Natasha's Dance

6

The Leningrad to which Akhmatova returned in 1944 was a shadow of its former self. For her it was a 'vast cemetery, the graveyard of her friends', Isaiah Berlin wrote: 'it was like the aftermath of a forest fire - the few charred trees made the desolation still more desolate'.¹⁶⁷ Before the war she had been in love with a married man, Vladimir Garshin, a medical professor from a famous nineteenth-century literary family. He had helped her through her son's arrest and her first heart attack in 1940. On Akhmatova's return to Leningrad she was expecting to be with him again. But when he met her at the station there was something wrong. During the siege Garshin had become the chief coroner of Leningrad, and the daily horror which he experienced in the starving city, where cannibalism became rife, stripped away his sanity. In October 1942 his wife had collapsed from hunger on the street and died. He had recognized her body in the morgue.¹⁶⁸ When Garshin met Akhmatova at the station, it was only to tell her that their love affair was over. Akhmatova returned to the Fountain House. The palace had been half-destroyed by a German bomb. Her old apartment had large cracks in the walls, the windows were all smashed, and there was no running water or electricity. In November 1945, her son Lev came to live with her, having been released from the labour camp to fight in the war, and he resumed his studies at the university.

During that same month Akhmatova received an English visitor. In

1945 Isaiah Berlin had just arrived as First Secretary of the British Embassy in Moscow. Born in Riga in 1909, the son of a Russian-Jewish timber merchant, Berlin had moved in 1916 with his family to Petersburg, where he had witnessed the February Revolution. In 1919 his family returned to Latvia, then emigrated to England. By the time of his appointment to the Moscow embassy Berlin was already established as a leading scholar for his 1939 book on Marx. During a visit to Leningrad, Berlin was browsing in the Writers' Bookshop on the Nevsky Prospekt when he 'fell into casual conversation with someone who was turning over the leaves of a book of poems'.¹⁶⁹ That someone turned out to be the well-known literary critic Vladimir Orlov, who told Berlin that Akhmatova was still alive and residing in the Fountain House, a stone's throw away. Orlov made a telephone call and at three o'clock that afternoon he and Berlin climbed the stairs to Akhmatova's apartment.

It was very barely furnished - virtually everything in it had, I gathered, been taken away - looted or sold - during the siege; there was a small table, three or four chairs, a wooden chest, a sofa and, above the unlit stove, a drawing by Modigliani. A stately, grey-haired lady, a white shawl draped about her shoulders, slowly rose to greet us. Anna Andreevna Akhmatova was immensely dignified, with unhurried gestures, a noble head, beautiful, somewhat severe features, and an expression of immense sadness.¹⁷⁰

After conversing for a while, Berlin suddenly heard someone shouting his name outside. It was Randolph Churchill, Winston's son, whom Berlin had known as an undergraduate at Oxford and who had come to Russia as a journalist. Churchill needed an interpreter and, hearing that Berlin was in the city, had tracked him down to the Fountain House. But since he did not know the exact location of Akhmatova's apartment he 'adopted a method which had served him well during his days in Christ Church'. Berlin rushed downstairs and left with Churchill, whose presence might be dangerous for Akhmatova. But he returned that evening and spent the night in conversation with Akhmatova - who, perhaps, fell in love with him. They spoke about Russian literature, about her loneliness and isolation, and about her friends from the vanished world of Petersburg before the Revolution,

some of whom he had since met as emigres abroad. In her eyes, Berlin was a messenger between the two Russias which had been split apart in 1917. Through him she was able to return to the European Russia of St Petersburg - a city from which she felt she had lived apart as an 'internal exile' in Leningrad. In the cycle Cinque, among the most beautiful poems she ever wrote, Akhmatova evokes in sacred terms the feeling of connection she felt with her English visitor.

Sounds die away in the ether,

And darkness overtakes the dusk.

In a world become mute for all time,

There are only two voices: yours and mine.

And to the almost bell-like sound

Of the wind from invisible Lake Ladoga,

That late-night dialogue turned into

The delicate shimmer of interlaced rainbows.¹⁷¹

'So our nun now receives visits from foreign spies,' Stalin remarked, or so it is alleged, when he was told of Berlin's visit to the Fountain House. The notion that Berlin was a spy was absurd, but at that time, when the Cold War was starting and Stalin's paranoia had reached extreme proportions, anyone who worked for a Western embassy was automatically considered one. The NKVD stepped up its surveillance of the Fountain House, with two new agents at the main entrance to check specifically on visitors to Akhmatova and listening devices planted clumsily in holes drilled into the walls and ceiling of her apartment. The holes left little heaps of plaster on the floor, one of which Akhmatova kept intact as a warning to her guests.¹⁷² Then, in August 1946, Akhmatova was attacked in a decree by the Central Committee which censored two journals for publishing her work. A week later Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin's chief of ideology, announced her expulsion from the Writers' Union, delivering a vicious speech in which he described Akhmatova as a 'left-over from the old aristocratic culture' and (in a phrase that had been used by Soviet critics in the past) as a 'half-nun, half-harlot or rather harlot-nun whose sin is mixed with prayer'.¹⁷³

Akhmatova was deprived of her ration card and forced to live off

food donated by her friends. Lev was barred from taking his degree at the university. In 1949, Lev was re-arrested, tortured into making a confession and sentenced to ten years in a labour camp near Omsk. Akhmatova became dangerously ill. With rumours circulating of her own arrest, she burned all her manuscripts at the Fountain House. Among them was the prose draft of a play about a woman writer who is tried and sentenced to prison by a writers' tribunal. It was an allegory on her own tormented position. Because the tribunal consciously betrays the freedom of thought for which, as fellow writers, they are meant to stand, its literary bureaucrats are far more terrifying than the state's police.¹⁷⁴ It is a sign of her utter desperation that, in an attempt to secure her son's release, she even wrote a poem in tribute to Stalin.* Lev was only released, after Stalin's death, in 1956. Akhmatova believed that the cause of his arrest had been her meeting with Berlin in 1945. During his interrogation Lev was questioned several times about the 'English spy' - on one occasion while his head was being smashed against a prison wall.¹⁷⁵ She even managed to convince herself (if no one else) that their encounter was the cause of the Cold War. She 'saw herself and me as world-historical personages chosen by destiny to begin a cosmic conflict', Berlin wrote.¹⁷⁶

Berlin always blamed himself for the suffering he had caused.¹⁷⁷ But his visit to the Fountain House was not the cause of the attack on Akhmatova, nor of Lev's arrest, though it served as a pretext for both. The Central Committee decree was the beginning of a new onslaught on the freedom of the artist - the last refuge of freedom in the Soviet Union - and Akhmatova was the obvious place to start. For the intelligentsia she was the living symbol of a spirit which the regime could neither destroy nor control: the spirit of endurance and human dignity that had given them the strength to survive the Terror and the war. Zoshchenko believed that the decree had been passed after Stalin had been told of a literary evening at the Polytechnic Museum in Moscow during 1944 at which Akhmatova had received an ovation from a 3,000-strong audience. 'Who organized this standing ovation?' Stalin was said to have asked - a question so in keeping with his character that nobody could possibly have made it up.¹⁷⁸

* She later requested that it be omitted from her collected works.

Attacked by the same decree as Akhmatova was Mikhail Zoshch-enko. Like Akhmatova, he was based in Leningrad, a city whose spiritual autonomy made Stalin suspicious. The suppression of these two writers was a way of demonstrating to the Leningrad intelligentsia its place in society. Zoshchenko was the last of the satirists -Mayakov-sky, Zamyatin and Bulgakov had all perished - and a major thorn in Stalin's side. The immediate cause of the attack was a children's story, 'Adventures of a Monkey', published in Zvezda (one of the journals censured in the decree) in 1946, in which a monkey that has escaped from the zoo is retrained as a human being. But Stalin had been irritated by Zoshchenko's stories for some years. He recognized himself in the figure of the sentry in 'Lenin and the Guard' (1939), in which Zoshchenko portrays a rude and impatient 'southern type' (Stalin was from Georgia) with a moustache, whom Lenin treats like a little boy.¹⁷⁹ Stalin never forgot insults such as this. He took a personal interest in the persecution of Zoshchenko, whom he regarded as a 'parasite', a writer without positive political beliefs whose cynicism threatened to corrupt society. Zhdanov used the same terms in his vicious speech which followed the decree. Barred from publication, Zoshchenko was forced to work as a translator and to resume his first career as a shoemaker, until Stalin's death in 1953, when he was re-admitted to the Writers' Union. But by this stage Zoshchenko had fallen into such a deep depression that he produced no major writings before his death in 1958.

The attack against Akhmatova and Zoshchenko was soon followed by a series of decrees in which a rigid Party line was laid down by Zhdanov for all the other arts. The influence of Zhdanov was so dominant that the post-war period became known as the Zhdanovsh-china ('Zhdanov's reign'). Even though he died in 1948, his cultural policies remained in force until (and in some ways long after) the Khrushchev thaw. Zhdanov's ideology reflected the Soviet trium-phalism which had emerged in the communist elites following the victory against Hitler and the military conquest of eastern Europe in 1945. The Cold War led to renewed calls for iron discipline in cultural affairs. The terror of the state was now principally directed at the intelligentsia, its purpose being to impose an Orwellian conformity to

the Party's ideology on all the arts and sciences. Zhdanov launched a

series of violent attacks against 'decadent Western influences'. He led a new campaign against the 'formalists', and a blacklist of composers (including Shostakovich, Khachaturian and Prokofiev), who were charged with writing music that was 'alien to the Soviet people and its artistic taste', was published by the Central Committee in February 1948.¹⁸⁰ For the composers named it meant the sudden loss of jobs, cancellation of performances and their virtual disappearance from the Soviet repertoire. The declared aim of this new purge was to seal off Soviet culture from the West. Tikhon Khrennikov, the Zhdanovite hardliner at the head of the Composers' Union, stamped out any signs of foreign or modernist (especially Stravinsky's) influence on the Soviet musical establishment. He rigidly enforced the model of Tchaikovsky and the Russian music school of the nineteenth century as the starting point for all composers in the Soviet Union.

Immense national pride in the cultural and political superiority of Soviet Russia went hand in hand with anti-Western feeling during the Cold War. Absurd claims for Russia's greatness began to appear in the Soviet press. 'Throughout its history', declared Pravda, 'the Great Russian people have enriched world technology with outstanding discoveries and inventions.'¹⁸¹ Absurd claims were made for the superiority of Soviet science under the direction of Marxist-Leninist ideology, which led to the promotion of frauds and cranks like the pseudo-geneticist Timofei Lysenko, who claimed to have developed a new strain of wheat that would grow in the Arctic frost. The aeroplane, the steam engine, the radio, the incandescent bulb - there was scarcely an invention or discovery which the Russians did not claim as their own. Cynics even joked that Russia was the homeland of the elephant.*

This triumphalism also found expression in the architectural style which dominated plans for the reconstruction of Soviet cities after 1945. 'Soviet Empire' combined the neoclassical and Gothic motifs of the Russian Empire style that had flourished in the wake of 1812 with the monumental structures that trumpeted the magnificence of

* Andrei Sakharov records a joke in scientific circles at that time. A Soviet delegation attends a conference on elephants and delivers a 4-part report: (1) Classics of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism on Elephants; (z) Russia - the Elephant's Homeland; (3) The Soviet Elephant: The Best Elephant in the World; and (4) The Belorussian Elephant - Little Brother to the Russian Elephant (A. Sakharov, Memoirs (London, 1990), p. 123).

the Soviet achievement. 'Stalin's cathedrals', the seven elephantine wedding-cake-like structures (such as the Foreign Ministry and the Moscow University ensemble on the Lenin Hills) which shot up around Moscow after 1945, are supreme examples of this ostentatious form. But metro stations, 'palaces of culture', cinemas and even circuses were also built in the Soviet Empire style, with massive forms, classical facades and porticoes, and neo-Russian historical motifs. The most striking example is the Moscow metro station Komsomolskaia-Kol'tsevaia, built in 1952. Its huge subterranean 'Hall of Victory', conceived as a monument to Russia's military heroes of the past, was a model of the Russian baroque. Its decorative motifs were largely copied from the Rostov Kremlin Church.¹⁸²

Soviet pride in Russian culture knew no bounds in the post-war period. The Russian ballet was pronounced the best, the Russian classics in literature and music the most popular in the world. Russia's cultural domination was also imposed on the satellite regimes of eastern Europe and on the republics of the Soviet Union, where Russian became a compulsory language in all schools and children were brought up on Russian fairy tales and literature. Soviet 'folk' choirs and dancing troupes made frequent tours to eastern Europe, whose own state-sponsored 'folk' ensembles (the Lado and the Kolo in Yugoslavia, the Mazowsze in Poland, the Sluk in Czechoslovakia and the Hungarian State Ensemble) sprang up on the Soviet design.¹⁸³ The stated aim of these 'folk' groups was to promote regional and national cultures within the Soviet bloc. Soviet policy, since 1934, had been to foster cultures that were 'national in form and socialist in content'.¹⁸⁴ But these groups had little real connection with the folk culture they were meant to represent. Made up of professionals, they performed a type of song and dance which bore the clear hallmarks of the ersatz folk songs performed by Red Army ensembles, and their national character was reflected only in their outward forms (generic 'folk costumes' and melodies).

The long-term plan of Soviet policy was to channel these 'folk cultures' into higher forms of art on the lines set out (or so it was believed) by the Russian nationalists of the nineteenth century. Russian composers were assigned by Moscow to the Central Asian and

Caucasion republics to set up 'national operas' and symphonic

traditions in places where there had been none before. The European opera house and concert hall arrived in Alma Ata and Tashkent, in Bukhara and Samarkand, as pillars of this imported Soviet-Russian culture; and soon they were filled with the strange sound of a wholly artificial 'national music' which was based on native tribal melodies notated in the European style then placed in the musical framework of the Russian national movement of the nineteenth century.

The Russian composer Reinhold Gliere (the composition teacher of the young Prokofiev) wrote the first 'national opera' of Azerbaijan, mixing old Azeri melodies with European forms and harmonies. Gliere also composed the first Uzbek opera, Gulsara (1937), an epic Soviet tale of women's liberation from the old patriarchal way of life, with Uzbek folk tunes harmonized and orchestrated in the style of Berlioz. The Kirghiz opera was established by two Muscovites (Vladimir Vla-sov and Vladimir Fere) who orchestrated Kirghiz melodies (notated by the Kirghizian Abdilas Maldybaev) in their own imaginary Kirghiz national style with lots of raw and open harmonies. The Russian founder of the Kazakh national opera, Evgeny Brusilovsky, continued writing Kazakh opera until the 1950s, long after a new generation of native-born composers had emerged from the conservatory in Alma Ata. The campaign against the 'formalists' encouraged many composers to flee Moscow and Petersburg for the relatively liberal atmosphere of these remote republics. Alexander Mosolov, perhaps better known as a composer of experimental music in the 1920s, moved via the gulag to Turkmenistan, where he remained until his death in 1973, a composer of national Turkmen music in the style of Borodin. Maximilian Steinberg, Stravinsky's closest rival in St Petersburg in the 1900s and teacher to the leading avant-garde composers (including Shostakovich) in the early 1920s, ended his career as People's Artist of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic.¹⁸⁵

As the Cold War became more intense, and Stalin's own paranoic fear of 'internal enemies' and 'spies' increased, his regime's suspicions of all foreign influence turned to hatred of the Jews. This anti-Semitism was thinly veiled by Soviet (that is, Russian) patriotic rhetoric, but there was no mistaking that the victims of the vicious inquisition against 'cosmopolitanism' were predominantly Jewish. In January 1948, the well-known Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels, chairman of

the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC), was killed by state security troops. The assassination was carried out on the strict personal instructions of Stalin, who, three days before the brutal killing, had summoned all the members of the Politburo, denounced Mikhoels in a fit of rage and, in a way that suggests that this was to be a symbolic murder,* specified that 'Mikhoels must be struck on the head with an axe, wrapped up in a wet quilted jacket and run over by a truck'.¹⁸⁶

The murder of Mikhoels was linked to the arrest of several dozen leading Jews accused of taking part in an American-Zionist conspiracy organized by the JAFC against the Soviet Union.+ The JAFC had been established on Stalin's orders in 1941 to mobilize Jewish support abroad for the Soviet war campaign. It received enthusiastic support from the left-wing Jewish community in Palestine, so much so that Stalin even thought he might turn the new state of Israel into the main sphere of Soviet influence in the Middle East. But Israel's growing links with the USA after 1948 unleashed Stalin's lifelong hatred of the Jews.¹⁸⁷ The JAFC was abolished, its members all arrested and accused of plotting to turn the Crimea into an American-Zionist base for an attack on the Soviet Union. Thousands of Jews were forcibly evicted from the regions around Moscow and despatched as 'rootless parasites' to the Siberian wilderness, where a special 'Jewish Autonomous Region' had been established in Birobidzhan: it was a sort of Soviet version of Hitler's Madagascar, where the Nazis had once thought to export the Jews. In November 1948 the Central Committee decided that all the Jews in the Soviet Union would have to be resettled in Siberia.¹⁸⁸

In the cultural sphere the 'ugly distortions' of the avant-garde were put down to the influence of Jews like Eisenstein, Mandelstam,

* Stalin's father had been murdered by an axe wrapped in a quilted jacket; and his likely killer, an Armenian criminal who had worked with Stalin for the Tsarist secret police in Tiflis in the 1900s, was killed on Stalin's orders, sixteen years later in 1922,, when he was run over by a truck (R. Brackman, The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life (London, 2001), pp. 38-43).

+ Even two of Stalin's own relatives by marriage, Anna Redens and Olga Allilueva, were arrested for their Jewish connections. Explaining the arrest of her two aunts to his own daughter, Stalin stud: 'They knew too much. They blabbed a lot' (S. Allilueva, Only One Year (New York, 1969), p. 154).

Chagall. The offensive was personally instigated by Stalin. He even studied linguistics, and wrote at length about it in Pravda during 1949, with the aim of denouncing the 'Jewish' theory, originally advanced by Niko Marr in the 1900s, that the Georgian language had Semitic origins.¹⁸⁹ In 1953 Stalin ordered the arrest of several Jewish doctors who worked for the Kremlin on trumped-up charges (the so-called 'Doctors' Plot') of having poisoned Zhdanov and another Politburo member, A. S. Shcherbakov.* The tirade in the press against the 'murderers in white coats' produced a wave of anti-Jewish hatred, and many Jews were evicted from their jobs and homes. Jewish scientists, scholars and artists were singled out for attacks as 'bourgeois nationalists', even if (as was so often the case) they were more Russian than Jewish. The fact that they had 'Jew' written in their Soviet passports was enough to condemn them as Zionists.+

Jewish film directors (Leonid Trauberg, Dziga Vertov, Mikhail Romm) were accused of making 'anti-Russian' films and forced out of their studios. Vasily Grossman's novel Stalingrad, based on his work as a war correspondent, was banned principally because its central character was a Russian Jew. The Black Book (first published in Jerusalem in 1980), Grossman's still-unrivalled memoir-based account of the Holocaust on Soviet soil, which he assembled for the Literary Commission of the JAFC, was never published in the Soviet Union. When Grossman started writing in the 1930s, he thought of himself as a Soviet citizen. The Revolution had brought to an end the Tsarist persecution of the Jews. But in his last novel, the epic wartime story Life and Fate (first published in Switzerland in 1980), he portrayed the Nazi and Soviet regimes, not as opposites, but as mirror images of each other. Grossman died in 1964, a quarter of a century before his

* One of these prominent doctors was Isaiah Berlin's uncle Leo, who was accused of passing Kremlin secrets to the British through his nephew on his visit to Moscow in 1945. Severely beaten, Leo attempted suicide and eventually 'confessed' to having been a spy. He was held in prison for a year and released in 1954, shortly after Stalin's death. One day, while still weak from his time in prison, he saw one of his torturers in the street ahead of him, collapsed from a heart attack and died (M. Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London, 1998), pp. 168-9).

+ All citizens of the USSR had a Soviet passport. But inside the passport there was a category that defined them by 'nationality' (ethnicity).

masterpiece was published in his native land. He had asked to be buried in a Jewish cemetery.¹⁹⁰

'I had believed that after the Soviet victory, the experience of the thirties could not ever come again, yet everything reminded me of the way things had gone then', wrote Ilya Ehrenburg (one of the few senior Jewish intellectuals to emerge unscathed from the Stalin era) in Men, Years - Life (1961-6).¹⁹¹ Coming as it did after the release of the war years, this new wave of terror must have felt in some ways more oppressive than the old; to try to survive such a thing the second time around must have been like trying to preserve one's very sanity. Ehrenburg visited Akhmatova at the Fountain House in 1947.

She was sitting in a small room where her portrait by Modigliani hung on the wall and, sad and majestic as ever, was reading Horace. Misfortunes crashed down on her like avalanches; it needed more than common fortitude to preserve such dignity, composure and pride.¹⁹²

Reading Horace was one way of keeping sane. Some writers turned to literary scholarship or, like Kornei Chukovsky, to writing children's books. Others, like Pasternak, turned to translating foreign works.

Pasternak's Russian translations of Shakespeare are works of real artistic beauty, if not entirely true to the original. He was Stalin's favourite poet, far too precious to arrest. His love of Georgia and translations of Georgian poetry endeared him to the Soviet leader. But even though he lived amid all the creature comforts of a Moscow gentleman, Pasternak was made to suffer from the Terror in a different way. He bore the guilt for the suffering of those writers whom he could not help through his influence. He was tortured by the notion that his mere survival somehow proved that he was less than honour-able as a man - let alone as a great writer in that Russian tradition which took its moral values from the Decembrists. Isaiah Berlin, who met Pasternak on several occasions in 1945, recalled that he kept returning to this point, and went to absurd lengths to deny that he was capable of [some squalid compromise with the authorities] of which no one who knew him could begin to conceive him to be guilty'.¹⁹³

Pasternak refused to attend the meeting of the Writers' Union at which Akhmatova and Zoshchenko were denounced. For this he was expelled from the Union's board. He went to see Akhmatova. He gave her money, which may have led to the attack on him in Pravda as 'alien' and 'remote from Soviet reality'.¹⁹⁴ After all his optimism in the war Pasternak was crushed by the return to the old regime of cruelty and lies. He withdrew from the public scene and worked on what he now regarded as his final message to the world: his great novel Doctor Zhivago. Set amidst the horrific chaos of the Russian Revolution and the civil war, it is no coincidence that the novel's central theme is the importance of preserving the old intelligentsia, represented by Zhivago. In many ways the hero's younger brother, the strange figure called Evgraf, who has some influence with the revolutionaries and often helps his brother out of dire straits by making calls to the right people, is the very type of saviour figure that Pasternak himself would have liked to have been. Pasternak regarded the novel as his greatest work (much more important than his poetry), his testament in prose, and he was determined that it should be read by the widest possible audience. His decision to publish it abroad, after it was delayed and then turned down by the journal Novyi mir, was his final act of rebellion against the bullying of the Soviet regime.*

Shostakovich found another way to save his sanity. In 1948 he was dismissed from his teaching posts at the conservatories in Moscow and Leningrad - his pupils were also forced to repent for having studied with the 'formalist'. Fearing for his family, Shostakovich admitted his 'mistakes' at a Congress of Composers in April: he promised to write music which 'the People' could enjoy and understand. For a while, Shostakovich contemplated suicide. His works were banned from the concert repertoire. But, as in former times, he found a refuge and an outlet in the cinema. Between 1948 and 1953, Shostakovich wrote the music for no less than seven films.¹⁹⁵ 'It allows me to eat', he wrote to his friend Isaak Glickman, 'but it causes me extreme fatigue.'¹⁹⁶ He

* Smuggled out of Russia and first published in Italy in 1957, Doctor Zhivago became an international bestseller, and Pasternak was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1958, but under pressure from the Writers' Union, and a storm of nationalist abuse against him in the Soviet press, he was forced to refuse the prize. Pasternak died in 1960.

told fellow composers that it was 'unpleasant' work, to be done 'only in the event of extreme poverty'.¹⁹⁷ Shostakovich needed all the money he could earn from this hack work. But he also had to show that he was taking part in the 'creative life of the Party'. Five of the film scores he composed in these years were awarded the prestigious Stalin Prize, and two of his songs from Alexandrov's Meeting on the Elbe (1948) became hits, with enormous record sales. The composer's own political rehabilitation and a modicum of material comfort for his family were secured.

Yet all the time Shostakovich was writing secret music 'for the drawer'. Some of it was musical lampoon, like Rayok, or The Peep Show, a cantata satire on the Zhdanov era, with music set to the pompous speeches of the Soviet leaders, which finally received its premiere in Washington in 1989.* More than any other artist, Shostakovich laughed (inside) to save his sanity: that was why he so loved the writings of Gogol and Zoshchenko. But most of the music which he composed at this time was deeply personal, especially that music with a Jewish theme. Shostakovich identified with the suffering of the Jews. To some extent he even assumed a Jewish identity - choosing to express himself as a composer in a Jewish idiom and incorporating Jewish melodies in his compositions. What Shostakovich liked about the music of the Jews, as he himself explained in a revealing interview, was its 'ability to build a jolly melody on sad intonations. Why does a man strike up a jolly song? Because he feels sad at heart.'¹⁹⁸ But using Jewish music was a moral statement, too: it was the protest of an artist who had always been opposed to fascism in all its forms.

Shostakovich first used Jewish themes in the finale of the Second Piano Trio (1944), dedicated to his closest friend, the musicologist Ivan Sollertinsky, who had died in February 1944. It was composed just as the reports were coming in of the Red Army's capture of the Nazi death camps at Majdanek, Belzec and Treblinka. As Stalin

* It is not entirely clear when Shostakovich wrote Rayok. Sketches of it seem to date from 1948, but with the constant threat of a house search, it seems unlikely that he would have dared to compose the full score until after Stalin's death (see further M. Yakubov, 'Shostakovich's Anti-formalist Rayok: A History of the Work's Composition and Its Musical and Literary Sources', in R. Bartlett (ed.), Shostakovich in Context (Oxford, 1000), pp. 135-58).

initiated his own campaign against the Jews, Shostakovich voiced his protest by adopting Jewish themes in many of his works: the song cycle From Jewish Poetry (1948), courageously performed at private concerts in his flat at the height of the Doctors' Plot; the Thirteenth Symphony (1962), the 'Babi Yar' with its requiem, the words composed by the poet Yevtushenko, for the Jews of Kiev who were murdered by the Nazis in 1941; and virtually all the string quartets from No. 3 (in 1946) to the unforgettable No. 8 (in 1961). The official dedication of the Eighth Quartet was 'To the Victims of Fascism', but, as Shostakovich told his daughter, it was really 'dedicated to myself'.¹⁹⁹ The Eighth Quartet was Shostakovich's musical autobiography - a tragic summing up of his whole life and the life of his nation in the Stalinist era. Throughout this intensely personal work, which is full of self-quotation, the same four notes recur (D-E flat-C-B) which, in the German system of musical notation, make up four letters of the composer's name (D-S-C-H). The four notes are like a dirge. They fall like tears. In the fourth and final movement the grief becomes unbearable as these four notes are symbolically combined with the workers' revolutionary funeral lament, 'Tortured by a Cruel Bondage', which Shostakovich sings here for himself.