Russian audiences were extremely sensitive to these religious overtones and they wept at every performance in the Soviet Union: in the difficult war years Shostakovich’s music had a cathartic effect, and the concert hall substituted for the church, proscribed in socialist life. An important symbolic event that promoted the transformation of the symphony into a quasi-religious work was its performance in Leningrad. It was organized on Stalin’s orders with great efficiency, like a real military operation, and played on August 9, 1942, by the starved musicians of Leningrad, which by then was already considered a martyr-city.
For the democratic West, which for the sake of victory over Hitler had given up its anti-Bolshevik prejudices while entering into an “unholy” alliance with Stalin, the high point in the Seventh’s political status came with the national broadcast of its New York radio premiere on July 19, 1942, conducted by Arturo Toscanini; hundreds of North American performances followed, and after his picture appeared on the cover of
The Seventh Symphony was the second work by Shostakovich to receive the Stalin Prize, and once again, of the first degree. That was on April 11, 1942, a little over a month after its premiere, an unprecedented haste in the annals of the Stalin Prize. Of course, the geopolitical situation was extraordinary then, too. Behind lay the battle for Moscow, ahead, the fateful battle of Stalingrad. Washington announced that Allied troops were prepared to open a second front in Europe against Hitler.
Stalin had little faith that these promises would come to pass soon. But he cared about every cultural bridge that brought closer the two sides so far apart socially and politically. Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony was such an opportunity. That is why Shostakovich was probably Stalin’s most valued composer at that moment. But we cannot blame Shostakovich for that. It was the way the political cards fell then.
On August 31, 1941 (while Shostakovich was completing the first movement of his Seventh Symphony in besieged Leningrad), Marina Tsvetaeva, forty-eight, who had been evacuated to the small town of Elabuga in Tatarstan, hanged herself. This was the third suicide of a great Russian poet in the twentieth century, after Esenin in 1925 and Mayakovsky in 1930. Mourning these deaths later, Pasternak wrote: “Once they reach the idea of suicide, they give up on themselves, they condemn their past, declaring themselves bankrupt and their memories nonexistent.”1 Pasternak speculated that Tsvetaeva, “not knowing where to hide from the horror, hastily hid in death, shoving her head into a noose as if under a pillow.”2
In fact, Tsvetaeva’s fatal decision had not been spontaneous. A year earlier her fifteen-year-old son, Georgy (“Mur”), wrote in his unusually frank diary: “Mother is living in an atmosphere of suicide and keeps talking about it. She keeps crying all the time and talking about the humiliations she must endure…. We sent a telegram to the Kremlin, to Stalin: ‘Help me, I am in dire straits. The writer Marina Tsvetaeva.’”3
The figure of the outsider is common in twentieth-century Russian culture. Among them, Tsvetaeva was perhaps the most extreme case. She positioned herself early on as “the last romantic” in her work and life, and resembling an exotic bird, with piercing eyes peeking out beneath her bangs, the bisexual Tsvetaeva always made clear her rejection of the established order, whatever it may be. Joseph Brodsky, who insisted that she was the greatest twentieth-century poet in any language, described her viewpoint as Calvinist, with the poet feeling guilt for all human suffering.
Tsvetaeva was among the first to be repulsed by the mass chauvinist passions of World War I; while living in Bolshevik Moscow she openly sang the praises of the counterrevolutionary White Guards (her husband Sergei Efron had fought on their side), and when she immigrated in 1922 to the West, she took an intransigently antibourgeois position, which isolated her from the emigres.
Tsvetaeva’s loneliness in the West increased as her husband’s political views radicalized: Efron evolved from a fierce opponent of the Bolsheviks to an equally staunch supporter. He joined a small but ideologically influential emigre movement, the Eurasianists, which included some of the greatest minds of the Russian diaspora, the linguist and philosopher Prince Nikolai Trubetskoy, the theologian Georgy Florovsky, the literary critic D. S. Mirsky, the music critic Pierre Souvtchinsky, and the philosopher Lev Karsavin.
The central idea of the Eurasianists was Russia’s special geopolitical place and destiny as the bridge between Europe and Asia (Eurasia). They were the successors of the Scythian group in Russia, with right and left wings: the right (Trubetskoy, Florovsky) tending toward Christian Orthodoxy while the left (Mirsky, Efron) drifted to the side of the Soviet Union, which the Eurasianists considered the true heir to the Russian empire and the force to be reckoned with. The Kremlin took a keen interest in this movement, gradually bringing the left Eurasianists under the control of the Soviet secret services.
Son of the tsarist minister of internal affairs, Mirsky, whom Edmund Wilson affectionately called “comrade prince,” joined the British Communist Party in 1931. By then he had published the best—then and now—history of Russian literature in English, but in 1932, craving Gorky’s patronage, he returned to Moscow from England. It was a fatal mistake: in 1937, twelve months after Gorky died, “comrade prince” was arrested and expired in a Siberian prison camp.
Efron, together with Mirsky and Souvtchinsky, published the literary almanac
Tsvetaeva, who considered Efron “the most noble and selfless man in the world,” explained that “he had seen Russia’s salvation and the truth” in the White movement, and “when he discovered otherwise, he left it completely and wholly and never looked back.”4
In 1937, after a notorious “wet” operation (killing former Soviet agent Ignace Reiss, who defected to the West), Efron and a few comrades fled France to the Soviet Union, where Ariadna (“Alya”), Efron and Tsvetaeva’s twenty-five-year-old daughter, had been living for the last six months. Tsvetaeva was called in for questioning by the Paris prefecture but released when she started reciting poetry in French, her own and other writers’: they thought her mad. The less-kind Russian emigres, who had already been suspicious of Tsvetaeva, now rejected her completely.
Through Soviet diplomatic channels, Efron pleaded with Tsvetaeva to join him in Russia, and in June 1939 she and Mur came to Moscow. Soon after, her husband and daughter were arrested as part of a purge of the NKVD and particularly its foreign agents initiated by Lavrenti Beria, who replaced Yezhov.
Alya later recalled her predeparture conversation in Paris with Nobel laureate Bunin: “Where are you going, you little fool? What for? What’s pushing you? They’ll arrest you.”
“Me? For what?”
“You’ll see. They’ll find a reason.”5
Tsvetaeva’s strong, passionate, highly emotional, even occasionally overwrought (some said hysterical) poetic voice and her image as a willful, independent, and proud Amazon made her a favorite in gender studies. But the attempts by her
