The Noise of Time Read online

  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 def
initions 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.

  Davidenko’s credentials were impeccable. He had taught in a Moscow orphanage; he had supervised the lyrical activities of the Shoemakers’ Union, the Union of Textile Workers, and even of the Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol. He had written a genuine proletarian opera about the 1905 revolution. And yet, and yet … for all these qualifications, he remained stubbornly the composer of ‘They Wanted to Beat Us, to Beat Us’. A properly melodic work, of course, and one utterly devoid of formalist tendencies. But somehow Davidenko had failed to build on that one great success and earn the title Stalin longed to bestow. Which could have been his good luck. The Red Beethoven, once crowned, might have ended up sharing the fate of the Red Napoleon. Or that of Boris Kornilov, lyricist of the Counterplan. All those much-loved words he put into ‘The Song’, and all those throats which had poured them out, couldn’t save him from being arrested in 1937, and purged, as they liked to say, in 1938.

  The search for the Red Beethoven might have been a comedy; except that nothing around Stalin was ever a comedy. The Great Leader and Helmsman could easily have decided that the Red Beethoven’s failure to emerge had nothing to do with the organisation of musical life in the Soviet Union, and everything to do with the activities of wreckers and saboteurs. And who might want to sabotage the quest for the Red Beethoven? Why, formalist musicologists, of course! Give the NKVD enough time, and they would surely unearth the musicologists’ plot. And that would be no joke either.

  Ilf and Petrov had reported that there were no political offences in America, only criminal ones; and that Al Capone, while in his Alcatraz cell, had written anti-Soviet articles for the Hearst press. They also noted that Americans had ‘primitive culinary skill and primitive rote voluptuousness’. He could not judge the latter characteristic, though there had been a strange incident with a woman during a concert interval. He had been in a roped-off area when he heard a female voice persistently calling his name. Assuming that she wanted to talk about his music, he had indicated that she should be let through. She stood in front of him, and said, with a bright, open friendliness,

  ‘Hello. You resemble my cousin very much.’

  It sounded like a line with which spies make contact, and so put him on the defensive. He asked if this cousin was Russian, by any chance.

  ‘No,’ she replied, ‘he is one hundred per cent American. No, one hundred and ten per cent.’

  He waited for her to mention his music – or that of the concert they were both attending – but she had delivered her message, and with another bright, open smile she left. He was puzzled. So he looked like someone else. Or someone else looked like him. Did this mean something, or did it mean nothing?

  He knew, when he had agreed to attend the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace, that he had no choice. He also suspected that he might be displayed as a figurehead, a representative of Soviet values. He had expected some Americans to be welcoming, others to be hostile. He had been instructed that after the congress he would travel outside New York, to peace rallies in Newark and Baltimore; he would also speak and play at Yale and Harvard. He was not surprised that some of these invitations had already been rescinded by the time they landed at LaGuardia; nor was he disappointed when the State Department sent them home early. All this was foreseeable. What he had not prepared himself for was that New York would turn out to be a place of the purest humiliation, and of moral shame.

  The previous year, a young woman working at the Soviet consulate had jumped from a window and sought political asylum. So, during the congress, every day, a man paraded up and down outside the Waldorf Astoria with a placard reading SHOSTAKOVICH! JUMP THRU THE WINDOW! There had even been a proposal to construct nets around the building the Russian delegates were staying in, so that they could, if they wished, hurl themselves to freedom. By the end of the congress, he knew that the temptation was there – but that if he jumped, he would make sure that he missed any net.

  No, that was not true; that was not being honest. He wouldn’t aim for the pavement, for the simple reason that he wouldn’t jump. How many times over the years had he made threats of suicide? Countless. And how many times had he actually tried? None. It wasn’t that he didn’t mean it. He felt, in the moment, genuinely suicidal, if it were possible to feel genuinely suicidal without passing to the act itself. Once or twice, he had even bought pills to do the job with, but never managed to keep this fact to himself – whereupon, after hours of tearful argument, the pills were confiscated. He had threatened his mother with suicide, and Tanya, and then Nita. It was all perfectly genuine, just as it was all perfectly juvenile.

  Tanya had laughed at his threats; his mother and Nita had taken them seriously. When he returned from the humiliation of the composers’ congress, it was Nita who had dealt with him. But it was not just her moral strength that saved him; it was also the realisation on his part of exactly what he was doing. This time, he wasn’t threatening Tanya or Nita or his mother with suicide; he was threatening Power. He was saying to the Union of Composers, to the cats who sharpened their claws on his soul, to Tikhon Nikolayevich Khrenni
kov, and to Stalin himself: Look what you have reduced me to, soon you will have my death on your hands and on your conscience. But he realised it was an empty threat, and Power’s response hardly needed articulation. It would be this: Fine, go ahead, then we shall tell the world your story. The story of how you were up to your neck in the Tukhachevsky assassination plot, how for decades you schemed to undermine Soviet music, how you corrupted younger composers, sought to restore capitalism in the USSR, and were a leading element in the musicologists’ plot which will soon be disclosed to the world. All of which is made plain in your suicide note. And that was why he could not kill himself: because then they would steal his story and rewrite it. He needed, if only in his own hopeless, hysterical way, to have some charge of his life, of his story.

  The provoker of his moral shame was a man called Nabokov. Nicolas Nabokov. A composer himself in a small way. Who had left Russia in the Thirties and found a home in America. Machiavelli said that you should never trust an exile. This one was probably working for the CIA. As if any of that made it better.

  At the first public meeting at the Waldorf Astoria, Nabokov sat in the front row, immediately opposite him, so close that their knees almost touched. With an insolent friendliness, this Russian with a well-cut American tweed jacket and brilliantined hair pointed out that the conference hall they were in was called the Perroquet Room. He explained that Perroquet meant Parrot. He translated the word into Russian. He smirked as if the irony would be apparent to all. The ease with which he had installed himself in the front row suggested that he was indeed in the pay of the American authorities. This had made Dmitri Dmitrievich even more nervous than he was already. When he tried to light a cigarette he would snap the match; or else, distracted, he would let his cigarette go out. Always, the tweed-clad exile was there with a lighter, clicking it smoothly under his nose, as if to say, Jump Thru The Window and you can have a nice shiny lighter like mine.