On the tenth of February, P. Kerzhentsev, who directed the All Union Committee for Artistic Affairs, publicly urged and exhorted this Shostakovich to redeem himself by studying tuneful folk music from each Soviet zone. Because only the first few bars of this comradely criticism had been orchestrated, there remained at this juncture, like a canal-reflection of the BETTER-JOYFUL slogan itself, a trembling image of hope for the composer, who might yet be proved to be no worse than an egotist who’d committed careless errors. Sing an oratorio of contrition; perform the penance demanded; carry out any subsequent expiations, and his greying life might yet again become candy-striped like the tallest dome of the Church of the Savior of the Blood (one of Leningrad’s more picturesque edifices, which our Party has now transformed into a Museum of Atheism). Several individuals, who so far forgot the common decency and their own security as to wish him well, remarked that the energy which he must now spend to clear himself would distract him from his apprehensions. If he only did as he’d been told, they said, the next few measures might be sunnier.
Shostakovich was silent, then humbly ambiguous. He requested a meeting with Comrade Stalin. Unfortunately, Comrade Stalin did not seem to be so disposed.
Whispering every night with Nina, he tried to determine what had offended that bastard. Then he got out of bed; he could hardly get to sleep anymore even if he got drunk. What was that sound? He sat on the piano bench shivering, his shirt buttoned up to the neck, staring downward through his thick glasses as if a score-sheet lay virgin-ready in his lap. Loneliness had penetrated through his egotism first. Next he began to feel the fear.
I’m trying, you see, he whispered, to, to maintain a philosophical attitude, but at the same time it would help if I knew why. I was wondering if you’d heard anything new…
Just take it as a joke! rejoined his wife with a stinging laugh. What does it matter? Anyhow, the joke’s on both of us, I can tell you.
I… What do you mean?
Are you really such a child? Asking if I’ve heard anything new! Who’s even going to talk to me? I don’t have the nerve to borrow a cup of sugar anymore…
He tried to be funny. He said: This is only the first movement, Ninochka. In the finale they’ll have to shoot me, so I keep saying, come on, let’s, let’s at least get to the recapitulation, but it’s still only the development…
Keep laughing. I wonder if a person can laugh when they blow his head off? You are really beyond everything.
Well, well, well, well. Perhaps we both… But I really… Anyway, their speeches make my ears vomit.
Lower your voice, Mitya!
Tell me one thing, please. “Otello” is still my favorite opera of all time, and don’t you still enjoy Verdi also?
What are you getting at?
Because “Lady Macbeth” happens to be dedicated to you, I thought, well… do you like it?
Slowly she came to stand beside him, resting one arm upon the upturned piano lid. Her belt was level with his face. Her pregnant belly touched his cheek, and he, he, you know. She said: Mitya, darling, you know I was very flattered.
That’s not what I was asking. I wanted to do something important. If it’s only art, in which case I didn’t get it right then, maybe I, I,… you see, Lady Macbeth’s crimes are a protest against the life she’s trapped in, the suffocating existence of the merchant class of the last century—
You haven’t said a thing. What’s your question, exactly?
Can music attack evil? If I were to try, really sincerely, and perhaps to suffer, and to seek out the sufferings of others, or—
How could it do that?
The Baltic Fleet—
Go take a hike, said Nina. You don’t think they would rather have had bread?
So you’re saying that what I wanted to do was really, you know, impossible.
Who cares about whether it’s impossible or not? You love to torture yourself with these abstract questions. In fact, you’re so busy torturing yourself that you’ll never—
Then they won’t need to—ha, ha!—do it for me…
Please be careful, Mitya, oh, my God! What are you saying?
I do for some reason, you know, pity Katerina. As if she were actually… And if I could have made other people pity her also—
Enough with the past tense!
Then maybe somebody would even, you know, come to the rescue of some woman somewhere who happens to be as trapped as she is—
Stupidity!
And Sergei, you see, my music strips him, so to speak, naked. (I’m out of cigarettes.) Through his air of slick haberdasher oozes the future kulak who, if he hadn’t been sentenced to hard labor, would have become a merchant exploiter—
Where do you get all this from? You’re talking as if we’re in public!
No, no! And stop interrupting me! I sincerely—
They keep telling you to apologize and apply for membership in the Party. Maybe you should just do it. Hold your nose and do it, Mitya! Never mind about me, but you’ll soon be a father, remember.
I’m going to, I, well, I’m going to make a stand. When we’re all dead they’ll see. My music will—
Mitya, listen. I allow you your mistresses and your antisocial games, which might even be crimes. Haven’t I done enough? Do I have to let you commit suicide, too?
Anyway, said he, feebly cleaning his glasses, they can threaten me as much as they like. Perhaps they won’t actually—but regardless of their threats I’m going to keep on writing the music I please.
Very noble, she said, gazing down at his twitching hands. And what about your family?
Ninusha, you know I didn’t mean it like that.
What’s that book you keep hiding under the cushion?
Oh, it’s—you see? Just an album of press clippings. Glikman was obliging enough to, well, I, I started keeping it last month, to see where my fault lies, so to speak. But, you know, I can’t find it.
And he stutteringly commenced yet again to run through everything in the opera which might have been considered incorrect. (Nina’s double shadow terrified him upon the ceiling.) Was it the police extortion in Act III, which could have been construed as a dig against our security organs? Then again, Comrade Stalin, being a busy man, might have overlooked the irony of the Amen sung by the workers when Katerina’s father-in-law, poisoned by her, gives up his nasty ghost. (It might well be, given the earnestness of our anti-religious campaign nowadays, that one should never say Amen even in jest. This thought just now occurred to him. Mitya had grown up at last.) Turning to the music itself, he worried about the sadistic-sardonic music of the lashes striking Sergei’s back while Katerina, watching helplessly from her window, shrieks in perfect time with each stroke. Someone might misconstrue that. Perhaps the abstract chromatism of the first entr’acte should have been toned down—
Are you kidding? said Nina. It’s the entire opera that they take issue with! But I’m glad you see (she went on sarcastically) that the “organs” may not appreciate your denunciation of police corruption, and that maybe, just maybe, in this day and age, the vanguard might not be thrilled that you put in two priests and a ghost…
Glikman and his wife want to pay us a visit. Do you think that you can prepare something, if it’s not too much for you in your, you know? I was hoping that perhaps—
You haven’t even heard my argument, and I’m going to bed. You think you know what I’m saying, so you don’t even listen. I’m not against you, Mitya, you know that. But just because everybody keeps telling you to toe the line just a little…