Symphony for the City of the Dead Read online

  They continued on their separate ways.

  Pasternak, for his part, decided to see for himself what was going on in the countryside. He requested a pass to visit Ukraine so that he could write a heroic ode on farm collectivization. As he traveled through the southern fields, he saw nightmare images. He discovered that Mandelstam was right — almost no one in Leningrad or Moscow knew the horrors that were going on in their name. Roughly six million people starved to death during the implementation of the Five-Year Plan. In 1933, more than four million people starved in Ukraine alone as their food was taken from them to pay for foreign factory equipment. The Soviet president of Ukraine admitted, “We know millions are dying. That is unfortunate but the glorious future of the Soviet Union will justify it.” Pasternak was appalled. “There are no words to describe what I saw there. It was such an inhuman, unimaginable misfortune, such a terrible calamity . . . the mind simply could not take it in.” When the poet returned home from his sojourn, he found he could not sleep for a year afterward.

  At around that time, Mandelstam recited his squib about Stalin to a circle of his friends.

  They were apparently not all his friends: one informed on him. He was arrested by the secret police on May 13, 1934, and charged with “committing a terrorist act against the ruler.”

  As Mandelstam once said, Russia took poetry more seriously than any nation in the world: “There’s no place where more people are killed for it.”

  The gathering gloom of the USSR in the early 1930s does not seem to have affected Shostakovich immediately. For one thing, as Pasternak and Mandelstam discovered, some of the most disastrous effects of Stalin’s Five-Year Plan were concealed. The government’s newspaper, Pravda (“Truth”), was full of lies. Propaganda songs smugly celebrated the triumphs of the Five-Year Plan: “The March of the Happy-Go-Lucky Guys” gloated, “We are taming space and time! We are the young masters of the earth!” Another mass song gushed dreamily, “We were born to make fairy tales come true.”

  The news that reached the cities was the good news: Industrial production was up, growing by 10 percent annually; collective farmers now had access to modern machinery (though no one mentioned that only one in twenty-five collective farms had electricity); and, perhaps the best news of all, literacy was flourishing in a country that, until the Revolution, had been widely illiterate. As the papers pointed out, the capitalist West, throttled by the Great Depression, appeared to be falling to its knees.

  It is unclear how much Shostakovich knew about what was really going on. It appears that at the time, Shostakovich thought he was doing what was expected of him as a composer. Speaking to a New York Times interviewer at the end of 1931, he said, “I think an artist should serve the greatest possible number of people. I always try to make myself as widely understood as possible, and, if I don’t succeed, I consider it my own fault.” This was in stark contrast to modernist composers of the West like Arnold Schoenberg, who claimed, “If it is art, it is not for everybody, and if it is for everybody, it is not art.” Shostakovich told the American interviewer and her translators, “I am a Soviet composer, and I see our epoch as something heroic, spirited, and joyous.”

  He said this sitting nervously in his apartment, “a pale young man, with the lips and hands and the manners of a bashful schoolboy.” We do not know if he meant what he said; sitting around him on his mother’s sofa were not only the American interviewer but also an official government translator and a Soviet press attaché, who would have reported anything questionable to their superiors. As one Shostakovich scholar has pointed out, this was not the best atmosphere for the free and easy exchange of ideas.

  Still, his music of the period really does set out to speak directly to the people — to be “heroic, spirited, and joyous.” Just as writers were increasingly being convinced, one way or another, to write novels about scenes of everyday life, about triumphant assembly-line workers, about beautiful milkmaids on collective farms falling in love with handsome tractor drivers, Shostakovich wrote music for ballets and popular films on healthy topics of labor.

  He wrote the score for the movie The Counterplan (1932), a tale of turbine factory workers scrambling to install new machinery. The movie’s theme song, “The Song of the Counterplan,” with lyrics by the poet Boris Kornilov, swept across Russia and became a huge hit. In Shostakovich’s ballet The Bolt (1931), a lazy, malcontented factory worker sabotages machinery by literally throwing a wrench in the works. He is caught, and the ballet ends with the march of triumphant socialist labor. Nothing could be closer to the spirit of Stalin’s Five-Year Plan — except perhaps Shostakovich’s next ballet, The Bright Stream (1935). It is a pretty, even trivial, tale about the love life of a student agronomist at a collective farm in the Caucasus. There is no hint of suffering. The collective farmers spend their time in celebration and dancing.

  In projects like these, Shostakovich adhered to the demands of the new style that was sweeping the arts in Soviet Russia, later called Socialist Realism. The “realism” was not necessarily realistic. Yes, writers and composers and painters were no longer supposed to depict the dreams, fables, absurdities, and science-fiction concoctions of the twenties. They were urged to depict real life — keeping in mind that real life in a Soviet state was supposedly leading to universal perfection. As the Composers’ Union wrote in their guidelines (1934), “The main attention of the Soviet composer must be directed towards the victorious progressive principles of reality, towards all that is heroic, bright, and beautiful.” When Shostakovich wrote The Bright Stream, he could not depict the unrest, starvation, and desperate hiding of grain that was going on in the collective farms. That would have been too dangerously real for Soviet Realism.

  In a society that was supposed to be understood as a huge machine, literature and the arts were supposed to be the “gear and screw” of the propaganda mechanism, allowing the government to manipulate people, who were mere “levers” in the intricate clockworks. Stalin had urged writers and artists to be “engineers of human souls.” Perhaps without the young Shostakovich even realizing it, his two ballets reflected the two great prongs of attack in Stalin’s Five-Year Plan: collectivization in the countryside (The Bright Stream) and the arrest of “wreckers” in the city’s factories (The Bolt). His friends and colleagues were also working on propaganda symphonies about the joys of collective farming and on film scores for wholesome instructional movies with titles like Communist Youth — The Boss of Electrification.

  If Shostakovich objected to all these stage works and film scores for hire, it was not because he resisted writing about Soviet labor but because he also wanted to work on his own, private projects. He did finally draw the line at writing music for a lively-sounding movie called The Cement Hardens.

  He wanted to work on his next masterpiece, an opera called Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District. In it, he would capture all the passion of his youth, and because of it, his life would be in danger.

  The opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District was written over several years. It is a tale of stormy love and murder — a wife who conspires to slay her husband so she can be with her lover and ends up dying in a Siberian chain gang.

  Shostakovich’s own love life was tempestuous during these years, though hardly homicidal.

  One evening, Shostakovich called Tatiana Glivenko and told her he was going to be in Moscow. He asked her to meet him at his hotel. She came to his room. She had difficult news: She was tired of negotiating the distance between Leningrad and Moscow. She was tired of Shostakovich being unable to commit to her. She was tired of Shostakovich’s mother. Sofia Shostakovich worshipped her son like a little god and hated it when other women were near him. Tatiana had made up her mind: she was getting married to someone else the next day. Another boyfriend had issued an ultimatum. “Either you marry me or I’ll stop coming to your house.” Tatiana had decided he was the better bet.

  Shostakovich couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Tatiana was not wrong: there
were other women in his life. In particular, he’d met a young physicist named Nina Varzar in Leningrad, and he’d started to go in the evenings to parties at her family’s apartment, where he’d play dances on the piano and make stupid puns to get her to laugh. He felt, however, that he was truly in love with Tatiana.

  After years of visits back and forth, their relationship was over.

  The next day, Shostakovich miserably called Tatiana’s apartment. In the background, he could hear people celebrating. Evidently, the marriage had just happened. Shostakovich was too late. Someone pulled Tatiana away from the wedding party and she picked up the phone.

  He said, “It’s me — Shostakovich. . . .”

  “Yes, I’m listening. . . .”

  Was there a silence then? Did he hang up the phone? Did she have to insist that it was over? We don’t know how the conversation ended, and it’s best that some things remain private. Tatiana herself remembered: “No more was said, and that was that. He returned to Leningrad. According to Zoya, when he walked into his flat his first words were, ‘Tanya’s got married.’ Thereafter my name wasn’t mentioned for some time in their house.”

  Shostakovich’s mother watched him like a hawk, though he was now a man well into his twenties. She would call a friend of theirs, a conductor named Nikolai Malko, and gripe, “Mitya wants to marry.”

  “Well,” said Malko. “What then? Let him.”

  “How can you say that? He’s still a child.”

  The next day, she would call back. She’d say, “It is not so bad.” She was no longer worried about a surprise wedding.

  “Why?”

  “I looked through his diary and found a note, ‘Find a room.’ I know him. He will never start looking. He does not even know how to start.”

  She was sure he was too unworldly to be able to move out on his own.

  He was, at the time, working on the score for Lady Macbeth, with all its passion and tragedy. One of his ex-girlfriends, Galina Serebryakova, visited him at around this time and later recalled:

  [Shostakovich] was thirsting to recreate the theme of love in a new way, a love that knew no boundaries, that was willing to perpetrate crimes inspired by the devil himself. . . .

  In the murky room he was writing this new work on a large desk. He would play bits of it through on the piano. I was entertained to tea by two beautiful light-haired girls, Shostakovich’s sisters, and his charmingly simple and affectionate mother. The young composer admitted to me that he was about to get married. He was unable to hide his agitation, and, gulping down his words, he told me about his fiancée, trying to remain cool and objective about her, an impossible feat for those in love!

  We do not know which fiancée he might have been talking about. The situation was a little complex.

  For a long time, Shostakovich still tried to wheedle Tatiana Glivenko away from her husband. She almost agreed to leave her spouse, move to Leningrad, and marry Shostakovich. When he heard this, he acted skittish. Then, in May 1932, she had her first child.

  Two weeks later, Zoya wrote to Tatiana and told her that Shostakovich had suddenly, impulsively, married Nina Varzar, the young physicist.

  The marriage had happened this way:

  Shostakovich announced to his family that he was going to Moscow for business. His mother said she’d walk him to the train station. He waved her away. “There’s no need to accompany me.”

  The second he left, his mother ducked out after him and followed him at a distance.

  When she came back in a little while, she was crying. Zoya asked her what had happened, what was wrong.

  “I saw the silhouette of Nina [Varzar] in the window of the train compartment,” she blubbered. Her son and the Varzar girl were sneaking off to get married secretly.

  Zoya Shostakovich and her mother sat next to each other and wept all night long. Later, Zoya couldn’t remember why she had been weeping. She actually liked Nina Varzar.

  It was important that they all liked each other. Once Nina and Dmitri got married, Nina had to move into the apartment with the Shostakoviches and their tenants. Sofia Shostakovich slept on the couch.

  At first, Sofia Shostakovich was no more pleasant to Nina than she had once been to Tatiana. Relations around the apartment were apparently strained. Shostakovich, however, was desperate to enjoy time alone with his new wife. She later remembered, “No sooner would I arrive at the laboratory and get started on an experiment than Mitya would ring up and ask when I would get home.” In these close quarters, with his family crowded around him, Shostakovich worked on his ballets, on his film scores, and on the project of which he was proudest, Lady Macbeth.

  He dedicated the score to Nina.

  Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District was launched in January 1934 at two theaters at once — one in Leningrad and one in Moscow. Though the plot was old — based on a nineteenth-century short story by Nikolai Leskov — the music was passionate, bold, and direct. It contained few of the crazed experiments of The Nose, despite slashes of savage humor. There is a touching nobility and deep sadness to its homicidal heroine.

  To be safe, Shostakovich invited the People’s Commissar of Enlightenment to a run-through, after which the government declared that Lady Macbeth was “the start of the brilliant flowering of Soviet operatic creativity.”

  The opera met with immediate success. After the first public performances, the applause was so wild that Shostakovich had to go onstage to take bows not only at the end of the performance but in between individual scenes. Fellow composers wrote that the piece was “a remarkable, deep, and brilliantly orchestrated composition,” “the apex of Shostakovich’s creative work.” Leningrad newspapers trumpeted that the opera would soon become “one of the most beloved of the mass viewer.”

  Quickly, demands came from opera houses all over the world. The piece was staged in North America, in South America, in England, Sweden, and Czechoslovakia. Leningrad factories staged excerpts of the piece during lunch hours and held discussions of the music among the workers. It was a huge success. Not even thirty years old, Shostakovich was becoming the most famous composer in the Soviet Union.

  Even amid the clapping of audiences around the world, however, he could not have helped but notice the murderous hand of history slipping toward Leningrad. In late 1934, the same year Lady Macbeth and her lover first strangled her husband onstage, Leningrad’s Communist Party boss, Sergei Kirov, was walking down the hall in Party Headquarters when an assassin who had slipped past the guards pulled out a revolver and shot him in the neck.

  Kirov was one of Joseph Stalin’s closest friends. He would often stay at Stalin’s rooms in the Kremlin when visiting Moscow; Stalin was a coffin bearer at his funeral. The dictator demanded quick action to find and punish whoever was responsible for his friend’s death. An emergency order was passed on the day of Kirov’s murder, December 1, specifying that anyone arrested for terrorism against the state had to be tried within ten days of their arrest and that, if found guilty, they could be executed summarily, without benefit of appeal. What was later to be called the Great Terror had begun. The purges that convulsed the countryside a few years earlier now hit the urban population. Thus began, in a sense, the first siege of Leningrad.

  The secret police began their arrests. Stalin had always hated the city, with its troublesome intelligentsia and its windows on the West. He tried to avoid the place and had not even set foot there during the decade between Lenin’s death and the assassination of Kirov. He growled that Leningrad was rotten with traitors waiting to kill off the Communist Party leadership and gave orders that anyone deemed even remotely suspicious should be rounded up and tried for treason. Spreading through the streets and squares, the secret police grabbed everyone they heard had a dubious past: a former baron who was working at an industrial meal-service, an ex-general who was a geography teacher, another ex-general who sold cigarettes in a kiosk. Within a few months, thousands of innocent Leningraders had been pulled out of their homes and de
livered to “the Big House”— the headquarters of the secret police in the city. They disappeared. Most were sent to remote work camps; some were shot.

  Everyone whose family had not been working class and Bolshevik was in some danger of arrest. People began “masking” themselves, as it was called — hiding their identities and their family histories. The Shostakoviches were in a complicated position. Many of the family had been Revolutionaries and Party members, but Sofia, in particular, had many of the marks of the middle-class intellectual: She had attended an elite girls’ school, the Irkutsk Institute for Noblewomen. She had once even been presented to Tsar Nicholas II and, with a troupe of other girls, had danced a mazurka in the royal presence. If attention was turned on her, the family would not be safe from accusation.

  The secret police pulled up in front of Leningrad apartments in long black cars, the Black Marias. Everyone listened for the footsteps on the stairs, the knock on the door. Residents’ diaries describe the horror of the arrests: A mother watches the secret police search her apartment. They find no evidence; they call their headquarters to report, “Nothing here.” They are instructed to arrest the mother anyway. She knows her innocence will not protect her from a sentence of years in a northern work camp. Before they take her, she embraces her four-year-old daughter one last time and whispers, heartbroken, “When I come back, you’ll be all grown up.”

  Her neighbors watch her being bundled into the Black Maria and driven away.

  Prisoners were usually sent to work camps in frigid northeastern Siberia or in the deserts of Kazakhstan. They felled trees, worked as slave labor on construction projects, and, most dreaded sentence of all, they toiled in the arctic Kolyma goldfields, where the temperature could drop well below –50°F. Death from exhaustion, starvation, or exposure was common, even desired.