Symphony for the City of the Dead Read online

  The composer was ten years old at the time, in a city where the streets had recently been scoured with machine-gun fire. Did his parents really kiss him on the head and send him out at midnight to join the Revolutionary mob?

  Or was this story of him viewing the future leader of Russia from afar something made up later when he — or others — wanted to create, in retrospect, a direct connection to the Bolshevik cause?

  At the time when Shostakovich would have seen Lenin at the station, so shortly after the February Revolution, the Bolshevik leader would have only been one Revolutionary extremist among many. No one could have foreseen that he would rise so quickly to power. Moreover, Shostakovich’s parents, though they were in favor of the Revolution like many, were certainly not radical Bolsheviks. It’s doubtful they would have taken much notice of Lenin at the time. Would their ten-year-old son have gone out of his way to see this man step off a train? It’s not impossible, but we also can’t take it for granted.

  Reconstructing a Soviet life is often difficult. Many of the details of Shostakovich’s youth we know only because his aunt Nadejda Galli-Shohat collaborated on a biography years later, against his wishes. She is not an entirely reliable source; an American interviewer called her “one of those wonderfully frank Russians who can drop into fantasy as easily as most of us find our way into the subway.” When the Shostakovich children were young, she loved telling them fairy-tale fibs about her youth in Siberia. We should be cautious of believing absolutely the testimony of a natural storyteller who claimed that in her infancy, she was nursed by a bear.

  In the summer of the Revolutionary year 1917, the Shostakoviches decided to send the children out to the peat farm at Irinovka where Dmitri senior worked. While, in the capital, the wobbling Provisional Government sustained attacks from the left and from the right, Mitya and his sisters wandered through the fir groves, picked mushrooms, read spy novels, and played waltzes on the piano.

  As always, it was Zoya who found the mushrooms, and her dreamy brother, Mitya, who picked them.

  Zoya later commented, “He could stand right on top of a mushroom and not notice it.”

  In the midst of the country’s political struggles, it was clear to Lenin and the Bolsheviks that they could not win control of the government through a legitimate vote of the nation’s new Assembly. As a result, they launched the year’s second rebellion.

  On October 25, 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power. The battleship Aurora chugged into position beside the Winter Palace, which was now the headquarters of the Provisional Government. The ship lowered its guns and fired off a terrifying rally of blanks. It was a warning.

  Bolshevik forces attacked the palace. It was defended by only a few military cadets, a small division of the Women’s Battalion of Death, and forty of the Knights of Saint George under the command of a staff captain on a cork leg. The government’s defenders crouched with machine guns behind piles of firewood. The Bolshevik Red Guard swept in and ransacked the place.

  This second uprising was called the October Revolution. As the February Revolution had overthrown the tsar, the October Revolution brought the Bolsheviks — the Communists — to power over all the other possible parties.1 One revolution had just been toppled by another. The heads of the Provisional Government stepped aside, surrendered, or fled.

  Still, when elections for the nation’s legislative body, the Assembly, were held, the Bolshevik Party didn’t get even a quarter of the votes — so Lenin simply dissolved the Assembly. Now the Bolsheviks, who just a few months earlier had been considered a fringe group of radicals, were in sole control of Russia. Lenin said that he had seized power in the name of the people — though the people had not voted him into power and, as the Bolsheviks knew well, their rebellion was “not popular”: “The masses received our call with bewilderment,” they reported with frustration. Nonetheless, for roughly the next seventy years, Lenin’s party would rule the sprawling empire that had once been the tsars’.

  Immediately after the Bolsheviks took power, they made good their promises to the working class of Russia: they gave over the factories to the control of the urban workers, and they confiscated all of the great landowners’ country estates in the name of the peasants. The whole notion of private property was in question. Russia had embarked on one of the boldest social experiments in human history.

  In the unrest after Lenin dissolved the Assembly, Bolshevik thugs killed two of the previous members of the Provisional Government in cold blood. The city’s intelligentsia was shocked.

  Dmitri Shostakovich was asked to play the piano for a memorial service held at his sisters’ school. He played his “Funeral March for the Victims of the Revolution.”

  But who at this point were the “Victims of the Revolution”? He had written the piece earlier in the year to lament the death of Revolutionaries killed by the tsar’s police. Only a few months later, he played it to lament these two men killed by the Revolutionaries. Two opposing forces, one piece of music.

  So Russia proceeded into its uncertain future — as Dmitri Shostakovich played its solemn march of victimhood or victory.

  SOURCES

  1 A note on terminology: The terms Bolshevik, Communist, socialist, Marxist, and Soviet are related and often used as if they mean the same thing, but they all have different shades of meaning. Lenin’s party was the Bolsheviks. They were a Communist party, that is to say, they believed that eventually, after a series of transformations, all government would fall away and be replaced by utopian communes. They believed that one of the stages government had to go through to reach true Communism was complete government control of industry and commerce — a totalitarian form of socialism. Socialism can refer to the government ownership of any industry or service, from things we take for granted like the fire department, the postal service, railroads, and the highway department to health care, banking, or manufacturing. Different nations make different decisions about what should be owned and provided by the government. Lenin and the Bolsheviks believed that the regime should own all industries and services. In general, the Communists drew their philosophy from the political economist Karl Marx and so were also called Marxists. Finally, in the early stages of the revolution, they found their power in the workers’ councils, or “soviets,” and so the country they eventually gave their name to was called the Soviet Union (or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). While these terms — Bolshevik, Communist, Marxist, socialist, and Soviet — are sometimes used interchangeably, many people have died to make distinctions among them.

  The future had arrived.

  Petrograd was full of it.

  Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich entered his teenage years just as the capital of Russia also exploded into a strange new youth.

  Lenin, in toppling the first Revolutionary government with his own Bolshevik Revolutionary government, had unleashed civil war on the country. This bloody conflict between the Communists and their many enemies would rage for years across the vast territory of Russia. Yet later, Shostakovich claimed, “Despite all the difficulties, I remember that time with a warm feeling.”

  He was not alone in this. The old world had been tossed away, and a new world beckoned. In this new world, supposedly everyone would be educated — everyone would work — everyone would have enough to eat. The Bolsheviks promised equality for all races and equality for the sexes. Workers and peasants would walk the streets of Moscow and Kiev wearing fine suits and hats. War would, eventually, disappear. In nation after nation, the working class, the proletariat, would rise up and toss aside their masters. National boundaries would no longer matter. This seemed like a wonderful dream. The world would be a lush, industrial utopia.

  Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky predicted, “Man in Socialist societies will command nature in its entirety, with its grouse and sturgeons. He will point out places for mountains and for passes. He will change the course of rivers, and he will lay down rules for oceans.”

  There was nothing
humankind was not capable of.

  A lot of young Shostakovich’s pleasure came from a warm and happy home. His mother doted on him. His father cracked jokes. His older sister, Maria, played piano duets with him. His younger sister, Zoya, was growing into an angular, eccentric girl with a huge amount of energy and verve.

  She insisted on hanging all the pictures in the house at a slant.

  Sofia Shostakovich loved to hold parties, and so these years were filled with loud gatherings and evening salons. When Mitya was younger, he would hide under the piano, listening to the sounds thrumming down through the latticework of wood. When he was older, he took part himself, playing dances while the guests and the rest of his family swirled around the apartment. “We invited up to thirty people,” his sister Zoya remembered. “There was nothing much to feed the guests on, but we would dance until six in the morning. . . . Life was quite fantastic in those days. Mitya enjoyed himself with the rest of us, and he didn’t miss out on the dancing either.”

  Already, young Mitya’s power on the piano astonished people. “It was wonderful to be among the guests,” one remembered,

  when the bony boy with thin lips pressed together, a small, narrow, faintly Roman nose, and old-fashioned spectacles with bright metal frames . . . entered the large room and, rising on tiptoe, sat down at the huge piano. Wonderful, for by some obscure law of contradictions the bony boy was transformed at the piano into a bold musician with a man’s strength in his fingers and an arresting rhythmic drive. . . . His music talked, chattered, was sometimes quite outspoken. . . . Then the boy got up and went quietly to join his mother, who blushed and smiled as if the applause were for her and not her wordless son.

  Sometimes the Shostakoviches would go to parties at which the great musicians and poets of the city gathered. Alexander Glazunov, the stout director of the Petrograd Conservatory, would be there smoking his cigars and talking about music. When he played the piano, he kept the cigar between his fingers, and the ash waggled up and down the keyboard. The poet Anna Akhmatova, as striking as an idol and carrying herself as if she were already a statue in a ruined temple, would stalk through the crowds of guests, engaged on her strange affairs.

  It was through Glazunov that Sofia Shostakovich somehow got her Mitya into the Petrograd Conservatory to study piano at the very young age of thirteen. (As with many musical prodigies, a mother’s demands were part of his success.) The boy took the entrance examinations and was found to be very gifted. He left school at thirteen to focus completely on music.

  His door to the future was open.

  Shostakovich went to the Conservatory to study piano in 1919. There often was not much food or heat in the place in those years, because the Civil War was still disrupting the life of the country in countless ways — but Mitya seemed to feed on music.

  The classrooms were freezing. The students trudged to their piano classes in long coats, hats, felt boots, galoshes, and fingerless gloves. On the way to the Conservatory, they’d pick up bits and pieces of wood — a slat from a chair or a broken picture frame. They needed them for heat. During the lesson, they wouldn’t take off their coats or hats. There was a small tin stove in the classroom, and they all fed their kindling, scrap by scrap, into the flame. They’d swap seats during the class. Whoever was about to play the piano next would sit by the stove, stretching their fingers. They’d warm their hands and prepare to play. The piano keys were freezing. The ivory was so cold it burned.

  In the Conservatory’s concert hall, the cherubs on the ceiling had ice on their cheeks.

  One of Shostakovich’s friends, Leo Arnshtam, remembered the faculty’s glee when cabbages were delivered. Round Glazunov tiptoed into a classroom and announced that the cabbages were being unloaded — and, Chopin be damned, the teachers were off like a shot.

  “The Conservatoire of my youth smelled of cabbage,” said Leo Arnshtam, “but despite everything it breathed inspiration!”

  Shostakovich and his friends walked back and forth across the city, across bridges and icy squares, just to hear concerts. They didn’t have any money, so they sneaked into rehearsals to listen. They heard symphonies, operas, sonatas. Sitting side by side at the piano, pounding on the keys, breathing steam in the cold of the morning, they played versions of the pieces they’d heard the night before.

  Learning these duets, Shostakovich taught himself composition from inside the scaffolding of music, where its wheelworks and gears lay hidden.

  Shostakovich’s friend Arnshtam called those years “hungry, but nevertheless happy.” He remembered Shostakovich:

  This thin and apparently fragile adolescent was exceptionally animated and always in rapid motion. His sharp profile, crowned by a jaunty lick of hair, would flash past me at different corners of the Conservatoire. His outward appearance and behavior did not lead one to suspect the artist in him. . . . Like the rest of us, he waited his turn for the cabbage soup in the Conservatoire queue. And he too, before touching the icy keyboard, had to warm his hands, frozen to the point of numbness.

  His teachers certainly noticed him. “An excellent musician, despite his young age. Such early development is remarkable,” they wrote in 1921. In 1922, they wrote, “Exceptional gifts which have blossomed early.” By 1923, Glazunov announced that Shostakovich was already musically mature.

  In those times, said Leo Arnshtam, “Music triumphed. And not just the music we played on our instruments, but the music of revolution!”

  The Bolshevik government did not want music and the other arts simply to be for the wealthy anymore. Lenin wrote, beautifully and thrillingly:

  Art belongs to the people. It must have its deepest roots in the broad masses of the workers. It must be understood and loved by them. It must be rooted in, and grow with, their feelings, thoughts, and desires. It must arouse and develop the artist in them. Are we to give cake and sugar to a minority when the mass of workers and peasants still lack black bread? . . . So that art may come to the people, and the people to art, we must first of all raise the general level of education and culture.

  Russians of all classes had always been particularly drawn to poetry and music. In the early 1920s, the government tried to promote these enthusiasms. The Commissar of Enlightenment — in charge of spreading education throughout the whole workforce — arranged music schools near factories to teach students of any age and any background how to play instruments and sing. He also arranged for the Conservatory students to go out into the world and make music for the people.

  Pianos heaved out of the homes of the bourgeoisie were rolled up onto flatbed trucks. Singers, cellists, and violinists would climb onto the backs of the trucks and they’d bang and rattle out into the countryside to give concerts and dances for the Red Army or for factory workers during their breaks. Shostakovich played in fields and in dining halls.

  The audiences, delighted with the free music, would sometimes give him soup or half a sandwich. It made a huge impression on the young composer.

  Petrograd, the city of the arts, was wild with frenzied experimentation.

  “The streets are our brushes, the squares are our palettes,” declared the great Russian Futurist poet and painter Vladimir Mayakovsky. “Drag the pianos out onto the streets.”

  And art did move onto the streets.

  Lenin needed word of Communism to be spread to the people, and creative artists, excited by the idea of this new world, were thrilled to take part in the transformation of art for the masses. Not only were there roving bands of musicians like Shostakovich in his clanking music wagon. There were now great artistic and musical spectacles staged on the avenues of Petrograd. Parades featured effigies of capitalists with top hats and monocles; behind them puttered modern threshing equipment with banners reading, “Machines and Tractors for the Peasants!”; and behind them, to keep everyone interested, leaped acrobats dressed as cucumbers and turnips.

  On the anniversary of the October Revolution, a cast of ten thousand acted out “The Storming of the T
sar’s Winter Palace” while more than a hundred thousand people looked on, awed, moved, and delighted. Experimental theater troupes set off into the countryside to perform news stories, absurdist clown acts, science-fiction dramas. The Futurist Mayakovsky created bizarre propaganda plays like his Mysterium-Buffo, a postapocalyptic extravaganza in which a few working-class survivors of a great biblical flood kick their way through heaven and hell and arrive, instead, at the new Communist utopia — Machine World! — where a glorious new Russia arises, full of electricity and manufacturing.

  Many artists thought that this was the moment to destroy the arts of the past. “The thunder of the October cannons helped us become innovative,” declared artist Kazimir Malevich. “We have come to burn the brain clean of the mildew of the past.”

  “Blow up, destroy, wipe from the face of the earth all the old artistic forms,” cried the head of the Petrograd Committee of Enlightenment. “How can the new artist, the proletarian artist, the new man not dream of this?” New art, new music, and new drama had to be found for a new world where workers ruled. What would music sound like now that it was no longer being played in the salons of the rich? What would painting look like when it did not have to adorn the Rococo walls of Russian palaces?

  As a result, Petrograd swarmed with new art movements: Cubo-Futurists and Neo-Primitivists, Constructivists and Suprematists, Rayonists and Productivists.

  For some years, schools of artists all over the globe had been excited by the idea of the future. The poets of the past had flinched from the roaring of automobiles and the screeching of braked trains — but these new artists embraced the strength and dynamism of movement, metal, whistles, cogs. Now these Futurists became a loud voice in the new Bolshevik order — literally shouting on street corners.