The Noise of Time (10 page)

Dear Iosif Vissarionovich,

First of all, please accept my heartfelt gratitude for the conversation that took place yesterday. You supported me very much, since the forthcoming trip to America had been worrying me greatly. I cannot but be proud of the confidence that has been placed in me; I will fulfil my duty. To speak on behalf of our great Soviet people in defence of peace is a great honour for me. My indisposition cannot serve as an impediment to the fulfilment of such a responsible mission.

As he signed it, he doubted the Great Leader and Helmsman would read it himself. Perhaps its contents would be conveyed to him, and then the letter would disappear into some file in some archive. It might stay there for decades, perhaps generations, perhaps 200,000,000,000 years; and then someone might read it, and wonder what exactly – if anything – he had meant by it.

In an ideal world, a young man should not be an ironical person. At that age, irony prevents growth, stunts the imagination. It is best to start life in a cheerful and open state of mind, believing in others, being optimistic, being frank with everyone about everything. And then, as one comes to understand things and people better, to develop a sense of irony. The natural progression of human life is from optimism to pessimism; and a sense of irony helps temper pessimism, helps produce balance, harmony.

But this was not an ideal world, and so irony grew in sudden and strange ways. Overnight, like a mushroom; disastrously, like a cancer.

Sarcasm was dangerous to its user, identifiable as the language of the wrecker and the saboteur. But irony – perhaps, sometimes, so he hoped – might enable you to preserve what you valued, even as the noise of time became loud enough to knock out window-panes. What did he value? Music, his family, love. Love, his family, music. The order of importance was liable to change. Could irony protect his music? In so far as music remained a secret language which allowed you to smuggle things past the wrong ears. But it could not exist only as a code: sometimes you ached to say things straightforwardly. Could irony protect his children? Maxim, at school, aged ten, had been obliged publicly to vilify his father in the course of a music exam. In such circumstances, what use was irony to Galya and Maxim?

As for love – not his own awkward, stumbling, blurting, annoying expressions of it, but love in general: he had always believed that love, as a force of nature, was indestructible; and that, when threatened, it could be protected, blanketed, swaddled in irony. Now he was less convinced. Tyranny had become so expert at destroying that why should it not destroy love as well, intentionally or not? Tyranny demanded that you love the Party, the State, the Great Leader and Helmsman, the People. But individual love – bourgeois and particularist – distracted from such grand, noble, meaningless, unthinking ‘loves’. And in these times, people were always in danger of becoming less than fully themselves. If you terrorised them enough, they became something else, something diminished and reduced: mere techniques for survival. And so, it was not just an anxiety, but often a brute fear that he experienced: the fear that love’s last days had come.

When you chop wood, the chips fly: that’s what the builders of socialism liked to say. Yet what if you found, when you laid down your axe, that you had reduced the whole timberyard to nothing but chips?

In the middle of the war, he had set
Six Verses by British Poets
– one of the works banned by the State Commission for Repertoire, and then unbanned by Stalin. The fifth song was Shakespeare’s Sonnet number 66: ‘Tired with all these, for restful death I cry …’ Like all Russians, he loved Shakespeare, and knew him well from Pasternak’s translations. When Pasternak read Sonnet 66 in public, the audience would wait keenly through the first eight lines, eager for the ninth:

And art made tongue-tied by authority

At which point they would join in – some under their breath, some whisperingly, the boldest among them fortissimo, but all giving the lie to that line, all refusing to be tongue-tied.

Yes, he loved Shakespeare; before the war, he had written the music for a stage production of
Hamlet
. Who could doubt that Shakespeare had a profound understanding of the human soul and the human condition? Was there a greater portrayal of the shattering of human illusions than
King Lear
? No, that was not quite right: not shattering, because that implied a single great crisis. Rather, what happened to human illusions was that they crumbled, they withered away. It was a long and wearisome process, like a toothache reaching far into the soul. But you can pull out a tooth and it will be gone. Illusions, however, even when dead, continue to rot and stink within us. We cannot escape their taste and smell. We carry them around with us all the time. He did.

How was it possible not to love Shakespeare? Shakespeare, after all, had loved music. His plays were full of it, even the tragedies. That moment when Lear awakes from madness to the sound of music … And that moment in
The Merchant of Venice
where Shakespeare says that the man who doesn’t like music isn’t trustworthy; that such a man would be capable of a base act, even murder or treason. So of course tyrants hated music, however strenuously they pretended to love it. Although they hated poetry more. He wished he had been at that reading by Leningrad poets when Akhmatova came on stage and the entire audience had risen instinctively to applaud her. A gesture which led Stalin to demand furiously: ‘Who organised the standing up?’ But, even more than poetry, tyrants hated and feared the theatre. Shakespeare held a mirror up to nature, and who could bear to see their own reflection? So
Hamlet
was banned for a long time; Stalin loathed the play almost as much as he loathed
Macbeth
.

And yet, for all this, for all that he was unparalleled in depicting tyrants knee-deep in blood, Shakespeare was a little naive. Because his monsters had doubts, bad dreams, pangs of conscience, guilt. They saw the spirits of those they had killed rising in front of them. But in real life, under real terror, what guilty conscience? What bad dreams? That was all sentimentality, false optimism, a hope that the world would be as we wanted it to be, rather than as it was. Those who chopped the wood and made the chips fly, those who smoked Belomory behind their desks at the Big House, those who signed the orders and made the telephone calls, closing a dossier and with it a life: how few of them had bad dreams, or ever saw the spirits of the dead rising to reproach them.

Ilf and Petrov had written: ‘It is not enough to love Soviet power. It has to love you.’ He himself would never be loved by Soviet power. He came from the wrong stock: the liberal intelligentsia of that suspect city St Leninsburg. Proletarian purity was as important to the Soviets as Aryan purity was to the Nazis. Further, he had the vanity, or foolishness, to notice and remember that what the Party had said yesterday was often in direct contradiction to what the Party was saying today. He wanted to be left alone with music and his family and his friends: the simplest of desires, yet one entirely unfulfillable. They wanted to engineer him along with everyone else. They wanted him to reforge himself, like a slave labourer on the White Sea Canal. They demanded ‘an optimistic Shostakovich’. Even if the world was up to its neck in blood and farm slurry, you were expected to keep a smile on your face. But it was an artist’s nature to be pessimistic and neurotic. So, they wanted you not to be an artist. But they already had so many artists who were not artists! As Chekhov put it, ‘When they serve coffee, don’t try to find beer in it.’

Also, he had none of the political skills required: he lacked the taste for licking rubber boots; he didn’t know when to conspire against the innocent, when to betray friends. You needed someone like Khrennikov for that job. Tikhon Nikolayevich Khrennikov: a composer with the soul of a placeman. Khrennikov had an average ear for music, but perfect pitch when it came to power. They said he’d been hand-picked by Stalin, who had an instinct for such appointments. ‘A fisherman sees another fisherman from afar,’ as the saying goes.

Khrennikov came, appropriately enough, from a family of horse-traders. He thought it natural to take orders – as well as instructions in composition – from those with asses’ ears. He had been attacking artists with more talent and originality than him since the mid-1930s, but when Stalin installed him as First Secretary of the Union of Composers in 1948, his power became official. He led the assault on formalists and rootless cosmopolitans, using all that terminology which made the ears bleed. Careers were ruined, work suppressed, families destroyed …

But you had to admire his understanding of power; at that, he was second to none. In shops, they used to display posters exhorting people how to behave:
CUSTOMER AND CLERK, BE MUTUALLY POLITE
. But the clerk was always more important than the customers: there were many of them and only one of him. Similarly, there were many composers but only one First Secretary. Towards his colleagues, Khrennikov behaved like a shop clerk who had never read the posters. He made his small power absolute: he denied them this, he rewarded them thus. And like any successful placeman, he never forgot where true power lay.

One of Dmitri Dmitrievich’s former duties as professor at the Conservatoire had been to help examine the students on Marxist–Leninist ideology. He would sit with the chief examiner beneath an enormous banner which declared:
ART BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE – V. I. LENIN
. As his own understanding of political theory was not profound, he remained largely silent, until one day his superior rebuked him for non-participation. So when the next student came in and the chief examiner nodded pointedly at his junior partner, he had asked her the simplest question he could think of.

‘Tell me, whom does art belong to?’

The student looked completely baffled. Gently, he tried to help her along with a suggestion;

‘Well, what did Lenin say?’

But she was too panicked to catch the clue, and for all his inclinations of the head and rolling upwards of the eyes, she failed to locate the answer.

In his view, she had done well, and when he occasionally noticed her in the corridors or stairways of the Conservatoire, he tried to give her an encouraging smile. Though given how she had failed to pick up the heaviest of hints, perhaps she thought his smiles, like his weird eye-rolling and head-jerking, were facial tics the distinguished composer was unable to control. Yet every time he passed her, the question reverberated in his head: ‘Tell me, whom does art belong to?’

Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who savour it. Art no more belongs to the People and the Party than it once belonged to the aristocracy and the patron. Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art’s sake: it exists for people’s sake. But which people, and who defines them? He always thought of his own art as anti-aristocratic. Did he write, as his detractors maintained, for a bourgeois cosmopolitan elite? No. Did he write, as his detractors wanted him to, for the Donbass miner weary from his shift and in need of a soothing pick-me-up? No. He wrote music for everyone and no one. He wrote music for those who best appreciated the music he wrote, regardless of social origin. He wrote music for the ears that could hear. And he knew, therefore, that all true definitions of art are circular, and all untrue definitions of art ascribe to it a specific function.

A crane operator on a building site had once written a song and sent it to him. He had replied: ‘Yours is such a wonderful profession. You are building houses which are needed so badly. My advice to you would be to keep going with your useful work.’ He did so not because he believed a crane operator incapable of writing a song, but because this particular would-be composer showed as much talent as he himself would if put in the cabin of a crane and instructed to operate the levers. And he hoped that if, in the old days, an aristocrat had sent him a composition of similar worth, he would have had the fortitude to reply: ‘Your Excellency, yours is such a distinguished and exacting position, being responsible on the one hand for maintaining the dignity of the aristocracy, and on the other for looking after the welfare of those who toil on your estates. My advice to you would be to keep going with your useful work.’

Stalin loved Beethoven. That’s what Stalin said and what many musicians repeated. Stalin loved Beethoven because he was a true revolutionary, and because he was exalted, like the mountains. Stalin loved everything that was exalted, and that was why he loved Beethoven. It made his ears vomit when people told him this.

But there was a logical consequence to Stalin’s love of Beethoven. The German had lived, of course, in bourgeois, capitalist times; so his solidarity with the proletariat, and his desire to see them throw off the yoke of servitude, inevitably sprang from a pre-Revolutionary political consciousness. He had been a forerunner. But now that the longed-for Revolution had taken place, now that the most politically advanced society on earth had been built, now that Utopia, the Garden of Eden and the Promised Land had all been rolled into one, it was obvious what must logically come forth: the Red Beethoven.

Wherever this ludicrous idea had come from – perhaps, like much else, it had sprung fully-formed from the Great Leader and Helmsman’s own forehead – it was a concept which, once articulated, must find its own embodiment. Where was the Red Beethoven? And there took place a nationwide search unparalleled since Herod’s quest for the infant Jesus. Well, if Russia was the homeland of elephants, why should it not also be the homeland of the Red Beethoven?

Stalin assured them that they were all screws in the mechanism of the State. But the Red Beethoven would be a mighty cog, hard to keep hidden. Self-evidently, he must be a pure proletarian and a member of the Party. Conditions which happily ruled out Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich. They pointed instead, for a while, to Alexander Davidenko, who had been one of the leaders of the RAPM. His song ‘They Wanted to Beat Us, to Beat Us’, written to celebrate the glorious victory of the Red Army over the Chinese in 1929, had been even more popular than ‘The Song of the Counterplan’. Performed by soloists and massed choirs, by pianists, violinists and string quartets, it had stirred and cheered the land for a full decade. At one point, it seemed likely to replace all other available music.