Akhmatova is also tuned in; she’s sure of it. Akhmatova’s sweet on Mitya. Well, what woman wouldn’t be? And Nina’s got him, lucky Nina! His grip on her life is clammy. Maybe his soccer player pals from the Dynamos have tuned in, too, if any are still alive. And of course, who knows what Comrade Stalin hears? Two violinists, seen in profile, grip the bows of their instruments determinedly, pointing them outward like bayonets. It’s a grey and dreary picture.
In Leningrad, the poetess Olga Berggolts, who in due time would find herself reciting Stalin odes to her fellow prisoners, proclaimed of Shostakovich: This man is stronger than Hitler!—Stalin himself is said to have commented that the Seventh was of as great striking power as a squadron of bombers. Pravda called it the creation of the conscience of the Russian people. Shostakovich’s fame was as blinding as the snowdrifts iced over against Leningrad walls. (I seem to see his whitish, half-boyish face blazing awfully close to pretty B. Dulova’s, both of them rapt in their concert seats in 1942.) Toscanini conducted the Seventh in Radio City, New York. The director of the Boston Symphony proclaimed: Never has there been a composer since Beethoven with such tremendous appeal to the masses. The émigré Seroff, who seems never to have met him, rushed out a biography, which begins with this justification: Today the “average” American can not only pronounce that name but even spell it. Bartók parodied the Seventh with bitter disgust—a compliment of sorts. The British Dictionary of Musical Themes quoted no less than eleven of its motifs. The bourgeois critic Layton denounced the Rat Theme, insisting that this naive stroke of pictorialism reduces the Seventh to the impotence of topical art. In the postwar era, other intellectuals who’d never been compelled to pitch their tents in necessity’s winds would soon disdain the Seventh Symphony more loudly, hearing in it a musical battleground occupied by two utterly irreconcilable antagonists: Shostakovich’s desire to express reality, and his need to please his masters. Reader, which would you choose?
Although D. D. Shostakovich was neither a Jew nor a Pole, Comrade Stalin himself has stated that the very concept of nationality is but a smokescreen used by the capitalists to prevent us from seeing class differences. As for the Party’s dictum that art must be national in form, socialist in content, that’s a mere transition scheme to wean the people gently from their hidebound categories. Therefore, I make no apologies for ending this fable with an extract from the sixteenth-century musings of a Warsaw Kabbalist named Moses Cordovero. In his Tomer Devorah, commonly translated as The Palm Tree of Deborah, it is written: God does not behave as a human being behaves. If one person angers another, even after they are reconciled the latter cannot bring himself to love the one who offended him as he loved him before. Yet if you sin and then return to God, your status is higher. As the saying goes, “Those who return to God occupy a place where even the completely righteous cannot stand.” And so it came to pass that on 11 April 1942, Shostakovich received the Stalin Prize, First Class.
At seven-o’-clock in the evening of 9 August 1942—the day that we lost the battle of Maikop—the Seventh Symphony was performed in Leningrad. How should I tell that tale? Adoring Glikman has left us a full account of his ten-day train journey from Tashkent to Kuibyshev, subsisting all the way on twenty insect-ridden meat pies; apparently there was no easier way for the refugees from the Leningrad Conservatory to obtain a copy of the score than to send him personally. Shostakovich met him at the station and then they walked home because the trams were infested with typhus. To Glikman, it was all, as usual, perfect, right down to the decent-sized divan on which I slept very comfortably for a month… I was happy just to be sitting near him and to be able to shoot covert glances at his handsome, animated face. Several days later, his hero played the Seventh on the piano, just for him, then said: You know, Isaak Davidovich, to be sure, on the whole, I, I’m happy with this symphony, but…—Glikman gazed at him in astonishment. Clearing his throat, the host refilled both glasses and murmured (Nina and the children had already withdrawn behind their curtain for the night): I believe that Elena Konstantinovskaya has been, you know, evacuated to Tashkent. Perhaps you could greet her for me. Sometimes her, um, friends call her Lyalya. Perhaps you also—no, forgive me, forgive me; that would have been personal. But do send her my respects, you understand. Just my… Actually, on second thought, it might be better not to. You’re very… But do send everyone my best wishes, and express my, um, apologies for the fact that this symphony isn’t more, you know, optimistic…—By the middle of May, the score was safely in Tashkent. (That was when Shostakovich was finally beginning to hear which of his colleagues in Leningrad had died.) In June, while the German Fascists launched Operation Blau (Kharkov had already fallen), our countervailing musicians learned their parts.
They arrived in Leningrad just as the first assault on Stalingrad began. In fact, the news could hardly have been worse. During rehearsals the audience-seats had been empty like rows of tombstones, because who could possibly be excused from digging antitank ditches? Secondary musicians were now brought back from the front, and the score (hand-copied by Glikman, runs the legend) flown in by an Li-2 airplane from Vnukovo Airport. High-ranking Party members began to appear, in obedience to the will of Comrade Stalin. Radio broadcasters ran their cables between the bas-reliefed pillars. This was by no means our first such spectacle. To celebrate the anniversary of the October Revolution we’d held a military parade in Moscow in the darkest moments of that city’s siege. Such spectacles educated the world, said Comrade Stalin, who as always proved to be correct; even the Americans were impressed. Why not repeat the lesson in Leningrad? Still and all, how strange it was that our slender, treacherously brilliant Mitya, whose fingers never stopped trembling like jellyfish tentacles, whose wife refused to sleep with him, whose mistress had married someone else and whose outlook had been convicted of the crime of formalism, should have been thus elevated, when we’d all long since agreed that his destiny was as worn as the Conservatory’s tiled floors, that his next premiere would take place in the Lubyanka’s cellars, that his so-called “musical voice” meant no more than the echoing farting of a tuba down the corridor! And it seemed stranger still that Leningrad, that city as mysterious, subtle and narcissistic, hence as distrusted, as her own poet, Anna Akhmatova, should be allowed so much radio time! But this only confirms our faith in Comrade Stalin, whose genius can build socialism out of the most unlikely bricks. (The reactionary critic Wolfgang Dömling has remarked, apologetically in my view, that it is because of this historic aura and the immense moral stature of the work that discussions about its aesthetic value appear of secondary significance.) Anyhow, for reasons best known to the “organs” Mitya did not attend his own performance.
The German Fascist High Command now stripped away most of Eleventh Army from an attack upon the Caucasian oil fields and sent it north to break Leningrad. Field-Marshal von Manstein himself was coming—a sure sign that the sleepwalker in Berlin had actually started to wake up. Field-Marshal Ritter Wilhelm von Leeb had resigned seven months ago; he’d been unable to raze the city as ordered, and our counteroffensive had neutralized a hundred thousand of his men. Three years from now this old gentleman would be squatting in the Mannheim prison yard, tracing in the dirt each bygone trench and disposition to prove to his fellow Field-Marshals, Vlasovites and