He’d retreated somewhat, to be sure; he’d fallen back to his inner line. If you didn’t know, you might call it, well, an agreeably stereotyped situation: children and all that, I mean. For instance, Galina, Galya, Galotchka, Galisha, what a girl she was! Her second birthday had been a star performance, although for some reason Nina had been very, never mind. From her he learned that to a child all things are pure. He envied her and felt ashamed. As for Maxim, that red-faced creature, nicknamed Opus 2, wasn’t quite six weeks old. Sollertinsky said… Shostakovich knew that a father was supposed to get involved with his offspring. Well, why get overly specific? He wasn’t going to wash his hands of anything. As far as his so-called “career” went (don’t make me, you know, laugh), his hope was that he could still write the music he chose, but only on occasion and only if he presented it obsequiously enough. Glikman advised him to write more movie music, with lots and lots of upbeat chorus numbers; we all knew who’d like that! And if he could, so to speak, keep from being affected personally…
Although he was now officially known as “the enemy of the people Shostakovich,” the “organs” nonetheless permitted him to rent a dacha near Luga, because it wasn’t their way to strike always the same chord; and it was there that he slept in Elena Konstantinovskaya’s arms for the very last time. It was July, so I’ve been told; he rose in the humid white morning to watch sun-play and leaf-play, which Lebedinsky later claimed to find in his Sixth Symphony; when he came back to bed, she was awake and almost dressed.—Did I tell you, Elena (it’s really quite hilarious) that, that Glikman tried to persuade me to write an opera, well, more likely it would be an operetta, about a Red Army man and a priest’s daughter in Spain? Because Spain, you see, is, well, with the civil war and all, it’s a crucible of world struggle; Glikman hypothesizes that Comrade Stalin might, so to speak, like that. Have you seen “Salute, Spain”? I won’t see it. Sometimes Glikman is very… Then I could put “Lady Macbeth” behind me. That’s his notion, and—Elenka dearest, why are you crying?—I’m going to Spain, and I’ll never come back, she said. And I’ve drawn a heart on the wall, behind the head of the bed where they’ll never see, and in the heart I wrote our initials. I don’t want you to look at it. And I won’t kiss you again, not ever.
In the autumn of 1938, not long before the first snowfall, he announced that his next symphony would be dedicated to Lenin. Thin, anxious, pale, distinguished by a knife-sharp profile, he promised to include folk songs, too. But at the premiere, not a single reference to Lenin could be found. The critics sneered that the finale of this Sixth so-called Symphony was nothing more than the recapitulation of a football match; he never to the end of his life forgot that humiliation, but at least his life did not feel threatened. For some reason there was a lull in the terror. Indeed, by 1941 his Piano Quintet in G Minor (Opus 57) had in spite of several secret denunciations received a Stalin Prize, category one.
In the press he read that the volume of production in Leningrad was now 12.3 times higher than it had been in 1913. He read that the Kirghiz composer A. Maldybaev’s “Aichviek” (The Lunar Beauty) was now considered “a Soviet classic.” This last item reminded him of his sister Mariya, still languishing in Middle Asia.
He lurked out of sight with his family, which The Soviet Way of Life defines as a socio-biological community of people characterized by matrimonial or kindred relations, living together and having a common budget. He and Nina sat in silence together, reading the Red Evening Gazette. To Glikman, who saved all his letters and from whom he concealed much, his voicelessness was almost literally godlike: Nothing perturbed the great Shostakovich! But they kept the curtains drawn. Whenever anyone knocked on the door, Nina gasped. He tried not to betray any emotion, but his fingers remained uncontrollable. He rose to clasp Nina tight against his terrified heart. He pretended to be kissing her, so that he could whisper in her ear: This is our life…—Sometimes late at night they could hear faint volleys from the Peter and Paul Fortress. Who was dying in the cellars? Galisha woke up and tried to hide; Nina worried that she would smother herself beneath the pillows. Oh, what a comic life we lead! I hold Galya in my arms and I feel better; then I’m ashamed of feeling better, because she’s going to grow up alone. Well, well, I love my daughter; no doubt that fact speaks for itself. Shunned by the righteous and the prudent, he expected that midnight knock, followed by the one-way trip in a Black Maria. Elena had told him how it went. No wonder the celebrated “horror” of his Fifth Symphony, which in the words of S. Volkov expressed the feelings of the intellectual who tried in vain to hide from the menacing outside world. And now from that outside world came bombs, murk, lights and tanks.
Although it was the program music of the Seventh Symphony which would make him famous, the course of the war is better symbolized by the first three movements of his incomparably greater Eighth Symphony in C Minor (an unwholesome work, to be sure, for its pessimism deviates from the Party line). The opening theme truly does bear comparison with the “Fate” motif of Beethoven’s Fifth, but whereas the urgency of the German melody is tempered by its composer’s autumnal mellowness, Shostakovich’s version strikes us as harshly as a Russian winter. The apples have fallen, snow is here, and destiny holds out no possibility of anything but evil. The deep, thrumming resonance of the very first chord evokes a community united only by sleep. Wickedness hovers outside the frosty windows of Leningrad. This wickedness is on the march; and the Eighth Symphony, compressing time like the walls of a condemned cell, hastens its arrival. In my own dreams on the nights before the anniversaries of bad days, I sometimes see my death as a tall shadow bending over me, warning in a soft baritone voice that I’d better rise up and get ready, for it’s time to leave my warm bed forever. But it’s still night, and it’s so cold outside; I don’t want to wake into that dream! And who is this shadow? It can’t really be death; how could I possibly die? Russia for her part couldn’t perceive even the outlines of the figure which menaced her, thanks to the Nazi-Soviet Pact which Comrade Stalin had so wisely signed in 1939. No longer could we denounce Hitler as a Fascist. We’d united with him against the imperialist Franco-British bloc.22 When Germany swallowed western Poland, the Soviet Union upheld the interests of the oppressed proletariat and overran the east. Now only rivers and barbed wire stood between us. Diplomats called this expedient partition the Ribbentrop-Molotov Line, and in military maps it was black with swastikas and arrows on the left, blood-red with stars and arrows on the right. Every general who dared to warn of militarypreparations on the German side, of tanks and planes massing, got threatened with death.
In Berlin, that other composer, Adolf Hitler, was putting the final dispositions on the score of his Thirteenth Symphony: Skizze B: Heeresgruppe Nord. Eigene Lage am 22.6.1941 abds. Operation “BARBAROSSA.” Roman numerals, an hourglass flag, checkerboard flags, numerals inside circles and semicircles, all of these stood dark upon a pale grey map of western Russia. The plural of staff is staves. His General Staff were all staves and knaves stacked one above another in parallels on the music paper. His score had no end. Shostakovich, it’s said, could write twenty or thirty pages a day when well engaged upon a symphony, and Heeresgruppe Nord, Army Group North, would make similarly rapid progress across the pale grey flatness en route to Leningrad. The other two Army Groups proved equally exemplary. Before their symphony was done, they’d kill almost as many high-ranking Russian officers as had Comrade Stalin himself.
22
As the