Testimony

Introduction

BY SOLOMON VOLKOV

THE figure who lay in the open coffin had a smile on his face.

Many times I had seen him laughing; sometimes he roared with laughter. Often he had snickered or chuckled sarcastically. But I couldn't remember a smile like this: aloof and peaceful. Quiet, blissful, as though he had returned to childhood. As though he had escaped.

He liked to tell a story about one of his literary idols, Nikolai Gogol: how he had apparently escaped from his grave. When the grave was dug up (in Leningrad in the 1930s) Gogol's coffin was empty.

Later, of course, the incident was clarified; Gogol's body was found and returned to its assigned place. But the idea itself-hiding after death-was greatly enticing.

He had escaped and could not be affected by the official obituary printed in all the Soviet newspapers after his death on August 9, 1975:

"In his sixty-ninth year, the great composer of our times passed away-Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich, Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R., laureate of the Lenin and State prizes of the U.S.S.R. A faithful son of the Communist Party, an eminent public xix

and state figure, citizen artist D. D. Shostakovich devoted his entire life to the development of Soviet music, reaffirming the ideals of socialist humanism and internationalism . . . . "

And so on and so forth, in cast-iron bureaucratese. The first signature under the obituary was that of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, and then followed, in alphabetical order, the chief of the secret police, the defense minister . . . (The long list of signatures is ended by a. truly minor figure: Vladimir Y agodkin, the Moscow propaganda chief, who will be remembered only because he set bulldozers on an outdoor exhibit of dissident art in September 1974.) At the official funeral, on August 14, the top administrators from the ideological departments crowded around Shostakovich's bier.

Many of them had for years made a career of denouncing his sins.

"The ravens have gathered," a close musician friend of Shostakovich said, turning his pale face to me.

Shostakovich had known all this ahead of time; he had even written music to a poem that described the "honored" funeral of a Russian genius of another era, Alexander Pushkin: "So much honor that there is no room for his closest friends . . . To the right and the left, huge hands at their sides, the chests and crude faces of the gendarmes . . . "

Now none of this mattered: one more grotesque scene, one more contradiction, could not worry him. Shostakovich had been born in the midst of contradictions, on September 25, 1906, in Petersburg, the capital of the Russian empire, which still reverberated from the revolutionary tremors of 1905. The city would have to change its name twice in a decade-in 1914 it became Petrograd and in 1924, Leningrad. The conflict between the rulers and the people never ceased here; it was just less visible from time to time.

Russian poets and writers had long created an evil image of Petersburg, a place of "doubles" and ruined lives. It was the grandiose project of a tyrant, Peter I, who forced its construction in a swamp at a cost of countless lives, the mad dream of a total autocrat. Dostoevsky, too, thought that "this rotten, slimy city would rise with the fog and disappear like smoke."

· · --..,

This Petersburg was the source, and the framework and the setting, of many of Shostakovich's works. It was the site of the premieres of xx

seven symphonies, two operas, three ballets, and most of his quartets.

(They say that Shostakovich had wanted to be buried in Leningrad, but they buried him in Moscow.) In acknowledging Petersburg as his own, Shostakovich doomed himself to an enduring psychological duality.

Another contradiction-between his Polish ancestry and his constant striving to handle in his art, like Dostoevsky or Mussorgsky, the most vital problems of Russian history-came from his heredity. Heritage and history crossed paths. The composer's great-grandfather Pyotr Shostakovich, a young veterinarian, took part in the uprising of 1 830, a desperate attempt to gain Polish independence from Russia.

After the cruel repression of the uprising and the taking of Warsaw, he was sent with thousands of other rebels into exile in the Russian wilderness-first to Perm, then to Ekaterinburg.

Even though the family became Russified, the admixture of "foreign blood" undoubtedly made itself felt. And Shostakovich was reminded of it himself before his trip to Warsaw for the Chopin Competition in 1 927, when the state authorities wondered whether "that Pole" should be permitted to go or not.

Shostakovich's grandfather Boleslav participated in the preparations for another Polish uprising-in 1863-which the Russian Army also routed. Boleslav Shostakovich had close ties to the revolutionary Land and Freedom organization, one of the most radical socialist groups. He was sent to Siberia. In those years in Russia the words "Polish" and

"rebel" and "instigator" were almost synonymous.

The fashionable radicalism of the 1860s in Russia was markedly materialistic. Art was rejected as the pastime of the idle and a popular slogan of the times declared that "A pair of boots is worth more than Shakespeare." This attitude endured. The composer's father, Dmitri Boleslavovich Shostakovich, did not involve himself in politics; he worked with the famous chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev and lived a quiet life as a successful engineer in Petersburg. He married a pianist, Sofia Vasilyevna Kokoulina. Music was a serious interest of the family and they no longer scorned Mozart and Beethoven, but their underlying philosophy still held that art had to be useful.

Young Shostakovich-Mitya-was nine, relatively old, when he be-xxi

gan piano lessons. His first instructor was his mother, who, when she saw his rapid progress, took him to a piano teacher. The following conversation was a favorite family story:

"I've brought you a marvelous pupil!"

"All mothers have marvelous children . . . . "

Within two years he played all the preludes and fugues in Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. It was clear that he was exceptionally gifted.

He did well in general school subjects too. He always wanted to be best at whatever he did. When he began composing, almost simultaneously with his piano lessons, he worked at it seriously; among his earliest compositions is the piano piece "Funeral March in Memory of the Victims of the Revolution." This was an eleven-year-old's reaction to the revolution of February 1917, which overthrew Nicholas II. Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik Party, had returned to Russia from abroad. At the Finland Station in Petrograd, he was greeted by crowds; we would have seen young Mitya among them.

That same year the October Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power. Civil war broke out soon afterward. Petrograd, no longer the capital (Lenin had moved the government to Moscow), slowly emptied. Shostakovich's family remained loyal to the new regime and did not leave the city as did many of the intelligentsia. The country was in chaos. Money had virtually lost its value. Food was beyond price. Factories closed, transportation stopped. "In glorious poverty Petropol is dying," wrote the poet Osip Mandelstam.

In 1919, in the midst of this tumult, Shostakovich came to the Petrograd Conservatory, which still enjoyed its reputation as the best musical academy in the country. He was thirteen. The building had no heat. When classes were able to meet, the professors and students huddled in coats, hats, and gloves. Shostakovich was among the most persistent of the students. If his piano teacher, the famous Leonid Nikolayev, did not come to the conservatory, Mitya headed for his house.

The family's circumstances grew more and more harrowing. In early 1922 his father died, succumbing to pneumonia as a result of malnutrition. Sofia Vasilyevna was left with three children: Mitya, then sixteen; the elder daughter, Maria, nineteen; and the you�ger, Zoya, thirteen. They had nothing to live on. They sold the piano, but the rent was still unpaid. The two older children went to work. Mitya xxii

found a job playing piano in a cinema, accompanying silent films. Historians like to say that this hack work was "beneficial" to Shostakovich, but the composer thought back on it with revulsion. In addition, he grew ill. The diagnosis was tuberculosis, and the disease ravaged him for almost ten years.

Perhaps a different person would have been broken by this, but not Shostakovich. He was stubborn and tenacious. He had had faith in his genius from early childhood, ·even though he kept this conviction to himself. His work was primary. At all costs, he was determined to remain a top student.

The earliest portrait we have of Shostakovich (done in charcoal and sanguine by the distinguished Russian artist Boris Kustodiev) communicates this stubbornness and inner concentration. It shows another quality as well. In the portrait Shostakovich's gaze resembles the poetic description made by a friend of his youth: "I love the spring sky just after a storm. That's your eyes." Kustodiev called Shostakovich Florestan; But young though he was, Shostakovich thought the comparison too romantic. Craft was all. He placed his faith in it as a child and he depended on it all his life.*

The gifted young Shostakovich seemed then to be a faithful adherent of the reigning musical traditions of the Rimsky-Korsakov school of composition. Though Rimsky had died in 1908, the key positions at the conservatory continued to be held by his associates and students.

Shostakovich's teacher of composition was Maximilian Steinberg, Rimsky's son-in-law. Shostakovich's first musical triumph was a confirmation of his affinity for the "Petersburg School." He was nineteen when he wrote a symphony for his graduation. It was performed that same year (1925) by a leading orchestra under a top conductor at the Leningrad Philharmonic. Its success was instantaneous and wild; everyone liked the work, which was striking, temperamental, and masterfully orchestrated, and at the same time traditional and accessible.

Its reputation spread rapidly. In 1927 the symphony had its Berlin premiere under the baton of Bruno Walter, in 1928 it was conducted by Leopold Stokowski and Otto Klemperer, and in 1931 the First be-

*In his mature years he told a student who complained that he couldn't find a theme for the second movement of his symphony: "You shouldn't be looking for a theme; you should be writing the second movement.'.' As late as 1972, in a letter to me, he was still emphasizing the importance of musical craft.

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came part of the repertoire of Arturo Toscanini. The reaction was enthusiastic almost everywhere. Shostakovich was alluded to as one of the most talented musicians of the new generation.

Yet at this moment of triumph, Shostakovich shied away from a future as a derivative composer. He decided he did not want to become the "lady pleasing in all respects" of Gogol's Dead Souls. He burned many of his manuscripts, including an opera based on a long Pushkin poem and a ballet on a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, thinking them nothing more than scribbling. He was afraid that if he used academic techniques he would lose his "own selr' forever.

Despite the conservatory tradition, the 1920s were a time when

"left" �t predominated in the new Russia's cultural life. There were many reasons for this, and one of the primary ones was the readiness of the avant-garde to cooperate with Soviet power. (The most prominent representatives of traditional culture had left Russia, or were sabotaging the new regime, or were waiting things out.) For a time the leftists seemed to be setting the tone of cultural politics. They were given the opportunity to realize several daring projects.

Outside influences added to this trend. As soon as life had settled a bit after the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, new music came in from the West and was eagerly learned and performed. In the mid 1920s in Leningrad there was an interesting premiere almost every week: the compositions of Hindemith, Krenek, Les Six, and the "foreign" Russians....:..Prokofiev and Stravinsky. Prominent avant-garde composers, including Hindemith and Bartok, came to Leningrad, and played their works. Shostakovich was excited by this new music.

The prominent visiting musicians, like many others, were awed by stories of how generously this new progressive state supported the new arts. But, in truth, there are no miracles. It soon proved that the state patrons of the arts were willing to support only those works that contained propaganda. Shostakovich received an important commission: to write a symphony for the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. He fulfilled this commission successfully. "A Symphonic Dedication to October" (his name for the work), with a chorus to the bombastic verses of the Komsomol poet Alexander Bezymensky, marked (with a few other works) Shostakovich's switch to modernist techniques. The score has a xxiv

part for a factory whistle (though the composer notes that it can be replaced by a unison sounding of French horn, trumpet, and trombone).

Shostakovich wrote several other major commissioned works then.

They were all generally well received by the press. Influential figures in musical administration supported the talented young composer.

They were obviously preparing the vacant post of official composer for him.

But Shostakovich was in no hurry to fill the vacancy, even though he wanted success and recognition very badly-and financial security as well. By the late 1920s the honeymoon with the Soviet government was over for genuine artists. Power had come to behave as it always must: it demanded submission. In order to be in favor, to receive commissions and live peacefully, one had to get into state harness and plug away. For a while, as a young and aspiring artist, Shostakovich had gone along with the new patrons' preferences, but as he matured in his work, the simple-minded' demands of Soviet officialdom became more and more difficult for him to endure.

What was Shostakovich to do ? He could not and did not want to enter into open conflict with the authorities. Yet it was clear to him that total submission threatened to become a creative dead end. He ·chose another path; whether consciously or not, Shostakovich became the second (Mussorgsky was the first) great yurodivy composer.

The yurodivy is a Russian religious phenomenon, which even the cautious Soviet scholars call a national trait. There is no word in any other language that can precisely convey the meaning of the Russian word yurodivy, with its many historical and cultural overtones.

The yurodivy has the. g�ft to see and hear what others know nothing about. But he. tells the world about his insights in an intentionally paradoxical way, in code. He plays the fool, while actually being a persistent exposer of evil and injustice. The yurodivy is an anarchi�t and individualist, who in his public role breaks the commonly held

"moral" laws of behavior and flouts conventions. But he sets. strict limitations, rules, and taboos for himself.

The origins of yurodstvo go back to the fifteenth century· and even earlier; it existed as a noticeable phenomenon until the eighteenth century. During all that time, the yurodivye could expose things and remain in relative.safety. The authorities recognized the right of the yur-xxv

odivye to criticize and be eccentric-within limits. Their influence was immense. Their confused prophetic words were heeded by tsars and peasants alike. Yurodstvo was usually innate, but it might also be taken on voluntarily, "for Christ's sake." A number of educated men became yurodivye as a form of intellectual criticism, of protest.

Shostakovich was not the only one to become a "new yurodivy."

This behavior model had gained a certain popularity in his cultural milieu. The young Leningrad Dadaists, forming the Oberiu Circle, behaved like yurodivye. The popular satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko created. a consistent yurodivy mask for himself, and he had a deep effect on Shostakovich's personal manner and expression.

For these modern yurodivye the world lay in ruins and the attempt to build a new society was-at least for the time being-an obvious failure. They were naked people on a naked earth. The lofty values of the past had been discredited. New ideals, they felt, could be affirmed only "in reverse." They would have to be conveyed through a screen of mockery, sarcasm, and foolishness.

These writers and artists chose unremarkable, crude, and purposely clumsy words to express the most profound ideas. But these words did not carry a simple meaning; they had double or triple implications. In their works, street speech grimaced and clowned, taking on mocking nuances. A joke was transformed into a parable, a child's ditty into a terrifying examination of "la condition humaine. "

It goes without saying that the yurodstvo of Shostakovich and his friends could not be as consistent as that of their historical models. The yurodivye of the past had abandoned culture and society forever. The

"new yurodivye" left in order to remain. Their attempt to rehabilitate traditional culture with methods borrowed from the arsenal of anticulture, even though it had deliberate moralizing and sermonizing overtones, took place in a secular context.

Shostakovich set great store by this bond with Mussorgsky, who, wrote the musicologist Boris Asafiev, "escaped from some internal contradiction into the region of semi-preaching, semi-yurodstvo. " On a musical plane, Shostakovich had seen himself as Mussorgsky's successor; now he tied himself to him on a human level as well, occasionally playing the "idiot" (as even Mussorgsky's closest friends had called him).

Stepping onto the road of yurodstvo, Shostakovich relinquished all xxvi

responsibility for anything he said: nothing meant what it seemed to, not the most exalted and beautiful words. The pronouncement of familiar truths turned out to be mockery; conversely, mockery often contained tragic truth. This also held for his musical works. The composer deliberately wrote an oratorio "without envoi,"' in order to force the audience to seek out the message in what appeared at first glance to be an insignificant vocal work.

His decision was not made suddenly, of course; it was the result of much vacillation and inconsistency. Shostakovich's everyday behavior was determined to a great degree-as was the behavior of many authentic old Russian yurodivye "for Christ's sake" -by the reaction of the authorities, which were sometimes more intolerant, sometimes less.

Self-defense dictated a large portion of the position of Shostakovich and his friends, who wanted to survive, but not at any cost. The yurodivy mask helped them. It is important to note that Shostakovich not only considered himself a yurodivy, but he was perceived as such by the people close to him. The word "yurodivy" was often applied to him in Russian musical circles.

Shostakovich periodically returned throughout his life to this yurodstvo, with its traditional concern for oppressed people. It took on various forms as the composer's body and spirit matured and then withered. When he was young, it set him apart from the leaders of

"left" art, such as Meyerhold, Mayakovsky, and Eisenstein. Pushkin has a famous line about "calling for mercy for the fallen." Shostakovich could claim to share Pushkin's concern for the fallen after 1927; for this theme is important in the composer-yurodivy's two operas_,.

The Nose, based on the Gogol story (completed in 1928), and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, based on the Leskov story (completed in 1 932).

In Gogol's story the characters are treated as masks, but Shostakovich turns them into human beings. Even the Nose, who separated himself from his owner, Major Kovalyov, and strolled about Petersburg in uniform, takes on realistic traits in Shostakovich's treatment.

The composer is interested in the interaction between the faceless crowd and the individual; he carefully explores the mechanism of mass psychosis. We care about the Nose, driven to death by frenzied townspeople, and we <:are about "noseless" Kovalyov.

Shostakovich used the story plot merely as a springboard, refracting xx vii

events and characters through the prism of a completely different writer with a different style-Dostoevsky.

In I.Ady Macbeth of M tsensk District (the opera was called Katerina lzmailova in a later, second edition) the connection with Dostoevsky is also apparent. An example is the depiction of triumphant, all-pervasive police power. As in The Nose� Shostakovich brings his characters into collision with the police machine.

In both instances a criminal case is used to draw the "stations of the cross" of his characters with more clarity. He vulgarizes the already vulgar and intensifies colors by the use of harsh, strident contrasts.

In I.Ady Macbeth, Katerina Izmailova murders for love and Shostakovich exonerates her. In his interpretation, the heartless, oppressive, and powerful men who are killed by Katerina are actually criminals and Katerina is their victim. The finale of the opera is very important.

The katorga (labor camp) scene is a direct musical embodiment of certain pages from Dostoevsky's The House of the Dead. For Shostakovich the convicts are neschastnen'kie, or "poor little wretches," and judges at the same time. Katerina suffers from her conscience and her intonations coincide, almost blend, with the melodies of the prisoners'

chorus; that is, the individual and sinful dissolves into the general, the ethical. This concept of redemption and cleansing is cardinal in Dostoevsky; in I.Ady Macbeth it is expressed with almost melodramatic frankness. Shostakovich does not hide his sermonizing intentions.

The road traveled by Shostakovich from The Nose to I.Ady Macbeth is the distance between a young man of great promise and a widely known composer. I.Ady Macbeth was an enormous-and unparalleled-success for a contemporary work. It was given thirty-six times in the five months after its premiere in Leningrad in 1934, and in Moscow it had ninety-four performances in two seasons. It was presented almost immediately in Stockholm, Prague, London, Zurich, and Copenhagen; Toscanini added fragments from it to his repertoire. The American premiere under Artur Rodzinski created great interest; Virgil Thomson's article in Modem Music (1935) was titled "Socialism at the Metropolitan."

Shostakovich was hailed as a genius.

Then calamity. Stalin came to see I.Ady Macbeth and left the theater in a rage. On January 28, 1936, the devastating editorial "Mud-xx viii

die Instead of Music" appeared in the official Party organ, Pravda, dictated in fact by Stalin. "The listener is flabbergasted from the first moment of the opera by an intentionally ungainly, muddled flood of sounds. Snatches of melody, embryos of musical phrases, drown, escape, and drown once more in crashing, gnashing, and screeching. Following this 'music' is difficult, remembering it is impossible."

This was a time when terror raged across the land. Purges took on immense proportions. A new country was growing within the country-the "Gulag Archipelago." Within this context, Stalin's warning to Shostakovich in Pravda-"This is playing at abstruse things, which could end very badly" -was clearly and directly threatening. And one week later a second editorial appeared in Pravda, this time berating Shostakovich's music for a ballet produced by the Bolshoi Theater.

The composer and everyone around him were certain that he would be arrested. His friends maintained their distance. Like many other people at that time, he kept a small suitcase packed and ready. They usually came for their victims at night. Shostakovich did not sleep. He lay listening, waiting in the dark.

The newspapers of the period were filled with letters and articles demanding death for "terrorists, spies, and conspirators." They were signed by almost everyone who hoped to survive; but whatever the risk, Shostakovich would not sign such a letter.

Stalin had made a private decision concerning Shostakovich that would never be rescinded; Shostakovich was not to be arrested, despite his closeness to such "enemies of the people" ruthlessly destroyed by Stalin as Meyerhold and Marshal Tukhachevsky. In the framework of Russian culture the extraordinary relationship between Stalin and Shostakovich was profoundly traditional: the ambivalent "dialogue"

between tsar and yurodivy, and between tsar and poet playing the role of yurodivy in order to survive, takes on a tragic incandescence.

A wave of Stalin's hand created and destroyed entire cultural movements, not to mention individual reputations. The article in Pravda was the start of a vicious campaign against Shostakovich and his confreres. The epithet used was "formalism," which was shifted from an aesthetic lexicon to a political one.

In the history of Soviet literature and art there is not a single even slightly significant figure who has not been at one time or another xxix

branded a "formalist. " It was an entirely arbitrary accusation. Many of those accused of it perished. After the "Muddle" article, Shostakovich was in despair, near suicidal. The constant anticipation of arrest affecte.d his mind. For nearly four decades, until his death, he would see himself as a hostage, a condemned man. The fear might increase or decrease, but it never disappeared. The entire country had become an enormous prison from which there was no escape.

(In many respects, much of Shostakovich's hostility toward and mistrust of the West comes from this period, when the West was doing its best not to notice the Gulag. Shostakovich never did have friendly contacts with a foreigner, with the possible exception of the composer Benjamin Britten. It was no accident that he dedicated to Britten his Fourteenth Symphony, for soprano, bass, and chamber orchestra, in which the protagonist, thrown into jail, cries out in prostration: "Here above me is the crypt, here I am dead to all.") A premonition of reprisal made Shostakovich postpone the premiere of the Fourth Symphony, which he had finished in 1936; he was afraid to tempt fate anew.* In 1932, after a stormy courtship, the composer had married Nina Varzar, a beautiful and energetic young woman and a gifted physicist. In 1936 their daughter, Galya, was born, and in 1938, their son, Maxim. So Shostakovich was now responsible not only for himself but for his family as well.

The situation was becoming increasingly dangerous. All dictators try to create an apparatus for managing "their" art; the one that Stalin built is stil.l the most effective the world had ever known. He secured from Soviet creative figures an unprecedented degree of submissiveness in the service of his continuingly shifting propaganda goals. Stalin strengthened and perfected the system of "creative unions." Within the framework of this system, the right to work (and therefore to live as an artist) comes only to those officially registered and approved. The creative unions of,writers, composers, artists, et al. were formed, begin-1

•The premiere took place over a quarter century later. For all those years the composer patiently listened to press reports that he was keeping the symphony under wraps because he was dissatisfied with it; he even encouraged this nonsense. Y ct when the symphony was finally rehearsed once more, he didn't change a single note. The conductor, who had suggested a few cuts, was refused categorically: "Let them cat it," Shostakovich said. "Let them cat it." The Fourth Symphony was a resounding success, as were revivals of other works long forbidden. His music stood the test of time:.

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ning in 1932, as bureaucratic organizations with strictly defined ranks and with equally strong accountability and constant cross-checking.

Every organization had a branch of "security services," or secret police, as well as innumerable unofficial informers. The practice continues to this day. Any attempt to circumvent one's union ended badly: various forms of pressure and repression were always ready. Moreover, obedience was rewarded. Behind this well-oiled and smoothly running mechanism stood the figure of Stalin, an inevitable presence that often gave events a grotesque, tragicomic coloration.

In Shostakovich's life and work his relationship with Stalin was a decisive factor. In a country in which the ruler has total sovereignty over the fate of his subjects, Stalin inflicted severe trials and public humiliations on Shostakovich; yet almost simultaneously he rewarded him with the highest titles and honors. Paradoxically, the honors and defamations both produced unparalleled fame for the composer.

November 21, 1937, can be considered a watershed day in the musical fate of Shostakovich. The hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic was overflowing: the cream of Soviet society-musicians, writers, actors, artists, celebrities of every kind-had gathered for the premiere of the disgraced composer's Fifth Symphony. They were waiting for a sensation, a scandal, trying to guess what would happen to the composer, exchanging gossip and jokes. After all, social life went on despite the terror.

And when the last notes sounded, there was pandemonium, as there would be at almost all later Soviet premieres of Shostakovich's major works. Many wept. Shostakovich's work represented the effort of an honest .and thoughtful artist confronted by a decisive choice under conditions of great moral stress. The symphony is riddled with neurotic pulsations; the composer is feverishly seeking the exit from the labyrinth, only to find himself, in the finale, as one Soviet composer put it, in "the gas chamber of ideas."

"This is not music; this is high-voltage, nervous electricity," noted a moved listener of the Fifth, which to this day remains Shostakovich's most admired work. The symphony made it clear that he spoke for his generation, and Shostakovich became a symbol for decades. In the West his name took on an emblematic quality for both the right and XXXl

the left. Probably, no other composer in the history of music had been placed in so political a role.

Shostakovich had revived the dying genre of the symphony: for him it was the ideal form in which to express the emotions and ideas that possessed him. In the Fifth he finally reworked the influences of the new Western composers, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and primarily Gustav Mahler, to create his own inimitable, individual style.

Most characteristic of Shostakovich's music are its strained, seeking melodics. Themes usually grow throughout the symphony, creating new "branches" (the source of the integrated quality of Shostakovich's symphonic canvases, often huge and almost always diverse) .

Another important element in Shostakovich's music is his rich, three-dimensional, varied rhythm. He sometimes uses rhythm as an independent means of expression, building large symphonic sections with it (for instance, the famous "march" episode in the Seventh

["Leningrad"] Symphony) .

Shostakovich imparted great significance to orchestration. He was able at once to imagine music as played by an orchestra and he wrote it down in score form from the start, not in piano reduction as many composers do. The orchestral timbres were individuals for him, and he liked personifying them (say, the predawn voice of the flute in the

"dead kingdom" of the first movement of the Eleventh Symphony) .

The monologues of solo instruments in his orchestral works often resemble an orator's speech; at other times they are associated with intimate confession.

There is also much in Shostakovich's symphonies that evokes analogies with the theater and with film. There is nothing reprehensible in this, although many critics still seem to think so. In its day the "pure"

symphonic music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven incorporated the programmatic images of the Enlightenment, and Tchaikovsky and Brahms, each in his own way, reworked the material of Romantic literature and drama. Shostakovich took part in the creation of the musical mythology of the twentieth century. His style, to use the words Ivan Sollertinsky applied to Mahler, is truly Dostoevsky retold by Chaplin.

The music of Shostakovich combines lofty expressiveness, grotesquerie, and penetrating lyricism with the unpretentiousness of narrative.

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The listener can almost always follow the "plot" of the music, even if he does not have much musical erudition and experience.

In the article "Muddle Instead of Music,'' along with the mocking jibes, there was a revealing slip: the statement that Shostakovich was not in the least untalented and that he knew : how to express simple and powerful emotions in music. Unquestionably this observation is connected with Stalin's reaction to films for which Shostakovich had written the scores. These films had been very successful in their day, not only in the Soviet Union, but in the West among the left-wing intelligentsia (though now they are rarely remembered), and certainly the longest-lived element in them is Shostakovich's music.

Stalin, who had a superlative appreciation of the propaganda potential of art, paid special attention to film. He saw that Soviet movies had a powerful emotional effect, which was much enhanced by Shostakovich's music. Thus his film scores met with Stalin's approval. For Shostakovich, writing for the movies was his "rendering unto Caesar"; it seemed an effective and relatively harmless way of staying alive and at work on his own music. The authorities greeted the Fifth and many subsequent compositions matter-of-factly. Some of these works were even honored with Stalin Prizes-the highest awards of the period, given annually and with Stalin's personal approval.

But the greatest propaganda value was extracted by Stalin from Shostakovich's so-called military symphonies, the Seventh and Eighth, which appeared during World War II. The circumstances surrounding the creation of the Seventh were publicized around the world: the first three movements were written during a month or so in Leningrad while .it was under fire from the Germans, who had reached the city in September 1941. The symphony was thus seen as a direct reflection of the events of the first days of the war. No one recalled the composer's manner of working. Shostakovich wrote very fast, but only after the music had taken final form in his head. The tragic Seventh was a reflection of the prewar fate of both the composer and Leningrad.

Nor did the first audiences link the famous "march" from the Seventh's first movement to the German invasion; that was done by later propaganda. The conductor Y evgeny Mravinsky, the composer's friend in those years (the Eighth is dedicated to him), reminisced that when he heard the march from the Seventh on the radio in March xxxiii

1942 he thought that the composer had created a universalized image of stupidity and crass tastelessness. *

The popularity of the march episode has overshadowed the obvious fact that the first movement-indeed, the entire work-is full of mournful emotions in the manner of a requiem. Whenever the opportunity presented itself, Shostakovich stressed the fact that for him the requiem mood held the "central position" in this music. But the composer's words were deliberately overlooked. The prewar period, in truth filled with hunger and fear and the mass deaths of innocent people in the Stalinist terror, was now painted in official propaganda as luminous and carefree, an idyll. Why should the symphony not be transformed into a "symbol of struggle" with the Germans ?

It was harder to do this with the Eighth Symphony, first played a year and a half later. Ilya Ehrenburg wrote: "I came home from the performance astounded: I had heard the voice of an ancient chorus from Greek tragedy. Music has a great advantage: without mentioning anything, it can say everything." Ehrenburg later remembered the war years as a time of relative freedom for Soviet creativity: "You could depict grief and destruction," for the fault lay with foreigners, the Germans. II). peacetime unclouded optimism was required of art; under such circumstances Shostakovich's "requiems" would certainly have been subjected to annihilating criticism. Ironically, the war rescued the composer.

Another temporary shield was offered by the ever-increasing popularity of Shostakovich in the Allied countries. In England, sixty thousand listeners welcomed the Seventh rapturously when it was performed under the baton of Sir Henry Joseph Wood at Albert Hall. In the United States, leading conductors-Leopold Stokowski, Eugene Ormandy, Serge Koussevitzky, Artur Rodzinski-vied for the right to present the premiere of the sensational symphony. They wrote letters and sent telegrams to the Soviet embassy; their friends and agents campaigned to persuade the Soviet representatives to give the right of first

• From a purely musical point of view, it's not difficult to understand where this impression came from: the march theme assimilates a popular tune from Lehar's operetta The Merry Widow. For Shostakovich's close friends there was an "in joke" in that theme of the Seventh Symphony: in Russia the melody was sung with the words ''poidu k Maksimy ya" ("I'll go see Maxim") and probably it was often addressed within the family to Shostakovich's small son, Maxim.

xxxiv

performance to "their" conductors, at the same time relating whatever

"compromising" information they could about the other competitors.

Arturo Toscanini entered the fray late, but he had the power of NBC behind him and won. He received the first copy of the score, on film brought to the United States by military ship: The radio premiere of the work was broadcast from Radio City in New York on July 19, 1942, and was heard by millions of Americans.

That first season the symphony was performed sixty-two times in the United States. It was broadcast by 1,934 United States stations and ninety-nine Latin American ones. In September 1942 a festival of Shostakovich's music was held in San Francisco, with the best American orchestras participating. Toscanini repeated the Seventh Symphony there in a vast outdoor amphitheater. CBS paid the Soviet government ten thousand dollars for the right to the first broadcast of the Eighth Symphony.

In those years Western audiences grew familiar with Shostakovich's face through photographs, portraits, and magazine covers: wary eyes behind round glasses, thin, tight lips, the boyish facial contours, and the eternal cowlick. (Much later, the corners of the mouth lowered, while the eyebrows rose; old age was trying to change the face's blueprint. The mask of fear was sharper.) Shostakovich responded to applause clumsily and grotesquely. He bowed convulsively, awkwardly, his foot jerking to the side. Shostakovich did not "look like a composer," but they liked that too.

Stalin paid close attention to the propaganda he directed to the Allies. For a time he held his xenophobic instincts in check, but when friendly relations with the Allies ended after World War II, the explosion of anger was that much stronger. On Stalin's orders a campaign began against "cosmopolitanism" and "kowtowing to the West." This was a political campaign. The millions of Soviet citizens who during the war had come into contact with another world and another way of life, who had learned to take risks and be brave, to assert an initiative, had to be brought back into a state of submission. Mass arrests and deportations began again; several harsh anti-Jewish drives were carried out. Simultaneously, Russian nationalism was celebrated at every opportunity.

The regime devoted particular "attention" to culture. Beginning in xxxv

1946, one Party resolution after another was proclaimed, containing attacks on books, plays, and films; the first victims were Mikhail Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova. The culmination was the Resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of February 10, 1948, "On the Opera The Great Friendship by V. Muradeli." According to a contemporary Soviet commentary, the "historical world significance" of this unfortunately famous resolution lay in the fact that "having shown the true path of the development of the greatest musical culture of our times, it at the same time brought a decisive blow to the aesthetics of bourgeois decadence, exposing its putrid essence to the millions of simple people of all the countries of the world." The commentator added gleefully: "Bourgeois modernism will not survive this blow."

The "historical resolution" attacked composers "maintaining a formalistic, anti-people tendency." Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Shebalin, Gavriil Popov, and Miaskovsky were listed as composers "in whose work formalist perversions and antidemocratic tendencies in music, alien to the Soviet people and its artistic tastes, were particularly glaring." The resolution erased the most talented figures in Soviet music, foremost among these Shostakovich and Prokofiev. The hack Muradeli and his colorless opera condemned in the

"historical resolution" were onlt an excuse. Stalin was particularly angry at Shostakovich-both because of his popularity in the West and because of his refusal to present Stalin with a majestic triumphal Ninth Symphony at the end of the war that would have hailed the genius and wisdom of the leader. Instead, in 1 945, Shostakovich had written a symphony full of sarcasm and bitterness. The yurodivy wept at the festivities, when the majority thought that life would be cloudless. And his sad prophecy, as everyone could see, was correct.

After 1948, Shostakovich withdrew into himself. The split into two personae was complete. He continued making occasional mandatory public appearances, hurriedly and with visible revulsion reading confessions or pathos-filled pronouncements he had not written. This time he was not traumatized as he had been in 1936, because he was prepared for the worst. Events hurtled past him without impact; he seemed to watch them as from a distance. His works disappeared from the repertory-no reaction; the newspapers were full of "letters from xxxvi

workers" condemning his music-no reaction; in school, children memorized texts about the "great harm" Shostakovich had · brought to art-also no reaction.

He felt himself alone-his friends died or disappeared, or worked on their careers-but he was used to that too. He lived in Moscow now-a city that had never become home to him. His family remained a small bastion, but that last sanctuary was given a short life by fate: his beloved wife Nina Varzar died in 1954; his children grew independent. A second, unhappy marriage to Margarita Kainova quickly ended in divorce. And through it all, it seemed as though the witch hunt would go on forever. The world turned permanently gray. It was a world of betrayal, of fear, which had become as untemarkable as rain on the window.

But Shostakovich also composed privately, as the Russians put it,

"for his desk." One work, which mocked Stalin and his henchmen for organizing the "antiformalist" campaign of 1948, has yet to be performed or published. Other compositions became widely known later.

Among them are several major works (the First Violin Concerto, the vocal cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry, the Fourth Quartet) in which Shostakovich speaks, using echoes of Yiddish folklore, with compassion about the fate of the Jews-exiles on the brink of extinction who miraculously survived. This theme blended into an autobiographical motif: the lone individual against the raging, stupid mob. *

It was also a period of contradictions, as is clear in Shostakovich's astounding dialogue with Stalin, to be found in this book. On the one hand Shostakovich's major works were not performed-and yet Stalin personally telephoned him to urge him to make the journey to New York in March 1949, to attend the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace as a leading representative Soviet artist. Despite his heated exchange with Stalin, he went-and it was a profoundly unhappy experience for him. He played the scherzo from the Fifth Symphony on the piano to a huge audience at Madison Square Garden.

But he felt like a pawn in a cynical political game. Except for his visit

•Shostakovich came out openly against anti-Semitism in his Thirteenth Symphony. It was 1 962 then and Khrushchev was in power, not Stalin, but the official attitude toward Jews was, as always, hostile. The moralizing Thirteenth (which incorporated Yevgeny Yevtushenko's famous poem "Babi Yar") was the cause of the last sharp and well-known conflict between Soviet power and the composer.

xxxvii

to Warsaw for a piano competition as a young man, with a side trip to Berlin, this was his first trip abroad, and in the uncomfortable role of a mock celebrity to boot. His attitude had already formed toward things "Western" as being inimical and alien to his inner strivings.

His brief American stay, which took place under extremely harried circumstances (like subsequent visits, in 1959 and 1973), merely reinforced his prejudice. Shostakovich was particularly traumatized ,by the aggressiveness of American reporters, and the bleakness of his life upon his return seemed almost welcome to him.

In 1953, Stalin died, leaving the country in shock. The Soviet Union began changing, tentatively, cautiously, but in a direction that the browbeaten intelligentsia had never let themselves dream of-that is, for the better and not for the worse. The "thaw" began. An enormous world power stood at a crossroads; and many human beings saw themselves at a crossroads too.

Shostakovich summed up Stalin's era in the Tenth Symphony (1953). The second movement is inexorable, merciless, like an evil whirlwind-a "musical portrait" of Stalin. In the same work he introduced his own musical monogram, DSCH (the notes D, E fiat, C, B), which would take so important a place in his subsequent compositions.

It was almost as though with the dictator's death the yurodivy could begin to assert his own identity in his work.

It goes without saying that Shostakovich stood wholeheartedly with the liberals. When Khrushchev dethroned Stalin in 1956, the facts he made public came as no surprise to Shostakovich. All it meant was that one could now talk about the crimes of the "leader and teacher"

openly, though this freedom would prove to be short-lived. Shostakovich wrote music for the very progressive (by Soviet standards) poet Yevtushenko; he wrote and signed petitions for the "rehabilitation" of musicians who had been sentenced to the camps by Stalin, and helped the survivors return and find work; he tried to influence the relaxation o( harsh cultural edicts established by Stalin. A new Party resolution, made on Khrushchev's orders in 1958, announced that Stalin was

"subjective" in his approach to works of art; this removed the label

"formalist" from Shostakovich and noticeably improved his standing.

The composer devoted the greater part of his time to helping ordinary people in many ways, defending them against bureaucracy.

xxxviii

When the authorities decided to appoint Shostakovich to the post of first secretary of the proposed "Russian" division of the national Composers' Union, he had to join the Party for the first time. On September 14, 1960, the open meeting of the Composers' Union, convened for the admission of Shostakovich into the Party, attracted a large group of people expecting something unusual: they anticipated a spectacle from the yurodivy. And they were right. Shostakovich mumbled his prepared text without lifting his eyes from the paper, except for one. moment when he suddenly raised his voice dramatically: "For everything good in me I am indebted to . . . " The audience expected the standard and obligatory "the Communist Party and the Soviet government," but Shostakovich cried out, " . . . to my parents!"

Six years later, on the eve of his sixtieth birthday, he wrote a small vocal work, full of painful self-irony, titled "Preface to the Complete Collection of My - Works and a Brief Meditation on This Preface,"

with his own text. A major element in this work is a mocking list of the composer's "honorific titles, extremely responsible duties and assignments." These are grotesque jokes for those in the know. To understand them one m.ust know the rules of the game. * But despite his titles and awards, the Russian intelligentsia itself did not see the composer as part of the official system until the late 1 960s. For decades the emotional truth of his music had helped them survive morally. Russia had no other Shostakovich.

In the years of the "thaw" Shostakovich wrote several major works that had a noticeable resonance in Soviet society; and other compositions, previously inaccessible to audiences, were performed-among them Lady Macbeth (retitled Katerina lzmailova), the Fourth Symphony, and instrumental and vocal works. of the late 1940s. However, a gulf gradually formed between the greatest living Russian composer and the most freethinking intellectuals.

A brief chronology indicates the tension of developing events. In 1962 the journal Novy mir printed Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In 1966 the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, who had printed their satirical works in the West,

• For instance, in order to appreciate fully the meaning of Opus 1 39, March of the Soviet Police for band, composed in 1 970 between the Thirteenth Quartet and the Fifteenth Symphony, one must be aware that the writer Mikhail Zoshchenko, Shostakovich's idol, had served briefly on the force in his youth. The list of such private jokes in the composer's works is long.

xxxix

were tried in Moscow. This trial rocked the Soviet creative elite. Dissent mounted throughout the "Prague Spring" and the Warsaw Pact troops' invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. That same year academician Sakharov made public his essay "On Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom." The essay was widely distributed in samizdat, which by then had won for itself the status of a

"parallel" Russian literature, at home and abroad, often much more influential than the official one.

Dissidence was turning into a political movement. Shostakovich watched with interest and sympathy, but he could not join in. The yurodivy cannot infringe on the social order. He confronts people, not conditions. He protests in the name of humanity and not in the name of political changes. Shostakovich was a moralist-eventually, as is clear in this book, a very embittered one-but he never had a political program.*

Moreover, his compositions became more and more introspective as he entered his "late" period. The theme of reflection, of self-analysis, always characteristic of . his music, took on a different sound: before it was music for others, about himself in conflict and interrelationships with others; now it was about himself for himself.

The composer's health, never very good, was failing rapidly. In 1966 he developed heart trouble, the ne�t year he broke his leg; his bones had become fragile and a careless sharp movement could have painful consequences. His condition was never definitively diagnosed.

Treatment brought only temporary relief.

Now Shostakovich appeared in public only with his young third wife, Irina Supinskaya. She had to help him to sit and stand, would hand him his coat. His mouth could be seen to tremble, as though he were about to cry. Public appearances were extremely difficult for him. At home he seemed much calmer and more self-confident. Yet playing his compositions on the piano cost him great pain; when he offered his right hand, he supported it with his left. He was seriously training himself to write with his left hand, in case his right gave way completely.

The image of death now dominated his works. The influence of

• In his last years he wrote to me: "Music is good, not evil. Poetry is good, not evil. Primitive, but oh, so true!"

xi

Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death is profoundly reflected in his Fourteenth Symphony (1969). The music is permeated with inconsolable anguish; "Death is all-powerful," the soloist in this symphony proclaims. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn could not · accept this, as a dissident and as a deeply religious Christian. He and Shostakovich had a falling out, despite their cordial relations up to then.* The dissidents demanded political action rather than introspection. The government was for them a much more urgent antagonist than death. Moreover, Shostakovich's refusal to put his signature on the dissidents' political statements was, they felt, nothing less than capitulation. For the first time, the composer was seen as an opportunist rather than a yurodivy.

He was dying. His long, lonely journey was coming to an end, but he saw it as having gone nowhere. In that sense, as in many others, he was a true Dostoevsky hero-the man who, moving forward with . dizzying velocity, is actually, if you look closely, motionless. His music of this final period expressed fear before death, a numbness, a search for a final sanctuary in the memory of future men; explosions of impotent and heartbreaking anger. Sometimes Shostakovich seemed most to fear that people would think he was repenting, asking for forgiveness. He was dying an "underground man."

Shostakovich died at the Kremlin Hospital-reserved for the eliteon August 9, 1 975, of heart failure, according to the physicians. The obituaries in the West were unanimous: "One of the greatest twentieth-century composers and a committed believer in Communism and Soviet power" (London Times); "He contributed a decisive statement to the musical history of the century" (Die Welt); "A committed Communist who accepted sometimes harsh id,eological criticism" (The New York Times) .

We live in a world without mercy. It sees the artist as gladiator and demands from him, in the words of Boris Pasternak, "total death, seriously." And the artist complies, offering his death as the price of his achievement. It was a price Shostakovich paid long before he died.

• Shostakovich was ambivalent toward Solzhenitsyn. He thought highly of him as a writer, and felt that his life had been extraordinarily courageous. But he also felt that Solzhenitsyn was creating an image of "luminary" for himself, aspiring to be a new Russian saint. This ambivalence was reflected in two of his compositions, which were produced in quick succession after Solzhenitsyn's expulsion to the West in 1974. In the vocal suite on the poems of Michelangelo, Shostakovich used the poet's angry lines about the expulsion of Dante from Florence to address Solzhenitsyn with poignant music. And then appeared the satiric piece "Luminary" with parodic words from Dostoevsky's The Possessed.

xli

TESTIMONY

'IESE are not memoirs about myself. These are memoirs about other people. Others will write about us. And naturally they'll lie through their teeth-but that's their business.

One must speak the truth about the past or not at all. It's very hard to reminisce and it's worth doing only in the name of truth.

Looking back, I .�ee nothing but ruins, only mountains of corpses.

And I do not wish to build new Potemkin villages on these ruins.

Let's try to tell only the truth. It's difficult. I was an eyewitness to many events and they were important events. I knew many outstanding people. I'll try to tell what I know about them. I'll try not to color or falsify anything. This will be the testimony of an eyewitness.

Of course, we do have the saying "He lies like an eyewitness."

Meyerhold* liked to tell this story from his university days. He studied

•vsevolod Emilyevich Meyerhold (1 874-1 940), director and actor, theorist of the avant-garde theater, a friend and patron of Shostakovich. In 1928 Shostakovich was responsible for the music in the Theater of Meyerhold and later he wrote the music for the premiere of Mayakovsky's comedy The Bedbug. (Subsequently Shostakovich invariably refused Meyerhold's proposals of collaboration.) Not only were Meyerhold's productions extremely popular, but his name was 3

law at Moscow University, you know. A professor was lecturing on testimony when a hooligan rushed into the classroom and created a disturbance. A fight broke out, they called in the guards, who removed the troublemaker. The professor suggested that the students recount what had just happened.

It turned out that each told a different story. Everyone had his own version of the fight and his own description of the hooligan, and· some even maintained that there had been several hooligans.

Finally the professor admitted that the whole incident had been staged to demonstrate that future lawyers should know what eyewitness testimony was worth. They were young people with good eyesight and their accounts of what had just transpired varied. But witnesses were sometimes elderly. And they described things that happened long ago. How can you expect them to be accurate?

But nevertheless, there are courts of law where one seeks the truth and where everyone gets his just deserts. And that means that there are witnesses who testify before their own consciences. And there is no more horrible judgment than that.

I didn't spend my life as a gaper, but as a proletarian. I worked hard since childhood, not at seeking my "potential," but in the physical sense of the word. I wanted to hang around and look, but I had to work.

Meyer hold used to say, "If there's a rehearsal at the theater and I'm not there yet, if I'm late-look for the nearest row. I adore rows."

Meyerhold held that rows were a school for artists, because when people fight they reveal their most basic traits and you can learn a lot.

Probably Meyerhold was right. While I didn't spend much time on the streets, I did see enough rows. Small ones and bigger ones too. I can't say that it enriched my life, but it has given me a lot to tell.

I had not expressed a desire to study music before I began taking lessons, although I had some interest in music and listened ear to the wall when a quartet met at the neighbors'.

My mother, Sofia Vasilyevna, saw this and insisted that I begin known throughout the Soviet Union and among leftist circles of the Western intelligentsia. Despite that fact, Meyerhold disappeared without a trace in the years of the "great terror." In the fifteen years that followed, if Meyerhold was written about at all, it was usually in this vein: "All the work of Meyerhold, ringleader of formalism in the theater, is a betrayal of Russia's great culture and a groveling before the bourgeois unprincipled art of the West." During the "thaw,''

Shostakovich was one of the first to work toward Meyerhold's "rehabilitation."

4

learning the piano, but I hedged. In the spring of 1915 I attended the theater for the first time and saw The Legend of Tsar Sa/tan. I liked the opera, but it still wasn't enough to overcome my unwillingness to study music.

The root of study is too bitter to make learning .fo play worthwhile, I thought. But Mother had her way and in the summer of 1915 began giving me lessons. Things moved very quickly, I turned out to have absolute pitch and a good memory. I learned the notes quickly, and I memorized easily, without repetition-it came on its own. I read music fluently and made my first attempts at composing then too.

Seeing that things were going well, Mother decided to send me to the music school of Ignatiy Albertovich Gliasser (he died in 1925). I remember that at one recital I played almost half the pieces in Tchaikovsky's Children's Album. The next year, 1916, I was promoted into Gliasser's class. Before that I had been studying with his wife, 0. F.

Gliasser. In his class I played sonatas by Mozart and Haydn, and the following year, Bach's fugues.

Gliasser treated my composing quite skeptically and didn't encourage me. Nevertheless, I continued composing and wrote a lot then. By February 1917 I lost all interest in studying with Gliasser. He was a very self-confident but dull man. And his lectures already seemed ridiculous to me.

At the time I was studying at the Shidlovskaya Gymnasium. There was no certainty yet in the family that I would be a musician and they planned for me to become an engineer. I was a good student in all my subjects, but music began taking up more and more time. Father had hoped that I would be a scientist, but I didn't.

I was always a diligent student. I wanted to be a good student, I liked getting good grades, and I liked being treated with respect. I've been like that since childhood.

That may be the reason I left Gliasser's school. Mother was against it, but I held my ground. I make decisions of that kind instantly. I decided not to go-and I didn't. And that was it.

My parents were, without a doubt, intelligents. And consequently had the required subtle spiritual make-up. They liked Art and Beauty.

And incidentally, they had a special affinity for music.

Father sang; he sang gypsy romances, things such as "Ah, it's not you I love so passionately" and "The chrysanthemums in the garden 5

have faded." Magical music, they called it, and it was a great help to me later on when I banged away in cinemas.

I don't renounce my interest in gypsy songs. I don't see anything shameful in it, as opposed to, say, Prokofiev, who pretended to be enraged when he heard such music. He probably had a better musical education than I did. But at least I'm not a snob.

Mother studied at the Petersburg Conservatory with Rozanova, the same woman to whom she later took me. She played the piano rather well. There's nothing particularly significant in that, for in those days there were many more amateur musicians than there are now. Take my neighbors' quartet, for instance.

In an old book I read, the local dignitaries-governor, police chief, and so on-got together and played the Mendelssohn Octet. And that was in some small town. If the chairman of the city council, the police chief, and the Party chief of Ryazan or some place like that were to get together today, what do you think they could play ?

I rarely reminisce about my childhood. Probably because it's boring to reminisce alone, and the number of people with whom I could talk about my childhood is diminishing.

The young aren't interested in my childhood. And they're absolutely right. It may be interesting to know about Mozart's childhood, because it was unusual, and because his creative life began so early. But in my biography the events that could possibly be of some interest come much later. My childhood had no significant or outstanding incidents.

The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue. The one exception to this is Stravinsky. In his memoirs the most interesting part is his childhood.

There's one thing that displeases me greatly: why did Stravinsky say such bad things about his parents ? You get the impression that he's taking revenge for his childhood.

You can't take revenge on your parents. Even if your childhood wasn't very happy. You can't write a denunciation of them for your descendants, to the effect that Father and Mother were terrible people and I, poor child, had to put up with their tyranny. There's something despicable about that. I do not wish to listen to people denouncing their parents.

6

Sometimes I think that I've forgotten what my childhood was like. I have to strain to remember small scenes from my early years and I don't think that they are of any interest to others.

After all, I wasn't dandled on Leo Tolstoy's knee. And Anton Pavlovich Chekhov didn't tell me stories. My childhood was totally average. There was nothing extraordinary about it and I just can't seem to remember any special, earth-shaking events.

They say that the major event in my life was the march down to the Finland Station in April 1917, when Lenin arrived in Petrograd. The incident did take place. Some classmates froin Shidlovskaya and I tagged along with the small crowd that was marching to the station.

But I don't remember a thing. If I had been told ahead of time just what a luminary was arriving, I would have paid more attention, but as it is, l don't remember much.

I remember another incident more clearly. It took place in February of the same year. They were breaking up a crowd in the street. And a Cossack killed a boy with his saber. It was terrifying. I ran home to tell them about it.

There were trucks all over Petrograd, filled with soldiers, who were shooting. It was better not to go out in those days.

I didn't forget that boy. And I never will. I tried to write music about it several times. When I was small, I wrote a piano piece called

"Funeral March in Memory of the Victims of the Revolution." Then my Second and Twelfth Symphonies addressed the same theme. And not only those two symphonies.

I also remember that there were a lot of prostitutes in Petrograd.

They came out in flocks onto Nevsky Prospect in the evening. This began with the war, they serviced the soldiers. I was afraid of the prostitutes too.

Our family had Narodnik* leanings-and, naturally, liberal views.

We had a definite understanding of right and wrong.

In those days I thought the whole world was that way. But now I see that our family was rather daringly freethinking, as compared with

*Narodnichestvo (from narod, "the people") was a radical political movement in nineteenthcentury Russia, which encompassed broad circles of the intelligentsia. The central idea of the Narodnilr.i was peasant democracy as the "Russian" path to socialism. The Narodnilci fought autocracy through agitation and terrorist acts. In the Stalinist period, the activities of the Narodnilr.i were hush� up and distorted.

7

the atmosphere at Prokofiev's house: they were much more reactionary there. To say nothing of the Stravinskys. After all, the family was supported by the Imperial Maryinsky Theater.

Our family discussed the Revolution of 1 905 constantly. I was born after that, but the stories deeply affected my imaginatiOn. When I was older, I read much about how it all had happened. I think that it was a turning point-the people stopped believing in the tsar. The Russian people are always like that-they believe and they believe and then suddenly it comes to an end. And the ones the people no longer believe in come to a bad end.

But a lot of blood must be shed for that. In 1 905 they were carting a mound of murdered children on a sleigh. The boys had been sitting in the trees, looking at the soldiers, and the soldiers shot them-just like that, for fun. Then they loaded them on the sleigh and drove off. A sleigh loaded with children's bodies. And the dead children were smiling. They had been killed so suddenly that they hadn't time to be frightened.

One boy had been torn apart by bayonets. When they took him away, the crowd shouted for weapons. No one knew what to do with them, but patience was running out.

I think that many things repeat themselves in Russian history. Of course, the same event can't repeat itself exactly, there must be differences, but many things are repeated nevertheless. The people think and act similarly in many things. This is evident, for example, if you study Mussorgsky or read War and Peace.

I wanted to show this recurrence in the Eleventh Symphony. I wrote it in 1 957 and it deals with contemporary themes even though it's called " 1 905." It's about the people, who have stopped believing because the cup of evil has run over.

That's how the impressions of my childhood and my adult life come together. And naturally, the events of my mature years are more meaningful.

For some reason no one writes about the humiliations of childhood.

They reminisce tenderly: I was so small and already independent. But in reality, they don't let you be independent when you're a child. They dress and undress you, wipe your nose roughly. Childhood is like old age. A man is helpless when he's old too. And no one speaks tenderly of olcl age. Why is childhood any better?

8

Childhood injuries last a lifetime. That's why a child's hurts are the most bitter-they last his whole life. I still remember who insulted me in the Shidlovskaya Gymnasium and even before that.

I was sickly as a child. It's always bad to be sick, . but the worst time to be sick is when there's not much food. And there were some very bad times with food. I wasn't very strong. The trolleys ran infrequently. When the trolley finally came, the cars were packed, and the crowds still tried to push in.

I rarely managed to get in. I didn't have the strength to push. The saying "The pushy ride cushy" was coined then. That's why I always left early to get to the Conservatory. I didn't even think of the trolley. I walked.

That's how it always turned out. I was always walking, and the others. rode by on the trolley. But I didn't envy them. I knew that there was no way that I could have got on, I was too weak.

I learned how to assess people, a rather unpleasant pastime, since it inevitably leads to disillusionment.

The supposedly marvelous years of youth are made for seeing the world through rose-colored glasses. For seeing merry things and beautiful objects. Clouds, and grass, and flowers. You don't want to notice the shady sides of glorious reality. You want to think that they're an optical .illusion, as was once suggested by a sarcastic writer.*

But willy-nilly you begin looking closer. And then you notice certain ugly phenomena, you begin to see what moves what, as Zoshchenko t put it, and what pushes what. And that makes you rather sad.

Well, not enough to plunge you into despair and pessimism, but a few doubts start gnawing at your youthful brain.

I worked in my youth as the piano player at the Bright Reel Theater-now called the Barricade. Every Leningrader knows the place.

•Daniil lvanovich Kharms (Yuvachev; 1906- 1 942), Dadaist writer, one of the most eccentric figures of Petrograd/Leningrad during Shostakovich's youth. He earned his living writing children's poetry. Kharms disappeared during the years of Stalinist terror. In the 1 960s his absurdist

"anecdotes" were widely distributed in samizdat.

tMikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko (1 895-1 958), satirist and playwright, a friend of Shostakovich. A brilliant stylist, he gained unheard-of popularity while still quite young. Zoshchenko noted dryly: "I write with compression. My sentences are short. Accessible to the poor. Perhaps that's why I have so many readers." After World War II, Zoshchenko was viciously attacked by the Party; "thoroughly rotten and decayed sociopolitical and literary physiognomy," "vile, lustful animal," "unprincipled and conscienceless literary hooligan," were a few of the official descriptions of Zoshchenko. "Let him get out of Soviet literature," a Party leader demanded, and the order was carried through. Zoshchenko's original literary style had a decided influence on Shostakovich's manner of expressing himself.

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My memories of the Bright Reel are not very pleasant. I was seventeen and my work consisted in providing musical accompaniment for the human passions on the screen.

It was disgusting and exhausting. Hard work and low pay. But I put up with it and looked forward to receiving even that paltry sum.

That's how hard up we were then.

The owner of the theater was not an ordinary man. He was famous, no more and no less than an honorary citizen of Milan. And he re-.

ceived that citizenship for his scholarly work on Leonardo da Vinci.

The honorary citizen of Milan was called Akim Lvovich Volynsky, also known as Flekser. And he was, as I've said, a famous man, a critic in various fields of the arts. Before the Revolution, Volynsky headed a highly respectable journal, printed Chekhov and even Leo Tolstoy.

After the Revolution, Volynsky started a ballet school, because he knew the field inside out. You might say the entire ballet world trembled in anticipation of his lengthy, innumerable articles. The articles were long-winded and abstruse. The ballet world read them with trepidation.

Every day the honorary citizen of Milan showed up at the ballet school and looked at the girls with satisfaction. This was Volynsky's little harem. He was about sixty then. He was a short man with a large head and a face like a prune.

He gave his harem good publicity, by the way. He published A Book of Rejoicing. The title in capitals. And in rejoicing, Volynsky prophesied world fame for his protegees. Nothing came of it. It turned out that Volynsky's patronage wasn't enough, you needed some talent as well.

My month of labor at the Bright Reel didn't fly by, it dragged. And then I went to see Volynsky for my salary. The honorary citizen of Milan ran from me as from the plague. But I finally caught up with him. I dragged him away from his contemplation of the ballet girls.

Volynsky looked at me with disdain. He was, let's be honest, extraordinarily august in his pre-Revolutionary frock coat. Once upon a time, that coat had been made for him, and not badly. His oversized head was propped up by a dirty collar. Volynsky looked down at me, even though that was difficult.

He asked me, "Young man, do you love art ? Great, lofty, immortal art ?" I felt uncomfortable, and I replied that I did. That was a fatal t o

mistake, because Volynsky put it this way: "If you love art, young man, then how can you talk to me now about filthy lucre?"

He gave me a beautiful speech, itself an example of high art. It was passionate, inspired, a speech about great immortal art, and its point was that I shouldn't ask Volynsky for my pay. In doing so I defiled art, he explained, bringing it down to my level of crudity, avarice, and greed. Art was endangered. It could perish if I pressed my outrageous demands.

I tried to tell him that I needed the money. He replied that he couldn't imagine or understand how a man of the arts could be capable of speaking about such trivial aspects of life. He tried to shame me.

But I held my own.

I hated art by then. It made me sick. We were desperate for money, I had worked hard, and now they didn't want to pay me for that work.

I was seventeen, but I knew that I was being cheated. It disgusted me. All the fine words of the world taken together were worthless-so I thought. What right does that man have to lecture me? Let him pay me my money. And I'll go home. Had I worked so hard in order to support Volynsky's harem ? Not at all.

But Volynsky didn't give me my money. I came to see him a few more times, in vain. He lectured me but didn't give me the money. Finally he paid part of it. I had to sue for the rest.

Naturally, I left the Bright Reel, and it goes without saying that I didn't harbor any warm feelings for Volynsky after that business. I read his high-flown articles on ballet and other exalted matters with revulsion.

And then my First Symphony was performed and I acquired a certain fame. As a result, one fine day I received an invitation. At first I was insulted, because the invitation was to a memorial evening for Volynsky, who had died by then. They were planning to memorialize his creative activity with a gala evening and they wanted me to appear with my reminiscences of him, since I had had contact with him at the Bright Reel.

I was angry at first. But then I thought about it and decided why not ? Why shouldn't I appear with my reminiscences ? I had a story to tell and I went. There was a large audience. The master of ceremonies was Fyodor Ktizmich Sologub, a very famous man, a poet and writer.

At the time Sologub was chairman of the All-Russian Writers' Union.

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Anyone with the slightest interest in Russian literature knows Sologub. In those days he was a living classic. No one was reading his books by then, but a strange and mysterious occurrence in Sologub's life was making the rounds.

Sologub had a wife. Not just a wife, but a second Sologub. Sologub's wife was unquestionably an outstanding woman. They say that she collaborated with him on many of his novels and·she also wrote many erudite articles on her husband's work. Not limiting herself to that, she put together an entire anthology in his honor. In other words, she was more than the ideal wife. Every artist should have such a wife.

Sologub wrote often about death. Of course, even that theme can pay off. You can set yourself up comfortably, write about death, and live well.

Mr. and Mrs. lived very well. But one day mystical vapors thickened in their house or they had a fight. In either case, one not very fine autumn evening Sologub's wife left the house and didn't return.

This was, of course, a tragedy. And in view of Sologub's fame, and the mystical nature of his work, this tragedy was given special significance. You could only venture a guess as to what happened to his wife, who had disappeared so mysteriously.

Someone had seen a woman throw herself into the Neva River from a bridge on that fateful night. Her body wasn't recovered. Perhaps that had been Sologub's wife.

The poet suffered and emoted. He languished for his wife. They say he set a place for her at dinner every night. Many members of the city's intelligentsia suffered and emoted along with Sologub. Winter passed and spring arrived. The ice on the Neva broke and right in front of Sologub's house, by the Tuchkov Bridge, a drowned woman surfaced.

They came for Sologub, he had to identify the body. "Yes, it's she,"

the poet said glumly, turned, and walked away.

This story was much discussed. There was something mysterious about it. Why had the body surfaced right in front of Sologub's house?

"She came to say farewell," one writer. decided.

Zoshchenko heard about this. It was too much for him and he wrote a parody. There were similarities: an unearthly love, a drowned woman, and so on. The commentary went something like this: "Maybe she 1 2

had lived with this backward element for years and years and then went and drowned herself. And maybe it was because he filled her head with his mysticism. But that's really unlikely. Actually, if you want a psychological explanation, she slipped on the logs and drowned."

The hero of Zoshchenko's parody was an engineer, not a writer, but when they brought him to view his drowned wife he behaved exactly like Sologub.

The whole business of the poet's wife who floated over to the house to bring him a greeting from the other world grated on Zoshchenko.

And with a laugh he concluded: "And this unfortunate incident has proved conclusively that all this mysticism, this idealism, all kinds of unearthly love, and so on are just absolute garbage and nonsense. Let us rise in honor of the memory of the drowned woman and the profound unearthly love for her and then let's move on to current events.

Particularly since these are not the times to spend a lot of time on drowned citizens." Zoshchenko called his parody "The Lady with the Flowers."

And so it was this famous Sologub who was in"charge of the evening for the great idealist and ballet lover Volynsky. I came out and started telling my story. I heard a murmur go through the audience.

Naturally, my performance was out of tune with the other orators.

They remembered primarily what an exalted personage Akim Lvovich had been. And here I was with my crude materialism, talking about money. One didn't bring up money on memorial evenings. And if one did, it was only to remind those present what a selfless man the dear departed had been.

I violated decorum on all fronts. A scandal was brewing.

By the way, there was a scandal with Zoshchenko when he published his parody. The intelligentsia who sprang to Sologub's defense maintained that the mockery of the man was too blatant. Yet Zoshchenko hadn't intended to mock Sologub at all. He was laughing at people who wove all sorts of nonsense out of a sad and altogether prosaic event. "How can you laugh when the lady drowned?" That's from Zoshchenko. So she drowned. Why turn Sologub and his wife, Chebotarevskaya, into Tristan and Isolde?

I shared my memories. The audience was in an uproar, and I 1 3

thought, Even if you drag me off the stage, I'll finish my story. And I did.

And as I left I heard Sologub ask his neighbor loudly, "Who is that young bastard?" I bowed to him politely. For some reason, he didn't respond.

And so what might have been our historic meeting didn't take place that evening. He didn't pass his torch to me and now I can't boast that I continue Sologub's treatment of death.

Sologub died soon after.

Zoshchenko tried a materialistic approach to the issue. He thought that if he wrote about death ironically he would stop fearing it. For a while I was in complete agreement with Zoshchenko, I even wrote a composition on the theme-"McPherson Before Execution," based on a poem by Robert Burns. But later I decided that Zoshchenko apparently had been unable to rid himself of the fear of death. He only wanted to convince himself and others that he had succeeded. In general, my feelings on the subject changed with the years. But more about that later.

Zoshchenko created his own method of psychoanalysis. He called it self-healing. He treated himself for hysteria and melancholia. Zoshchenko didn't trust doctors.

He thought that you could free yourself of melancholy and depression. You only had to understand what it was you feared. When a man realizes the reason for his fears, depression will flee. You have to untangle your fears.

Zoshchenko was right about a lot. He was wrong, .J suppose, only in that he sought the causes of fears in early childhood. After all, he himself said that catastrophes are more likely to occur at a mature age, because neuroses come to a head when you're at a mature age. True fear comes at a mature age.

Of course, fear is always with us. It's with us from earliest childhood. But you don't fear in childhood as you do as an adult.

As a child, Zoshchenko was afraid of beggars. More precisely, he was afraid of outstretched hands. He was afraid of water. He was also afraid of women.

I, apparently, was also afraid of outstretched hands. A hand can grab you. That's the fear of being grabbed. And besides, a stranger's 1 4

hand might take away your food. And thus the fear of being hungry.

I was also afraid of fire. A story I read as a boy left a deep impression on me. The clown Durov told it. It happened in Odessa before the Revolution. There was an outbreak of plague. They decided that it was being spread by rats, and the mayor of Odessa gave the order to destroy rats.

The rat hunt began. Durov was walking down an Odessa side street and saw that some boys had set fire to several rats they had caught.

The rats were running around in a frenzy, the boys were cheering.

Durov yelled at the boys and managed to save one of the rats. It was covered with burns, but somehow survived. Durov named the rat Finka. Finka hated people. Durov moved Finka in with him, and fussed over it a long time, treating it. It was very hard for him to win the rat's trust, but finally Durov succeeded.

Durov felt that rats were smart and talented animals. He cited examples. He said that a dislike of rats was one of man's many superstitions. Tukhachevsky* had a mouse living in his office. He was very used to the animal and fed it.

Setting fire to animals is horrible. But unfortunately, these things happen even in our day. A talented director,+ a young man, was making a film and he decided that what he needed in this film was a cow engulfed by flames. But no one was willing to set fire to a cow-not the assistant director, not the cameraman, no one. So the director himself poured kerosene over the cow and set fire to her. The cow ran off bawling, a living torch, and they filmed it. They were shooting in a village and when the peasants found out about it they almost killed the director.

When I hear about someone else's pain, I feel pain too. I feel pain for everything-for people and animals. For all living things.

I'm afraid of pain too, and I'm not too thrilled about death. But I'll live a long time, I know that, because I've learned to be calmer about

*Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky (1 893-1 937), Soviet marshal, a patron of Shostakovich. He had a brilliant career from the stan, with a series of important military victories, including the rout of the anti-Bolshevik Kronstadt Uprising in 1 921 . The uprising had a profound impact in nearby Petrograd and was remembered vividly by Shostakovich. Stalin saw Tukhachevsky as a possible competitor and had him shot, using as an excuse false documents supplied by the Gestapo that named Tukhachevsky as a German spy.

tA reference to Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky (b. 1932), a leading Soviet film director. This episode took place during the filming of Andrei Rublyov (1966), a film well received in the West.

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death. When I was a child I was terrified of death, maybe because of the war, I don't know.

I was afraid of corpses when I was a child. I thought that they would jump out of their graves and grab me. Now I know that unfortunately corpses don't jump out of graves. You can't jump out of there.

Of course, there was an incident in the late thirties that made me ready to believe that the dead fled their coffins. For some reason or other, they dug up Gogol's grave, and Gogol wasn't in his coffin. The lid was thrown back and the coffin was empty. A great corpse had run off.

Unpleasant rumors began circulating throughout Leningrad-it goes without saying-to the effect that the times were so bad even Gogol took off, couldn't stand it. And naturally, the appropriate departments took an interest: How could he have run off? What did this signify?

They cordoned off the burial place and conducted a search. It turned out that Gogol hadn't gone far. He lay nearby, headless. His head was next to him. And everything was cleared up simply.

It seemed that on some anniversary of Gogol's, they decided to erect a monument. It was made of brick and the bricks broke through the coffin, knocking off the lid. There were so many bricks that they knocked the body out of the grave and tore off Gogol's head.

Well, they put him back. The moral: Don't put too many bricks on the graves of great men. The deceased don't like it. And if you are going to put bricks above a grave, then at least don't dig around inside. It will be better that way.

No, I don't feel like digging around in my childhood. Let's leave that to others. If others, that is, have the time and the inclination.

I've worked at remembering a few times. Not for amusement, but following Zoshchenko's method. Nothing good ever came of it, my sickness got worse, and I couldn't sleep at night, I fell apart completely. Those who wish to know what I was like should take a good close look at my portrait by Kustodiev.* I think it's a good portrait. A good

•Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev {1878-1927), painter, illustrator, and theater designer, famous for his colorful, rather exaggerated depiction of Russian life: heavily bearded merchants, voluptuous sloe-eyed wives, dashing artisans. His is a world of fairs, troikas, and bars. He could achieve both pathos and irony in his paintiilgs, and this combination is found in Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth.

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likeness. I think it's the best one of me, the most truthful one, and yet at the same time, not an insulting one. I like it very much.

The portrait is done in charcoal and sanguine. I had just turned thirteen. It was a birthday present from Kustodiev.

I don't feel like talking about the portrait. It seems to me that it speaks for itself. And I, an old man, sit at my desk and keep looking at it. It hangs on the wall to the side, it's easy to look at.

The portrait is not only a reminder of the way I was at thirteen, it's also a reminder of Kustodiev, and the suffering that befalls man.

Fate, higher powers-all that is meaningless. What explanation can there be for Kustodiev's lot ? Now he is probably the most popular Russian artist. The least educated person, seeing any drawing or painting of his, will say, "A-a-ah, that's Kustodiev." That's what's called the "Kustodiev style." In bad times they used to call it "Kustodievism."

When a person finds himself in an ancient Russian city or sees typical Russian countryside, he says, "Just like a Kustodiev landscape."

And a full-figured, voluptuous woman walks by and he says, "There's a Kustodiev type." And this whole movement was created by a hopelessly sick man, a paralytic.

The diagnosis, if I'm not mistaken, was sarcoma of the spinal cord.

There's a man the doctors abused as they wished. He was treated, by the way, by the best doctors. The last operation-the fourth-was done by the same surgeon who had treated Lenin. He removed the growth on Kustodiev's spine.

The operation lasted five hours, Kustodiev said, the last hours without anesthetic. It was local anesthetic and it wore off quickly. That was a form of torture, plain and simple.

Almost none of my friends avoided torture. They tortured Meyerhold, and Tukhachevsky, and Zhilayev. * You know how things turned out.

I never knew Kustodiev as a healthy man. I saw him only in his wheelchair, which, I must say, he used with unusual ease. Sometimes he gritted his teeth-from pain-and then his face divided sharply into

•Nikolai Sergeyevich Zhilayev (1881-1942), composer and musicologist, Shostakovich's mentor. An eccentric and mysterious figure, a friend of Marshal Tukhachevsky, Zhilayev was taken by the secret police right after Tukhachevsky's arrest and killed.

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two: one half turned red, the other stayed white.

And it was in that pathetic state that Kustodiev painted his famous portrait of Chaliapin, larger than life-size. It has Chaliapin, and his bulldog, and two of his daughters, Marfa and Marina, and a coachman with a horse. Chaliapin came to pose for Kustodiev after his performances. And they made the bulldog pose by putting a cat on the wardrobe; when it mewed, the dog froze.

Chaliapin felt that this portrait was the best representation of him.

He took Kustodiev to all his performances. He came for him, took him out of his wheelchair, and carried him down from the fifth floor. And then he drove Kustodiev to the Maryinsky Theater, where he settled him in his box. After the performance, Chaliapin brought him back.

I was taken to Kustodiev by his daughter Irina, with whom I studied at the 108th Labor School. I wasn't eager to go to a strange house, but I was told that Kustodiev was a very sick man who loved music and I had to play for him.

I wrote down the titles of everything I knew and took the list with me. Kustodiev, leaning back in his chair, listened closely. He had kittens cuddling inside his jacket, dozing in ecstasy. When the music bored them, the kittens jumped noisily to the floor.

Kustodiev liked to listen to me play. He told me many things about art and Russian painters. And he was very pleased to be able to tell me something I didn't know. He told me and grew happy, pleased that now I also knew.

I was deeply impressed by Kustodiev's passion for voluptuous women. Kustodiev's painting is thoroughly erotic, something that is not discussed nowadays. Kustodiev made no secret of it. He did blatantly erotic illustrations for one of Zamyatin's* books.

If you dig deeper into my operas The Nose and Lady Macbeth, you can find the Kustodiev influence in that sense. Actually, I had never thought about it, but recently in conversation I remembered a few things. For instance, Leskov's t story "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk Dis-

•Yevgeny lvanovich Zamyatin (1 884-1 937), writer, author or the utopian novel We; he was branded a counterrevolutionary arter We was published in the West. When the campaign against him was at its peak, Zamyatin wrote to Stalin, who eventually allowed him to emigrate. He died in Paris. We is still banned in the Soviet Union.

+Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov ( 1 831-1895), short-story writer and novelist, whose artistic world is related in some ways to that or Kustodiev (who liked to illustrate Leskov's stories). His stylized prose depicts Russia in bold transformation and bright colors. Shostakovich wrote an opera based on Leskov's short story "Lady Macbeth or Mtsensk District."

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trict" was illustrated by Kustodiev, and I looked through the drawings at the time I decided to write the opera.

The Nose was designed in Leningrad by Vladimir Dmitriev, a marvelous artist, who seemed to be stuck on Kustodiev: he made fun of him all the time but couldn't get away from him.

Parody and stylization are one and the same, after all. Dmitriev either stylized the production after Kustodiev or parodied Kustodievbut the result was the same: Kustodiev on stage. The same thing happened with Katerina Izmailova in Nemirovich-Danchenko's* production. The designer was also Dmitriev.

These names are connected for me-Kustodiev, Zamyatin, Leskov.

Zamyatin wrote a play, The Flea, based on a Leskov story. It was produced in Leningrad at the Bolshoi Dramatic Theater. The sets and costumes were by Kustodiev.

The play and the production made a great impression on me. I even turned to Zamyatin when I decided to write my opera The Nose. I asked him to help with the libretto. Zamyatin knew of me from Kustodiev and so he agreed. But it didn't work, Zamyatin couldn't do it, he just didn't understand what was needed. But I'm grateful to him for a few ideas.

As for Kustodiev, I grew further and further away from him with the years. For a while I was in love with animation. Actually, with Mikhail Tsekhanovsky, a talented director. I consider him our most talented animator. It's a pity that he's been forgotten.

I wrote two small operas for Tsekhanovsky. They're listed as music for cartoons, but actually the films were made for my music, real operas, small-The Story of the Priest and His Worker Balda, based on the Pushkin poem, and The Story of the Silly Mouse. There was a lot of music. Too bad it's all been lost somewhere.

The Story of the Priest was completely anti-Kustodiev. It depicted a drunkard selling pornographic postcards at a fair. And the cards were a painting by Kustodiev, called Venus Without Shirt and with Fat Thighs. That was an obvious reference to Kustodiev's popular Russian Venus.

*Vladimir lvanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko (1 858-1 943), director and playwright, who with Stanislavsky founded the famous Moscow Art Theater. In 1 934 he produced the Moscow premiere of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth in the music theater he headed. In his late years Nemirovich insisted that Shostakovich was a genius and he never retreated from that position.

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Crippled Kustodiev painted his voluptuous nudes using a special contraption to move the canvas toward him so that he could reach it with his brush. He tilted the canvas and then returned it to its vertical position.

I watched in awe as he worked. Kustodiev liked my sister Marusya, and he used her in the painting Blue House. The picture depicts several scenes: a boy with his pigeons, a young couple in love, three friends talking. The painting also has a coffin-maker reading. That's life-the boy on the roof, the coffin-maker in the cellar.

Kustodiev grew tired of living. He couldn't work any more. Voluptuous women no longer brought him any pleasure. "I can't live any more, I don't want to," he used to say.

And he died, not of his disease, but of exhaustion. From a cold, which was naturally only an excuse. Kustodiev was forty-nine then, but to me he seemed an old man.

Kustodiev's example had a profound effect on me, something that I've become aware of now. Because I see that you can be the master of your body. Of course, you can't really be the master in the sense that if your legs don't work, then they don't work, and if your hands don't move, then they don't move. But you must try to continue your work, you must train and figure out feasible working conditions.

Kustodiev went on working even though he was seriously ill. This is a question of vital importance for me now.

You must try to work always, under any circumstances. It can sometimes save you. For instance, I can say that work saved Glazunov;* he was so busy that he never had time to think of himself.

After the Revolution, _everything around Glazunov changed and he lived in a terrible world that he didn't understand. But he thought that if he died, important work would perish. He felt responsible for the lives of hundreds of musicians, so he didn't die himself.

Once Glazunov listened to a friend and myself sight-read Brahms's Second Symphony. We were reading badly, because we didn't know

•Alexander Konstantinovich Glazunov (1 865-1 936), composer, head of the Pctcrsburg/Pctrograd/Lcningrad Conservatory Crom 1 906 to 1928. In this position he earned general respect.

A musician of conservative bent (he wrote lush, colorful symphonies and stylized ballets), Glazunov nevertheless was sympathetic toward Shostakovich. Placed under strong pressure at the Conservatory by radical teachers and students to case the Conservatory's academic traditions, Glazunov went abroad on a business trip in 1 928 and never returned to Russia. He died in France.

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the music. Glazunov asked whether we knew it, and I answered honestly, "No, we don't." And he sighed and said, ''You're so lucky, young men. There are so many beautiful things for you to discover.

And I already know it all. Unfortunately."

Glazunov, like Kustodiev, liked watching the young learn. Performers-violinists, cellists, pianists, harpists-came to his house every day.

And of course, singers. They brought him invitations and tickets to their recitals, each of which was described as being a decisive recital, vitally important for the performer. And Glazunov's opinion would be the ray of light in the darkness that . . . And so on, the same old nonsense.

Actually, Glazunov's opinion as such was not that indispensable for a young artist. I'm talking about his opinion on the essential point, the music. But there were other considerations-publicity-at work.

A recital is greatly enhanced, as every pushy artist knows, by the presence of celebrities. They always tried to seat Glazunov in the first row. And some very resourceful ones even managed to haul him on stage, where they set up chairs for particularly honored guests.

And the audience this way had double pleasure. For the same money they could watch the struggling performer and his famous guests. A circus.

And how lovely afterward: the green room, the violinist (or pianist or harpist) stands there pleasantly excited, accepting his due from his fans. And then the celebrity makes his way through the excited crowd and either shakes the performer's hand or kisses it, depending on the musician's sex. And pronounces a few pretty words, which immediately become known to the broad musical community. Cheap and satisfying, as they say.

I had to go through all that and more myself. Not with such frequency as Glazunov, who certainly holds the record. But they say that Glazunov had recourse to illegal means to make the record, to use a sports analogy.

It's said that when he came to a recital Glazunov stuffed cotton in his ears and sat and thought his own thoughts. I must admit that he thought prodigiously, and the process was very impressive to behold.

And his neighbors were certain that Glazunov was listening diligently to the sounds pouring from the stage.

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And when it was time to go backstage to the green room to congratulate the "subject of the festivities," Glazunov surreptitiously slipped. the cotton from his ears and muttered a few noncommittal but definitely laudatory generalities. "Marvelous, and such a stylish touch in the first part . . . "

Of course, to continue the sports metaphor, he should have been disqualified. But no one guessed, or they all pretended not to. E,veryone had something to gain from this comedy.

The greatest paradox lay in the fact that Glazunov's taste in music was on the highest level. He was actually a very strict and demanding appraiser.

How can this be explained? And it's very important to me that it be explained, because if I can explain Glazunov's position on this issue, it will clear up much confusion about my own evaluations and reviews.

I know that my reviews and opinions are greeted skeptically by some comrades. A complex game is being played here. On the one hand, people try to get a recommendation or review from me. And on the other . . .

And on the other hand, I was once told about the words of one of our outstanding conductors.* He's supposed to have said about me,

"Ah, that yurodivy, who says 'Very good, very good' about any performance."

First of all, it seems to me sometimes that this magnificent conductor (I hold his talent in high esteem) has more reason to be called yurodivy than I. I'm referring to his religious fanaticism. But I'm not talking about him here. Isn't it perfectly clear that there are many occasions when shooting a cannon at sparrows is completely unnecessary and pointless ?

There is a severe critic inside all of us. It's not so hard to be tough, but is it worth airing your aural preferences before everyone? When it's necessary I can express myself-and have-very sharply, when it comes to the performance of both other people's music and my own.

As a youth I was very harsh and intolerant. The slightest deviation

*A reference to Ycvgeny Alexandrovich Mravinsky (b. 1903), appointed chief conductor and musical director of the Leningrad Philharmonic orchestra in 1 938 and still in this post. He led the first performances of the Fifth, Sixth, Eighth (which is dedicated to Mravinsky), Ninth, and Tenth Symphonies of Shostakovich, and for many years was a close friend of the composer. Although a man of religious convictions, Mravinsky has remained a member of the Party. His relationship with Shostakovich deteriorated in the last years of the composer's life.

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from the planned performance of one of my works irritated me extremely.

This lasted a fairly long time, and included collisions that had a fatal effect on the future of my works. I feel that this was part of the problem with my Fourth Symphony, and it's painful for me to think about it.

These and other circumstances and also, naturally, age have changed my position somewhat. I certainly haven't become more complaisant, but I have begun expressing my point of view in such a way that the point is made without mortally insulting the performer.

A major factor is that more attention is paid to my opinion. Before, in order to be heard, I had to be extreme. Later, musicians began to understand mere hints. It became easier for me to speak with musicians. But · harder at the same time. Why harder? Because when a single word carries more weight it also hits harder.

I hear many mediocre musicians. A great many. But they have the right to live. It's only song-and-dance ensembles like the Red Army Chorus that drive me crazy. If I were suddenly to become minister of culture, I would immediately disband all these ensembles. That would be my first order. I would naturally be arrested immediately for sabotage, but they would never reorganize the scattered ensembles.

Before, when I spoke, people didn't pay too much attention, even when it concerned my own compositions. In order to overcome the performer's resistance, I had to be more aggressive than I would have liked. I had to scream where a normal voice should have done.

Most often I encountered an insulting condescension. But there were . also highly irritable citizens, who became nervous at my modest requests and were rude to me.

Now I can't abide rudeness, even in so-called great artists. Rudeness and cruelty are the qualities I hate most. Rudeness and cruelty are always connected, I feel. One example out of many is Stalin.

As you know, Lenin in his "political will"* said that Stalin had only one fault-rudeness. And that everything else was in good shape.

•A reference to the so-called Letter to the Congress, dictated by the gravely ill Lenin in late December 1 922-early January 1923; in it, Lenin, addressing the Party leaders, gave comparative evaluations of his possible successors, including Stalin. Published in the West in 1926, this important document, now widely known as Lenin's "political will," was denounced as a forgery at the time by Soviet leaders. It was not published in the Soviet Union until 1 956, when it was officially included in the complete works of Lenin.

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As we know all too well now, the Party leadership didn't feel the need to remove Stalin from his post as head of the Party because, in their opinion, what kind of fault was rudeness? On the contrary, it was almost like valor.

I remember reading in a commentary to some notes of Lenin's that important Party leaders (I think it was Ordzhonikidze* and some other Georgian) traded insults and slapped each other. A little joke among friends.

And we know how it all ended. No, don't expect anything good from a rude man.

And it doesn't matter in what field the boor is, politics or art. It doesn't matter where, he always tries to become a dictator, a tyrant.

He tries to oppress everyone. And the result, as a rule, is very bad.

What galls me is that these sadists always have fans and followersand sincere ones at that. The typical example of this is Toscanini.

I hate Toscanini. I've never heard him in a concert hall, but I've heard enough of his recordings. What he does to music is terrible, in my opinion. He chops it up into a hash and then pours a disgusting sauce over it. Toscanini "honored" me by conducting my symphonies.

I heard those records too, and they're worthless.

I've read about Toscanini's conducting style and his manner of conducting a rehearsal. The people who describe this disgraceful behavior are for some reason delighted by it. I simply can't understand what they find delightful.

I think it's outrageous, not delightful. He screams and curses the musicians and makes scenes in the most shameless manner. The poor musicians have to put up with all this nonsense or be fired. And they even begin to see "something" in it.

Naturally, you must grow accustomed to it. For if you are mocked every day you either get used to it or you go mad. Only a strong person can remain between these two extremes, yet are there many truly strong people among orchestra players ? The habit of group playing ·

breeds the herd instinct. Not in everyone, of course, but in many. And

*Grigori (Sergo) Konstantinovich Ordzhonikidze (1886-1 937), one of the leaders of the Communist Party. He committed suicide when the "great terror" began. The official version attributed his death to a heart attack. His relatives and friends suffered under the repressions, but Stalin thought it useful to maintain Ordzhonikidze's image as a "loyal Stalinist." Ncvcrthdcss, Stalin's hatred of Ordzhonikidzc was so great that it played a part in his denunciation of the opera The Great Friendship by Muraddi, the hero of which was Ordzhonikidze.

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they are the ones who exalt Toscanini.

Toscanini sent me his recording of my Seventh Symphony and hearing it made me very angry. Everything is wrong; The spirit and the character and the tempos. It's a lousy, sloppy hack job.

I wrote him a letter expressing my views. I don't know if he ever got it, maybe he did and pretended not to-that would be completely in keeping with his vain and egotistical style.

Why do I think that Toscanini didn't let it be known that I wrote to him? Because much later I received a letter from America: I was elected to the Toscanini Society! They must have thought that I was a great fan of the maestro's.

I began receiving records on a regular basis-all new recordings by Toscanini. My only comfort is that at least I always have a birthday present handy. Naturally, I wouldn't give something like that to a friend. But to an acquaintance-why not? It pleases them and it's less trouble for me. That's one of life's most difficult problems-what to give for a birthday or anniversary to a person you don't particularly like, don't know very well, and don't respect.

Conductors are too often rude and conceited tyrants. And in my youth I often had to fight fierce battles with them, battles for my music and my dignity.

Some of them tried to become my "patrons." Thanks a lot. Patronage makes me sick to my stomach. It was usually a poorly disguised attempt to foist their will on me, and I had to cut off these patrons brusquely, that is, put them in their place.

To respond to someone's rudeness in a way to end his desire to be rude once and for all is not easy. It's an art. I had good teachers. Naturally, Sollertinsky* was the best, but I tried to learn from others as well. I'm always happy to see that I've put down a boor.

An actor friend was appearing in a cabaret called Crooked Jimmy (this was in Moscow during the New Economic Policy). He came out on stage and wanted to begin, but he couldn't. A fat man was standing in front of the first row, berating someone in the audience. Time

•Ivan lvanovich Sollertinsky (1902-1944), musicologist, Shostakovich's closest friend from 1 927. He had an enormous influence on the formation of Shostakovich's tastes, and not only musically. A man of jovial and eccentric nature, Solleninsky made brilliant appearances, and his pre-concert commentaries were often as appreciated as the music that followed. During the antiformalist campaign of 1936, he was put under great pressure, but continued to defend Shostakovich. His only concession was the prorriise "to begin studying Georgian." Sollertinsky knew dozens of languages and dialects, including Sanskrit and Ancient Persian.

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passed and finally my friend lost his patience and said, "Allow me to start, comrade . . . " only to hear the obnoxious and too familiar reply:

"A goose is no comrade to a pig!"

My friend flapped his arms like wings and said, "In that case, I'm flying away . . . . " And tiptoed off the stage like a dying swan from Swan La.ke.

That's a quick wit. The audience laughed so loud that the boor shot out of there like a bullet.

Once, in my presence, Sollertinsky cut a haughty and obnoxious woman down to size. She herself was nothing, but her husband was a Leningrad big shot. At a banquet for an opera premiere at the Maly Theater, Sollertinsky came up to this woman. And wanting to compliment her, he said in his usual excited, spluttering manner, "How wonderful you look, you are absolutely ravishing today!"

He was just getting ready to enlarge on his dithyramb when the lady interrupted, "Unfortunately, I can't say the same for you." (She had Sollertinsky's face in mind, as well as his rather extravagant manner of dressing.) But Sollertinsky kept his wits about him and replied, "Why don't you do what I did? Lie."

Being rude is, in essence, easy; being sharp is significantly harder. I hope that the differences between these two manifestations of temperament are clear. The hardest, though, is telling the truth without being either rude or sharp. The ability to express yourself in this way comes only with years of experience.

But there is another danger here-that you begin expressing yourself obliquely. You begin lying.

In the last few years people have completely stopped being rude to me. It's good and it's bad. It should be obvious why it's good, and it's bad for two reasons.

First of all, people seem to be "protecting" me. They must be afraid that I'll shatter from a rude remark and they won't be able to glue me back together, not even in the best Kremlin hospital. They're sorry for me.

But the important part is this: the absence of rudeness today certainly doesn't mean that they won't be rude tomorrow or the next day with added gusto. Because boorishness as such is alive and flourishing and 26

almost anything at all can happen at any time.

And you're no longer what you were, you grow soft. You're used to being treated well, you've lost your immunity. Arid then they'll trample you, poor naked devil, trample you to dust.

But at the present I sense a desire for restraint in their treatment of me, an avoidance of rudeness. And this inspires in me, a man brought up in the spirit of St. Petersburg, the desire to soften my opinions. And I immediately think of Glazunov.