I think that for me the most serious obstacle on the path to conducting was just that-the resistance of the orchestra, which I always expected. I was used to it from my very first steps, from my First Symphony. Overcoming it is the work of born dictators. I don't like feeling that I'm distrusted. That disgusting professional condescension, such confidence, such aplomb and the constant desire to judge, to anathematize, constant distrust and disdain. And incidentally, the higher the orchestra's pay, the more it has of that impenetrable, stubborn . . . professionalism ? No, I would say professional snobbery.

Glazunov liked to say that amateurs would make the best musicians, adding after some thought, "If they only knew how to play."

Do you know the line from Chukovsky's children's story about how hard it is to pull a hippo from a swamp ? Well, I'm pulling a hippo from the swamp of my memory, and the hippo's name is Glazunov.

He is a good, kind, and helpful hippo.

The work of memory goes on and I of ten think about its meaning.

Sometimes I'm sure that the meaning will not be understood by anyone. Other times I'm more optimistic and I think that I'm guaranteed at least one reader who will know what it's about-myself. I'm explaining various people to myself, people whom I knew in various ways-not well, well, and very well. And in one case, perhaps better than anyone else on earth.

I spoke of these people, my acquaintances, in various ways throughout my life. Occasionally I contradicted myself-and I'm not ashamed of that. I changed my mind about these people and there's nothing shameful in that. There would have been, had I done so because of external pressures or to make my life better. But that was not the case.

These people simply changed and so did I. I listened to new music and grew to know the old better. I read, I was told many things, I suffered from insomnia and I spent my nights ruminating. All this affected me.

And that's why today I don't think about people the way I did thirty, forty, or fifty years ago.

75

When I was younger, I often used swear words in conversations with friends. With the years I came to use them less and less. I'm getting old, death is near, you might say that I'm looking it in the eye.

And now I think that I understand my past better. It, too, has. come closer to me and I can look it in the eye as well.

Yuri Olesha,* when we were still friends, told me this parable in a didactic voice. A beetle fell in love with a caterpillar and she returned h�s love, but she died and lay still, wrapped in a cocoon. The beetle grieved over his beloved's body. Suddenly the cocoon opened and a butterfly appeared. The beetle decided to kill the butterfly because it disturbed his meditations over the body. He rushed over to her and saw that the butterfly's eyes were familiar-they were the caterpillar's eyes. He had almost killed her, for after all, everything was new except the eyes. And the butterfly and beetle lived happily ever after.

But you need to look things in the eye for that, and not everyone can do it, and sometimes a lifetime isn't long enough.

•Yuri Karlovich Olesha (1 899-1 960), writer and playwright, whose brilliant style resembles Nabokov's. Olesha stopped writing fiction for a long time after the publication 0£ his long story

"Envy" (1927), in reaction to the sociopolitical situation, which was not conducive to creative work. He esteemed Shostakovich, but after the article "Muddle Instead 0£ Music" appeared, he publicly criticized his work, declaring that "Leo Tolstoy would have signed the article in Pravda," and that Shostakovich's music "humiliated" him, Olesha. Later the critic Arkady Belinkov commented: "His speech was one or the earliest and most brilliant examples or betrayal or the 1 934-53 model."

76

I THINK of Meyerhold too frequently, more frequently than I should, because we are now neighbors of sorts. I often walk or drive past the memorial plaque that depicts a repulsive monster and I shudder. The engraving says: "In this house lived Meyerhold." They should add,

"And in this house his wife was brutally murdered."

I met Meyerhold in Leningrad in 1 928. Vsevolod Emilyevich called me on the telephone and said, "This is Meyerhold speaking. I want to see you. If you can, come to me. Hotel So-and-so, room such-andsuch."

I don't remember what we talked about. I only remember that V sevolod Emilyevich asked if I would like to join his theater. I agreed immediately and a short time later I went to Moscow and began working in the Theater of Meyerhold in a musical capacity.

But I left the same year: it involved too much technical work. I couldn't find a niche for myself that satisfied both of us, even though it was very inter�sting to be part of the theater. Most fascinating were 77

Meyerhold's rehearsals. Watching him prepare his new plays was enthralling, exciting.

My work in the theater, basically, was playing the piano. Say, if an actress in The Inspector General was called upon to sing a romance by Glinka, I donned tailcoat, went on as one of the guests, and sat down at the piano. I also played in the orchestra.

I lived at Vsevolod Emilyevich's apartment on Novinsky Boulevard.

In the evenings we often spoke of creating a musical drama. I was working hard then on my opera The Nose. Once there was a big fire at Vsevolod Emilyevich's apartment. I wasn't home at the time, but Meyerhold grabbed my music and handed it to me perfectly intact.

My score survived thanks to him-a magnificent deed, for he had things much more valuable than my manuscript.

But everything ended well; I don't think that his property was heavily damaged either. If it had been, he would have had to answer to his wife, Zinaida Nikolayevna Raikh.

My feelings for Raikh are subjective and probably stem from the following fact: Meyerhold himself tried to underplay the difference in our situations and ages. He never would have dared to raise his voice to me. But his wife yelled at me now and then.

Raikh was an energetic woman, rather like the sergeant's widow in The Inspector General. She imagined herself a social lioness. This reminds me of a poem by Sasha Cherny.• It notes a certain rule of life.

While a celebrity, Cherny says, may casually give you his hand, his wife at best will proffer two fingers. And this could have been written about Zinaida Nikolayevna.

Meyerhold loved her madly. I had never seen anything like it. It's hard to imagine that such a love could exist in our day. There was something ominous about it-and it did end badly.

It makes you think: the best way to hold on to something is to pay no attention to it. The things you love too much perish. You have to treat everything with irony, especially the things you hold dear.

There's more of a chance then that they'll survive.

•s� Cherny (Alexander Mikhailovich Glikberg; 1880-1932), satirical poet. He died in France. Shostakovich loved Chemy's mocking poems and wrote a vocal cycle based on his texts in 1960. His prerevolutionary poems turned out to be so relevant more than four decades later that the first performance of the cycle created havoc among the apparatchiks of the Ministry of Culture.

78

That is perhaps one of the greatest secrets of our life. The old men didn't know the secret. That's why they lost everything. I can only hope that the young people will be luckier.

Meyerhold liked to dress elegantly and to surround himself with beautiful things-paintings, porcelain, crystal, and so on. But it was nothing compared to Zinaida Nikolayevna's passion for luxury. Raikh was a very beautiful woman, but perhaps a bit on the heavy side, which was particularly evident on stage. She moved with astounding clumsiness on stage.

Raikh loved her own beauty. And she knew how to make herself look good, how to frame her beauty. Everything in the Meyerhold house served that purpose: the furniture, the decor, everything. And of course, the jewels.

Almost . immediately after Meyerhold's disappearance,"' bandits came to Raikh's house. They killed her. Seventeen knife wounds; she was stabbed in the eyes. Raikh screamed for a long time, but none of the neighbors came to her aid. No one dared to go into Meyerhold's apartment. Who knew what was going on? Maybe Raikh was being battered by the iron fist of an official thug. Better keep away from trouble. And so they killed her and got away with all the jewels.

Raikh was of Lutheran stock, and a noblewoman at that, but I would never have thought so to look at her. She seemed a typical Odessa fishwife. I wasn't very surprised to learn that she was born in Odessa. Her Odessa heritage overshadowed the rest. Zinaida Nikolayevna often frequented a secondhand shop, the one near Novinsky Boulevard, where former ladies sold remnants of their past. Raikh was an excellent haggler.

Raikh's attitude toward me was, I suppose, one of the reasons that I left the Theater of Meyerhold. Because she let me know that I was living on Meyerhold's charity like a sponger. Naturally, it was never articulated, but it was obvious in her treatment of me. And I didn't like it.

Meyerhold was my benefactor. He heard about me from Arn-

• "Disappearance" refers here to Meyerhold's arrest on June 20, 1939. People often simply disappeared in those days, without any official word on their fate; when this happened, relatives knew enough to make inquiries of the secret police. The subsequent fate of those arrested often remained unknown for many years, and in most cases the dates or death are approximate.

79

shtam. * In Meyerhold's production of The Teacher Bubus, Arnshtam sat in a shell over the stage. He wore tails and he played pieces by Chopin and Liszt. Including the Dante Sonata ("After Reading Dante"), which ended the play. The Teacher Bubus was a rather wild and clumsy play. The shell in which poor Arnshtam was enthroned was gilded. Candles burned on the grand piano. And voluptuous Raikh marched heavily to Chopin's music.

Arnshtam was planning to leave Meyerhold, since he was being drafted. Meyerhold had heard my First Symphony. He didn't like it very much, but still he knew my name. Arnshtam recommended me as a pianist. It was a good deed for Meyerhold. He thought along these lines: Here's a young man with nothing to eat. I'll take him into my theater. And he did. But being a noble spirit, he didn't hold his good deed against me. Not like Zinaida Nikolayevna.

Raikh was the one who destroyed Meyerhold. I'm absolutely convinced of it. It was she who made him stay close to the rulers, close to Trotsky, Zinoviev, t et al. Meyerhold dedicated one of his plays to Trotsky (he called his plays opuses). And it backfired.

Meyerhold's admirers included Bukharin and Karl Radek.* But to Meyerhold's credit, he never felt on friendly footing with the authorities. Important guests had a terrible effect on him. I can attest to that.

And naturally, Meyerhold would never lower himself to the role of Stalin's flunky. Stalin hated Meyerhold. It was a hatred by default, you might say, because Stalin had never been present at a single production of Meyerhold's. Not a one. Stalin based his feelings for Meyerhold completely on denunciations.

•Leo Oskarovich Arnshtam (b. 1905), film director, a friend of Shostakovich. In his youth, he worked as a piano player at the Theater of Meyerhold. Shostakovich wrote the scores for five of Arnshtam's films, including Girlfriends (1936), which was a success in the United States.

tGrigori Evseyevich Zinoviev (Radomyslsky; 1 883-1936), a leader of the Communist Party and the Comintem. As Chairman of the Pctrograd City Soviet, he was notorious for his cruelty (including executions of hostages). An artist who knew him recalled that Zinoviev told him: "The Revolution, the Internationale-they are major events, that's true. But I'll burst out crying if they touch Paris!" He was shot on Stalin's orders for being a "terrorist."

*Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (1 888-1 938), a Communist Party leader. In his "political will"

Lenin described Bukharin as "not only the most valt:ed and most important theoretician of the Party, but also justly the favorite of the Party." He was shot by Stalin. The same fate awaited the major Party worker and journalist Karl Bemgardovich Radek (Sobclson; 1 885-1939), who in his day was hailed as the best fabricator of anti-Soviet jokes.

80

Just before the Theater of Meyerhold was shut down, Kaganovich*

came to a performance at the theater. He was very powerful. The theater's future depended on his opinion, as did Meyerhold's future.

As was to be expected, Kaganovich didn't like the play. Stalin's faithful comrade in arms left almost in the middle. Meyerhold, who was in his sixties then, ran out into the street after Kaganovich. Kaganovich and his retinue got in the car and drove off. Meyerhold ran after the car, he ran until he fell. I would not have wanted to see Meyerhold like that.

A strange thing happened with Meyerhold. He certainly wasn't a pedagogue, more of an antipedagogue, in fact. If an extremely curious person pestered him with questions, it led to a grandiose scene.

Meyerhold attacked the innocent person, shouting that he was being spied upori, that his best creative discoveries were being stolen from him, and so on, bordering on insanity.

But even people who spent a very brief time with Meyerhold learned something. And even if Meyerhold threw them out on their ears, they still came away enriched, unless, of course, they were complete idiots.

When I lived with Meyerhold on Novinsky Boulevard, he occasionally shared his ideas with me. I sat in on many rehearsals and I saw many of his productions. If I start thinking, there was Tare/kin's Death, The Teacher Bubus, Trust D.E., The Forest, The Mandate, Commander of the Second Army, The Inspector General, The !Ast Decision, Thirty- Three Swoons, The Baths, and The Lady of the Camellias. I saw Meyerhold's production of Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades at the Maly Theater, I saw a revival of The Masquerade, I wrote music for The Bedbug, I was in charge of the music for Woe to Wit,+ and I learned a f cw things, I would think, from Meyerhold.

Some of his ideas took root in me then, and they turned out to • be important and useful. This, for example: You must strive for some-

*Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich (b. 1893), a leader of the Communist Party. Stalin was married to Kaganovich's younger sister, Rose. Kaganovich's signature appeared on multitudes of death warrants in Stalin's time. In 1957 Khrushchev removed him from power as a member of an "anti-Party group."

tin Meyerhold's prciduction of Alexander Griboyedov's classic comedy Woe from Wit, the title was Woe to Wit (as the author himself had called the original draft)-a small touch illustrating Meyerhold's eternal desire to confuse and astound the audience.

81

thing new in each work, so that each new work stuns. Set a new technical goal in every work. Meyerhold followed this rule of his with maniacal stubbornness. Today such a rule may seem a commonplace, but in those days, at that time, it was a major discovery for me. We had never been taught anything like that. At the Conservatory it was: So you compose? Well, go ahead, however you please. Of course, follow certain rules. But nothing more than that.

And this leads to the second rule, Meyerhold's second lesson. You must prepare for every new composition. Look through a lot of music, search-maybe there was something similar in the classics. Then you must try to do it better, or at least in your own way.

All these considerations helped me very much in that period. I quickly forgot my fears about never turning into a composer. I began thinking through each composition, I had more confidence in what I was writing, and it was harder to throw me off the track.

And one more Meyerhold rule helped me to be calmer in the face of criticism of my work. This is Meyerhold's third lesson, and it is useful for others, not just me. Meyerhold stated it more than once: If the production pleases everyone, then consider it a total failure. If, on the other hand, everyone criticizes your work, then perhaps there's something worthwhile in it. Real success comes when people argue about your work, when half the audience is in raptures and the other half is ready to tear you apart.

In general, when I remember Meyerhold I feel sad. And not only because of the horrible fate that befell him. When I think of his end, it merely hurts. The sadness comes because V sevolod Emilyevich and I didn't do anything together. Nothing came of the vast plans we made to collaborate. Meyerhold wanted to stage my opera The Nose; it didn't work. He also wanted to put on Lady Macbeth; that didn't work out either. I wrote the music for one of his productions, Mayakovsky's The Bedbug, yet essentially, I felt great antipathy for that play. I had fallen under Meyerhold's spell.

I refused Meyerhold's other proposals because I was angry with him over The Bedbug. I didn't work with him on Mayakovsky's awful play The Baths, which was a failure. I even refused to write the music for his play Thirty- Three Swoons, based on Chekhov. And naturally, I didn't write the music for Meyerhold's production of One Life. That 82

was a terrible creation based on Ostrovsky's horrible novel How the Steel Was Tempered. Meyerhold wanted to disassociate himself from formalism* with this play. He ordered realistic scenery so that everything looked real. But it was too late for disassociation. His list of ideological sins was too long. And the authorities, seeing the realistic sets, decreed, "This is intentional, the better to mock realism."

The play was banned, and they shut the Theater of Meyerhold.

It's like the Ilf and Petrov story: Come on over, the Petrovs won't be here. Neither will the lvanovs. Come over, do. The Sidorovs won't be here either. No matter what I think of, it's the same: it didn't happen, we didn't have the time, we didn't do this because we were afraid, that we just didn't do at all. You look, and your whole life is gone.

Meyerhold wanted to do an opera with me based on Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time. He planned to write the libretto himself. Then we thought about doing an opera with Lermontov's Masquerade. And he proposed that I write an opera on Hamlet, which he also planned to produce. It's very sad. Though I can imagine what we would have got for doing Hamlet, since Meyerhold's ideas on that were as wrong as they could be for those times. We would have been decried for formalism.

It's a shame that it didn't work out with Meyerhold. I ended up writing music for a Hamlet anyway, for a most formalistic one. I'm very unlucky with that formalism. An artistic project is planned, I'm asked to be the composer, and then there's always a scandal. It must be fate. "Fateful eggs," like Bulgakov's story.

One of the most "fateful eggs" was the first of the three productions of Hamlet with which I was involved. The production was scandalous, the most scandalous, they say, in the history of Shakespeare. It may be so, I don't know. In any case, there was a great hue and cry. And of course, it was over the same old thing: formalism.

• "Formalism" has been a "cant" word in Soviet art and literature since the 1 920s. As history has shown, this word has almost no real aesthetic content. It has been an epithet for the most varied creative figures and tendencies, depending on the political line and personal tastes of the leaden of the Soviet Union at a particular time. Let us quote one typical Soviet definition of "formalism": "Formalism in art is the expression of bourgeois ideology that is hostile to the Soviet people. The Party did not cease its vigilant struggle even for a moment against any even minute manifestation of formalism." It therefore is not strange that all kinds of punishments were brought upon those branded as "formalists," up to and including extermination.

83

Akimov* was doing Hamlet at the Vakhtangov Theater. He's five years older than I, and that's an enormous difference, especially when you're young. This was in the early 1930s, and Hamlet was Akimov's first independent production. Daring, wouldn't you say? Particularly if you bear in mind what kind of Hamlet he wanted to show the audience.

To this very day, that scandalous production is a nightmare for Shakespearian scholars. They blanch at the mention of the production, as though they're seeing the Ghost. Incidentally, Akimov got rid of the Ghost. I think that this must have been the only version of Hamlet without him. The production had a materialistic base, so to speak.

Meyerhold, as you know, adored Hamlet. He considered it the best play of any time and any country. He said if all the plays ever written suddenly disappeared and only Hamlet miraculously survived, all the theaters in the world would be saved. They could all put on Hamlet and be successful and draw audiences.

Meyerhold may have overstated the case a bit. But really, I love Hamlet too. I "went through" Hamlet three times from a professional standpoint, but I read it many more times than that, many more. I read it now.

I'm particularly touched by Hamlet's conversation with Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, when Hamlet says that he's not a pipe and he won't let people play him. A marvelous passage. It's easy for him, he's a prince, after all. If he weren't, they'd play him so hard he wouldn't know what hit him.

Another Shakespeare play I love is King Lear. I met "the prince"

three times and "the king" twice, and in one case I shared their music-King Lear shared with Hamlet. t Crowned personages, I thought, would work it out between them.

In King Lear the important thing as I see it is the shattering of the miserable Lear's illusions. No, not shattering. Shattering comes all at once, and it's over; that wouldn't make it tragedy. It wouldn't be inter-

*Nikolai Pavlovich Akimov (1901-1968), theater director and artist, perpetually charged with

"formalism." His 1932 production of Hamlet was highly regarded in its day in the American literary press.

tThe director Grigori Mikhailovich Kozintsev (1905-1973) used Shostakovich's music, written earlier for his production of King Lear, in his staging of Hamlet. Later Shostakovich wrote the scores for Kozintsev's famous films of Hamlet and King Lear.

84

esting. But watching his illusions slowly, gradually crumbling-that's another thing. That's a painful, morbid process.

Illusions die gradually-even when it seems that it happened suddenly, instantaneously, that you wake up one fine day and you have no more illusions. It isn't like that at all. The withering away of illusions is a long and dreary process, like a toothache. But you can pull out a tooth. Illusions, dead, continue to rot within us. And stink. And you can't escape them. I carry all of mine around with me.

I think about Meyer hold. There were many tragedies in his life.

His whole life was tragic, and one of the tragedies was that he never directed Hamlet. Meyerhold liked to discuss how he would stage this or that scene from Hamlet. His ideas had much in common with Akimov's concept. Meyerhold had thought of it all earlier and carried it around in his head. Then he shouted on every corner that Akimov had robbed him. Of course, he hadn't. Akimov thought of everything himself. But it's significant that the idea of staging Hamlet as a comedy was in the air.

Meyerhold wanted Hamlet to be played by two actors, perhaps a man and a woman, and for one Hamlet to read the tragic monologues and the other to bother him. The second Hamlet would be comic. I think that Raikh would have read the tragic monologues. Meyerhold had already tried her as Hamlet.

Meyerhold was worried by the Ghost. He didn't believe in ghosts.

But more important, the censors didn't believe in ghosts. And so Meyerhold thought about how to present him. He demonstrated how the Ghost would climb out of a huge old trunk, creaking and groaning.

The Ghost would wear glasses and galoshes and sneeze constantly. It was damp in the trunk and he had caught cold. Meyerhold was very funny talking about the Ghost. And then Akimov had a Hamlet without the Ghost. That's interesting too.

But at the time I was going through a serious crisis.* I was in terrible shape. Everything was collapsing and crumbling. I was eaten up

•In 1931, when Shostakovich was writing lml:y Macbeth, a series of painful failures befell him: his ballet Bolt was taken out of the repertoire and the music to several plays and films did nothing to enhance his reputation (one production set to Shostakovich's music included circus horses and Alma the Trained Dog). He wanted to create "high art" and he was angry with all the pressures that were distracting him from his real work. His courtship of Nina Vasilyevna Varzar, his future wife! was going through a difficult and strained period at this time too.

85

inside. I was writing my second opera then. My second finished one.

We'll talk another time about my unsuccessful operatic projects. There were enough of them. They cluttered up my mind and exhausted my spirit. But this one seemed to be going well and I wanted to complete it. But I was being pulled in all directions. I was being bothered.

It was a bad period in general. And Akimov kept after me. I had agreed to write the music, and, it's important to note, the theater had paid my advance. Akimov was a very vitriolic man, and persistent, and he kept seducing me with tales about how scandalous his Hamlet would be.

The point is that in those days, Hamlet was banned by the censors.

You may believe it or not. In general, our theater has had trouble with Shakespeare, particularly with Hamlet and Macbeth. Stalin could stand neither of these plays. Why ? It seems fairly obvious. A criminal ruler-what could attract the leader and teacher* in that theme ?

Shakespeare was a seer-man stalks power, walking knee-deep in blood. And he was so na'ive, Shakespeare. Pangs of conscience and guilt and all that. What guilty conscience ?

All that is conventional, na'ive, and beautiful. At times, Shakespeare speaks to us like a small child. When you talk with a child, the words aren't important. What's important is what lies behind the words-the mood, the music.

When I speak to small children I often don't delve into the meaning of their babble, I just listen to timbres. It's the same with Shakespeare.

When I read Shakespeare, I give myself up to the flow. It doesn't happen often. But those are the best moments. I read-and listen to his music.

Shakespeare's tragedies are filled with music. It was Shakespeare who said that the man who doesn't like music isn't trustworthy. Such a man is capable of a base act or murder. Apparently Shakespeare himself loved music. I'm always taken with one scene in Lear, in which the sick Lear awakens to music.

Stalin didn't give a damn about all these refinements, naturally. He simply didn't want people watching plays with plots that displeased

• "Leader and Teacher" · is one of the traditional formulas invariably appended to Stalin's name in his lifetime. Among the other epithets were "Great Railroad Engineer," "Friend of Children," "Great Gardener." These expressions arc still part of the ironic vocabulary of the Soviet intelligentsia.

86

Eighteen-year-old

Sho takovich (standing econd

from left) among other

students of his professor in

piano at the Leningrad

Conservatory, Leonid

Nikolayev (seated fourth from

left). Note two other major

figures: the pianists Maria

Yudina (standing third from

left) and Vladimir Sofronitsky

(seated first from right).

Leningrad, 1924.

The young Shostakovich:

"I like to be treated with respect. "

T h e Leningrad

Conservatory, the

oldest and most

prestigious musical

academy in Russia.

In front is the

monument to

Rimsk y-Korsakov.

The director of the

Leningrad Conservatory,

Alexander Glazunov, the

"Russian Brahms." He

had been a Wunderkind

himself, and as such,

understood Shostakovich

especially well. 1 920s.

With his friend and

mentor Vsevolod

Meyerhold at the

director's Moscow

apartment. Shostakovich

was writing The Nose in

this period. Ten years

later Meyerhold would

disappear forever behind

Stalin's prison walls.

Moscow, 1 928.

Holding up the music for

the production of

Vladimir Mayakovsky's

comedy The Bedbug.

Seated (left to right) :

Shostakovich and

Meyerhold; standing (left

to right) : Mayakovsk y

(who shot himself in 1 930)

and avant-garde artist

Alexander Rodchenko.

Moscow, 1 929.

Shostakovich's patron,

Marshal Mikhail

Tukhachevsky, and his

wife, Nina. Stalin had

Tukhachevsky destroyed.

Director Nikolai Akimov.

Shostakovich wrote the music for

his scandalous production of

Hamlet. 1932.

The satirical writer Mikhail

Zoshchenko, Shostakovich's

friend. I n 1946, Party leader

Andrei Zhdanov would call him

an "abominable, lustful animal."

After a stormy romance, Shostakovich

married Nina Varzar in 1932. The opera

Lady Macbeth of Mstensk District, which

provoked Stalin's wrath, was dedicated to

her. Nina died in 1954.

With his closest friend,

the musicologist Ivan

Sollertinsk y.

The distinguished musicologist Boris

Asafiev. Shostakovich was never able

to forgive his betrayal.

A rare photograph: Stalin at the bier of Leningrad Party leader Sergei Kirov, killed, it is now believed, on Stalin's orders. Stalin used Kirov's murder as an excuse for massi e repressions. Next to Stalin i Andrei Zhdanov, later the Party ideologist on cultural matter . For man ear their tastes determined the official attitude toward Sho tako ich's mu ic.

Leningrad, 1934.

T I M E

T H E \\' E E J..: ! Y '1 E "

A (, .\ ? ! f

During World War I I ,

Shostakovich i n a fire fighter's

helmet was a symbol of Russian

resistance to H itler's armies.

(Copyright 1 942, Time Inc. All

rights reserved.)

The composer Veniamin Fleishman (seated second from right), a student of Shostakovich's, who died during the war in the battle defending Leningrad. Stunned b his death, Shostakovich completed and orchestrated Fleishman's opera Rothschild's Violin, based on the Chekhov story.

Three titans of Soviet music: they were enemies, they were friends.

From the left : Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, Aram Khachaturian. Mosco.w, 1945.

With bomber pilots

( 1942). Shostakovich

took his wartime

obligations serious} ..

Tikhon Khrennikov, appointed b Stalin to administer So iet music, attacks Shostakovich at the first Composers' Congress: 'J\.rmed with clear Party directi e , we will put a final end to an manife tations of anti

People formalism and decadence, no matter what defensive coloration the may take on ." Moscow, 1948.

The Congress "unanimously" condemned "formalists": Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, and other leading composers.

him; you never know what might pop into the mind · of some demented person. Of course, all the people knew once and for all that Stalin was the greatest of the great and the wisest of the wise, but he banned Shakespeare just in case. What if someone decided to play Hamlet or Macduff?

I remember how they stopped a rehearsal of Hamlet at the Moscow Art Theater. It was, if you can put it that way, Stalin's "favorite" theater. More precisely, it was the only theater that the leader approved fully and entirely. For the actor playing Hamlet, the banning of the play became a real tragedy. Hamlet had been his dream, everyone around him understood that this would have been a fantastic Hamlet.

But Stalin's word was law, and the leader and teacher didn't even have to give a written order. There was no order, just a wish. Why forbid ? You might go down in history with a less than noble image.

It's better to merely ask, as Stalin did, "Why is this necessary-playing Hamlet in the Art Theater, eh ?" That was all, that was enough.

The play was removed and the actor drank himself to death.

And for many long years Hamlet was not seen on the Soviet stage.

Everyone knew about Stalin's question directed at the Art Theater and no one wanted to risk it. Everyone was afraid.

And King Lear? Everyone knows that our best Lear was Mikhoels*

in the Jewish Theater and everyone knows his fate. A terrible fate.

And what about the fate of our best translator of Shakespeare----:Pasternak ?

Almost every name bears a tragedy, more tragic than anything in Shakespeare. No, it's better not to become involved with Shakespeare.

Only careless people would take on such a losing proposition. That Shakespeare is highly explosive.

But back then, in my youth, I gave in to Akimov's exhortations. He was a unique director, a siren with a cabbage head. Akimov was always elegantly dressed and extremely polite, but it was better not to be the butt of his wit or his pen. Akimov was a mean artist. His caricatures were lethal. I think I got off lightly.

•Solomon Mikhailovich Mikhoels (Vovsi; 1 890-1 948), Jewish actor and director. He was brutally murdered on Stalin's orders and the murder was said to be an attack by hooligans. In 1 943, when Mikhoels was chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (later disbanded by Stalin), he came to America on Albert Einstein's invitation. In New York he appeared with Mayor La Guardia in the Polo Grounds before a crowd of 50,000.

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Akimov obtained provisional permission for a production of Hamlet.

This was a major victory. The problem was that the previous Moscow production of the play was deemed totally inadmissible by the censors.

The legendary Mikhail Chekhov played Hamlet. He, as you know, was an anthroposophist, and he imbued his theater with anthroposophy. Hamlet was staged that way. Mikhail Chekhov set the play in Purgatory. Literally. That is, Chekhov thought that Shakespeare had written a purely symbolic play, that everyone was actually dead. The courtiers were the souls of the dead and the protagonists were anthroposophic symbols.

Probably Mikhail Chekhov sincerely believed that Shakespeare really was an anthroposophist, and that's how he played Hamlet. The atmosphere was otherworldly. The actors were brilliant, after all, and Chekhov was simply a genius. The audience came away from this strange Hamlet with the feeling that it had just come from the other world. You see what mysterious ideas artistic people can have. You might call them delirious. Officials saw the play and, horrified, banned Hamlet immediately as a reactionary, pessimistic, and mystical play.

Akimov, as I said, was a mean man, but a jolly one. He saw Mikhail Chekhov's interpretation of Hamlet and was outraged. He told me, "I look at the stage and think, Could the author of this morose delirium really be Shakespeare ?" Akimov developed a passionate desire to stage his own Hamlet. That often happens: inspiration from the contrary, so to speak. For example, Meyerhold conceived his version of The Queen of Spades under the influence of a terrible production he had seen. He later told me that he would have been ready to strangle the tenor who sang Gherman if he had run into him in a dark alley.

Akimov suffered mightily during Chekhov's Hamlet and it was the final straw that led to his own conception of the play. The concept was, I must say, revolutionary. Akimov decided to stage it as a comedy.

A comedy of struggle for power. Akimov gave the part to a rather famous comic actor. The actor was stocky and fat, a man who loved food and drink. I might note that this corresponds to the text of the play, which mentions Hamlet's corpulence. But the audience is completely unused to it. It's used to exalted Hamlets, to sexless Hamlets, I would say. Or rather, to androgynous ones in black, thigh-hugging tights.

Women have played Hamlet-Asta Nilsen, I think. And Zinaida 88

Raikh planned to play it. With her body. I think it's the only male role in world literature that women have attempted. And now suddenly a fat Hamlet. With a loud voice, full of vitality.

When Akimov informed the theater authorities of his project, they were also surprised. There didn't seem to be anything to forbid here.

And in any case, this concept didn't reek of reactionary mysticism. On the contrary, it gave off the healthy smell of alcohol. For Hamlet, according to Akimov, was a merry, cheerful, and hard-working man who enjoyed his drink. Actually, there wasn't anyone who didn't in this unique version. Gertrude, Claudius, Polonius, even Ophelia, drank. In Akimov's version, Ophelia drowns because she's drunk. In the language of a medical examiner's report: "an autopsy revealed traces of heavy alcoholic intoxication." The gravediggers spoke thus: "To drink or not to drink-that is the question." The doubter was set straight:

"�hat question? Of course, to drink." The dialogue was written specially for this scene.

Now about the struggle for power. This struggle became the central theme of Hamlet for Akimov. The struggle for the crown. And none of the traditional pangs of guilt, the doubts, and so on. I'm sick of that struggle for power, the eternal theme of art. You can't get away from it. Particularly in our times. So. Hamlet pretends to be mad the better

\

to trick Claudius. Akimov calculated that in the play Hamlet feigns madness seventeen times. Akimov's Hamlet wages a persistent and clever fight for the throne. There is no Ghost, as I said. Hamlet himself impersonates the Ghost. He does that to frighten and terrorize the courtiers. Hamlet wants to present an important witness for his side, from. the other world, to have the witness confirm that Claudius is on the throne illegally. And so the scene of the Ghost's appearance was staged as pure comedy.

As for "To be or not to be,'' Hamlet spoke the lines weighing the crown in his hands. He tried it on, twirled it every which way. His relations with Ophelia, a bitch and a spy, were unambiguous. Hamlet was screwing her. And Ophelia, pregnant, got drunk and drowned herself.

Polonius was marvelous. This was perhaps the acting triumph of Akimov's production (another of his paradoxes). The famous Boris Shchukin played the role. Later Shchukin became even more famous 89

as the first actor to portray Lenin on the screen. Or rather, as the first professional actor upon whom such a historic mission was bestowed.

Shchukin, like Akimov, was a very nasty man. He tried various approaches to the role of Polonius. But nothing seemed to work at first. I later got to know Shchukin better, when he was putting on a Balzac play in his theater and asked me to write the music. It was then that Shchukin revealed a small secret of his success in Hamlet.

I think the story is interesting and quite educational for actors. A small lesson in the art of acting. I laughed heartily when I heard it.

Shchukin wanted to get away from the cliches. Polonius's part isn't very clear. He seems clever and at the same time rather stupid. He can be a "noble father," that's how he behaved with his son. But in relation to his daughter he's a panderer. Usually Polonius's appearances are boring for the audience. But the audience is used to it and bears it.

The feeling is that if it's a classic, you have to bear certain things. You must have respect for the classics.

This was Shchukin's method. He found traits and characteristics in his friends that would help him create a role, and that's what he did with Polonius. He took something from one friend and something else from another. And then at a rehearsal Shchukin tried reading Polonius's monologue as though he were Stanislavsky.

And suddenly the role began taking shape. Everything fell into place. Even the most difficult parts of the role, when spoken in the manner and from the persona of Stanislavsky, suddenly sounded convincing. Shchukin copied Stanislavsky impeccably. You could cry laughing. The result was something majestic and slightly stupid. The man lives comfortably, very well, yet he prattles on with this nonsense.

That's how Shchukin portrayed Stanislavsky.

There were many jokes about Stanislavsky then. He understood nothing about what they call "surrounding reality." Sometimes when Stanislavsky appeared at rehearsal in the Art Theater (and that was becoming rare), the actors were horrified by his stupid questions, particularly if they were rehearsing a play about Soviet life.

One of the comedies, Squaring the Circle, for instance, revolved around the fact that two families were living in one room. Well, two weren't that many in those days. If the room was large, it could be divided into three and even four sections. And there was no talk of a lux-90

ury like an apartment. An apartment could hold ten or fifteen families.

There was a housing shortage, what could you do?

Fine words: communal apartment. The phenomenon must be immortalized, so that even our distant descendants know what a communal apartment is. Zoshchenko is incomparable here. He sings this song: "Of course, having our own separate apartment is nothing but a petty-bourgeois dream. We must live together, in collective harmony, and not lock ourselves up in our own fortresses. We must live in communal apartments. You're surrounded by people. There are people to talk to. To advise. To punch."

And it's easier to make a statement or, to put it bluntly, a denunciation, about your neighbor, since your neighbor's life is on display. Everything is visible-who came, what time he left, who visited whom, who his friends are. What a person cooks for dinner is also visible, since the kitchen, obviously, is communal. You can peek into your neighbor's pot when he steps out. You can pour in more salt. Let him eat something salty if he's so smart. And you can add something else.

For his appetite, for better taste.

There are plenty of diversions in a communal kitchen. Some like to spit into the neighbor's pot. Others limit spitting to teapots. It calls for certain skills, after all. You have to wait for the person to leave the kitchen, rush over to the teapot, pull off the cover, and cough up lots of sputum. It's important not to scald yourself. There is the element of risk. The person might come back any second. If he catches you, he'll punch you in the face.

It's as Zoshchenko said: learned secretaries should be housed with learned secretaries, dentists with dentists, and so on. And people who play flutes should be settled outside of town. Then life in communal apartments will shine in its full glory.

Yes, we need, we really do need, epochal and monumental works on the deathless theme of the communal apartment. The communal apartment must be captured, depicted, glorified, and proclaimed. This is the duty of our art, of our literature.

I confess here that I also tried to take part in the common cause. To wit, to depict this misery in music. I tried to create a musical composition on this immortal theme. I wanted to show that you can kill a man in many ways, not just physical ones. Not only by shooting, say, or 91

through hard labor. You can kill the human being in a man through simple things, by life style, for example, by the infernal communal apartment or kommunalka, as we all call it. May it rot in hell.

This is not a theme for comedy. I mean, not for chuckles and laugh""

ter. It's a theme for satire. But the Art Theater staged a comedy on the topic. They decided to have a pleasant laugh over it when they should have been weeping, as I've said. And Stanislavsky, to general amazement, didn't even comprehend the mechanism of the plot. He asked,

"What's the point? Why are all these people living in one room!"

Stanislavsky lived in a town house.

They told Stanislavsky, "They don't have individual apartments."

Stanislavsky didn't believe it. Stanislavsky's famous "I don't believe it." Actors of the world, start trembling. Stanislavsky said, "It can't be!

It can't be that people don't have their own apartments. You're pulling my leg."

They tried to convince Stanislavsky that this was the unadulterated truth, that there were some citizens living in the!!e abnormal conditions. The old man became upset. They calmed him down. And then Stanislavsky made the brilliant decision: "All right, in that case we'll put in the posters that this is a comedy about people who don't have their own apartments. Otherwise the audience won't believe it."

This is a true story about one of the great directors of our time.

Now, it's clear that Stanislavsky lived in his own world. He was an exalted man with an artistic soul. He received groceries from an exclusive distributor, as did all geniuses and Party workers bringing outstanding benefit to the state.

But in his naivete, the old man called the exclusive distributor his

"secret provider." People in the theater talked about it with a smirk.

Stanislavsky really did think that it was a great secret. But it was no secret. Everyone knew about exclusive distributors. Everyone knew that important people got their groceries from a different source than other citizens, in special places set up just for them. Everyone was used to this fact of our life, as though that was the way it was supposed to be. And everyone kept quiet, thinking he was keeping the

"great secret."

One Leningrad con man made a lot of money ·over it. He took both 92

circumstances into account, as it were, and used them. The circumstance that everyone knew about exclusive distribution and the circumstance that everyone kept quiet about it. The ones who didn't get groceries kept quiet so that they wouldn't end up behind bars for spreading slander, and as for the ones who got groceries, it's obvious why they kept quiet.

The con man operated this way. He read the paper, paying special attention to the obituaries. When he saw that the Party organization of some plant or office "expressed condolences to the family of the deceased," he clipped it, got the phone number, and sometime later called the number. The con man represented himself as the head of an exclusive distribution concern and said that they had received "orders from above" to provide the family of the deceased with "everything necessary." "Since the deceased had performed such great services for them,'' the con man added. He asked them to place an order for whatever they wanted-eggs, butter, meat, sugar, even cocoa and chocolate.

All at fantastically cheap prices. And why not-an exclusive distributor, just for deserving comrades.

Waiting for a few more days, the con man called again and said the order was ready. He asked the honored relatives of the deceased to appear for the groceries at such-and-such a place, and when the trusting people came to the appointed spot for the order, he took the money, promised immediate delivery, and disappeared.

The scoundrel got away with it for a long time, even though he pulled the trick dozens and perhaps hundreds of times, because he had worked it out so well-the plan was simple, but a work of genius. If the crook had come to a worker's family with such a proposition, they simply wouldn't have believed him. But a bureaucrat's family-they believed and how, because they knew very well that exclusive distribution existed, that it functioned openly, that it was done covertly, and that they shouldn't talk about it.

The new life style brought so many new and fresh conflicts. The exclusive distributor. The communal apartment. In previous eras a man might wander around a castle with a sword, looking for a ghost. In our times a man wanders around a communal apartment with an ax in his hands, ke�ping watch for the resident who doesn't turn out the 93

light in the toilet. Imagine a novel of secrets and horrors of the new era. Here's my hero, ax in hand, threatening to chop up the sloppy resident if he catches him in the act. I feel that I didn't sing his praises enough, that is to say, I didn't portray him fully enough.

I'm not indulging in irony now. For some reason, people think that music must tell us only about the pinnacles of the human spirit, or at least about highly romantic villains. But there are very few heroes or villains. Most people are average, neither black nor white. They're gray. A dirty shade of gray.

And it's in that vague gray middle ground that the fundamental conflicts of our age take place. It's a huge ant hill in which we all crawl. In the majority of cases, our destinies are bad. We are treated harshly and cruelly. And as soon as someone crawls a little higher, he's ready to torture and humiliate others.

That is the situation that needs watching, in my opinion. You must write about the majority of people and for the majority. And you must write the truth-then it can be called realistic art. Who needs the tragedies? There's an Ilf and Petrov story about a sick man who washes his foot before going to the doctor. When he gets there he notices that he washed the wrong one. Now, that's a real tragedy.

To the extent of my ability I tried to write about these people, about their completely average, commonplace dreams and hopes, and about i their suspicious tendency toward murder.

I regret that I wasn't consistent enough, perhaps, in that regard. I didn't have Zoshchenko's determination and will power. Zoshchenko plainly rejected the idea of a Red Leo Tolstoy or a Red Rabindranath Tagore, and that sunsets and dawns had to be described in flowery prose.

But I do have one great excuse. I never tried to flatter the authorities with my music. And I never had an "affair" with them. I was never · a favorite, though I know that some accuse me of it. They say that I stood too close to power. An optical illusion. What was not, was not.

It's simplest to look at the facts. Lenin, as it is easy enough to surmise, never heard my music. And if he had, I doubt that he would have liked it. As far as I can tell, Lenin had specific tastes in music.

He had a rather distinctive approach to it, more peculiar than is usually imagined.

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Lunacharsky* used to speak of it in this way: Lunacharsky often invited Lenin to his house to listen to music, but Lenin was always busy and refused. Once, tired of Lunacharsky's invitations, he said directly,

"Of course, it's very nice to listen to music. But can you imagine, it depresses me, I find it hard to bear." You see, poor Lenin was saddened by music. A telling fact, if you think about it.

Chief of Petrograd Zinoviev didn't become a fan of my music. Zinoviev was replaced by Kirov,+ and I had no luck with him either.

In his time, Zinoviev ordered all the opera houses in Leningrad closed. He explained it something like this: The proletariat doesn't need opera houses. They are a heavy burden for the proletariat. We Bolsheviks can't carry the heavy burden any more. (Lenin, if you recall, also called opera a "piece of purely upper-class culture.") Kirov, on the contrary, often attended the opera. He liked being a patron of the arts. But that didn't help my opera The Nose any. Kirov had a strongly negative reaction to The Nose and the opera was taken out of repertory. They blamed it on the fact that it needed too many rehearsals. The artists, they said, got tired. At least they didn't shut down the theater. They had planned to squash the opera house completely over Krenek's operas.

I don't need to speak of Stalin, Zhdanov, or Khrushchev here. Everyone knows of their dissatisfaction with my music. Should I have been upset? It seems a strange question. Of course not! That would be the simplest answer. But the simple answer isn't enough. These weren't mere acquaintances, men on the street. They were men wielding unlimited power.

And the comrade leaders used that power without thinking twice about it, particularly if they felt that their refined taste was off ended.

An artist whose portrait did not resemble the leader disappeared forever. So did the writer who used "crude words." No one entered into

•Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky (1875-1 933), a Communist Party leader, People's Commissar of Education. The first and last educated Soviet "culture boss," he wrote many lively articles on music and would never have given orders, as did a later minister of culture, to organize "a quartet of ten men." In l 921 , on Lunacharsky's personal orders, young Shostakovich was awarded food rations.

tSergei Mironovich Kirov (Kostrikov; 1 886-1 934), a Communist Party leader, the "boss" of Leningrad. He was killed by a terrorist (the murder is now thought by most historians to have been engineered by Stalin), and Stalin used this terrorist act as an excuse for a wave of massive repressions, long remembered by Leningraders. In l 935 the famous Maryinsky Theater of Opera and Ballet was renamed after Kirov.

95

aesthetic discussions with them or asked them to explain themselves.

Someone came for them at night. That's all.

These were not isolated cases, not exceptions. You must understand that. It didn't matter how the audience reacted to your work or if the critics liked it. All that had no meaning in the final analysis. There was only one question of life or · death: how did the leader like your opus. I stress: life or death, because we are talking about life or death here, literally, not figuratively. That's what you must understand.

Now you see why it's impossible to answer the question was I upset.

Of course I was.

Upset is the wrong word, but let's let it stand. Tragedies in hindsight look like farces. When you describe your fear to someone else, it seems ridiculous. That's human nature. There was only one single person with supreme power who sincerely liked my music, and that was very important for me. Why it was important should be self-evident. He was Marshal Tukhachevsky, the "Red Napoleon," as they liked to call him.

When we met, I wasn't even nineteen and Tukhachevsky was over thirty. But the main difference between us wasn't age, of course. The main difference was that by then Tukhachevsky had one of the most important positions in the Red Army and I was just a beginning musi·

cian.

But I behaved very independently. I was cocky, and Tukhachevsky liked that. We became friends. It was the first and last time that I was friends with a leader of the country, and the friendship was broken tragically.

Tukhachevsky was probably one of the most interesting people I knew. Of course, his military glory was irresistible. Everyone knew that at twenty-five Tukhachevsky was commander of the army. He seemed to be fate's favorite. He had fame, honors, high rank. It lasted until 1937.

Tukhachevsky enjoyed being attractive. He was very handsome and he knew it. He was always dressed flashily. I really liked that about him. When I was young I enjoyed dressing well myself. I rather envied another of his qualities-his unshatterable health. I had a long way to go to be like him. I was a sickly youth, while Tukhachevsky 96

could put a man on a chair and then lift the chair, yes, lift the chair and its occupant by one leg with his arm outstretched. His office in Moscow had a gym with beams, a horizontal bar, and other incomprehensible equipment.

Undoubtedly, Tukhachevsky was a man of outstanding ability. It's not for me to judge his military talent, and I didn't always feel like falling into raptures over some of Tukhachevsky's famous military operations-for instance, the suppression of the Kronstadt Uprising.

But I often witnessed people singing dithyrambs to his military achievements. He had more than enough flatterers around him. I kept quiet.

Tukhachevsky was a very ambitious and imperious person-a typical military man. In these traits the marshal resembled Meyerhold, who adored military masquerade. He wore a Red Army uniform.

Meyerhold proudly bore the ridiculous title "Honored Red Army Soldier." He had a passion for cannons, decorations, drums, and all the other military paraphernalia.

That was Meyerhold's weakness, let's put it that way. Tukhachevsky's weakness was art. Meyerhold looked silly in a uniform, but many were impressed. Tukhachevsky looked just as silly when he picked up his violin, but many were charmed. By the way, we're dealing here with pure and simple phoniness in both cases.

Strange: Meyerhold played the violin and so did Tukhachevsky.

(Tukhachevsky also made violins with great passion.) Each of them recalled the craft not long before his tragic death. That, of course, is merely a coincidence. One of life's cruel jokes.

Meyerhold, as he awaited arrest, regretted that he hadn't become a violinist. "I'd be sitting in some orchestra now, sawing away at my fiddle, and I wouldn't have a care," Meyerhold said with bitterness and fear. He was sixty-five then. Forty-four-year-old Tukhachevsky said almost the same thing before his arrest. "How I wanted to learn the violin as a child! Father didn't buy me a violin. He never had the money. I would have been better off as a violinist."

The coincidence amazes and horrifies me. A renowned director and a famous military leader-both suddenly wanting to become little, unnoticeable. Just sit in some orchestra and saw at a fiddle. The marshal 97

and the maitre would have traded their biographies with almost anyone, with any drunkard who amused the crowds in the cinema lobbies.

But it was too late.

Tukhachevsky liked being a patron of the arts. He liked finding

"young talents" and helping them. Perhaps because the marshal himself had been a military Wunderkind, or perhaps because he liked demonstrating his enormous power.

From the very first day we met, Tukhachevsky demanded that I play my compositions for him. He praised them and criticized some.

Often he asked me to repeat things-which is torture if music gets on your nerves. So Tukhachevsky probably did like my music.

Sometimes I think about how my life would have been if Tukhachevsky hadn't been shot on Stalin's orders. Maybe everything would have gone differently? Better, happier? But let's cast off dreams. After all, Stalin didn't consult Tukhachevsky. When the wise leader and teacher had them harass me over Lady Macbeth, Tukhachevsky hadn't known anything beforehand. He learned it with everyone else, in a notorious article in Pravda. And what could he have done? Talked Stalin out of it?

Tukhachevsky's future at that moment seemed radiant. Only a few months earlier he had become Marshal of the Soviet Union. Sounds impressive? And a year and a half later he was shot. And by chance I remained alive. Which of us was luckier?

Back at that time, in 1 936, I was called to Moscow for a show whipping. Like the sergeant's widow, I had to declare to the whole world that I had whipped myself. I was completely destroyed. It was a blow that wiped out my past. And my future.

To whom could I turn for advice? To whom could I go? I went to Marshal Tukhachevsky. He had recently returned from his triUmphant visit to London and Paris. Pravda wrote about him every day.

And I was a leper, people were afraid to come up to me. I was shunned. Tukhachevsky agreed to see me. We locked ourselves in his office. He turned off his phones. We sat in silence. And then we started talking very softly. I spoke softly because my grief and despair wouldn't let me speak in my normal voice. Tukhachevsky spoke softly because he feared prying ears.

Even then you had to take a guest to the bathroom to tell him a 98

joke. You turned on the water full force and then whispered the joke.

You even laughed quietly, into your fist. This marvelous tradition did not die out. It continues in our day.

But we were in no mood for jokes then. Tukhachevsky knew Stalin incomparably better than I. He knew that Stalin pursued a man to the end. In those days it looked as though that would happen to me. A second article in Pravda, destroying my ballet this time, confirmed my direst fears.

Tukhachevsky promised to do what he could. He spoke carefully. I could see him controlling himself when the talk turned to Stalin. And what could he have said then?

Tukhachevsky's plans have remained a mystery. Had he wanted to become a dictator? Why not, I think now. But I doubt that it would have been possible under those conditions. Now it's well known that Tukhachevsky was destroyed through the joint action of Stalin and Hitler. But one mustn't exaggerate the role of German espionage in this matter. If there hadn't been those faked documents that "exposed"

Tukhachevsky, Stalin would have got rid of him anyway. The Germans just played into Stalin's hands. It was an accompaniment.

Whether there was a reason or not-what was the difference? Tukhachevsky's fate was sealed.

Tukhachevsky's recommendations on military matters always rankled Stalin, and yet it was Stalin who decided which recommendations to approve. I know that Tukhachevsky had to resort to trickery. He and his deputy would plan it this way: They would appear together before Stalin. Tukhachevsky would make his. proposal and the deputy would "correct" him. This always made Stalin very happy. Stalin would add to and develop the "correction." He liked the fact that Tukhachevsky was "wrong." In the end the idea would be accepted. But it was no longer Tukhachevsky's, it was Stalin's idea. Another marvelous illustration of where Stalin's ideas came from.

They sometimes say that Tukhachevsky was powerless before Stalin, that Stalin was more clever. That's nonsense. Stalin attacked from around the corner, like a bandit. You don't need to be cleverer for that.

You just have to be meaner.

Tukhachevsky was alone. He had no friends, only fawners and companions Cot amorous expeditions. Tukhachevsky was attacked by 99

the "old cavalrymen": Budyonny and Voroshilov.* Tukhachevsky maintained, after all, that the next war would be won by tanks and aviation. As we all know, the marshal was right. But the former cavalrymen didn't want to listen. They thought that they could easily gallop over to Paris and Berlin.

Tukhachevsky, who discussed the meaning of Einstein's theory of relativity as it applied to warfare, stuck in their craw. It was easier for Stalin to talk with the cavalrymen. They looked up to him. That allowed Voroshilov, for instance, to live through all the unpleasant events. Of course, in his last days, Stalin began saying that Voroshilov was a British spy, but he didn't remember what he was saying any more. Voroshilov survived.

Voroshilov loved choral singing. He sang himself, he was a tenor, and that's probably why he felt he was as much a specialist in music as Zhdanov. He longed to give valuable advice to composers and performers. His favorite works were Ukrainian folk songs. He used to sing them with his puny tenor voice. One of my actor friends told me how he sang with Stalin, Voroshilov, and Zhdanov after a reception.

The soloists of the Bolshoi modestly sang along with the leaders. A horrible dissonance hung in the air. Stalin conducted. He wanted to command even here. Of course, they were all quite drunk.

It's obvious to everyone that I'm no judge in military matters. I'm a total amateur in the field and very happy that it's so. But I heard a lot about various military matters from Tukhachevsky. He naturally realized that it was stupid to discuss military affairs with me, but he couldn't stop himself.

We met often, and went out a lot. He liked driving to the country and he used to take me with him. We would leave the car and go deep into the woods. It was easier to talk freely there.

Tukhachevsky was always professional, everywhere, in any situation. He wanted to be a patron of the arts, but his mind swirled with military affairs. Sometimes he told me a thing or two.

In those moments I liked him and didn't like him. I liked him because he talked about the subject he knew. I don't care for dilettantes.

•Semyon Mikhailovich Budyonny (1 883-1973) and Kliment Efremovich Voroshilov (1881-1969), marshals of the Soviet Union, both of whom began their careers as cavalrymen. Budyonny, famed for his huge mustache and his outstanding stupidity, became a figurehead even before World War II, but Voroshilov continued on top almost until his death.

1 00

I find professionals more simpatico. But Tukhachevsky was a specialist in a terrible profession. His profession was walking over the dead.

Tukhachevsky strove to do it as successfully as possible, and his enthusiasm for military matters repelled me.

Tukhachevsky loved impersonating Harun al-Rashid. Actually, the uniform became Tukhachevsky and he knew it. But he was recognized immediately in uniform, and therefore he often went into town in blatantly civilian clothes. His suit would also be well made. Tukhachevsky loved the cinema. He could have seen the films in private screening rooms for the top brass. But he preferred putting on his civilian clothes and going to a seedy movie house. Alone, without a bodyguard. It was more interesting for him that way.

Once Tukhachevsky went to a theater and saw that the piano player was the former music teacher from the Cadet Corps. He had taught Tukhachevsky. The piano player's name was Erdenko, and he was related to the famous violinist Mikhail Erdenko. The old man was in pathetic straits. Tukhachevsky decided to bestow favors on him. He went up to him and introduced himself. He said that he wanted to study with him again, that the lessons of his youth were so good that he, Marshal Tukhachevsky, still couldn't forget them.

Naturally, Tukhachevsky didn't start taking lessons from his old teacher. But the old man did get a tidy sum. Tukhachevsky paid for something like a year's lessons in advance. He wanted to help the old man in a gracious way, without insulting him. He liked looking gracious.

Once Tukhachevsky and I went to the Hermitage to look at the paintings. Actually, it was his idea. He was in mufti, of course. First we wandered around the museum on our own, then we tagged along with a group. The group had a guide. A young fellow and obviously not very educated. Tukhachevsky began correcting the guide. He said two words to the guide's one, and, I must admit, to the point. The people stopped listening to _the guide, and listened only to Tukhachevsky.

Finally the guide grew angry. He wouldn't even talk to Tukhachevsky. He approached me and said, "Who is that?" Meaning, why is he sticking his nose in my business?

Without blinking, I replied, "Tukhachevsky." It was like a lightning bolt. At first the guide didn't believe me. But then he looked 101

closely, and of course recognized him. Tukhachevsky had an extremely distinctive face. Naturally, this not very educated worker at the Hermitage got scared. He feared for his job, that his children would starve.

And they would have fired him if Tukhachevsky had ordered it, or if he had merely complained. As commander of the military district, Tukhachevsky had great power iri Leningrad.

The guide's feistiness was replaced by terrible fear. He , began thanking Tukhachevsky for his priceless information. Tukhachevsky replied benignly, "Study, young man, study. It's never too late." And we headed for the exit. Tukhachevsky was very pleased with the adventure.

Once Tukhachevsky's security men discovered a man sitting in his car completely drunk, soused. He was trying to unscrew the door handles, for some reason. They were nickel-plated, very shiny, and apparently they had caught the citizen's eye. Well, the security men planned to take this citizen "where he should be." There is such a marvelous place, with very bad consequences, I might add.

Tukhachevsky interfered. He ordered them to let the drunkard go.

Let him sleep it off. He turned out to be the composer Arseny Gladkovsky, a rather famous composer in his time, one of his operas was quite successful. The opera was just then being revived, after a long hiatus, and since it dealt with a military theme (the defense of Petrograd in 1919), Gladkovsky thought Tukhachevsky might be interested in hearing it. In his invitation he thanked Tukhachevsky for not sending him "where he should be."

Tukhachevsky saw the opera but didn't like it very much. Later he said to me thoughtfully, "Maybe I was mistaken in letting him go?"

He was joking, of course.

They called Tukhachevsky the "greatest Soviet military theoretician." Stalin couldn't stand that. Stalin was also very suspicious of Tukhachevsky's friendship with Ordzhonikidze. When People's Military Commissar Frunze died suddenly-as they now suspect, Stalin had a hand in that death too-Tukhachevsky recommended Ordzhonikidze for the vacant post. Stalin didn't like that at all. That, too, played a part in future events.

On Stalin's personal orders Tukhachevsky was sent to Leningrad.

This was a sort of exile for Tukhachevsky, but I got to see him much 1 02

more. Tukhachevsky flew into a frenzy of activity in Leningrad, the results of which were apparent later, during the war-after Tukhachevsky had been shot.

During the war I thought of Tukhachevsky often. Naturally, we sorely lacked his clear mind. Now we know that Hitler didn't sign the Barbarossa plan* right away. He hesitated, and signed only because he thought that without Tukhachevsky the Red Army was powerless.

I thought of Tukhachevsky when I dug trenches outside Leningrad in July '41. They sent us beyond the Forelli Hospital, divided us into groups, and handed each of us a shovel. We were the Conservatory group. The musicians looked pathetic and worked, I might add, very badly. It was a hot July. One pianist came in a new suit. He delicately rolled up his trousers to his knees, revealing his spindly legs, which were soon covered with mud to the thigh. Another one-a highly respected music historian-kept setting aside his shovel every minute.

He had arrived with a briefcase stuffed with books. Heading for a shady bush, he would pull out a thick volume from his briefcase.

Of course, everyone tried hard. So did I. But what kind of ditchdiggers were we? All this should have been done before. Much earlier and more professionally. It would have had more effect. The little that had been done earlier in terms of defense had been done under Tukhachevsky.

When Tukhachevsky insisted on increasing the number of planes and tanks, Stalin called him a harebrained schemer. But during the war, after the first crushing defeats, Stalin caught on. It was the same with rockets. Tukhachevsky began rocketry while in Leningrad. Stalin later had all the Leningrad rocketry experts shot, and then they had to start from scratch.

The war became a terrible tragedy for everyone. I saw and lived through a great deal, but the war was probably the hardest trial. Not for me personally, but for the people. For composers and, say, poets, perhaps, it wasn't so hard. But the people suffered. Think how many perished. Millions.

War was inevitable, of course. It's a terrible, dirty, and bloody business. It would be better if there were no war and no soldiers. But if

*Hitler's plan of attack on the Soviet Union, named after Frederick I "Barbarossa" (Red Beard), the Holy Roman Emperor who had marched east in t t 90.

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there is war, then . the professionals should take care of it. Tukhachevsky was a war professional and naturally he would have done his work better than the inexperienced or incompetent military leaders who led our troops after all the purges.

Tukhachevsky told me how he had fought in the First World War.

He was more than skeptical of the tsar and yet he fought, and fought passionately, bravely. Tukhachevsky, fighting the Germans, felt that he was defending the people and not the tsar. It would have been worse for the people under the Germans than under the tsar.

I often remembered those words of Tukhachevsky's. They became real for me during the war. I hate war. But you have to defend your country from invasion by the enemy. You have only one motherland.

Tukhachevsky had spent time as a German prisoner of war. By present-day standards, the camp was like a sanatorium. The prisoners were allowed to walk around the camp without guards; a written agreement not to run away was enough. An officer's word, so to speak.

Tukhachevsky asked another officer to sign in his place, and escaped.

He told me about it with a smile. But Tukhachevsky didn't manage to get away from Stalin.

When Tukhachevsky was introduced to Lenin, his first question was how did Tukhachevsky manage to get away from the German prison camp? Apparently he thought that the Germans had "helped"

Tukhachevsky escape, just as they had "helped" Lenin appear in Russia right after the Revolution.

Lenin sensed that Tukhachevsky was a kindred spirit. He delegated the most responsible jobs to the obscure lieutenant. As you know, Tukhachevsky's army reached Warsaw, but it failed and had to retreat.

Lenin forgave Tukhachevsky his failure. Tukhachevsky reminded me of that before my trip to Warsaw for a competition. Tukhachevsky had attacked Warsaw in 1920. We were leaving for Warsaw in January 1927, just some six years later. There were three of us. We played our competition programs for Tukhachevsky. Tukhachevsky put up with it and said something to the eff ecfthat we should be brave. Nothing terrible would happen even if we lost. After all, he hadn't been beheaded for his failure, and neither would we.

I wonder who plays the violins that Tukhachevsky made, if they 1 04

survived at all, that is. I have the feeling that the violins emit a pathetic sound. I was very unlucky in life. But others were unluckier. When I think of Meyerhold or Tukhachevsky, I think of the words of Ilf and Petrov: "It's not enough to love Soviet power. It has to love you."

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I WORKED on Lady Macbeth for almost three years. I had announced a trilogy dedicated to the position of women in various eras in Russia.

The plot of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District is taken from the story of the same name by Nikolai Leskov. The story amazes the reader with its unusual vividness and depth, and in terms of being the most truthful and tragic portrayal of the destiny of a talented, smart, and outstanding woman, "dying in the nightmarish conditions of prerevolutionary Russia," as they say, this story, in my opinion, is one of the best.

Maxim Gorky once said: "We must study. We must learn about our country, her past, present, and future"; and Leskov's story serves this purpose. Lady Macbeth is a true treasure trove for a composer, with its vividly drawn characters and dramatic conflicts-I was attracted by it. Alexander Germanovich Preis, a young Leningrad playwright, worked out the libretto with me. It followed Leskov almost in its entirety, with the exception of the third act, which for greater social impact deviates slightly from the original. We introduced a scene at the 1 06

police station and left out the murder of Ekaterina Lvovna's nephew.

I resolved the opera in a tragic vein. I would say that Lady Macbeth could be called a tragic-satiric opera. Despite the fact that Ekaterina Lvovna is a murderer, she is not a lost human being. She is tormented by her conscience, she thinks about the people .she· killed. I feel empathy for her.

It's rather difficult to explain, and I've heard quite a bit of disagreement on the matter, but I wanted to show a woman who was on a much higher level than those around her. She is surrounded by monsters. The last five years were like a prison for her.

Those who criticize her harshly do so from this point of view: if she's a criminal, then she's guilty. But that's the common consensus, and I'm more interested in the individual. I think it's all in Leskov.

There are no general, standardized rules of conduct. Everything depends on the situation and on the person. A turn of events is possible in which murder is not a crime. You can't approach everything with the same measure.

Ekaterina Lvovna is an outstanding, colorful person and her life is sad and drab. But a powerful love comes into her life, and it turns out that a crime is worth committing for the sake of that passion, since life has no meaning otherwise anyway.

Lady Macbeth touches on many themes. I wouldn't want to spend too much time on all the possible interpretations; after all, I'm not talking about myself in these pages and certainly not about my music.

In the long run, you can just go to see the opera. In the last few years it's been produced frequently, even abroad. Of course, all the productions are bad,· very bad. In the last few years I can point out only one good production-in Kiev under the direction of Konstantin Simeonov, a conductor who has a wonderful feel for music. And he starts from the music, not the plot. When his singers started overpsychologizing their parts, Simeonov shouted, "What are you trying to do, set up the Moscow Art Theater here? I need singing, not psychology. Give me singing!"

They don't understand that too well here, that singing is more important in opera than psychology. Directors treat the music in opera as something of minor importance. That's how they ruined the film version, Katerina lzmailova. The actors were magnificent, particularly 1 07

Galina Vishnevskaya, * but you can't hear the orchestra at all. Now, what is the point of that?

I dedicated Lady Macbeth to my bride, my future wife, so naturally the opera is about love too, but not only love. It's also about how love could have been if the world weren't full of vile things. It's the vileness that ruins love. And the laws and proprieties and financial worries, and the police state. If conditions had been different, love would have been different too.

Love was one of Sollertinsky's favorite themes. He could speak for hours on it, on the most varied levels: from the highest to the very lowest. And Sollertinsky was very supportive of my attempt to express my ideas in Lady Macbeth. He spoke of the sexuality of two great operas, Carmen and Wozzeck, and regretted that there was nothing comparable in Russian opera. Tchaikovsky, for instance, had nothing like itand that was no accident.

Sollertinsky believed that love was the greatest gift and the person who knew how to love had a talent just as does the person who knows how to build ships or write novels. In that sense Ekaterina Lvovna is a genius. She is a genius in her passion, for the sake of which she is prepared to do anything, even murder.

Sollertinsky felt that contemporary conditions were not conducive to the development of talents in that area. Everyone seemed worried about what would happen to love. I suppose it will always be like that, it always seems that love's last days are here. At least, it always seems that everything is different today from what it was yesterday. And it will all be different tomorrow. No one knows how, but it will be different.

Love for Three was a success in the movies, the theaters were running plays like The Nationalization of Women, and there were debates on free love. Debates were very popular, and they debated the theory of "the glass of water." It used to be said that having sexual inter-

*Galina Pavlovna Vishnevskaya (b. 1926), soprano. Shostakovich's vocal cycle Satires and his instrumentation of Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death are dedicated to her. She sang the premieres of these works and sang in the first performance of the Fourteenth Symphony. In 1978

she and her husband, cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, were stripped of Soviet citizenship for "systematic acts that bring harm to the prestige of the Soviet Union." Thereafter, Vishnevskaya's name was removed from all Soviet reference works.

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course should be as simple as having a glass of water. At TRAM, in some play, the heroine said that satisfying your sexual needs was the only important thing, and that drinking from the same glass all the time gets boring.

There were also debates on a popular book, Moon from the Right, by Sergei Malashkin. It's a terrible book, but the readers didn't care.

The point was that it described orgies with young Komsomol girls.

And so they tried the heroes of this book-with appointed counsel and judges. The question they were hotly debating was can a young woman have twenty-two husbands?

This problem was on everyone's lips, even Meyerhold was taken with it, and he was a man of excellent taste. This is just further proof of what the atmosphere was like then. Meyerhold planned to stage Tretyakov's* play I Want a Baby and even began rehearsals, but the play was banned. He tried for two years to get permission and failed.

The censors felt that the play was too frank. Meyerhold, in defense, insisted that if you wanted to remove all vulgar words from the stage you'd have to burn all of Shakespeare and leave only Rostand.

Meyerhold wanted to put on Tretyakov's play as a debate too. In fact, things seemed to be moving toward the abolition of love. One good woman in a play said as much: "The only thing I love is Party work." And love can fall by the wayside. From time to time, we'll give birth to healthy children, naturally pure from a class point of view, of a good Aryan, I mean proletarian, background.

This is not a happy business. Tretyakov dreamed of how everyone would give birth by plan, and they destroyed him. And it went on Meyerhold's record that "he stubbornly persisted in staging the play I Want a Baby by enemy of the people Tretyakov, which was a hostile slander of the Soviet people."

So you see that even though my opera's plot did not deal with our glorious reality, actually there were many points of contact, you only have to look for them. In general, a heroine like Ekaterina Lvovna is not very typical for Russian opera, but there are some traditional

*Sergei Mikhailovich Tretyakov (1892-1939), avant-garde playwright, who worked with Meyerhold, Eisenstein, and Mayakovsky. Bertolt Brecht considered Tretyakov one of his teachers in the field of Marxism. He was shot during the "great terror."

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things in Lady Macbeth and I think they're very important. There's the scrawny little man, something like Grishka Kuterma, * and the entire fourth act, with the convicts. Some of my friends objected that the fourth act was too traditional. But that was the finale I had -in mind, because we're talking about convicts.

In the old days a convict was called neschastnen'kii, or "poor little wretch"; people tried to help them, to give them something. But in my day the attitude toward the arrested had changed. If you got yourself in jail, you no longer existed.

Chekhov went to Sakhalin Island to better the lot of criminal convicts. As for political prisoners-they were all heroes in the eyes of cultured men. Dostoevsky recalled how a little girl gave him a kopeck when he was a convict. He was a poor wretch in her eyes.

And so I wanted to remind the audience that prisoners are wretched people and that you shouldn't hit a man when he's down. Today you're in prison, tomorrow it might be me. That's a very important moment for me in Lady Macbeth, and incidentally, a very traditional one for Russian music. Recall Khovanshchina, for instance-Prince Golitsyn is an extremely unsympathetic character, but when he's taken away into exile, Mussorgsky sympathizes with him. That's as it should be.

I think it was a great stroke of luck for me that I found the plot of Lady Macbeth, even though there were many factors promoting it. For one, I like Leskov, and for another, Kustodiev did good illustrations for Lady Macbeth and I bought the book. And then I liked the film that Cheslav Sabinsky made of the story. It was roundly criticized for being unscrupulous, but it was vivid and engrossing.

I composed the opera with great intensity, which was enhanced by the circumstances of my personal life.

When I write vocal music I like to picture concrete people. Here's a man I know-how will he sing this or that monologue? That's probably why I can say about any of my characters, "That's So-and-so and she's So-and-so." Of course, that's just my personal feeling, but it does help me compose.

'"Grishka Kutenna is the character in Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Tale of the City of Kitezh who symbolizes betrayal and repentance. Lunacharsky wrote or "the almost Wagnerian, yet Slavic, Russian Orthodox power or the sinner Kutenna."

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Naturally, I think about tessituras and such, as well. But first of all I think about personality and that may be why my operas don't have an emploi and sometimes it's hard for the performers to find themselves. It's the same with my vocal cycles.

For instance, I have rather complicated feelings about Sergei from Lady Macbeth. He's a bastard, of course, but he's a handsome man and, more importantly, attractive to women, while Ekaterina Lvovna's husband is a degenerate. I had to show Sergei's flashy sex appeal through my music. I couldn't resort to mere caricature because it would be psychologically false. The audience had to understand that a woman really couldn't resist a man like that. So I endowed Sergei with several characteristics of a close friend of mine, who naturally wasn't a Sergei at all, but a very intelligent person. He missed nothing when it came to ladies, though; he was quite persistent in that regard. He says many beautiful things and women melt. I gave that trait to Sergei.

When Sergei seduces Ekaterina Lvovna, in intonation he's my friend.

But it was done in such a way that even he-a subtle musician�didn't notice a thing.

I feel it's important to use real events and real people in the plot.

When Sasa Preis and I did our first drafts of Lady Macbeth, we wrote all kinds of nonsense drawn from the personalities of our friends. It was amusing and it turned out to be a big help in our work.

The opera was a huge success. I wouldn't bring it up at all, of course, but later events turned everything around. Everyone forgot that Lady Macbeth ran for two years in Leningrad and for two in Moscow under the title Katerina lzmailova at Nemirovich-Danchenko's theater. It was also produced by Smolich* at the Bolshoi.

Worker correspondents wrote incensed letters about The Nose. And the ballets The Golden Age and Bolt were also denounced in every way. But it wasn't like that with Lady Macbeth. In both Leningrad and Moscow the opera played several times a week. Katerina lzmailova ran almost a hundred times in two seasons at Nemirovich-Danchenko's and as often in Leningrad. You might say that that's good for a new opera.

You must understand that I'm not indulging in self-praise here. The

*Nikolai Vasilycvich Smolich (1888-1968), opera director, avant-gardist, who directed the premieres of The Nose and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District.

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point isn't only in the music and in the productions themselves, which in both Leningrad and Moscow were done with talent and care. The general atmosphere was important too, and for. the opera it was good.

This may have been the happiest time for my music, there was never anything like it before or after. Before the opera I was a boy who might have been spanked, and later I was a state criminal, always under observation, always under suspicion. But at that moment ·everything was comparatively fine. Or to be more accurate, everything seemed to be fine.

This essentially unfounded feeling arose after the breakup of RAPP

and RAPM. * These unions had been on everybody's back. Once the Association came to control music, it seemed that Davidenko's "They wanted to beat, to beat us"t was going to replace all available music.

This worthless song was performed by soloists and choirs, violinists and pianists, even string quartets did it. It didn't get as far as a symphony orchestra, but only because some of the instruments were suspect-the trombone, for instance.

You can see there was plenty of reason to fall into despair. It looked as though neither orchestral music nor the opera had any prospects at all. And most musicians were in a terrible mood. One after another, with bowed heads, they joined the ranks of RAPM. For instance, my friend Ronya Shebalin suddenly began singing the praises of Davidenko. I protected myself by working at TRAM.

RAPM had turned the screw so tight that it seemed things couldn't possibly be any worse. (Later it turned out that they could be a lot worse.) And when RAPM disappeared, everyone heaved a sigh of relief. For a time, professionals were in charge of things; I mean, natu•

rally they had no power, but their suggestions were taken into account, and that was quite something.

I went to Turkey as part of a semiofficial cultural delegation. They were trying to improve relations with Turkey and President Kemal

*The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (1920-1932) and its "musical" offshoot, the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (1923-1932), arose as instruments of the cultural policies of the Party. The influence of these unions was almost overwhelming at the end of the 1920s and into the early 1930s. They often turned out to be greater royalists than the king, and were disbanded by Stalin when he decided that the or�izations had served their function. ·

tThis song by one of the leaders of RAPM, Alexander Davidenko, was written in late 1 929, after Soviet-Chinese conflict in the Far East. One of the first successful examples of the popular Soviet propaganda song, "They Wanted to Beat Us" remained popular right up to World War II, when its dashing tone seemed inappropriate.

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Ataturk, who arranged endless receptions for us. All the men received inscribed gold cigarette cases and all the women got bracelets. They fussed over us greatly. Turkey's musical life was iii an embryonic stage then. David Oistrakh and Lev Oborin, who were part of the delegation, needed some sheet music-I think it was · Beethoven-and it couldn't be found in all of Ankara. They played everything they could remember by heart.

I learned to wear a tuxedo in Turkey, since I had to wear one every evening, and when I got home I showed it off to my friends and acquaintances. I was rewarded for my tuxedo sufferings with a soccer game between Vienna and Turkey. When the Austrians made a goal there was absolute silence in the stadium, and the match ended in a huge brawl.

But it was fun. We drank coffee and then didn't sleep-not from the coffee, but from its price. I went into a store to buy a pair of glasses.

The owner demonstrated how strong the glasses were by flinging them down onto the floor; twice they didn't break. He wanted to show me a third time. I said, "Don't bother, it's all right." He didn't listen to me, threw them down a third time, and broke them.

After my trip to Turkey, which got a lot of coverage in the Soviet papers, I was offered guest performances at very flattering terms. I went on one of these trips, to Arkhangelsk, with the cellist Viktor Kubatsky. He played my cello sonata. On January 28, 1 936, we went to the railroad station to buy a new Pravda. I opened it up and leafed through it-and found the article "Muddle Instead of Music." I'll never forget that day, it's probably the most memorable in my life.

That article on the third page of Pravda changed my entire existence. It was printed without a signature, like an editorial-that is, it expressed the opinion of the Party. But it actually expressed the opinion of Stalin, and that was much more important.

There is a school of thought that holds that the article was written by the well-known bastard Zaslavsky.* It might have been written down by the well-known bastard Zaslavsky, but that's another matter

*David Iosifovich Zaslavsky (1880-1965), a journalist, whom Lenin, before the Revolution, had called a "notorious slanderer" and a "blackmailing pen for hire." He became a trusted Stalin crony and died a respected member of the staff of Pravda. The last well-known article by Zaslavsky is "Ballyhoo o[ Reactionary Propaganda Around a Literary Weed," which appeared in Pravda in 1958 and marked the beginning of the campaign against Pasternak.

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entirely. The article has too much of Stalin in it, there are expressions that even Zaslavsky wouldn't have used, they were too ungrammatical.

After all, the article appeared before the big purges. There were still some fairly literate people working at Pravda and they wouldn't . have left in that famous part about my music having nothing in common with "symphonic soundings." What are these mysterious "symphonic soundings" ? It's clear that this is a genuine pronouncement of our leader and teacher. There are many places like that in the article. I can distinguish with complete confidence Zaslavsky's bridges from Stalin's text.

The title-"Muddle Instead of Music"-also belongs to Stalin. The day before, Pravda had printed the leader and teacher's brilliant comments on the outlines of new history textbooks, and he talked about muddles there too.

This text by the Leader of the Peoples and Friend of Children was printed over his signature. Obviously, the word "muddle" stuck in his mind, something that often happens to the mentally ill. And so he used the word everywhere. Really, why call it a muddle?

All right, the opera was taken off the stage. Meetings were organized to drum the "muddle" into everyone's head. Everyone turned away from me. There was a phrase in the article saying that all this

"could end very badly." They were all waiting for the bad end to come.

It went on as if in a nightmare. One of my friends, whom Stalin knew, thought that he might be of some help, and he wrote a desperate letter to Stalin. His letter maintained that Shostakovich wasn't a lost soul after all, and that besides the depraved opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, which was criticized with perfect justification by our glorious organ Pravda, Shostakovich had also written several musical works singing the praises of our socialist homeland.

Stalin attended a ballet with my music called Bright Stream, which was being done at the Bolshoi. Lopukhov had staged the ballet in Leningrad, where it had been popular, and he was invited to stage it in Moscow. And after doing this ballet, he was named director of ballet for the Bolshoi Theater. The results of the leader an� teacher's cultural outing are known-not even ten days after the first article in 1 1 4

Pravda, another appeared. It was written more grammatically, with fewer nuggets, but that didn't make it any more pleasant as far as I was concerned.

Two editorial attacks in Pravda in ten days-that was too much for one man. Now everyone knew for sure that I would be destroyed. And the anticipation of that noteworthy event-at least for me-has never left me.

From that moment on I was stuck with the label "enemy of the people," and I don't need to explain what the label meant in those days.

Everyone still remembers that.

I was called an enemy of the people quietly and out loud and from podiums. One paper made the following announcement of my concert:

"Today there is a concert by enemy of the people Shostakovich." Or take this example: In those years my name wasn't welcomed enthusiastically in print unless, of course, it was used in a discussion about struggles against formalism. But it happened that I was assigned to review a production of Otello in Leningrad and in my review I did not say ecstatic things about the tenor Nikolai Pechkovsky. I was swamped with anonymous letters saying in effect that I, enemy of the people, did not have long to tread on Soviet soil, that my ass's ears would be chopped off-along with my head.

They really loved Pechkovsky in Leningrad. He was one of those tenors who know three things to do with their hands while singing: gesture toward yourself, away from yourself, and to the side. When Meyerhold heard Pechkovsky in the role of Gherman in The Queen of Spades, he told everyone, "If I run into him in a dark alley, I'll kill him."

A German musicologist came to Leningrad before the war-and nothing interested him, not music, not concerts, nothing. Everyone at the Composers' Union was sick and tired of him. What could they do with the man? Finally someone suggested, Would you like to go to see Pechkovsky? The German brightened. "Ohh! The famous pervert!" and hurried off. Everyone sighed in relief, Pechkovsky had saved the day.

Actually, Pechkovsky's life took an unfortunate turn and he spent quite a lot of time in the camps. If I had known that ahead of time I would never have permitted myself to say anything negative about 1 1 5

him. But in those days I stood a greater chance of ending up in the camps than he did.

Because after the articles came the "Tukhachevsky affair." It was a terrible blow for me when Tukhachevsky was shot. When I read about it in the papers, I blacked out. I felt they were killing me, that's how bad I felt. But I wouldn't like to' lay it on too thick at this point. It's only in fine literature that a person stops eating and sleeping because he's so overwrought. In reality, life is much simpler, and as Zoshchenko noted, life gives little material to fiction writers.

Zoshchenko had a firm philosophy on the matter-a beggar stops worrying as soon as he becomes a beggar, and a roach isn't terribly upset about being a roach. I wholeheartedly agree. After all, life goes on, I had to live and feed my family. I had an infant daughter who cried and demanded food and I had to guarantee food for her as best I could.

"The author's feelings before the grandeur of Nature are indescribable." Naturally, without sparing color and in broad strokes, I could describe my depressed condition, my moral torment, my constant strong fear, not only for my own life but for the lives of my mother, sisters, wife and daughter, and later my son. And so on. I don't want to deny that I went through a bad period. Perhaps the careful reader will understand that or perhaps he'll just skip all this drivel and think, munching a piece of candy, "Whatever made me read this book? It's just upsetting me before bedtime."

When I picture an idiot like that, I don't even want to go on reminiscing. I just sit with a feeling of guilt, when there isn't anything really that I'm guilty of.

The greatest specialist in depression, despair, melancholy, and such, of all the people I've met in my life, was Zoshchenko. I think I'm talking too much about myself, and these memoirs are not about me, they're about others. I want to talk about others first and about me only tangentially.

So, about Zoshchenko. It's a fact that cobblers go about without shoes, and there's no better confirmation of the truism than Zoshchenko. He was the most popular humorist of my youth and he's just as popular now, despite all the bans and persecution. Millions of people laughed over his stories. Perhaps they weren't very aware or cul-1 1 6

tured readers, maybe they laughed when they should have cried. They laughed over those works of Zoshchenko's that I personally consider tragic. But my opinion isn't important here. Zoshchenko was considered a great humorist, but in fact he was a man thoroughly riddled by depression and melancholy.

I'm not ref erring now to his tragic literary fate or to the fact that he was forced to write more and more poorly, so that I can't read his last works without a feeling of bitterness and disillusionment.

No, Zoshchenko was dying of depression when there was nothing to foreshadow his sad fate, when he had fame and money. Zoshchenko's ennui wasn't a literary affectation. He really did nearly die of depression....,-he couldn't leave the house and he couldn't eat. They gave him medicine and injections, but to no avail. Zoshchenko was still a young man, just 'twenty-seven, and he decided to battle his illness on his own, without the help of doctors, because the doctors, he was sure, didn't understand the cause of his terrible and extraordinary depression.

Laughing sadly, Zoshchenko told me about his visit to a psychiatrist. Zoshchenko described his dreams, in which he saw tigers and a hand reaching out toward him. The doctor was a specialist in psychoanalysis and immediately replied that the meaning of these dreams was very obvious to him. In his opinion, little Zoshchenko had been taken to the zoo at too tender an age and an elephant frightened the child with his huge trunk. The hand was the trunk, and the trunk was a phallic symbol. And therefore Zoshchenko had a sexual trauma.

Zoshchenko was certain that the doctor was mistaken. His fear of life stemmed from other causes, he felt, because not all our impulses can be reduced to sexual attraction. Fear can take root in a man's heart for social reasons too.

Zoshchenko maintained that fear based on social causes could be even more powerful and could take over the subconscious. I agree with him completely. It's true that sex plays an important part in this world and no one is free of its effect. But illness can spring from other causes and fear can be produced by other forces.

Fear arises from cruder and more substantial causes-fear of losing food, or fear of death, or fear before a horrible punishment. Zoshchenko said that a man ill with this kind of fear can remain basically normal and reveal his illness in just a few bizarre actions, that is, a 1 1 7

few eccentricities. He felt that these eccentricities were a better guide to the cause of the illness than dreams, because the bizarre behavior was almost always infantile. The adult behaved like a child, or rather, he tried to be one. This playing at being a child seems to help the adult avoid danger, helps him avoid contact with dangerous objects and dangerous forces.

The patient begins to maneuver every which way, and when �he disease takes this turn everything hinges on the strength of the patient's psyche as against the strength of the illness. Because if the fear grows, it can lead to a total collapse of the personality.

The person tries to avoid dangerous phenomena and that leads to thought of suicide. What is suicide? Zoshchenko explained it to me.

He explained that death can look like salvation. The point is that a child doesn't understand what death is, he only sees that death is absence. He sees that you can escape danger, can get away and hide from danger. And that escape the child calls death, because death is not frightening to him.

When a man is sick, his feelings are the feelings of a child. That's the lowest level of his psyche, and a child fears danger much more than death. Suicide is a hurried escape from danger. It is the act of a child who has been scared by life.

In my unhappy life there were many sad events, but there were periods when danger gathered ominously, when it was particularly palpable, and then my fear augmented. In the period about which we were talking just now, I was near suicide. The danger horrified me and I saw no other way out.

I was completely in the thrall of fear. I was no longer the master of my life, my past was crossed out, my work, my abilities, turned out to be worthless to everyone. The future didn't look any less bleak. At that moment I desperately wanted to disappear, it was the only possible way out. I thought of the possibility with relish.

And in that critical period my familiarity with Zoshchenko's ideas helped me greatly. He didn't say that suicide was a whim but he did say that suicide was a purely infantile act. It was the mutiny of the lower level against the higher level of the psyche. Actually, it's not a mutiny, it is the victory of the lower level, complete and final victory.

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Naturally, it wasn't only Zoshchenko's thoughts that helped me in that desperate hour. But these and similar considerations kept me from making extreme decisions. I came out of the crisis stronger than I went in, more confident of my own strength. The hostile forces didn't seem so omnipotent any more and even the shameful treachery of friends and acquaintances didn't cause me as much pain as before.

The mass treachery did not concern me personally. I managed to separate myself from other people, and in that period it was my salvation.

Some of these thoughts you can find, if you wish, in my Fourth Symphony. In the last pages, it's all set out rather precisely. These thoughts were also present in my mind later, when I was writing the first part of the Sixth Symphony. But the Sixth in a way had a much happier fate than the Fourth. It was played right away and criticized moderately. The Fourth was played twenty-five years after it was written. Maybe that was for the best, I don't know. I'm not a great adherent of the . theory that musical compositions should lie in the ground waiting their time. Symphonies aren't Chinese eggs, you know.

In general, music should be played right away, and that way the audience gets pleasure in time and it's easier for the composer to tell what's what. And if he has made mistakes, he can try to correct them in the next work. Otherwise it's just nonsense, like the business with the Fourth.

Now some people say that I was to blame for the whole incident, that I stopped the performance of my symphony, that I whipped myself, like the sergeant's widow, and that I have no right to point at others. It's easy to judge from afar. But if you had been in my shoes, you'd sing a different tune.

It seemed then as if every performance of my works caused nothing but trouble. The Maly Opera Theater brought Lady Macbeth to Moscow-and there was "Muddle Instead of Music." The Bolshoi Theater staged my ballet-and there was another Pravda editorial, "Balletic Falsity." And what would have happened if the Fourth had been performed then too? Who knows, perhaps no one would have said a word, and my song would have been sung for good.

The conditions were grave, fatal. There's no point in thinking about 1 1 9

it. Besides, Stiedry's"' rehearsals weren't merely bad-they were outrageous. First of all, he was scared to death, because no one would have spared him either. In general, conductors aren't the bravest men on earth. I've had many opportunities to confirm this opinion. They're brave when it comes to yelling at an orchestra, but when someone yells at them, their knees shake.

Secondly, Stiedry didn't know or understand the score, and. he expressed no desire to grapple with it. He said so straight out. And why be shy? The composer was an exposed formalist. Why bother digging around in his score?

This wasn't the only time Stiedry behaved this way, and it wasn't only my music he treated carelessly. In his time, Stiedry truly upset Glazunov. He was supposed to conduct Glazunov's Eighth Symphony.

He came to Leningrad and then it became clear that he was confusing the Eighth with Glazunov's Fourth-quite literally, probably because they are both in the key of E fiat.

This didn't embarrass Stiedry in the least. He didn't give a damn.

As long as Glazunov sat in the auditorium, he rehearsed a little. But Glazunov had to leave, because he was called to court. He was having an argument with the tenants' committee of his building and not paying his rent. As soon as Glazunov left the auditorium, Stiedry perked up and ended the rehearsal. He said, "It'll do like this."

Someone could say to me: Why are you complaining about others?

What about you? Weren't you afraid too? I answer honestly that I was afraid. Fear was a common feeling for everyone then, and I didn't miss my share.

Then he might say: What were you afraid of? They didn't touch musicians. I'll reply: That's not true, they did touch them-and how.

The story that the musicians weren't touched is being spread by Khrennikovt and his henchmen and since men of the arts have short

*Fritz Stiedry (1883-1968), conductor, Mahler's assistant in the Vienna Opera. In 1933 he emigrated to the U.S.S.R., where he was chief conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic. He led the premiere of Shostakovich's First Piano Concerto. After the war he was one of the principal conductors of the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

tTikhon Nikolaycvich Khrennikov (b. 1913), composer, head of the Composers' Union of the U.S.S.R. from the time of its First Congress (1948). He was appointed to the post by Stalin (as were leaders of the analogous unions of writers, artists, etc.). In the Stalinist years the duties of the head included approval of lists of the union's members marked for repression. Khrennikov is the only original union leader of the "creative" unions to retain his post to this day. For many years he attacked Shostakovich and Prokofiev viciously. He has received all the highest Soviet orders and prizes.

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memories, they believe him. They've already forgotten Nikolai Sergeyevich Zhilayev, a man I consider one of my teachers.

I met Zhilayev at Tukhachevsky's; the two were friends. Zhilayev taught at the Moscow Conservatory, but most of the lessons were given in his home. Whenever I was in Moscow, I dropped in on him and showed him my latest works. Zhilayev never made a comment merely to say something. By that time there was no point in showing my work to Steinberg, my teacher at the Conservatory, for he simply didn't understand the kind of music I was writing then. Zhilayev replaced my teacher as much as possible.

He had a large picture of Tukhachevsky in his room, and after the announcement that Tukhachevsky had been shot as a traitor to the homeland, Zhilayev did not take the picture down. I don't know if I can explain how heroic a deed that was. How did people behave then?

As soon as the next poor soul was declared an enemy of the people, everyone destroyed in a panic everything connected with that person. If the enemy of the people wrote books, they threw away his books, if they had letters from him, they burned the letters. The mind can't grasp the number of letters and papers burned in that period, no war could ever clean out domestic archives like that. And naturally, photographs flew into the flames first, because if someone informed on you, reported that you had a picture of an enemy of the people, it meant certain death.

Zhilayev wasn't afraid. When they came for him, Tukhachevsky's prominently hung portrait amazed even the executioners. "What, it's still up?" they asked. Zhilayev replied, "The time will come when they'll erect a monument to him."

We forgot about Zhilayev too quickly, and the others. Sergei Popov died, a very talented man. Shebalin introduced us. He recreated Tchaikovsky's opera Voyevode, which the composer had burned in a fit of despair. When they took Popov away, the- score was destroyed a second time. Lamm• resurrected it once more.

Or Nikolai Vygodsky, a talented organist. The same story. And they've forgotten Boleslav Pshibyshevsky, the director of the Moscow

*Pavel Alexandrovich Lamm (1882-1951), musicologist, famed for his work on the academic texts of the operas of Mussorgsky (with Asafiev) and Borodin. Lamm wrote the orchestrations for many important works of Prokofiev, including The Betrothal in the Convent and War and Peace, as well as the music for the films Ale"ander Nevslcy and Ivan the Terrible (see the recent Soviet reference work Avtografy S. S. Prolcofeva, Moscow, 1977).

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Conservatory. He was the son of the famous writer. And they've forgotten Dima Gachev.

Gachev was a good musicologist, and after completing some difficult work he decided to take a rest and went to a sanatorium, where he shared a room with several others. Someone found an old French newspaper. To his misfortune, Gachev read French. He opened the paper and began reading aloud, just a few sentences, and stopped-it was something negative about Stalin. "Ah, what nonsense!" But it was too late. He was arrested in the morning. Someone from the room turned him in, or perhaps they all did.

Before his arrest, Gachev had corresponded with Romain Rolland, who liked the work Gachev had written on him. Rolland praised Gachev. I wonder, did the great French humanist ever inquire what happened to his admirer and researcher? Where he suddenly disappeared to?

I think Gachev got five years. He was a strong man and he got through the five years of hard labor, naYvely hoping that he would be released when his term was up. A few days before the end Gachev was told that he had got an additional ten years. It broke him and he died soon after.

Everyone wrote denunciations then. Composers probably used music paper and musicologists used plain. And as far as I know, not one of the informers has ever repented. In the middle of the 1 950s some of the arrested began returning, the lucky ones who survived. Some of them were shown their so-called files, which included the denunciations. Nowadays the informers and former prisoners meet at concerts.

Sometimes they bow.

Of course, one of the victims didn't turn out to be so polite. He publicly slapped the informer. But everything sorted itself out, the informer turned out to be a decent sort and didn't file a complaint with the police. The former prisoner died a free man, for his health had been seriously undermined by camp life. The informer is alive and thriving today.* He's my biographer, you might say, a Shostakovich specialist.

I was lucky then, I wasn't sent to the camps, but it's never too late.

•A reference to an incident involving Viktor Yulyevich Delson (1907-1 970), pianist and musicologist, who spent almost twenty years in Stalin's camps, and Lev Vasilyevich Danilyevich (b.

1912), the author of several works on Shostakovich's music.

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After all, it depends on how the new leader and teacher feels about your work. In my case, my music. They're all patrons of arts and refined literature-that's the general opinion, the voice of the people, and it's hard to argue with that voice.

Tyrants like to present themselves as patrons of the arts. That's a well-known fact. But tyrants understand nothing about art. Why? Because tyranny is a perversion, and a tyrant is a pervert. For many reasons. The tyrant sought power, stepping over corpses. Power beckoned, he was attracted by the chance to crush people, to mock them.

Isn't the lust for power a perversion? If you're consistent, you must answer that question in the affirmative. At the moment when the lust for power arises in you, you're a lost man. I am suspicious of every candidate for leadership. I had enough illusions in my misty youth.

And so� having satisfied his perverted desires, the man becomes a leader, and now the perversions continue, because power has to be def ended, def ended against madmen like yourself.

For even if there are no such enemies, you have to invent them, because otherwise you can't flex your muscles completely, you can't oppress the people completely, making the blood spurt. And without that, what pleasure is there in power? Very little.

An acquaintance with whom I went drinking once poured out his heart to me that night. He stayed overnight, but we got no sleep. He began confessing to me that he was tormented by one desire. One nightmare. And this is what I discovered. You see, since his childhood he had enjoyed reading descriptions of torture and executions. That was his strange passion. He had read everything that was written on this vile subject. He listed them for me, and it was a rather long list.

Strange, I thought, that when they torture in Russia, they try not to leave any traces. I don't mean on the body-those remain, even though there is a science now of torturing without leaving marks on the body.

I'm referring to written traces. But it turns out that there has been literature on the subject in Russia as well.

There's more. The man confessed that his interest in descriptions of torture was just covering up his real passion: he wanted to torture people himself. Before, I had thought that this man was a fair musician.

But the longer his story went on the less I believed he was. And he kept talking, panting and trembling.

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This acquaintance of mine had probably not even killed a fly in his life, but judging by what he said, it was not because he found executions and death repugnant. On the contrary, blood and everything that might make it flow excited and attracted him. He told me many things that night, for instance how Ivan the Terrible's famous henchman Malyuta Skuratov dealt with his victims and their wives. He made the women sit astride a thick cable and then started sawing them in half with the cable. Back and forth, pulling their legs one way and then the other, until they were sawn in half.

Another horrible method used in those times was described this way. The oprichniki* found two young trees that stood in an empty field not too far from each other. They climbed up and bent the trees down, so that their crowns almost touched. Then they tied a man to the crowns, making a living knot of the person. They released the tr�es, tearing the victim in half. They amused themselves that way with horses too, tying a man to two steeds and setting them off galloping in different directions.

This was the first I had heard of Malyuta Skuratov's sadistic exercises, even though I had known many other things about him. And it was the first that I heard of trials of animals. They had those too, people thought that it wasn't enough to torture only human beings. Of course, animals are tortured all the time, by anyone who has the energy. But this seemed particularly vicious. Not just torturing them, but hiding under the pretense of observing the law. I see a desire to drag animals down to the level of man, so that they can be dealt with like men. Actually, they tried to make men out of animals, and in doing so, the men turned into beasts.

All this torture took place not so long ago, a few centuries, that's all.

They had court trials for cows and horses, dogs, monkeys, even mice and caterpillars. They thought they were devils. Enemies of the people. They tortured the animals, blood flowed in rivers, cows mooed and dogs howled and moaned, horses neighed. They were being interrogated and specialists in mooing acted as translators. I can imagine

•Oprichniki were a kind of personal guard created by Tsar Ivan the Terrible (1 530-1 584) to fight the powerful feudal aristocracy. In Russian historiography and literature, the oprichniki were a symbol of lawlessness and terror. However, they were "rehabilitated" in the Stalinist period. The second part of Eisenstein's film /IJ(Jfl the Terrible angered Stalin, in part because of the ambiguous ponrayal of the oprichniki.

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how it went. "Does the enemy of the people admit to such-and-such and so-and-so?" The cow is silent. They stick a spear into its side. It moos and the specialist translates, "It fully admits culpability in all the acts it performed against the people."

Silence is a sign of guilt and so is mooing. Bonfires, blood, overheated executioners. Time? Seventeenth century. Place? Russia, Moscow.

Or perhaps it was yesterday ? I don't know. Which is the beast here, which is the human being? I don't know that either. Everything is confused in this world. Later I heard about this more than once, the trials of animals. But that memorable night I stared in· horror at the man, my guest. He was beside himself, his face blazing. He was usually calm and rational, but now there was another man before me. I clearly saw that he was of the same breed as the executioners, vile scum. He · waved his arms, his voice trembled and broke, but not from indignation, from excitement.

And then he grew quiet, losing steam all at once. I looked at him with repugnance, but without pity. No, there was no pity. I thought, You're a finished man. You crave power, you dream of torturing others, and the only reason you don't become an executioner is that you're a coward.

And I told him this to his face. That's my rule, say it and say it all.

He cried and repented, but from that moment he ceased to exist as a musician for me. I realized that I

Sometimes they say or write that the directors of the German death camps loved and understood Bach and Mozart. And so on. That they shed tears over the music of Schubert. I don't believe it. It's lies, made up by journalists. Personally, I've never met a single executioner who truly understood art.

But where do these persistent stories come from? Why are people so eager for tyrants to be "patrons" and "lovers" of art? I think there are several reasons. First of all, tyrants are base, clever, and cunning men who know that it is much better for their dirty work if they appear to be cultured and educated men rather than ignoramuses and boors. Let the ones who do the work be boors, the pawns. The pawns are proud to be boors, but the generalissimo must always be wise in all things.

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And such a wise man has a huge apparatus working for him, writing about him and writing speeches for him and books too. A huge team of researchers prepares papers for him on any question, any topic.

So you want to be a specialist in architecture? You will be. Just give the order, beloved leader and teacher. Do you want to be a specialist in graphic arts? You will be. A specialist in orchestration? Why not? Or in languages. You name it.

And as for that death camp director who supposedly adored Mozart, he had an assistant in ideology. And that assistant had his own assistant. In general, just look for a victim who did actually say that Mozart was a good composer, and the executioner was on the spot. · He strangled the victim and said the words about Mozart, but as though they were his own. He robbed the victim twice. He took his life and got an inheritance. And everyone around him said, "How cultured, how wise, how refined."

All the pawns, toadies, screws, and other tiny souls also desperately want their leader and teacher to be an undisputed and absolute titan of thought and pen. This is the second reason that these dirty inventions continue to live.

It's all marvelously simple. If the leader doesn't write books but cuts up people instead, then what is he? You don't need to look up the answer in an encyclopedia or wait for the next issue of the magazine with the answer to the crossword puzzle. The answer is simple: a butcher, a gangster. And that makes the toadies the henchmen of a butcher and gangster. And who wants to think of himself in those terms? Everyone wants to be clean, now that the new dawn has come.

(All tyrants always proclaim that the long-awaited dawn has come, always under the rule of the given tyrant. And in the darkest night people act out the comedy of the day that has come. Some enter their roles following Stanislavsky's precepts and that really impresses the uninitiated.)

It's a completely different picture when the leader loves Beethoven, is it not? That alters the landscape somehow. I've met many musicians who insisted seriously that Stalin loved Beethoven.

"Of course, he doesn't understand contemporary music," they said.

"But then there aren't many who do. Even professionals don't, even many composers, and some good ones, who write in a more traditional 1 26

style, consider the music of their more avant-garde colleagues to be delirium, muddles, and cacophony. You see, there is dissension among musicians on this complex issue. And losif Vissarionovich has many other concerns besides music, you know that. But he does love classical art. The ballet, for instance. And loves classical music, Beethoven, for instance. He loves everything exalted, like the mountains. Beethoven is exalted, that's why he loves him too."

I had my fill of speeches like that, thank you. It made my ears vomit. They shoved proof of Stalin's great love for the classics at us from all sides, front and back, above and below.

For instance, I heard the following story. Supposedly at the end of some Party Congress, it was decided to have a gala concert so that the delegates who had worked so hard could have a good rest. The program was· a typical one for these occasions. "Ensembles of dance and prance," combined choirs-to give a volume level that will knock out windowpanes-and a full collection of swans. The dance of the little swans and the big ones, dying ones and · recuperating ones, dances about swans and songs about eagles. You know, an avian, zoological theme for the program.

And they brought the program to Stalin for approval. Approving programs and lists was a hobby of his. The Party's program, lists of condemned men. He also liked approving menus, with Caucasian wine lists.

And now the story takes wing to the heavenly heights-a lackey's dream. Supposedly, Stalin rejected this mishmash with Caucasian wines, the menu displeased him. He had a taste for something · different, something more exalted; instead of the Caucasian wines he wanted the Caucasian mountains. Stalin crossed out the swans and eagles and instead wrote in one composition: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

Embrace, millions! He wrote it himself! With his own hand! The lackey's breath stops! How happy he made us, our benefactor! He made us happy! He made Beethoven happy!

I don't believe it for a minute. It's all lies.

First of all, no one has ever told me precisely at which congress it was that they ended with the Beethoven. Everyone gives me a different number.

Secondly, why was Beethoven given such honors only at this con-1 27

gress? Why did they dance and sing at the others? And they didn't sing "Millions embrace" either. They sang about Stalin the eagle, for there were always more than enough songs on that eternally fresh and captivating theme. I think there must have been some twenty thousand, maybe more. It would be interesting to work out how much money our leader paid out for songs about our leader.

Finally, even if this dubious fact of the Ninth Symphony did occur, it still doesn't prove anything, least of all Stalin's love of Beethoven.

Should we consider the production of The Valkyrie at the Bolshoi, done before the war on Stalin's direct order, to be proof of his love of Wagner? Rather it was a declaration of his love for Hitler.

This story about The Valkyrie is so shameful that it's worth telling.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was in force. We were supposed to love Fascists. We loved belatedly, but as a result with greater passion, the way a middle-aged widow loves her husky young neighbor.

They were pushing Jews out of the more important positions so that they wouldn't irritate German eyes. Litvinov was removed from his position as People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs, for instance. But these were negative actions, so to speak, and positive actions were called for. Well, they gave Hitler several hundred German anti-Fascists and German Jews who were seeking asylum in the Soviet Union.

But that was too modest, nothing on a grand scale, no publicity or fanfare. Just a business favor. And what was wanted were fanfares and a passionate Caucasian love. High emotions, "beautiful tea, and beautiful candy," as the poet said.* They remembered Wagner.

Funny things happen with Wagner in Russia. At first the Russian musicians got into fights with one another over him. Then they stopped fighting and learned from him. But this at least remained within the boundaries of a small group of professionals. Suddenly Wagner became popular. This was before World War I. The tsar, you see, ordered the production of The Ring of the Nibelung at the Imperial Maryinsky Theater. The court, the officers, and the clerks all fell in love with Wagner. And then suddenly the war came! A relative, you might say, and picking a fight. It hurt, it really did. Savages usually

•Shostakovich is quoting a popular line from the ironic poem by Nikolai Makarovich Oleinikov (1898-1942), who died in the Stalinist terror. He was one of Shostakovich's favorite poets.

His collected works have not been published in the Soviet Union.

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whip their graven images in these situations. In Russia they decided to whip Wagner. And he was thrown out of the repertory of the Imperial Maryinsky Theater.

After the Revolution they remembered Wagner again, because they needed an opera repertory that was commensurate with the epoch.

The revolutionary operatic repertoire was limited. You couldn't permit tsars or boyars onstage, or "fancied-up ladies," as they used to call Tatiana from Eugene Onegin in those days. They decided that Western operas held less danger for the Revolution. They tried to learn William Tell, Fiorella, and Le Prophete. And they pulled out Wagner's Rienzi.

Meyerhold began staging Rienzi. He told me that for some purely internal theatrical reason, he didn't see the production through to the end. He always regretted it. I think the problem was money. Meyerhold told me about his conception, which was very interesting and had nothing to do with the music.

Finally, another director produced Rienzi. I don't like the opera very much, I find it pompous and overblown. The conception is not capable of standing alone and the music is mediocre. The plot is good for a revolutionary play, but that's not a primary prerequisite for an opera.

I felt differently toward Wagner at different stages of my life. He wrote some pages of genius, and a lot of very good music, and a lot of average music. But Wagner knew how to peddle his goods. The composer-publicity man is a type I found alien; it is certainly not in the tradition of Russian music. That may be the reason why Russian music is not as popular in the West as it should be. Glinka, our first professional composer, was also the first to say, replying to Meyerbeer, "I do not hawk my own works." And that was so. Not like Meyerbeer.

And then there was Mussorgsky, who refused to go to see Liszt despite all his invitations. Liszt planned to give him marvelous publicity, but Mussorgsky pref erred to remain in Russia and compose. He was not a practical man.

There is one more example-Rimsky-Korsakov. Diaghilev was dragging him to one of his earliest concerts of Russian music in Paris.

They were talking about Sadko. Diaghilev demanded cuts from Rimsky-Korsakov. He insisted that the French were incapable of lis-1 29

tening to an opera from eight until midnight. Diaghilev said that the French couldn't even hear Pelleas to the end and fled in large crowds after eleven, creating a "murderous impression" (Diaghilev's words).

Korsakov replied thus: "I'm totally indifferent to the tastes of the French." And added, "If the weak-willed French audiences in tail coats, who drop in at the opera and who listen to the bought press and to claques, find it too difficult to hear the full Sadko, it shouldn't be offered to them." Not badly said.

After some clever maneuvering, Diaghilev managed to dig Korsakov out and drag him to Paris. Korsakov sent Diaghilev a postcard with his agreement, which said, "If we're going, then let's go, as the parrot said to the cat that was dragging him by the tail down the stairs."

Of the major Russian composers, only two have known how to sell themselves, Stravinsky and Prokofiev. But it's no accident that both are composers of a new era, and in a sense children, even though adoptive ones, of Western culture. Their love and taste for publicity, I feel, keep Stravinsky and Prokofiev from being thoroughly Russian composers. There's some flaw in their personalities, a loss of some very important moral principles.

Both took several lessons from the West too much to heart, lessons that perhaps should not have been learned at all. And in winning popularity they lost something just as valuable.

It's difficult for me to talk about this, I have to be very careful not to insult a man undeservedly. For Stravinsky, for example, may be the most brilliant composer of the twentieth century. But he always spoke only for himself, while Mussorgsky spoke for himself and for his country. But on the other hand, Mussorgsky didn't have a good publicity machine. Not at all.

Now, I hope, you'll see why I have ambivalent feelings towards Wagner. Russian composers learned a new way to orchestrate from him and not how to create publicity on a wide scale or to intrigue and infight. The forging of the sword in the first act of Siegfried is a moment of genius. But why mobilize an army of your proponents against Brahms? Badgering a colleague doesn't come from a fit of pique, it comes from an organic quality of the soul. And a mean soul will inevitably be reflected in music. Wagner is a convincing example of that, but far from the only one.

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During the entire prewar period Wagnerian operas played in Russia, but somehow limply, weakly, and wanly. Various things got in the way. They found traces of idealism, mysticism, reactionary romanticism, and petty-bourgeois anarchism in his works and they wrote all kinds of insulting things about him. And then suddenly the situation changed once again. (The word "suddenly" appears here like a messenger in a bad play-when the plot needs to be thickened, the runner comes and announces, "Your beloved is dead!" or "The enemy has entered the city!" Suddenly. That's bad writing, used by bad playwrights. And I'm a bad raconteur. Naturally, nothing happens "suddenly.") It was just that Stalin wanted to give Hitler a tighter hug, with loud music in the background. Everything had to be on family footing, as of yore. Wilhelm and Romanov were blood relatives. Stalin and Hitler were spiritual relatives.

And the most appropriate composer to accompany Russo-German friendship turned out to be Wagner. They called Eisenstein and told him to quickly produce The Valkyrie at the Bolshoi. Why Eisenstein, a film director? They needed a famous name. Wagner's opera had to be dramatic, as loud as the music. And most important, the director had to be a Gentile. And Eisenstein's father was even German, a converted Jew.

Eisenstein didn't realize the point of the invitation right away. He called up Alexander Tyshler, • a Jewish artist, and asked him to be designer of the production.

Tyshler was a wise man. He said, "Are you mad? Don't you realize what this production is? They won't let you use my name on the poster. The production will have to be judenfrei, free of Jews."

Eisenstein laughed. He still didn't want to understand what everyone else already did. Perhaps he was pretending, but anyway he said,

"I guarantee you work on this production." He called back a few days later, and this time he didn't laugh. He apologized. "You were right,"

Eisenstein said to Tyshler, and hung up.

Why didn't Eisenstein refuse to work on the project when he saw what it really was? We often say about someone that he works not for

•Alexander Grigoryevich Tyshler (b. 1908), artist who designed some of the most famous productions in Sovi� theater, including King Lear at the Moscow Jewish Theater (1935).

Tyshler was one of the favorite painters of the poet Osip Mandelstam.

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fear but for his conscience. Well, he had no conscience at all, but he did have fear, a lot of it. It turned out that Eisenstein was risking his head. They say that he was in torment and suffered greatly, but consoled himself with the thought that it would be interesting to work in the Bolshoi and that The Valkyrie was an opera of genius.

Recently I was talking to a musicologist, a friend of mine, and we brought up the shameful Wagnerian production. The musicologist def ended Eisenstein, saying that he had long wanted to work in opera, that he had "thought a lot about the synthesis of the arts," and that he had managed to introduce some of his ideas-certainly not all of them-onto the stage of the Bolshoi.

But I reminded the musicologist that Eisenstein had had an opportunity to realize his marvelous ideas in another opera production, also in Moscow. And the opera was by his close friend Prokofiev. I'm ref erring to Prokofiev's Semyon Kotko. This opera deals with the occupation of the Ukraine by the Germans in 1918. The Germans are depicted as cruel butchers. When Prokofiev was writing the opera, this corresponded to the political setting.

Actually, this Prokofiev plot was distinguished by great ideological consistency. There were Bolsheviks and evil kulaks and a vow sworn by Red partisans over the grave of a commissar and even a people's uprising.

Semyon Kotko was put into production at the Stanislavsky Opera Theater by Meyerhold himself. It was his last work in the theater. In fact, he never finished it, he was arrested in the middle of it, and he was no longer Meyerhold, but "Semyonich." That was his alleged underground saboteur's nickname. That's quite ridiculous. It was probably the interrogator who invented the name, having read something about Semyon Kotko in the papers.

The director was arrested but the work went on as though nothing had happened. This was one of the terrible signs of the age, a man had disappeared but everyone pretended that nothing had happened. A man was in charge of the work, it had meaning only with him, under his direction. But he was no longer there, he had evaporated, and no one said a word.

The name Meyerhold immediately disappeared from conversations.

That was all.

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At first everyone shuddered. Each thought: I'm next. Then they prayed-I don't know to whom, but they prayed that the next one would be someone else. And since there was no ·order stopping the work, they could continue. It meant that high up they felt that the work was necessary, and perhaps in working they could save their lives.

Prokofiev turned to Eisenstein, his friend. The word "friend" is used as a convention here, particularly when it's used for two men like Eisenstein and Prokofiev. I doubt that either of them needed friends.

They were both remote and aloof, but at least Prokofiev and Eisenstein respected each other. Eisenstein had also been a student of Meyerhold's, so Prokofiev asked the film director to bring the production of Semyon Kotko to completion.

Eisenstein refused. The political climate had changed by then, and in that wonderful era, attacks on Germans, if only in an opera, were forbidden. The opera's future looked doubtful. Why get mixed up in a politically dubious venture? So Eisenstein said, "I don't have the time." He found time, as we know, for The Valkyrie.

The subsequent history of both productions is interesting, very, very interesting. The premiere of The Valkyrie proceeded with all due pomp, and leaders from the Party and the state and the Fascist ambassador all attended. There were rave reviews. In a word, another victory on the arts front. Semyon Kotko barely squeaked into the world.

Naturally, the Germans were gone from the production, replaced by some unnamed occupying force. But nevertheless, the powers that be were displeased. Stalin panicked at the thought of angering the Germans. Officials from the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs showed up at every rehearsal, frowned, and left, saying nothing. That was a very bad sign.

Finally, Vishinsky* himself appeared. He was Stalin's right-hand man, a bastard and a butcher. Obviously, the leader and teacher had sent him to determine just what seditious ideas were being preached from the stage of the opera theater named after a man whom Stalin respected. I mean Stanislavsky. Under the wise direction of Vishinsky,

•Andrei Yanuaryevich Vishinsky (1 883-1954), one of the prime organizers of the political trials of the 1930s. In _his memoirs Winston Churchill described Vishinsky's performance as state prosecutor in these trials as "brilliant."

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the Procurator General of the U.S.S.R., the opera was brought into proper shape. He was satisfied that in terms of plot the opera was suitable; all it had required was playing down the Germans, or occupiers, or whoever. Let the White Guard be the enemy. "Where is the enemy?" as they sing in another opera, A Life for the Tsar, which was retitled Ivan Susanin in our day. As. long as there are enemies, it's fine. Any enemy. As long as there is someone to fight, there's ·no need to get overly specific about who it is.

And so this half-dead production came to life and no one liked it.

Everyone liked Wagner because Wagner, as was very obvious, was beloved by Stalin. And then suddenly, war again! And National Socialist Wagner was dropped from the repertory once more. He had fallen into bad company again. And all our professors and assistant prof essors and the leading and following music critics started teaching Wagner a thing or two, the way you do underage criminals in reform school colonies. They said Wagner had the wrong friends, went to the wrong places, and did the wrong things. And as for their love-it had never existed.

And so here is the sad story in two acts with a prologue and epilogue. History, as we see, repeats itself. You can see the same farce reenacted two, three, sometimes four times in a lifetime, particularly if you're lucky and if you've managed to live more than sixty years in our troubled times, jumping over several terrible barriers.

Every leap takes your last ounce of strength and you're sure that it's your last leap. But it turns out there's more life to live and you can take a rest and relax. And they show you the same old farce. You don't find it funny any more. But people around you are laughing, the young people who are seeing this vulgar show for the first time. It's pointless trying to explain anything to them, they won't understand anyway. You seek out spectators your own age, they know, they understand, and you can talk to them. But there aren't any, they have died off. And the ones who survived are hopelessly stupid, and that's probably why they survived. Or they pretend to be stupid, which also helps.

I will never believe that there are only idiots everywhere. They must be wearing masks-a survival tactic that permits you to maintain a minimal decency. Now everyone says, "We didn't know, we didn't un-1 34

derstand. We believed Stalin. We were tricked, ah, how cruelly we were tricked."

I feel anger at such people. Who was it who didn't understand, who was tricked? An illiterate old milkmaid? The deaf-mute who shined shoes on Ligovsky Prospect? No, they seemed to be educated peoplewriters, composers, actors. The people who applauded the Fifth Symphony. I'll never believe that a man who understood nothing could feel the Fifth Symphony. Of course they understood, they understood what was happening around them and they understood what the Fifth was about.*

And this makes it even harder for me to compose. It must sound odd: it's hard to compose because the audience understands your music. It's probably the other way around in most cases: when they understand, it's easier to write. But here everything is back to front, because the larger the audience, the more informers there are. And the more people who understand what it's about, the more likely that they'll inform.

A very difficult situation arose, which became more difficult with time. It's sad to talk about it, unpleasant, but I must if I am to tell the truth. And the truth is that the war helped. The war brought great sorrow and ma:de life very, very hard. Much sorrow, many tears. But it had been even harder before the war, because then everyone was alone in his sorrow.

Even before the war, in Leningrad there probably wasn't a single family who hadn't lost someone, a father, a brother, or if not a relative, then a close friend. Everyone had someone to cry over, but you had to cry silently, under your blanket, so that no one would see. Everyone feared everyone else, and the sorrow oppressed and suffocated us.

It suffocated me too. I had to write about it, I felt that it was my responsibility, my duty. I had to write a requiem for all those who died, who had suffered. I had to describe the horrible extermination machine and express protest against it. But how could I do it? I was constantly under suspicion then; and critics counted what percentage of

*The Fifth Symphony was composed and performed in 1 937, at the height of mass terror.

The premiere, at which many members of the audience wept, took place in Leningrad, a city that had suffered particularly harsh repressions.

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my symphonies was in a major key and what percentage in a minor key. That oppressed me, it deprived me of the will to compose.

And then the war came and the sorrow became a common one. We could talk about it, we could cry openly, cry for our lost ones. People stopped fearing tears. Eventually they got used to it. There was time to become used to it-four whole years. And that is why it was so hard after the war, when suddenly it all stopped. And that's when· I put many major works in my desk drawer, where they lay for a long time.

To be able to grieve is also a right, but it's not granted to everyone, or always. I felt that personally very strongly. I wasn't the only one who had an opportunity to express himself because of the war. Everyone felt it. Spiritual life, which had been almost completely squelched before the war, became saturated and tense, everything took on acuity, took on meaning. Probably many people think that I came back to life after the Fifth Symphony. No, I came back to life after the Seventh.

You could finally talk to people. It was still hard, but you could breathe. That's why I consider the war years productive for the arts.

This wasn't the situation everywhere, and in other countries war probably interferes with the arts. But in Russia-for tragic reasonsthere was a flowering of the arts.

The Seventh Symphony became my most popular work.* It saddens me, however, that people don't always understand what it's about, yet everything is clear in the music. Akhmatova wrote her Requiem and the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies are my requiem. I don't want to linger on the brouhaha connected with these works. Much has been written about it, and from an external point of view, this is the bestknown part of my life. And in the final analysis, this brouhaha had fateful repercussions for me. It was to be expected. And I had guessed that it would be so, almost from the very beginning.

At fi�st it seemed that a wider celebrity might help me, but then I

• "The Seventh Symphony arose from the conscience of the Russian people, who unwaveringly accepted mortal combat with evil forces." This is a typical reaction to the symphony's premiere, from the writer Alexei Tolstoy. The symphony, written and performed during World War II, found itself a subject of world public opinion for many reasons. In the Soviet Union it was raised to the status of symbol, and excerpts from it can be heard in many films and plays devoted to the war. The American radio premiere of the symphony, conducted by Toscanini on July 19, 1 942, was heard by millions of Americans. This was probably the first time in musical history that a symphony played so political a role. Shostakovich was not responsible for this, yet even to this day the political resonance of the Seventh interferes with an objective evaluation of its musical merits.

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remembered Meyerhold and Tukhachevsky. They were much more famous than I, and it didn't help them one bit. On the contrary.

At first, everything developed normally, but then I realized there were too many articles, too much noise. They were turning me into a symbol. "Shostakovich's symphony" was thrown in: where it was needed and where it wasn't and that was more than unpleasant, it was frightening. And I grew more and more frightened, especially when the West began making noise as well. I'm certain that the brouhaha was started with a specific goal. There was something artificial about it, a shade of hysteria.

You would think that the news that your music is enjoying success would bring nothing but pleasure, but I didn't have complete satisfaction. I was happy that they were playing my music in the West, but I would have pref erred that they talk more about the music and less about tangential matters.

I didn't know all of this then, I was just uneasy. Later I saw how right I had been. The Allies enjoyed my music, as though trying to say: Look how we like Shostakovich's symphonies, and you still want something more from us, a second front or something.

Stalin was incensed. Wendell Willkie came to Moscow, when he was a presidential candidate. He was considered a big shot who could do much. He was asked about the second front and he replied, Shostakovich is a great composer. Mr. Willkie, naturally, thought that he was an extremely deft politician; see how he got out of that one. But he didn't think about the repercussions for me, a living human being.

I think that was what started it. They shouldn't have made such a fuss over my symphonies, but the Allies fussed, and fussed deliberately. They were creating a diversion, at least that's how it was interpreted here in Russia. The ballyhoo kept growing, which must have irritated Stalin. A situation in which someone else is much talked about was intolerable for him. "They don't like it here," Akhmatova once said. Everyone had to be constantly praising only Stalin; only he could shine in all spheres of life, creativity, and science. Stalin was at the very pinnacle of power, no one dared contradict him, and still it wasn't enough.

What I'm saying is a sober analysis and not a temperamental outburst. Stalin's envy of someone else's fame might sound crazy, but it 1 37

did exist. And that envy had a disastrous effect on the lives and activity of many people. Sometimes it took only a trifle to make Stalin angry, a careless word. A man talked too much, or was, in Stalin's opinion, too educated, or carried out Stalin's orders too well. That was enough. He perished.

Stalin was a spider and everyone who approached his nets had to die. Some don't even deserve pity; they wanted to get close and be petted. They dirtied themselves with the blood of innocents, they fawned, and still they perished.

A man reporting to Stalin might read in his eyes, "Too nimble,"

and know that he was doomed. Sometimes all the ardent servitor had time to say at home was that the Master was displeased. They called him Master.

Stalin hated the Allies and feared them. He couldn't do a thing with the Americans. But almost immediately after the war he dealt cruelly with his citizens who had had relations with the Allies. Stalin transferred all his fear and hatred to them. This was a tragedy for thousands upon thousands. A man received a letter from America and was shot. And the naive former Allies kept sending letters and every letter was a death sentence. Every gift, every souvenir-the end. Doom.

And the most loyal wolfhounds shared Stalin's hatred of the Allies.

They felt the scent. They weren't allowed yet to attack and go for the throat. The wolfhounds merely snarled, but it was clear. Khrennikov was one of the wolfhounds, and his nose and brains were topnotch. He knew just what the Master wanted.

A Moscow musicologist told me this story: He was giving a lecture on Soviet composers, and in passing, praised my Eighth Symphony.

After his lecture Khrennikov came up to him, bursting with rage. He was almost shouting. "Do you know whom you were praising? Do you? As soon as we get rid of the Allies we'll put your Shostakovich under our thumbnail!"

The war was still on and the Allies were still comrades in arms, as they were called officially. But the wolfhounds already knew that it meant nothing and they were preparing for the reprisals.

Khrennikov was trying very hard. He hated me. It's funny to talk about it now, but there was a time, until I heard Khrennikov's opera Into the Storm, when my picture stood on Khrennikov's desk. A bad 1 38

opera. I considered Khrennikov a talented man and here was a weak imitation of Dzerzhinsky's terrible opera The Quiet Don. Khrennikov was obviously speculating. Everything in that opera fit the political situation. The libretto was based on a novel that Stalin liked very much and the music was based on an opera that Stalin had approved.

It was pallid music, uninteresting, with primitive harmonies and weak orchestration. Khrennikov clearly wanted to please the leader and teacher. I wrote a letter to Khrennikov about it. I wrote that he was stepping onto a dangerous path. I wanted to warn him. I went over his opera in detail, and the letter was a long one. Before sending it I showed it to a few friends, thinking it would be better to seek some advice. Perhaps I shouldn't send a letter like that, perhaps I was interfering for nothing. But they all approved of the letter, they said it was a necessary, beneficial letter from which they profited, so think how good it would be for Khrennikov.

But Khrennikov didn't see it that way. When he read my letter he tore it up and stamped on it in an excess of emotion. My picture was trampled at the same time. Khrennikov was terribly angry. I had thought that I was acting in the spirit of the Russian school-Russian composers had always conferred with one another and criticized one another, and no one took offense. But Khrennikov didn't .see it that way. He thought that I was blocking his way to the awards and prizes and that I was going out of my way to lead him from the righteous path into the alleys of formalism. When the point wasn't even in the music, in the musical ideas, so to speak. His point was that Stalin wouldn't praise him for formalism, while a trip down the righteous road of primitivism might enable him to pick up the leader and teacher's approval and all the concomitant blessings.

The success of the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies was like a knife in the throat for Khrennikov and company. They thought that I was blocking their light, grabbing up all the fame and leaving none for them. It turned into a nasty story. The leader and teacher wanted to teach me a lesson and my fell ow composers wanted to destroy me. And every report of the success of the Seventh or Eighth made me ill. A new success meant a new coffin nail.

The reprisals were being prepared ahead of time, the preparations began with the- Seventh Symphony. They said that only its first part 1 39

was effective, and that was the part, the critics pronounced, that depicted the enemy. The other parts were supposed to show the might and power of the Soviet Army, but Shostakovich lacked the colors for that assignment. They demanded something like Tchaikovsky's 18 12

Overture from me, and later on the comparison between my music and the overture became a popular argument, naturally not in my favor.

When the Eighth was performed, it was openly declared counterrevolutionary and anti-Soviet.* They said, Why did Shostakovich write an optimistic symphony at the beginning of the war and a tragic

.. one now? At the beginning of the war we were retreating and now we're attacking, destroying the Fascists. And Shostakovich is acting tragic, that means he's on the side of the Fascists.

The dissatisfaction gathered and rose; they wanted a fanfare from me, an ode, they wanted me to write a majestic Ninth Symphony. It was very unfortunate, the business with the Ninth. I mean, I know that the blow was inevitable, but perhaps it would have landed later, or less harshly, if not for the Ninth Symphony.

I doubt that Stalin ever questioned his own genius or greatness. But when the war against Hitler was won, Stalin went off the deep end.

He was like the frog puffing himself up to the size of the ox, with the difference that everyone around him already considered Stalin to be the ox and gave him an ox's due.

Everyone praised Stalin, and now I was supposed to join in this unholy affair. There was an appropriate excuse. We had ended the war victoriously; no matter the cost, the important thing was that we won, the empire had expanded. And they demanded that Shostakovich use quadruple winds, choir, and soloists to hail the leader; All the more because Stalin found the number auspicious: the Ninth Symphony.

Stalin always listened to experts and specialists carefully. The experts told him that I knew my work and therefore Stalin assumed that the symphony in his honor would be a quality piece of music. He would be able to say, There it is, our national Ninth.

I confess that I gave hope to the leader and teacher's dreams. I announced that I was writing an apotheosis. I was trying to get them off

•The Eighth Symphony (1943) vexed the apparatchiks of culture, but Shostakovich's world fame, and particularly the political ramifications of the Seventh, prevented an open attack. Later, in 1948, almost all of Shostakovich's works were censured officially, starting with the First Symphony. Even works that had been awarded the Stalin Prize were criticized-an unheard-of event.

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my back but it turned against me. When my Ninth was performed, Stalin was incensed. He was deeply off ended, because there was no chorus, no soloists. And no apotheosis. There wasn't even a paltry dedication. It was just music, which Stalin didn't understand very well and which was of dubious content.

People will say that this is hard to believe, that the memoirist is twisting things here, and that the leader and teacher certainly didn't have time in those difficult postwar days to worry about symphonies and dedications. But the absurdity is that Stalin watched dedications much more closely than affairs of state. For this was not only happening to me. Alexander Dovzhenko told me a similar · story. He made a documentary film during the war and somehow overlooked Stalin in som:e way. Stalin was livid. He called Dovzhenko in, and Beria shouted at Dovzhenko in front of Stalin, "You couldn't spare ten meters of film for our leader? Well, now you'll die like a dog!" By some miracle, Dovzhenko survived.

I couldn't write an apotheosis to Stalin, I simply couldn't. I knew what I was in for when I wrote the Ninth. But I did depict Stalin in music in my next symphony, the Tenth. I wrote it right after Stalin's death, and no one has yet guessed what the symphony is about. It's about Stalin and the Stalin years. The second part, the scherzo, is a musical portrait of Stalin, roughly speaking. Of course, there are many other things in it, but that's the basis.

I must say that it's difficult work depicting the benefactors of humanity in music, evaluating them through music. Now, Beethoven managed it, from a musical point of view. He was mistaken from the point of view of history, however.

I understand that my Twelfth Symphony isn't a complete success in that sense. I began with one creative goal and ended with a completely different scheme.* I wasn't able to realize my ideas, the material put up resistance. You see how hard it is to draw the image of leaders and teachers with music. But I did give Stalin his due, the shoe fits, as they say. I can't be reproached for avoiding that ugly phenomenon of our reality.

However, when I was composing the Ninth, the leader's death

*According to ShQStakovich's plan, the Twelfth Symphony (1961 ) was supposed to contain a musical portrait of Lenin.

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wasn't close at hand, and my stubbornness cost me dearly. Why didn't Stalin hit me right away? Right then, in 1 945 ? The answer is simple: first he had to deal with the Allies. And here a convenient opportunity presented itself. The wolfhounds had grown up and were baring. their fangs. Our wolfhounds had missed their share of the meat. No one abroad demanded Khrennikov's · compositions or the compositions of Koval* or Mikhail Chulaki. Orders came in for works by other composers. Terrible inequity. They thought they had destroyed formalism, and here it was rearing its ugly head.

The dissatisfied group showered Stalin with declarations, signed personally and collectively. As Ilf and Petrov noted once, "Composers denounce each other on music paper." They overrated composers, they wrote denunciations on plain paper.

One of the disgruntled was Muradeli,t a fact that is now forgotten.

After the historic resolution "On the Opera The Great Friendship,"

Muradeli seemed to walk among the victims, but actually Muradeli was never a victim, and he was planning to warm his hands on his Great Friendship.

And he wanted more than just personal glory, he hoped to pull formalism out by the roots from music. His subsequently infamous opera was accepted for production in 1947 by almost twenty opera companies, and most important, the Bolshoi was doing it, and they were planning it for an important occasion-the thirtieth anniversary of the October Revolution. They were going to open at the Bolshoi on November 7, with Stalin attending.

Muradeli walked around and blustered, "He Himself will invite me into his box! I'll tell him everything! I'll tell him the formalists have been blocking my way. Something has to be done!" Everything seemed to augur success for Muradeli. The plot had ideology, from the lives of the Georgians and Ossetians. The Georgian Commissar Ordzhonikidze was a character in the opera, he was cleaning up the Caucasus.

*Marian Viktorovich Koval (Kovalev; 1907-1971), a composer and one of the group of musical "wolfhounds" who cleared the path for: the "antiformalist" campaign of 1 948. He was the author of a uniquely hostile article on Shostakovich, printed in the magazine Sovets/uJya muzy/uJ in 1948. This is a political denunciation that is £rightening to read even today.

tVano Ilyich Muradeli (1908-1970), a composer whose place in the history of R.ussian music is assured because he was grouped with Shostakovich and Prokofiev as a "formalist." Of course, Muradeli does have his own musical �'record": a singing Lenin makes his first appearance in his opera October (1964). (A talking Lenin appeared in Soviet opera in 1939, in Khrennikov's Into the Storm.)

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The composer was also of Caucasian descent. What more could you ask?

But Muradeli had miscalculated terribly. Stalin disliked the opera.

First of all, he didn't like the plot, he found a major political error in it. According to the plot, Ordzhonikidze convirices the Georgians and Ossetians not to fight with the Russians. · Stalin, as you know, was an Ossetian himself (and not a Georgian, as is usually thought). He took offense on behalf of the Ossetians. Stalin had his own view of the matter. He despised the Chechens and Ingush, who were just then being moved out of the Caucasus. That was a simple thing to do in Stalin's day. They loaded two nations into wagons and took them away to the devil. So Muradeli should have blamed all the evildoing on the Chechens an� Ingush, but he didn't display the necessary mental nimbleness.

And then there was Ordzhonikidze. Muradeli showed his naivete once more. He thought that it would be a good idea to have Ordzhonikidze in the op�ra, he didn't think that reminding Stalin of him was like stepping on a com. At the time, the country had been informed that Ordzhonikidze had died from a heart attack. Actually, Ordzhonikidze shot himself. Stalin drove him to it.

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