Symphony for the City of the Dead Read online

  Finally, Shostakovich gave up waiting and went home to Leningrad, to his pregnant wife. Nina met him at the train station. He embraced her. “Don’t worry,” he said. “In our family, when somebody cuts a finger, we are worried, but when we are in big trouble, nobody panics,” and he murmured again to her, “Don’t worry.”

  He said this to soothe her, but in fact he himself was intensely anxious.

  He tried to bury himself in his work. At the time, he was in the middle of composing a huge, sprawling Fourth Symphony. He said defiantly to a friend, “Even if they cut off both my hands and I have to hold the pen in my teeth, I shall still go on writing music.”

  But the section of the new symphony that he worked on when he got home was a funeral march.

  The Leningrad Composers’ Union held a special session to discuss the formalism of Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich and what it meant for the future of Soviet music. Four hundred people showed up; Shostakovich himself was not among them. He knew that repentance was expected of him; he was supposed to get up onstage and admit wrongdoing. Instead, he was conspicuously absent.

  A friend of his described the scene with disgust: “One after another, composers, directors, and critics who had all previously praised the opera [Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District], got up to the podium and took back their earlier judgments.” They all admitted that “they had made an error, and only now had the Velikiy Vozhd, the Great Leader Stalin, opened their eyes.”

  Lev Knipper, spy for the secret police and composer of a famous song-symphony about the militants of the Communist Youth League, stood up and called Shostakovich “anti-People.” The room broke out into fierce muttering. Someone yelled at Knipper, “You bastard!” The growl of the assembly now was too loud for Knipper even to be heard.

  The chairman called the room to order. The meeting — and the accusations — went on. It had hardly concluded when a group of reporters perched themselves on Shostakovich’s front stoop, waiting to catch his reaction to being condemned.

  He did not appear in public to respond. Years later, he supposedly said,

  If you are smeared with mud from head to toe on the orders of the leader and teacher, don’t even think of wiping it off. You bow and say thanks, say thanks and bow. No one will pay any attention to any of your hostile rejoinders anyway, and no one will come to your defense, and most of all, you won’t be able to let off steam among friends. Because there are no friends in these pitiable circumstances.

  We know now from the files of the secret police, the NKVD,1 that they were having Shostakovich watched and were reporting the substance of his phone conversations. Doubtless he knew it at the time. The secret police often did not conceal their surveillance, finding it more effective if their targets were uncomfortably aware of scrutiny. At about the same time, for example, composer Sergei Prokofiev’s phone was wiretapped. The NKVD made no attempt to hide the fact. There was crackling on the line, and sometimes calls were simply disconnected. Eventually, disembodied voices on the line started laughing out loud at Prokofiev and his wife. During one call, Prokofiev’s voice faded and his wife shouted, “I can’t hear you!” An eavesdropper spoke up: “You were perfectly audible, I just decided to cut you off.”

  Leningrad poet Anna Akhmatova was also being watched. When she returned to her apartment after being out for a few hours, she would find magazines she hadn’t read spread around the table, or someone else’s cigarette butts in her ashtray. This was part of the torment. Shostakovich, similarly, must have known he was being watched.

  That spring, Shostakovich considered suicide. The NKVD reported to Stalin that Sofia Shostakovich had made calls to her son’s friends, begging them to help him before he fell apart, pleading, “What will happen to my son now?” A friend wrote, “They are driving Shostakovich to the point of suicide; people are saying that they have put a ban on playing Shostakovich over the radio.”

  Russia’s most celebrated author, Maxim Gorky, wrote to Stalin warning him that Shostakovich was a “highly nervous” person and that there would be an international outcry if the composer killed himself. His death would reflect badly on the Communist government. Gorky warned, “The article in Pravda struck him like a brick in the head. The fellow is completely depressed.”

  We have no knowledge of whether Stalin listened to Gorky’s plea. Regardless, a few months later, Maxim Gorky himself was dead. The head of the secret police admitted in court to having killed him with an overdose of injected heart stimulant.

  In Shostakovich’s apartment, the composer waited for the midnight knock on the door. He “paced the room with a towel and said he had a cold, hiding his tears.” His friends, fearful he would take his own life, “did not leave him and took turns keeping watch.”

  Why didn’t Shostakovich and his family just flee the country?

  The borders were closed. There was strict regulation of anyone going in and out of the Soviet Union. The government had announced in 1935 that anyone attempting to flee abroad would be executed. People had to get permission to travel from one Russian city to another, let alone travel to the West. When Soviet officials let a citizen visit Europe or the United States, they invariably kept members of the traveler’s family back in Russia to use as hostages. The government decree stipulated that in case of a defection, all “the remaining adult members of the traitor’s family,” whether they had known about the escape or not, would be arrested and sent into internal exile.

  We don’t know whether Shostakovich ever considered fleeing. (He does not seem to have had any special fondness for or interest in the capitalist West.) But if he had decided to cross the border illegally, he would have had to live with the awful knowledge that Maria, Zoya, and Sofia, as well as Nina’s extended family, would suffer grinding hardships for years as a result of his flight.

  There was no way to run.

  Nationally, conditions were getting worse. The Great Terror was spreading far beyond the streets of Leningrad. Late in the spring, Pravda and the other newspapers announced that the regime was preparing to stamp out a conspiracy of antirevolutionaries and spies in the pay of foreign powers across the whole width and height of the Soviet Union. German Fascist conspirators and enemies of the people supposedly were everywhere. They had murdered Kirov, and now they planned to destroy the whole Soviet state.

  In reality, there was no conspiracy except Stalin’s; he had decided to purge his own government of anyone who offered resistance to his rule. Now the net was spread nationwide. Moscow was hit particularly hard. Many of Stalin’s old comrades were arrested. Late in the spring of 1936, they were tortured in the basements of the NKVD until they confessed to staggering and even impossible crimes. The typical interrogation protocol was called the conveyor belt. Prisoners were pushed from room to room, being repeatedly questioned by different agents for days at a stretch without sleep. They were beaten by hired thugs. They were forced to stand against walls on their tiptoes for hours. They were told to name more names of others who took part in this imaginary conspiracy.

  Torture is a good way to get people to talk but a poor method of finding out the truth; people confess whether there is any reality to the confession or not. The notorious Lavrentii Beria, head of the NKVD during the Second World War, boasted that he could get a prisoner to tell any story required: “Let me have one night with him and I’ll have him confessing he’s the King of England.” The NKVD, however, was not looking for the truth of guilt or innocence. As another NKVD head snapped to his officers, “Better that ten innocent people should suffer than one spy get away. When you chop wood, chips fly.” And so the bizarre descriptions of impossible secret plots kept tumbling out.

  A torture survivor remembered, “It was impossible to tell who would be killed next. People died in delirium, confessing to a series of outrageous crimes — spying, sabotage, terrorism and wrecking. They vanished without a trace, and then their wives and children, entire families, disappeared as well.”

  When people disappeared, the
neighborhood gossips would always ask, “What was he arrested for?” (“Most people,” said the poet Mandelstam’s wife, “crazed by fear, asked this question just to give themselves a little hope: if others were arrested for some reason, then they wouldn’t be arrested, because they hadn’t done anything wrong.”) When confronted by this question —“What for?”— poet Anna Akhmatova cried, “What for? What do you mean, what for? It’s time you understood that people are arrested for nothing!” Nonetheless, the state had to make it appear that there was a reason for each and every arrest.

  In high-profile cases, the inquisitions were closely managed by Stalin and his cronies. When one of the accused sent a repentant letter to the Politburo, babbling that he had indeed been responsible for Kirov’s killing, it was sent back to him with a memo demanding that he try writing it again, this time with “greater sincerity.” Stalin made his suggestions like a movie director giving notes, coaxing the best performances out of his bleary-eyed, bloodied, and swollen cast.

  Books by the accused disappeared silently from the shelves of libraries. Once these people had been some of the greatest and loudest voices of Bolshevism. Now their voices were heard only by their captors, who waited patiently at their sides with pens, listening for the right story, the right plot twist, the right betrayal.

  Day followed day. Shostakovich was a pariah. Hardly anyone would agree to play his music. He saw his earnings diminish just as he faced the prospect of a new child in the family.

  “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.”

  His friend Meyerhold tried to console him. He spoke warmly about him at an open lecture in Leningrad, defending him publicly. (“He is an original among us — for he thinks.”) In private, Meyerhold wrote, “Dear friend! Be brave! Be cheerful! Do not give in to your sadness!” The director tried to convince Shostakovich to write some new music for another production of The Bedbug, but the composer miserably “said he was incapable of doing anything.”

  At times, the thought of suicide overwhelmed him. Then he remembered the words of his writer friend Zoshchenko — that suicide is a “purely infantile act.” Killing himself would have been particularly cruel, selfish, and infantile with his own infant on the way.

  It was this thought that saved him.

  On the morning of May 30, 1936, his daughter, Galina, was born. The celebration was riotous: by coincidence, he had a houseful of conductors coming over to listen to him bang out his Fourth Symphony on the piano. Intoxicated with the clamoring music and with the champagne he was drizzling in their glasses, several of them demanded that they wanted to play this new masterwork by the enemy of the people.

  Eventually it was determined that the premiere would be given by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra.

  When a friend of his warily raised the question of what Pravda would think of the sprawling, bizarre work, Shostakovich angrily leaped up from the piano. “I don’t write for the newspaper Pravda, but for myself. I basically don’t think about who will say what about my work, but write about what moves me, what has sprouted in my soul and mind.”

  He was fierce again in his own defense. He had found his way through his despair. Years later, he remembered, “After ‘A Mess Instead of Music,’ the authorities tried everything they knew to get me to repent and expiate my sin. But I refused. I was young then, and had my physical strength. Instead of repenting, I composed my Fourth Symphony.”

  Experimental composer Alexander Mosolov, who had created some of the most famous factory-machine music of the clanging twenties, was arrested for supposed “counterrevolutionary activity” and sentenced to the gulag — imprisonment in a work camp.

  Shostakovich’s friend Gavriil Popov, another one of the Futurist composers of the twenties, had his First Symphony banned after its premiere by the Leningrad Philharmonic because it “was a reflection of the ideology of the class enemy.” The symphony was not performed again during Popov’s lifetime. Both he and Mosolov turned away from their boldest experiments in music. Years later, when they felt it was safe to compose again, they wrote big, splashy tunes and garish finales. They both drank a lot.

  The great Sergei Prokofiev retreated from the spiky deviltry of his youthful style and escaped into the bright-colored worlds of fairy-tale ballet, adaptations of the classics, pieces for children (Peter and the Wolf), mass songs, and an abjectly fawning cantata in praise of Stalin:

  I sing as I cradle my son

  in my arms: “You grow up

  like a little ear of corn

  among the blue cornflowers.

  Stalin will be the first words

  on your lips.

  You will understand from whence

  this brilliant light streams.

  In your exercise-book

  you will draw Stalin’s portrait.”

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  We are happy to follow you, happy to follow.

  Stalin, Stalin!

  The whole generation of ultramodern composers who had made the twenties so clamorous and exciting had dissolved. Some had fled. Some had been forced to renounce their earlier work or to hide it in a drawer, to “step on their own song’s throat,” as Mayakovsky had once said.

  Shostakovich was the only one left composing in the bold style of the 1920s, and he was determined that he would make himself heard.

  That summer, as Nina nursed and Shostakovich cradled the newborn Galina, the high-ranking Bolsheviks who had been arrested and tortured that spring came up for public trial. The newspapers were full of exclamations of disgust at the prisoners for their treason.

  These were not like the tens of thousands of secret trials that were going on around the country, condemning people quietly to years in work camps or to unexplained deaths. The show trials were very public and were carefully stage-managed. Stalin wanted everyone to see proof of guilt, proof of the conspiracy that threatened to bring down the whole nation. This conspiracy, the prosecutors insisted, was the reason for the mass deaths, the millions plowed under, during the otherwise victorious First Five-Year Plan.

  When the accused came to trial, they were confronted by rows of their interrogators and torturers sitting in seats right in front of them, leaning forward, staring them in the face. It was important, now that they were on the stand, that they remember their lines. If they went off script, the NKVD ranks in the courtroom were expected to start shouting, to kick up a ruckus so the foreign press couldn’t hear what was being said. If any of the prisoners denied even part of their guilt while they were under oath, they were taken out of the courtroom for a brief recess, perhaps a drink of water. It was remarkable: After even a half hour alone with their former interrogators, when they returned to the trial, their former complaints had disappeared miraculously. They all admitted they were guilty. The state prosecutor pronounced, “They blow up mines, they burn down workshops, they wreck trains, they mutilate and kill hundreds of our best people, sons of our country.” The shortages of food and clothing across the country, the long lines that people in Moscow and Leningrad had to stand in to get the simplest items, and even pieces of broken glass in the butter — all this was due to these wreckers.

  The state prosecutor ended his speech on the final day of the trial by crying out, “I demand that these mad dogs should be shot — every one of them!” In a row, they were sentenced to death, and yet one of the condemned still cried out, “Long live the cause of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin!”

  These high-profile prisoners were all executed on August 25, 1936. The NKVD continued its search for more conspirators, more wreckers and spies in the pay of the Germans.

  After the trials, people pointed out that there had been some strange mistakes in the evidence. One alleged conspirator confessed to having recently met a foreign agent at the Hotel Bristol in Co
penhagen. But there was a problem: the hotel had been demolished back in 1917.

  Supposedly, Stalin was livid at these bumbles in his grand show. He roared, “What the devil did you need the hotel for? You ought to have said ‘railway station.’ The station is always there.”

  In this atmosphere, the musicians of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra were wary of playing a symphony by an enemy of the people. This was particularly true of Shostakovich’s bizarre Fourth Symphony. It is a big, loud, angry piece. Though its general shape is sprawling and obscure, one thing is very clear: whenever there’s a moment where the symphony gets small and conversational, something huge and ghastly swells up and pounces.

  People have tried to hear fanciful scenarios in the music — for example, a depiction of the NKVD thudding up steps and banging on Shostakovich’s apartment door. But that’s far too simple. The piece does not so much seem to be an autobiography as a demonology. It is a parade of grotesque portraits, some playful, some clumsy, and some malevolent. It is as if the composer, having been brutalized, now turns and enacts this savagery upon the audience.

  Perhaps most worrying for the orchestral players was the way the symphony ends. By the tenets of Socialist Realism, at the end of a work, there should be a sense of the sunlit Communist future. In the Fourth, after all the sneers and blows and japes, after the assaults and the postapocalyptic birdcalls and a poky funeral march that sounds as if the hearse is being led by a donkey — after almost an hour of kaleidoscopic travail — it seems as if finally, joy has been achieved. In a series of instrumental solos, Shostakovich takes earlier melodies and makes them dance, darlingly, like puppets. It resembles the music being written at the time for early cartoons — a tea party of woodland creatures, light and bumbling.

  And then, towering over all of it, a blaring and satanic anthem spreads its wings, obliterating everything.