In Lidiya Chukovskaya's Diaries, Which Chronicle the Labors and Days

Taking Notes for Testimony1

n Lidiya Chukovskaya’s diaries, which chronicle the labors and days I of the poet Anna Akhmatova, a telling episode is recorded. In 1946 Akhmatova was denounced in a resolution by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as a harmful writer, alien to the Soviet people. Andrei Zhdanov, the orchestrator of Stalin’s post– Second World War persecutions of artists and other intellectuals, in a famous speech qualified Russia’s great and beloved poet as “half nun, half harlot, mingling prayer with fornication.”2 There followed a massive press campaign urging the country to hate Akhmatova. She was berated at innumerable public meetings and ostracized from Soviet culture for a long time. Several years later, a visiting delegation of students from England asked to meet Akhmatova. The encounter took place in the presence of officials of the party and of the then all-powerful Writers’ Union. One of the students wanted to know Akhmatova’s reaction to the party resolu- tion and to Zhdanov’s speech. She had no choice but to stand up and say: “I consider both documents, the speech of Comrade Zhdanov and the resolution of the Central Committee, to be entirely correct.” The students made it clear that they found Akhmatova’s response “not pleasing.” Setting down Akhmatova’s story of this incident in her diary, Chu- kovskaya gave vent to her own sense of outrage. “What were those Eng- lishmen, idiots or scoundrels? … Someone was humiliated, beaten half to death and here they come asking: ‘Did you enjoy the beating? Show us your broken bones!’ And our own people—why did they allow this encounter? It’s sadistic.”3 But, of course, the students meant no harm.

1 Review of The New Shostakovich, by Ian MacDonald (Boston: Northeastern Univer- sity Press, 1990). Originally published in Times Literary Supplement, 7 September 1990, 949. 2 “Doklad t. Zhdanova o zhurnalakh ‘Zvezda’ i ‘Leningrad,’” Novyi mir, 1946, no. 9, xi. 3 Lidiia Chukovskaia, Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi, vol. 2, 1952–1962 (Paris: YMCA- Press, 1980), entry for 8 May 1954.

408 Taking Notes for Testimony

They were typical of Western intellectuals who for most of Stalin’s reign assumed that conditions in Communist countries were identical to those in Western democracies and that people there spoke what they thought. There was no way for them to imagine what the novelist Josef Škvorecký has called “the scientific methods of making terrified mice out of men and women.”4 One of the most valuable aspects of Ian MacDonald’s new biography of the composer Dmitry Shostakovich is his massive documentation of the terrorized state of Soviet society, including its artists, from the end of the 1920s on. Such fearless truth-seekers as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov could appear and take on the system only after Stalin’s death—in his time they would have been physically destroyed before they could make their mark. Shostakovich is a good example of a major artist deprived both of the right to express his ideas and of his dignity by political pressure and intimidation. An honored figure in Soviet culture for most of his career, the recipient of numerous Stalin and Lenin prizes, Shostakovich was also the object, in 1936 and again in 1948, of two savage vilification campaigns by the Soviet regime and media. At those times, he lived in constant ex- pectation of exile to the gulags or summary execution, sleeping in the lift so that the arresting officials would not disturb his children. But he weathered those periods of danger by making penitent statements and tailoring his music to the requirements of the state-imposed aesthetic of Socialist Realism. In the 1960s Shostakovich became bolder, writing music that indicted the conformism and anti-Semitism of the Brezhnev era: the vocal cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry and the Thirteenth Symphony, with its settings of satirical poems by Evgeny Evtushenko.5 But he was careful to intersperse his more daring works with safely conventional ones, such as his Twelfth Symphony, a paean to Lenin and the October Revolution, and the cantata The Execution of Stepan Razin (also to a Evtushenko text), which turns the seventeenth-century brigand-rebel into a politically correct proto- Bolshevik and preaches a Leninist message of class hatred. Still, for the

4 Josef Škvorecký, The Engineer of Human Souls, trans. Paul Robert Wilson (Toronto: Lester & Orpen, 1977), 462. 5 From Jewish Folk Poetry was actually written in 1948 and kept “in the drawer” until 1955, in the period of the so-called Thaw.—Ed.

409 VI. On Shostakovich outside world the composer remained a faithful son of the Communist Party (which he joined in 1960) and a loyal Soviet citizen. This is the image that MacDonald seeks to overthrow.The New Shostakovich is constructed by the author with considerable ingenuity and eloquence even if its main foundation, as he admits at the outset, is shaky. This foundation is the odd book Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, brought out in 1979 by the Soviet musicologist Solomon Volkov after he emigrated to America. Volkov claimed that the entire text was dictated to him by Shostakovich. Unfortunately, Western scholars soon discovered that the opening pages of each chapter of Testimony were taken verbatim from memoirs by Shostakovich published earlier in Soviet books and periodicals. Since the composer could not have memorized his old texts, the discovery cast doubts on the validity of the whole book. The refusal of Volkov’s publishers to make the original Russian text available for scholarly examination made things look even more dubious. Had Volkov styled himself as the author of Testimony, rather than as its stenographer and editor, had he refrained from “the editorial sleight of hand” (MacDonald’s phrase), his revisionist view of Shostakovich’s politics and outlook might have had a better chance of acceptance in the West. Shostakovich’s hatred of the Soviet system, the false and misleading character of the programs of his Fifth and Seventh Symphonies, his life of fear and demoralization—all this has been confirmed since Volkov’s book in the memoirs of people who knew the composer well, among them Ga- lina Vishnevskaya and the violinist Rostislav Dubinsky, and in a television interview of the composer’s son Maksim, cited by MacDonald. The New Shostakovich accepts (with occasional hand-wringing by the author) the reliability of Volkov’s Testimony, but it ups the stakes of the earlier book. In a detailed survey of Shostakovich’s entire oeuvre, MacDonald seeks to demonstrate that, beginning with 1931, virtually all of his music embodied a repudiation of Communism and was a por- trayal of the sufferings of the oppressed Soviet people. Under the present Gorbachev regime, when all accounts of Stalinist (and even Leninist) brutality are highly valued and encouraged, this could have been accom- plished by interviewing the composer’s surviving intimates and perhaps studying his archive in the Soviet Union. MacDonald chose a different path. He tries to show the composer’s liberalism, humanitarianism, and political subversiveness by either describing a passage of his music and

410 Taking Notes for Testimony then juxtaposing it with quotations from literary works that do take an adverse view of Communist realities, such as Nadezhda Mandelstam’s two volumes of memoirs or The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz; or else by identifying certain recurring musical formulae and cross-references which MacDonald then labels as codes for “Stalin,” “tyranny,” or “satire of Socialist Realism.” This search for programmatic codes is at times done with subtlety, as when a phrase from the last act of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District is shown to represent the idea of betrayal, and then the fortunes of this phrase in Shostakovich’s later symphonic and chamber works are traced. But all too often such analysis is simplistic and unconvincing. Two-note figures, usually involving the dominant and the tonic (the timpani at the opening of the last movement of the Fifth Symphony and the solo trom- bone squawks in the first movement of the Ninth) are invariably said to spell “Stalin.” The reasons for this assumption are explained in a footnote that simply fails to persuade. Because so much of MacDonald’s book consists of musicological and historical commentary intended to demonstrate the image of Shostako­ vich that the author favors, one example will have to suffice to show how and why MacDonald’s stratagems do not always work. He interprets the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District as counterrevolutionary in spirit, “a deliberate, if necessarily disguised, expression of antagonism to Communism” and “strong evidence of Shostakovich’s disenchantment with the Soviet regime.” It’s a pity he didn’t see the musical and political study of the same opera by Richard Taruskin, which first appeared in the program booklet of its 1988 production at the San Francisco Opera and was then expanded in the New Republic (20 March 1989).6 Taruskin com- pared the libretto of the opera to its literary source, a novella by Nikolai Leskov which is the story of a passionate murderess who exterminates anyone who stands in the way of her plans or desires. Shostakovich decided to idealize this murderess, insisting that she was an “intelligent, talented and interesting woman.” To this end, he elim- inated from the opera the third of her murders, that of a little boy who

6 This much-traveled piece found its final resting place (asEntr’acte “ : The Lessons of Lady M.”) in R. Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 498–510.—Ed.

411 VI. On Shostakovich stands to inherit the fortune of the husband she has assassinated (because, as Shostakovich put it at the time, “The murder of a child, no matter how it is explained, always makes a bad impression”). But the other murders— that of the heroine’s father-in-law, then of her husband—are justified in the opera because she alone is given lyric and poetic music, while the men are portrayed in grotesque, subhuman musical terms. The opera was composed, argued Taruskin, at the time of the expro- priation of the kulaks, when any moderately successful farmer was de- clared an enemy of the people and sentenced to extermination together with his family. By turning the husband and the father-in-law into class enemies, whom it is all right to eliminate (and reducing other authority figures, the priest and the policemen, to vicious caricatures), the music of Shostakovich supported Stalin’s genocidal policies, rather than disagreed with them, as MacDonald has it. The dictator and his henchmen later turned against this opera and denounced it only because their ears were too primitive to understand what its music was saying. There are some attractive things in MacDonald’s book—his love for the music of Shostakovich and his able demonstration of the self-referen- tial nature of many of Shostakovich’s compositions make one want to hear more of this music. He is aware of his hero’s penchant for writing trashy, low-comedy music suitable for accompanying the antics of circus clowns and then placing it in some of his more serious symphonic and chamber works. MacDonald always calls such passages “satiric,” but even he is hard put to decide just whom or what they are meant to satirize. Hardest of all to swallow is the book’s claim for Shostakovich as the twentieth century’s greatest composer on the grounds that he was the only one to portray the time’s political and moral realities, while other composers addressed themselves mostly to musical form. There is even an invidious compari- son of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, which in MacDonald’s decoding speaks “for the hundreds of millions … in the twentieth century who have suffered under political oppression,” to Chaikovsky’s Sixth, which “speaks primarily for Tchaikovsky.” In preglasnost times, there existed in the Soviet Union a vast criti- cal industry that specialized in discovering revolutionary and anti-tsarist messages in the work of politically conservative artists of earlier times, such as Gogol and Chaikovsky. Many pages of The New Shostakovich make one think of the products of that unlamented industry—not because one

412 Taking Notes for Testimony disagrees with what Ian MacDonald has to say, but because wishful think- ing so often takes the place of what should have been critical and histori- cal rigor.

* * *

Once again SK took note of methodological or tactical failings in a book of which he basically approved, as if offering a colleague a friendly, eminently constructive critique. And once again his upright stance was attacked by those who insisted on bias. This time the attack came not from the unregen- erate Stalinist party but from zealous revisionists who were ostensibly on the other side; and to the discomfiture of one of the present volume’s editors (RT), who must again slip into the first person, it was I who inadvertently attracted their wrath to him. SK’s citation of my essay on Lady Macbeth was to Ian Mac- Donald like waving a red rag at a bull, and he came charging, in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement that (as SK described it to me) revealed the writer’s true colors to his formerly friendly critic.7 Like MacDonald’s musical exegeses, which reminded SK of the methods and objectives of Soviet criticism, but much more bluntly, the letter bore the earmarks of a McCarthyite campaign (or, which amounted to the same thing, a KGB campaign), targeting not only me, at whom derisive adjectives (eccentric, contorted, cross-eyed, etc.) were hurled by the handful, but also, and incredibly, poor Shostakovich. “Like Solo- mon Volkov and Galina Vishnevskaya,” he wrote, “I see Lady Macbeth as the artistic foundation of Shostakovich’s moral individualism.”8 The only evidence offered in support of this interpretation consisted of a record of the compos- er’s personal relationships:

As a professor of literature, Karlinsky will know that non-Party satirists like [Mikhail] Bulgakov, Zamyatin, Olesha and Zoshchenko were, long before 1930, convinced that Marxist collectivism was a disaster. Shostakovich knew these writers personally, collaborating with one

7 Ian MacDonald, letter to the editor, Times Literary Supplement, 28 September 1990, 1031. 8 The reference to Vishnevskaya, the famous Soviet soprano, is to her memoir, Galina: A Russian Story, trans. Guy Daniels (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984). The discussion of Lady Macbeth is on p. 207ff. It places the opera, composed in 1930–32 and first performed in January 1934, in the historical context of the so-called Great Terror, which was unleashed in 1936.

413 VI. On Shostakovich

(Zamyatin: on the opera The Nose) and exploring a major project with another (Bulgakov: an opera on his play about Pushkin, Last Days). There is nothing to suggest that the composer—like, say, Mayakovsky— opposed the non-Party writers; on the contrary, the evidence is that he sympathized with them—which is presumably why he read their books, watched their plays and socialized with them.

He knew them personally. He read their books. There is nothing to suggest that he opposed them. State Procurator Vyshinsky could not have built a better case for guilt by association. MacDonald may have thought of it as exonera- tion, not guilt, but attempting to proving anything on the basis of association, and placing the burden of (negative) proof on the accused, brought chilling reverberations to the mind of one familiar with the tactics of Soviet show tri- als. It was a horrifying display, and when it came my turn to review The New Shostakovich I was far less generous to the author than SK had been.9 I owed to SK’s prior experience the same debt that Laurel Fay had owed to his early critique of Volkov’s Testimony.

9 Slavic Review 52, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 396–97.

414