing in an airless room, remained beyond the pale to Shostakovich. In other words, both the music which he loved so much and the utilitarian melody-silk which he spun out as easily as a spider still seemed to him to coexist within the same wholeness. In his nightmares he got glimpses of things; and the music itself (the purest music, at least) enkindled itself with sadness. No matter. Such was his nature. Although it got ever more frequently said that this precocious intellectual with his elitist pretensions enjoyed no hope of composing songs with the mass appeal of, for instance, K. Ia. Listov’s “The Machine-Gun Cart,” in 1932 Shostakovich’s “Song of the Counterplan” (Opus 33) sounded continually on the lips of the people. Hearing them hum his melody on the trams made him as happy as if he were rolling his tongue to yell in concert with his cronies at football games. Ponderous, happy, military-march-ish, the “Counterplan” hallooed and hurrahed as if we were all really going somewhere, sentimental woodwinds alternating with delightfully pompous brasses. The same busybodies who were always admonishing him to be careful now told him that he’d scored another victory on the cultural front! Even the capitalists liked it; they appropriated it for a Hollywood movie.21