literature,” and the Stalinist spokesman Zhdanov announced that Akhmatova “is either a nun or a whore, or rather a whore and nun who combines depravity with prayer.”22
Zhdanov’s pogrom-like denunciations of Akhmatova (and Zoshchenko, who was subjected to state ostracism at the same time) became touchstones for Soviet cultural policy for the next eight years, and they were not disavowed formally until 1988, in Gorbachev’s time. Those of us who studied in the Stalin years were obligated to quote them by heart in school and university, intoning, for instance, that Zoshchenko in his works depicts “people and himself as vile lascivious animals, who have neither shame nor conscience.”23
Stalin, who considered himself master of half the world (and actually was that in the postwar years, for once China joined the Soviet bloc in 1949, the “socialist camp” was almost a billion people), apparently pictured the ideal Soviet Union as a permanent military camp, where he would keep tightening the loosened cultural screws. For Stalin, Zoshchenko and Akhmatova themselves meant absolutely zero: all they were just pawns in a global ideological game. But for Akhmatova and Zoshchenko these persecutions (even though they were not arrested) skewed their lives. They both fought it, using different behavioral strategies.
Zoshchenko, a former tsarist officer with awards for valor, tried to defend his dignity, writing to Stalin: “It is very difficult for me to appear in your eyes as a literary rascal, a base person, or a man who worked for landowners and bankers. That is a mistake. I assure you.”24 Akhmatova in 1952 was forced to publish a pro- Stalin cycle of poems in an attempt to lessen the burden of her son, arrested yet again. No one blamed her for it, then or now.
Akhmatova, who died on March 5, 1966 (thirteen years to the day after Stalin), managed to create an image of herself for future generations as a fierce and uncompromising opponent of Stalin—the ancient Greek prophet Cassandra, through whom spoke History itself. Her image as “empress in exile,” extraordinary for the times, was obviously calculated and honed in the smallest details.
Shostakovich in his later years took an anti-Stalinist position similar to Akhmatova’s, although he did not project as imposing a presence in person (and who else could?). Neurotic and twitchy, looking like a frightened schoolboy with his round eyeglasses and cowlick, Shostakovich nevertheless had unparalleled inner discipline and enormous confidence in his creative power, which helped him to withstand Stalin’s personal attacks in 1936 and later in 1948.
Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony can be read as a coded narrative about the years of the Great Terror, parallel to Akhmatova’s
Akhmatova and Shostakovich had no illusions about the nature of the Stalinist regime, they simply rendered unto Caesar what was Caesar’s when it was demanded. Prokofiev, Shostakovich’s senior colleague and rival, was also attacked by the party in 1948, but his reaction to Zhdanov’s rebukes for “formalism” and music that was “anti-people” was more like Zoshchenko’s in an attempt to maintain personal dignity and decorum.
Prokofiev tried with utmost seriousness to explain to his Communist vilifiers the difficulties of writing easily accessible music: “You need particular care in composing a simple melody not to turn it into something cheap, saccharine, or imitative.”26 Zhdanov demanded a complete break with the West, while the former emigre Prokofiev, who still had many friends and admirers in the West, responded with explanations of the subtleties of his aesthetic differences with Wagner or Arnold Schoenberg.
The resemblance of Prokofiev and Zoshchenko could be gleaned in the parallel arc of their creative development (from stylistic excesses of the early oeuvre to the rather forced, pallid simplicity of the late works) and similarities of their personal problems. Beneath their impenetrable “business” mask, both hid an eternal infantilism and profound insecurity; both were tormented by neuroses and weak hearts, which they tried to cure with self- treatment. They both wanted to deal with their organism “scientifically” and it turned into an idee fixe: Zoshchenko wrote an autobiographical book of Freudian self-analysis, which he wanted to call
Christian Science teaches that illness must be overcome not through medication but spiritual influence. There is an entry in the composer’s diary when he was reading
After the Bolshevik revolution, the ambitious Prokofiev left Petrograd for the United States, to have a world career as a composer and pianist, even though Cultural Commissar Lunacharsky, who admired him, tried to talk him out of emigrating when he signed permission for him to leave. At first things went well in the West for Prokofiev, but by the early 1930s he sensed that he would not beat Stravinsky as a composer or Rachmaninoff as a pianist. They were the musical pillars of Russian emigres. And therefore Prokofiev, assuming that he had no rivals back home (he did not consider young Shostakovich a real threat), decided to return to the Soviet Union in 1936, at the height of the Great Terror.
We will never know how much the principles of Christian Science helped Prokofiev adjust to the realities of Soviet life, but in 1936–1938 he composed some of his greatest works: the operas
Some of Prokofiev’s later works are unjustly dismissed as compromised and primitive by some today: the
I was in school in Riga, the capital of Soviet Latvia, but even in that most “Western” part of the Soviet Union, the cultural situation was palpably stagnant and oppressive. Prokofiev’s late music seemed like a gulp of pure and fresh water. I had started reading early, at four, and I had skipped picture books and devoured almost immediately the daily newspapers and mainstream Soviet literature, often in the cheap mass editions of Roman-Gazeta.
Many of those books, popular with adults and teenagers alike, were based on true stories:
