Symphony for the City of the Dead Read online

  At the same time, Shostakovich’s mother and father brought up the three children — Dmitri (whom they called Mitya); his older sister, Maria; and his little sister, Zoya — in the best traditions of the Russian intelligentsia. They were surrounded by music and literature.

  Shostakovich’s father, Dmitri Boleslavovich Shostakovich, managed a peat moss farm at Irinovka, a couple of hours outside the capital. The family went out to join him for the summers. They stayed in a huge, cold, strange house. The builder had mistaken the measurements, confusing centimeters and meters, so the rooms were huge and the windows were tiny.

  Shostakovich’s father was a kind man with an excellent sense of humor and a strong Siberian accent. “He never seemed to take anything seriously,” said Zoya. “He was never worried and always full of fun. He had a passion for gadgets — new cigarette-lighters, tiny knives, fancy boxes for all purposes, and any wire or ring puzzles he could find; these he worked over for hours, with his children sitting on the floor around him.”

  While Mitya’s father worked during the day, the boy and his two sisters ran through the woods barefoot and picked mushrooms and berries. They played with the estate’s dogs, read adventure novels, and helped the handyman with chores.

  Shostakovich’s aunt recalled that he was a dreamy boy. “I think you would say he was very alone. He was always alone, really, even when he was gathering berries with his sisters in the country. They would be the ones to find the berries, the quiet Mitya would be the one to eat them.”

  Others found him shy, too. One of his childhood friends, Boris Lossky, remembered meeting him for the first time at school: “The nine-year-old boy, with fragile, sharp features, looked somewhat like a small sparrow. He sat at the window looking blank-faced through his spectacles while his schoolmates played and amused themselves. Probably his introspection was due to his being under the spell of his inner hearing.”

  His little sister, Zoya, saw another side of Dmitri Dmitrievich, however: “He was somewhat absent-minded,” she said. “Yet he was a wonderfully kind and cheerful child. He was full of mischief and good spirits in the first years of his life, and indeed he remained so until they started beating the fun out of him.”

  The “they” she spoke of had not yet come into power.

  The three children were also tutored in piano and dance. When Mitya was very little, he was not particularly interested in music. He saw that piano lessons made his older sister, Maria, cry. The young composer preferred blocks.

  When the family was in St. Petersburg for the winter, however, he could hear the neighbors — a cellist and a children’s book writer — play music through the wall of their apartment. The thin wall introduced him to the music of the old Viennese masters and Russian composers like Peter Tchaikovsky and Alexander Borodin.

  Hand in hand with his parents, Shostakovich walked through the streets where these composers had lived. He saw the house where Borodin — not just a composer but also a chemist — had written his splendid quartets and conducted his research on aldehydes and urine. The boy and his parents passed the concert halls where Borodin and the rest of the “Mighty Fistful” of St. Petersburg composers had premiered their works. He strolled on the embankments of the Neva River and the Winter Canal, where a famous heroine in an opera by Tchaikovsky met her lover and jumped to her death. (Tchaikovsky himself, composer of magical ballets, had tried to do the same thing by wading into a frigid river one night, hoping for fatal pneumonia.) It was a city full of music.

  Mitya’s parents took him to see one of the great fairy-tale operas of St. Petersburg composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Shostakovich claims it did not change his life. On the other hand, it did include a princess in a barrel, a man who transformed into a bee, and a whistling squirrel who ate emeralds.

  The next day, though he could not even read music, the boy remembered the opera perfectly and sang through much of it in its entirety.

  The political and economic situation got worse. Terrorism was on the rise. In the first year and a half of Shostakovich’s life, roughly 4,500 government officials were injured or killed in assassination attempts by radicals. In his toddler years, the government recorded 20,000 terrorist acts across the empire, with more than 7,500 fatalities.

  By the time he was eleven, the country was trapped in the midst of World War I — a disastrous conflict that many Russian soldiers on the front line did not even understand. Violence overtook the city, and this time, there was no turning back. Millions were starving to death. The country’s economy was falling apart. Anger at the regime extended from those living in abject poverty to some of the wealthiest families. The capital did not seem like the city it had once been. Its name had even been changed from St. Petersburg to the much more Russian Petrograd (gorod, or -grad, being Russian for “city,” versus the German -burg). The once grand capital now seemed chaotic, angry, hungry.

  In February 1917, the people of Petrograd took to the streets. Industrial workers walked out of their factories. Women marched through the avenues, demanding bread and the end of war.

  The government called out armed guards to force the mob to quiet down.

  The mob was not going away.

  On the morning of February 27, 1917, Sofia Shostakovich was eating breakfast when the janitor appeared at the door of their apartment and told her that the whole city was on the march. The government had sent out platoons of fierce Cossack horsemen to control the crowd. The news was terrifying: this was precisely how the massacre on Bloody Sunday had started.

  In a few minutes, the cook came in with more news. The tsar’s police had panicked and had roared the order, just as in 1905, for the Cossacks to fire into the crowd — to shoot to kill.

  But the Cossacks hadn’t fired. Instead, a Cossack officer had raised his saber and hacked off the police captain’s arm while the order to fire was being given. The Cossacks were siding with the crowd.

  Sofia muttered, “This looks like revolution.” She ran downstairs and out onto Nevsky Prospect, the great central avenue of the city.

  It was mobbed, but the mood was one of triumph. The Cossack horsemen rode along through the crowd, smiling, joking, and laughing. The guards and the army, it seemed, were on the people’s side, not the tsar’s.

  Sofia Shostakovich went back into her building and called Dmitri senior at work. He told her that the tsar’s police had lost control of the city. The city’s most famous prison had been attacked, and the prisoners had fled. Everything was in an uproar.

  The cook, Sasha, went to fetch young Mitya from school. As they pushed their way through the crowds, Mitya was anxious. He kept saying to himself, “There’s no revolution. It’s all nonsense. It’s all nonsense.” He held tightly on to Sasha’s skirt so he wouldn’t be swept away by the tide of people surging around them.

  Elsewhere in the city, the mood was not as festive. The tsar’s police, crouched on roofs and in doorways, shot at the protesters. Machine-gun fire rattled down avenues as people fled or threw themselves into snowbanks.

  Soldiers told to take up arms against their fellow Russians refused. They turned on their officers. Many just handed their guns to the Revolutionaries.

  All over the city, as people marched, they sang:

  Let’s denounce the old world!

  Let’s shake its dust from our feet! . . .

  The rich, the exploiters, the greedy mob

  Deprive you of your hard, hard work. . . .

  The tsar, the vampire, takes from your veins.

  The tsar, the vampire, drinks the blood of the people.

  And then:

  Arise, arise, working people!

  Arise against the enemies, hungry brother!

  Forward! Forward!

  Dmitri senior ran up the steps to the Shostakovich apartment and burst in, full of excitement. He shouted, “Children — Freedom!”

  It seemed as if the tsar’s tyranny was toppled. The past seemed to be dying in a single day.

  Young Dmitri demand
ed a length of ribbon, the red of revolution, to tie around his arm.

  For the rest of the afternoon, he and his sisters wore their scarlet sashes, parading back and forth in front of their building like soldiers.

  They played at rebellion.

  Things happened quickly in the days that followed. The old order was breaking down. Unpopular factory bosses who had made their workers’ lives miserable were thrown in burlap sacks and rolled through the streets in wheelbarrows. In the countryside, peasants raided their landlords’ immense Classical houses. The army and the police were locked in battle with each other on the streets of the capital. Machine-gun emplacements fired into the surging crowds, leaving many dead on the cobbles. All authority seemed to have crumbled to nothing.

  On March 2, 1917, Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia, realized that he could no longer rule, and he abdicated. Officially, he had already been dismissed. The three-hundred-year-old dynasty of the Romanovs was at an end. (The tsar and his family were exiled to a remote town; the next summer, they were all secretly murdered in their basement by their guards.)

  There was a new Provisional Government, and there were promises of a universal vote, of universal education, of industrial reforms, of judicial reforms.

  The red flag of the Revolution was hoisted up over the tsar’s Winter Palace. All over the city, the tsar’s two-headed imperial eagles were draped with red cloth.

  In one of Petrograd’s theaters, a ballet company put on Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty. Up in the imperial box, which had previously been reserved only for the tsar’s family, who would look down royally at the performance below, normal ticket-holders now lounged and slouched in the seats. In the magical kingdom onstage, the king and queen still wore crowns, but between the acts, the orchestra struck up Revolutionary tunes.

  At the end of the ballet, people from the audience jumped up onto the stage to mingle with the dancers. All the old lines between ruler and ruled, between those who paid and those who performed, between the worker and the watcher, seemed to be breaking down.

  Together, cast and audience, they all sang out: “Arise, arise, working people! Forward! Forward!”

  The Shostakovich children witnessed the celebratory joy of the February Revolution of 1917 — and its violence. Shostakovich later claimed he had seen a boy steal an apple, then, in the ensuing fight with the tsar’s police, get slashed to death. His older sister, Maria, and her classmates, spilling out of the doors of their school, saw a policeman brutally kill a young protester from the Bogdanov tobacco factory. There were trucks all over the city, Shostakovich later remembered, “filled with soldiers, who were shooting. It was better not to go out in those days.”

  In March, a funeral procession for the victims of the Revolution wound through the slushy streets of Petrograd, watched solemnly by millions as a bitter snow and rain fell. The coffins were covered with red flags, and the throngs sang a dirge: “You fell victims in the fatal struggle of selfless love for the people. . . . The people will rise, great, mighty, and free.” The Shostakovich children climbed up onto an iron fence by an old churchyard so that they could see.

  As the coffins were lowered into the pit where they would be covered with cement, the cannons on the grim, gray walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress across the Neva River fired a final salute. It was, said Leon Trotsky, one of the radicals, “a concluding chord in the symphony” of the February Revolution.

  We are told that when young Mitya got home from the mass burial, he played the piano quietly for a long time. There, sitting at the keyboard, he composed a “Funeral March for the Victims of the Revolution.” When guests would come to visit his mother, he would play them this piece and a “Hymn of Freedom” he had written.

  Years later, when his hair was flecked with gray, he would remember the songs he heard in the streets on the day of that funeral and the music he wrote right after. He would use them in symphonies recalling the revolutions of 1905 (when his father marched on the Winter Palace) and this year, 1917, the year of two revolutions, the year Russia changed forever.

  The houses of the wealthy and the middle class — the bourgeoisie — were ransacked for goods that could be requisitioned for the people’s fight, or simply looted in the name of the Revolution.

  One day Mitya and his mother were on their way home from his school. They drove through the city’s squares and avenues in the car that had come with Dmitri senior’s job. A hired driver was at the wheel. In those days, the Shostakoviches lived a life of relative luxury.

  As they made their way toward their apartment, two soldiers armed with rifles ran along beside the car. They jumped onto the running boards and held on. It was startling — the Shostakoviches didn’t know what was going on.

  The soldiers leaned into the windows and said that they were requisitioning the car for the Revolution.

  The driver started to argue. It was an outrage.

  Sofia Shostakovich quieted him gently. She asked the soldiers if they would drop the family off at home first.

  Once they were back at the apartment, she gave the car to the soldiers. They got in and drove off in it.

  In those days, most of the civilian automobiles in the city were seized. Family cars now careened around the streets decked with red flags, with guns bristling from the windows and soldiers stuffed in the seats, swaying on the running boards, and gripping the fenders. One diarist talks about the surprise of seeing luxury limousines that were spiky with bayonets.

  Cars also rattled down the streets with activists hurling pamphlets out the windows, trying to publicize their party or point of view. Shostakovich’s aunt remembered roads being thick with political litter.

  That year, it was as if the city was built of ideas and argument: People walked across a pavement of propaganda, and the walls were plastered with posters. Buildings were coated in debates. Type ran in every direction. Newspapers sprang up, printed a few issues in flurries, then died.

  Some argued for victory against the Germans. (The country, after all, was still at war.) Some argued for peace at any cost. Some argued for the rule of the industrial workers. Some argued for the rights of the peasants. Some argued for a republic. Some argued for Communism.

  Factions split into smaller factions, committees gave rise to other committees, and all of them fought about the shape of the future.

  Out of this political turmoil rose a man who called himself Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. That was not his name, but revolutionaries often didn’t call themselves by their names.

  In April of 1917, the story runs, Mitya Shostakovich and his friends from school heard that this radical, Lenin, was returning to Petrograd by train from his exile in western Europe. They ran in a group to see him when he arrived.

  Lenin was the head of the Bolshevik Party. The Bolsheviks argued for the rise of the workers to a long-delayed position of power. Lenin wrote:

  The only way to put an end to the poverty of the people is to change the existing order from top to bottom . . . to take the estates from the big landowners, the factories from the factory owners, and money capital from the bankers, to abolish their private property and turn it over to the whole working people throughout the country. When that is done the workers’ labor will be made use of not by rich people living on the labor of others, but by the workers themselves and those elected by them. The fruits of common labor and the advantages from all improvements and machinery will then benefit all the working people, all the workers.

  He believed that Russia was only the first country of many that would soon overthrow its government and the control of the bourgeoisie (the middle class — which, incidentally, included the Shostakoviches) in favor of rule by the working class, the proletariat.

  Shostakovich and his friends were eager to see this man who, as it happened, would soon change history and plunge his country into yet another bloody revolution. As the boys got near the train station, the crowds got thicker. Lots of people had shown up to see Lenin return to the capital. The
kids slipped into a column of workers crossing a bridge. They were part of the jostling.

  There was the train, sitting at rest. There, over the heads of adults, up on a platform, was Lenin: a distant smudge with a bald head and a smart little beard. He shouted out to the crowds.

  Shostakovich could not hear a word he said, but he did hear, all around him, the roar of the people.

  Over the mob, Lenin called out, “The world-wide Socialist revolution has already dawned. . . . Any day now the whole of European capitalism may crash. . . . Long live the worldwide socialist revolution!”

  To many people, it was a thrilling idea. As Karl Marx had written at the close of his Communist Manifesto, they had nothing to lose but their chains. But many others — including the Shostakovich family, as it turned out — had plenty to lose. Members of the Provisional Government, trying to forge a new democratic republic out of a broken-down monarchy, were very worried by Lenin’s radicalism.

  Few suspected that this was the direction of Russia’s future.

  Still, a Soviet biography of Shostakovich declares: “The spectacle of a billowing sea of people, the elemental force of the events taking place, and the figure of Lenin — all this was imprinted forever in the young composer’s memory, to pour out later in sweeping symphonic canvases.”

  We need to examine this story. Shostakovich’s biographers write that Lenin’s appearance in the city was “imprinted forever” in his memory. His sister Zoya claimed to remember Mitya jogging back from the train station “in raptures.”

  In his supposed memoir — which may be forged — Shostakovich merely said, “They say that the major event of my life was the march down to the Finland Station in April 1917, when Lenin arrived in Petrograd. The incident did take place. . . . But I don’t remember a thing.”

  There are definitely problems with the story. For one thing, Lenin did not arrive at the train station during the day, but in the middle of the night. Shostakovich could not have simply scampered over from the schoolyard.