Europe Central

Notes

1

If this organism does in fact reside in Moscow, then I presume that the cranial casing partakes of Soviet duralumin—an excellent variety, called kol’chugaliuminii, which was developed by Iu. G. Muzalevskii and S. M. Voronov.

2

Exegesis easily uncovers other ironies: The purple-cloaked priest, it is written, was as exasperated as his victims, because this marriage prevented him from renting the extra room of Lenin’s house which the bride and her mother would now occupy. (Had she remained unmarried, Krupskaya would have been remanded to the locality of Ufa.) And perhaps he scented the godlessness of the convict spouses. What must he have made of Krupskaya’s abashedness, Lenin’s sarcastic smiles? How might he have proceeded, had he understood that this church of his, by sealing the union of these two helpmeets, was hastening its own destruction, and his?

3

Upon his own escape from Siberia to England in 1902, Trotsky had likewise found them working in separate quarters. “Nadyezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya… was at the very centre of all the organization work,” he writes in his memoirs. “In her room there was always a smell of burned paper from the secret letters she heated over the fire to read.”

4

Blind faith, one might say. In Siberia she went literally and mysteriously blind for three years, but upon her blindness was engraved the secret alphabet of her cause. Under the influence of the terrorist Spiridovna, she swore to be patient, and someday to execute justice. And then, as if by magic, the world revealed itself once more to her sight.

5

Arguably Fanya Kaplan had, as exegetes like to say, “wrought better than she knew,” since the bullet remaining in Volodya’s neck proved to be a time bomb. Nearly three years later, the doctors finally decided to remove it, and although the operation was a success, scarcely two days later he suffered the first of the cerebral hemorrhages which were to carry him off.

6

Job 3:25.

7

Proverbs 16:33.

8

Literally, SHEKHINAH, the female aspect of Jehovah.

9

R. H. McNeal in his drily reliable Bride of the Revolution goes so far as to write that very likely Krupskaya lived out her life in the consoling belief that Fanya Kaplan was alive in jail.

10

In the last photographs taken before her widowhood one already finds a dourly absent expression upon her heavyset features, even when everyone else is smiling.

11

In 1924 our fellow traveler Otto Nagel had opened the first German arts exhibition in the Soviet Union. Käthe Kollwitz was represented. No one came out against her.

12

Surprisingly, as late as 1939 they’ll allow her a tiny entry in Meyers Lexikon: She was born; she received a German education; she’s been a wife since 1891. Her expressive pages are not free from the class-battle standpoint used for Communist propaganda. That knock on the door, when will it come? When it does, three years after her enforced resignation from the Prussian Academy, the Gestapo command her to disavow certain pro-Russian statements she’s made in an interview with Isvestiya. She submits. Afterward, she’ll make halfhearted plans with Karl to have poison ready. Karl, his practice already banned, will die of old age just as the sleepwalker’s tanks glide into Paris. On 23.10.43, the family flat will be destroyed by American bombers. Käthe will die in Saxony, shortly after the firebombing of Dresden. I quote from one of her very last letters: Oh, Lise, being dead must be good, but I am much too much afraid of dying, of being terribly afraid at the moment of death.

13

In fact, she is said to have resembled Tsvetaeva, especially around the mouth, although her long, dark hair, which she so often wore in bangs reaching nearly to the eyebrow, also reminded some people of that doomed poet.

14

Even Käthe Kollwitz herself copied out in her daybook Nietzsche’s letter to his sister rhapsodizing over Wagner’s “Parsifal.”

15

The so-called “D-S-C-H signature,” which will be discussed later, in my analysis of Opus 110, is by this simple criterion akin to a motif: in other words, it’s not relevant to the people. Accordingly, any references to an “E-E-K signature” must be contemptuously dismissed as anti-Soviet provocation. As we like to say, it’s no accident that even in Moser’s Musik Lexikon, published in the very first year of the Thousand Year Reich, Shostakovich gets passed over. Sousa and Serbian music are present; they’ll soon be considered enemies. Under Russische Musik, Shostakovich’s teacher Glazunov receives a nod on page 721, and below him a Gruppe Glasunow sits reverentially assembled. Glazunov, you see, was a classicist; Shostakovich is a formalist. Even the German Fascists know poison when they see it.

16

Americans.

17

In old days, kings gilded the horns of their favorite cows, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if that gold bracelet she wore was from Uncle Wolf.

18

I quote from his diary: If I myself don’t understand anything in art, what then do I understand? The “living” person and that’s all. Keep shooting live people; they get in people’s way, in the proletariat’s way. Keep shooting.

19

In the interests of justice I’m compelled to remind you of her dismissive cruelty to Nedobrovo’s wife, whom she despised for her ignorance of poetry—at least she found the husband to her taste. In the end she left the husband—she abandoned everybody!

20

It wasn’t until 1945, on the day after that foreign snake Isaiah Berlin departed, that we screwed a microphone into her ceiling. We made it visible on purpose; that saved us trouble. Next time he came to our country, she wisely refused to meet him.

21

The title of the American film says it all: “Thousands Cheer.”

22

As the Great Soviet Encyclopedia explains: “The Communist Party and the Soviet government foresaw the possibility of an armed struggle with the forces of imperialism, and, in the years of peaceful socialist development, adopted all the necessary measures to strengthen the country’s defensive abilities.”

23

It is perhaps this part which most influenced Martinov’s characterization of the third movement as a “Toccata of Death.”

24

One critic has even read into this symphony a two-note “Stalin motif” which first appears in bars four and five.

25

Simonov, whose testimony is unreliable since he seems to have also been in love with her, remembers seeing her going into the Palace Hotel in Madrid, now converted to an orphanage, and always bringing something for the children. On 24 October 1936, when the first Soviet tanks went into combat in the vicinity of Aranjuez, Elena was there in the midst of a detachment of Komsomol volunteers. Karmen saw her and was captivated. He believed her to be as attracted as he was to the Spanish carelessness for death. I’m informed that her Komsomol training stood her in good stead; the TASS journalist Mirova, who unfortunately disappeared on her return to Moscow in 1937, is said to have been drawn to her and often expressed admiration (although not to Karmen, who instinctively kept his distance from this individual as he did from the equally unlucky Koltzov of Pravda). However, what Mirova read in Konstantinovskaya as cool effectiveness, and Koltzov as a secret rage, Ehrenburg of Izvestiya, one of the few journalists to survive the purges, considered to be a calculated determination to get back in the Party’s good graces so that her spell of imprisonment in 1935 would not haunt her anymore. In his private letters, Ehrenburg writes about her with a venom akin to a rejected suitor’s. In any event, Konstantinovskaya fought bravely, winning her Order of the Red Star in the useless Brunete counteroffensive of July 1937.

26

In a photograph in an East German retrospective catalogue, we see Karmen in Loyalist uniform, but hatless, standing happily amidst his colleagues, shouldering his camera as they shoulder their rifles, with sandbags and a doorway behind them. He is the happiest man in the picture; for him, Spain seems to be a lark. His colleagues in their berets will stay and die, or else at the war’s sad end flee into internment camps in France. But this cruel and ignorant interpretation of a brave man’s smile neglects two facts: First, while he was with them, he ran at least as great a risk as they; secondly, he believed, and rightly, that only by inflaming the world, for instance through the camera-propaganda of R. L. Karmen, could the Spanish cause hope to triumph.

27

How far should one go with the enemy? Zoya herself will tell you: Not one inch! But G. Vodyanischkaya, who played Zoya, was certainly willing to follow Arnshtam’s script; isn’t one of the qualities we most prize in an actress acquiescence? Several reels of Karmen’s private footage disappeared immediately after his death in 1978, but I have it on good authority that he persuaded two starlets to let him film them kissing; this footage he reviewed over and over late at night at the Studio of Documentary Films, trying to accept Elena for who she was. Long after they’d separated forever, he would experience occasional flashes of rage when he happened to see two women sitting alone at a table in a restaurant, gazing into each other’s eyes.

28

The New York Times calls it grimly gratifying, but adds: Except for an obvious partiality toward the Soviet prosecutors, the film might have been assembled by any competent craftsman among the Allies.

29

The Russian title, Grenada, Grenada, Grenada Moya, sounds even more like a love song.

30

In our Soviet Union, of course, one may only be apolitical in the most enthusiastic and even militant fashion. It’s said that on one occasion Vlasov, having just denounced the brutal, hypocritical murderousness of a certain article in Pravda, was interrupted by the visit of a Party apparatchik. Quickly he began to praise the selfsame article. When the guest had gone away at last, Vlasov’s wife, standing numbly in the kitchen doorway, said to him, “Andrei, can you really live like that?”

31

Here we might as well insert another allegory. The metal of the day was steel. Hitler and Mussolini had their Pact of Steel, “Stalin” is a quite literally steely pseudonym; all hearts riflemen smiled at Vlasov, smoking their mahorka cigarettes. Then they went and died for him. The arc-welder’s glare whenever a tank was hit became their own eternal flame. Nonetheless, our attack faltered and froze. were supposed to be hardened and armored. But it remains a sad fact that in our Soviet smelting plants we most often find steel being alloyed against corrosion by means of neither that utopian substance platinum nor even the perfectly adequate nickel; rather, manganese gets pressed into this role, because it’s abundant and cheap in the USSR. So it is also with our weapons and even our fighters…

32

Accounts of his fate vary. The reader is invited to select one element from each of the following pairs: a bullet or a noose; the Germans or the Russians.

33

Here we might note that in several accounts, Vlasov is said to have fallen into German hands in the company of a certain Maria Voronova, whose husband was being reeducated at the expense of the state, in a certain unknown location in Siberia. To make ends meet, she cooked for the Vlasov family. At Vlasov’s wife’s behest, Maria Voronova supposedly made her way to the Volkhov pocket. In a photograph commemorating their capture, the pair sit in a military vehicle whose machine-guns face the sky. Vlasov’s taut, exhausted face can be seen only in near-profile. His glasses have slipped halfway down his nose. In his hand he clutches a tapering object which might well be a German cartridge, Geco 7.65 millimeter. Maria Voronova, if indeed this pallid, kerchiefed young woman is she, has managed to retain some of her attractiveness. She sits at his side, almost smiling.

34

The Soviet claim, that he was found on the floor of a Studebaker truck, wrapped up in a roll of carpet “like a coward,” has not yet been verified.

35

According to certain émigré sources, whose provenance naturally excludes them from credibility, the accused was warned that he might be tortured to death if he didn’t cooperate. —“I know that, and I’m extremely afraid,” he is alleged to have replied. “But it would be even worse to have to vilify myself…”—The even more mendacious accusation that Vlasov and his cohorts were hanged with piano wire, a hook being inserted at the base of each skull, can be refuted with the simplest extract from the Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: “Communist morality is the noblest and most just morality, for it expresses the interests and ideals of the whole of working mankind.”

36

He kept this promise as perfectly as all the others. On 1.2.43, which is to say the day after Field-Marshal Paulus’s surrender, Generals von Weichs, von Kleist and Busch all attained to the selfsame dignity. On 1.3.44, “Hitler’s fireman,” the brave General Model, got elevated in recognition of his defensive excellence, which bought us time to gas the Hungarian Jews. The truly final Field-Marshal was Schoerner (5.4.45), a man whose commendably hysterical brutality made him long to do to the defeatists of the German General Staff what he’d already done to Russian civilians; it seems more than befitting that he received his baton from the hands of our Führer himself.

37

As we read in Gottfried’s Tristan: What harms love more than doubt and suspicion?… Yet it is far more remiss in a man to reduce doubt and surmise to certainty; since when he has gained his object and knows that his doubts are justified, the fact which he was at pains to track down becomes a grief surpassing all others.

38

Why couldn’t the human factor have been eliminated entirely? World War III, which I expect Germany to win, will be fought with robots. Then we can all hide in deep bunkers; we’ll be invulnerable. On the first afternoon of Operation Citadel, our Goliath radio-controlled explosion machines broke through at Maloarkhangelsk, but One Hundred-and-Twenty-ninth Soviet Armored Brigade defeated further penetrations. Does that fact invalidate our Goliaths? Not at all. It’s merely that we didn’t have enough of them.

39

Here once again let’s quote Count Hermann Keyserling’s Das Spektrum Europas, which never goes out of date: Germany is the conscience of mankind… the mirror of the world.

40

Comrade Ulbricht had already proven helpful to us during the Spanish Civil War, when he’d prepared Trotskyite volunteers for liquidation. He declined to smile for R. L. Karmen’s cine-camera. From her own experience, Elena Konstantinovskaya knew exactly what he was and avoided him in terror. Comrade Leonhard remembers him as follows: Being entirely innocent of theoretical ideas or personal feelings, to the best of my knowledge he never failed to carry out the directives transmitted to him by the Soviet authorities with ruthlessness and skill. This was exactly the sort of person we wanted to run East Germany. Somewhat to our surprise, he survived the death of Stalin by pointing out that if he himself were purged, the criminals of 17.6.53 might be emboldened; and, after all, nothing must accrue to the advantage of these subversive elements. In 1969, A. A. Grechko, Marshal of the Soviet Union, who’d commanded the Soviet Union’s fraternal armed forces in Germany from 1953 through 1957, was overheard to say: The old one isn’t worth much anymore. And indeed, in 1971 Ulbricht was ousted by our new man, Comrade Honecker.

41

As the Great Soviet Encyclopedia explains, “the Western Powers… increasingly sabotaged the work of the Allied Control Council, and in March, 1948, wrecked it completely.”

42

The last three notes of this, stressed, sudden and sinister, recall in equal measure the triple knuckle-taps through which Russians in public places warn one another of the appearance of a known police agent, and the three short blasts of the all-clear which in an ominous reversal of their customary meaning admonish good Germans to prepare themselves for a possible air raid.

43

In fact the word which predominates in “Lady Macbeth” even more than the languorously salivary tselúy, kiss me, is—boredom.

44

Here we must footnote the dark elegance of “Babi Yar”’s poet, Yevtushenko, who often posed for photographs with his hand on his heart, while Shostakovich smiled beside him anxiously.

45

“I can testify that nobody I knew fought,” writes Nadezhda Mandelstam. “All they did was lie low. That was the most that people with a conscience could do—and even that required real courage.”

46

In fact, within a few years of Shostakovich’s death, the New York critics were deriding Cliburn for “superficiality.” His repertoire dwindled. In his tour of 1994 he played nothing but Rachmaninoff’s Third, and that first Tchaikovsky concerto which had brought him his freakish fame. (The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, however, which since the dissolution of the USSR can now never be superseded by a new edition, continues to praise his spontaneity, straightforward lyricism, exultant sound and impetuous dynamism.). I am told that he opens every performance with a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

47

The finer detail of our Ortho-Mx projections is the result not only of a higher organized nervous sensibility and improved moral accutance, but, above all, of absolute technological superiority. The millions of colors and tonal zones which we Americans now enjoy look better than ever, thanks to the cooperation of private industry. Digital smoothing is now underway. Before the next war breaks out, we hope to entirely eliminate every intra-atomic space.

48

Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier, trans. Lily Emmet (New York: Harper and Row, 1971 trans. of original 1967 French ed.), p. 71. The forgotten soldier was Alsatian, and he served with the Wehrmacht. He missed the sound of steel boots on cobblestones, a detail which I have pilfered for “Clean Hands.”

49

My own assessment of the man has much to do with the following remark in “Lost Victories” (p. 533): “I can only say that it was not granted to me—as one who had for several years past been engrossed in arduous duties at the front—to perceive Hitler’s real nature, or the moral deterioration of the régime, to the extent to which we can obviously do today. Rumors of the kind that circulated at home hardly penetrated to the front, perhaps least of all to ourselves.” I can accept this to an extent, but, as the Nuremberg Trial verdicts insisted, blindness at some point becomes culpability. Moreover, what does “moral deterioration” mean? Did he think the Third Reich to be moral at its inception? Did the mass murder of the Brownshirts and the opening of concentration camps at the very beginning not trouble him?