The Magical Chorus

Eisenstein was of medium height and rounded (some described him as being boneless), with stubby legs, thinning hair that stuck out around his bald spot, and a constant ironic smile playing on his lips. At first glance he created an impression of coziness, but that was misleading: the sexually ambivalent Eisenstein had been a tormented personality since adolescence with an interest in sadism and torture, as well as an “abnormal” (in the words of his friend, the filmmaker Mikhail Romm) habit “of drawing lewd pictures in front of ladies.”¹⁷ But Eisenstein, who had a heart condition, led an exceptionally moderate and orderly life and did not drink or smoke; his only known vice was a childish love of sweets.

Alexander Nevsky is a formally brilliant but cold work. Done at Stalin’s personal request, it had to be completed as speedily as possible, so the central scene of the battle between the thirteenth- century Prince Alexander Nevsky and the Teutonic knights on frozen Lake Peipus had to be filmed in the summer, on a back lot of Mosfilm, the asphalt covered with a thick layer of liquid glass and sprinkled with crushed chalk to create a winter landscape.

In that landscape Eisenstein played out his film as if it were a smart chess game with the end required by Stalin, Alexander Nevsky intoning: “And if anyone comes to us with a sword, then he shall die by the sword, that is the foundation of the Russian land.”(Eisenstein had planned to end the film with Nevsky’s death on his return from the Golden Horde, but Stalin rejected it: “Such a good prince cannot die.”)

The film was basically conceived for the sake of its final slogan, but when in 1939 Stalin signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler and the Nazis became “sworn friends,” Nevsky vanished from movie screens. That made even more significant the fact that Eisenstein and also Nikolai Cherkasov, who played Nevsky in the film, and two members of the crew were awarded prizes for the film in March 1941, when the pact was formally still in place.

Interestingly, at a private screening of Alexander Nevsky in Moscow for visitors from America—the writer Erskine Caldwell and the photographer Margaret Bourke-White—in mid-June, a week before the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union, Eisenstein confidently predicted that the film would be in wide distribution again very soon.

The director’s political intuition was highly tuned. But apparently not Stalin’s, because the neo-Teutonic attack, vividly foretold in Eisenstein’s film, came as a total surprise in reality. The consequences of Stalin’s miscalculation were catastrophic: the German army that attacked on June 22, 1941, rolled through the Soviet Union and reached Moscow by October.

Along with the rest of the country, the workers of the “cultural front” were mobilized against the enemy, thereby proving their usefulness to the Fatherland. The patriotic anthem Sergei Prokofiev wrote for Alexander Nevsky was played everywhere: “Arise, Russian people, for the glorious battle, the mortal battle!” The composer himself liked the anthem, and justly so. But in 1941, Stalin did not recognize Prokofiev’s work with a prize. At the time (and today, too) it looked like a punishment for something, especially since Prokofiev’s main rival, Shostakovich (who was fifteen years younger), not only got the Stalin Prize for his Piano Quintet, composed in 1940, but his photograph was placed first, clearly not alphabetically, in the display of the six “main” laureates on the front page of Pravda.

The story of Shostakovich’s prize is puzzling. We remember that in 1936 the young composer and his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District became central scapegoats in Stalin’s antiformalist campaign, which intended to define the parameters of Soviet art. Essentially, Stalin purged Shostakovich’s work from the confines of socialist realism. But in late 1937, the composer was rehabilitated for his Fifth Symphony.

The Fifth can be described as a symphony-novel (just as Alexander Nevsky can be described as a film-opera). A comparison to The Quiet Don seems appropriate. Both works are profoundly ambivalent and were at different times perceived as being Soviet and anti-Soviet. The very nature of symphonic music permits a wide variety of interpretations. Shostakovich’s opus is a magical vessel: each listener fills it in his imagination as he wishes. That is why the Fifth Symphony will remain for many people the most shattering reflection on the Great Terror, while The Quiet Don will compete with Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago for the most vivid depiction of Russia during World War I and the Civil War.

Strangely, while giving the award to Sholokhov for The Quiet Don, Stalin singled out in Shostakovich’s oeuvre not the Fifth Symphony, of which he had obviously approved, but the Piano Quintet, which did not fit at all even in the fairly broad spectrum of socialist realist works (from The Quiet Don to Alexander Nevsky, with Mukhina’s and Gerasimov’s creations in the middle) that he presented as “models.”

Symphonies, while not as high in the official genre hierarchy as Stalin’s beloved opera and not in the approved category of program music, were still epic works, which as a lover of the Russian classical tradition, Stalin preferred. Instead, the Piano Quintet was a refined chamber work in a neoclassical style, with a definite nod to Western tradition, which as we now know, was pointed out to Stalin by Shostakovich’s detractors among the Soviet musical bureaucrats.¹⁸

In literature, an analogous work to Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet would be a late poem by Khodasevich or a short story by Nabokov, in art—a drawing by Tatlin. Nothing of the sort could possibly be glorified on the front page of Pravda—not then, not later.

What had attracted Stalin in the Quintet? Its political and “civic” value must have seemed like zero to him then. Could he have been charmed by its neo-Bachian restraint, spiritual profundity, and impeccable craftsmanship? We can only guess.

But we can presume that Stalin did not regret his generous advance to Shostakovich when he was informed at the end of 1941 that the composer had completed his Seventh Symphony, dedicated to Leningrad, which was under Nazi siege. The composition’s fate is unprecedented. Hurriedly performed in March 1942 (first in Kuibyshev and then Moscow, with the composer attending both premieres, after he was brought out of besieged Leningrad on a special plane on Stalin’s orders), the Seventh took on instant political relevance, unheard-of in the history of symphonic music.

Like the Fifth, this symphony-novel is semantically ambiguous. The forceful finale of the Fifth can be perceived as a straightforward tableau of mass rejoicing or as an attempt at an ironic depiction of the forced gaiety and imposed “carnival”-like (to use the word in Bakhtin’s sense) enthusiasm typical of the Stalin era. The first movement of the Seventh provides the same opportunity for polar interpretations: is the vicious march theme with eleven variations, performed with an inexorable, avalanche-like crescendo (the “invasion episode”), a depiction of the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, as the world press instantly announced, or is it a reflection of the insidious expansion of Stalin’s repression apparatus, as the composer himself hinted in conversation with close friends? ¹⁹

The polysemantic nature of the Seventh Symphony is intensified by the religious motif that is in the subtext: originally Shostakovich (influenced by Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, which he admired so fervently that when he was flown out of Leningrad, the piano score he made of this great work was one of the few belongings he took with him) intended to use a chorus that would intone excerpts from David’s Psalms.