That was the year he married the physicist Nina Varzar. (Even then he desperately sought to persuade Tatyana Glivenko to run away with him.) To Nina, who tried throughout her life to protect him from the world, he sang a lukewarm Eroticon.
She herself had been an amateur singer. He quickly broke her of the habit of uttering imperfect noises in his presence. They were not happy. His soft, pale face had plumped out a trifle by then, and in it there shone more confidence and purpose than ever. His eyes, magnified by the lenses of the dark round spectacles, absorbed their surroundings with a nervous awareness which sometimes reeked of sadness.
Shortly after the wedding, we find his sister Mariusa writing to their aunt: Our greatest fault is that we worshiped him. But I don’t regret it. For, after all, he is a really great man now. Frankly speaking, he has a very difficult character…
In 1934 he was elected deputy of the October District of Leningrad. He dreamed that he’d been called to Moscow.
Near the end of that year, Comrade Kirov got assassinated by the internationalist Trotskyite bloc (or, according to capitalist historians, by Comrade Stalin), and the great show trials commenced. Our newlywed still believed that if he only stayed away from politics, nobody would touch him. But in spite of his naive fantasies, Soviet musical culture continued to make notable advances. The poison tide was at his feet.
He was marked now, although he could not perceive it. His precious vanity sunken down into a secretive spitefulness, he went on struggling to secure himself. Through his heavy spectacles he watched and watched. I’ve read that his baby fat protected him yet a little longer, mitigating his most sarcastic grimaces into a pallid blur, so that nothing could be proved against him. Beneath that snowy flesh-armor, he further fortified his innocence within the sandcastle walls of dissonant abstractions. With women he continued to (so Sollertinsky phrased it) play the octave, meaning that he could sound the same note in the hearts of several conquests, just as a pianist simultaneously touches two F-sharps eight notes apart. But he did that just to, how should I say, get by; because the secret place he lived in chilled him with its loneliness; not even Sollertinsky understood this; Glikman and Lebedinsky, who became his closest friends after Sollertinsky’s death, never even imagined that the world beneath the black keys existed. At one point he tried to make love with as many mezzo-sopranos as he could; their luxuriant moans nourished his music into special richness. How does that Baudelaire poem go? Because I, you know, since Elena and I went our separate ways I couldn’t really, since I can’t read French, while she, anyhow, there was a rhyme, I think it was measure and pleasure, something very calm, slow, sensuous and, and, I don’t know how to, I guess it was just full of itself, like Elena’s hand gliding slowly down my back. Calm, luxurious, voluptuous, I think I remember those words, also, but nowadays it feels too, I mean I’d rather not verify it; I suppose I feel, what’s the right word, disillusioned. In short, Shostakovich fell out of step with the times. His compositions weren’t very, you know. Nina, who for all her violent temper would never give up loving and forgiving him, warned him of the bad impression he made, but he really could not control himself! A melody exploded in his head, you see, and he had to write it down! His reconnaissance-notes of alienness infiltrated the staffs of score-sheets like flat-capped, rifle-pointing silhouettes creeping through gaps in barbed wire. Of the songs which everyone else was being compelled to sing he persisted in retaining only the vaguest idea. Anyway, hadn’t his “Counterplan” won a victory? Surely they’d remember that!
In 1935, when Comrade Stalin made twelve-year-olds subject to the death penalty, and Akhmatova was writing that without hangman and gallows a poet has no place in this world, his Cello Sonata in D Minor (Opus 40) provoked the authorities’ wrathful puzzlement. All the same, Glikman’s brother Gavriil was commissioned to sculpt a bust of Shostakovich for the Leningrad Philharmonic. That being the case, the model reasoned, why should he get, you know, especially since it wasn’t as if he’d never experienced insomnia anyhow. They called him music’s Kandinsky; they named him music’s Rodchenko. Nina made a point of withholding from him the most frightening rumors that she heard at work; in too many respects, he’d never grow out of his frail childhood. Sollertinsky warned her that he was drinking heavily, and she said: You’re telling me!
About Opus 40 we might note that it was written during the months of his adulterous passion with the translator E. E. Konstantinovskaya, and that its melodies reflect those emotional and sexual vicissitudes. (She slept in his arms. He lay listening to the wind.) Elena loved him without hope, although he’d already obtained his divorce from Nina. He wavered and trembled. Now for another English lesson; let’s play the kissing game; let’s pick linden leaves on the paths in Tsarkoe Selo. All this is extremely… She gazed at him with huge dark eyes. She made him feel, how should I say, anyhow, it was irrelevant; this should never have happened, because… The more he saw her, the more painful it became and the more he longed to see her, although of course there would be other women; he had to, so to speak, follow the score. Meanwhile he soon remarried Nina, for the sake of the unborn child.
His music to the ballet “The Limpid Stream” got singled out for denunciation in Pravda. By then, forty thousand Leningraders had already been arrested in reprisal for the Kirov affair. Old Bolsheviks, engineers, generals, commissars, peasants, artists, doctors, students, whole families disappeared into the Black Marias. It was better not to ask about them. Glikman took him into the water closet, turned on the taps, and whispered into his ear that he’d seen four Black Marias in a row driving off in the direction of the marshes where Comrade Kirov used to go duck-hunting. The road dead-ended there. Shostakovich cupped his hands around Glikman’s ear and replied: That’s called, you know, dialectics.—Truth to tell, he couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. It didn’t make sense that anybody could be so, you know.
Elena Konstantinovskaya got taken for a ride in a Black Maria, and no one ever knew why. She was fantastically lucky; they released her after a year. In his nightmares, she screamed and screamed, contralto.