The Magical Chorus

staging Crime and Punishment, based on the Dostoevsky novel. With his friend, the writer Aksyonov, he had a service said for Tarkovsky in a local Russian Orthodox church. In Paris, where Tarkovsky’s funeral was held at the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Mstislav Rostropovich played Bach, so beloved by Tarkovsky, on his cello right on the church steps: a fitting ritual gesture, of which Rostropovich was a master.

Tarkovsky was buried in the Russian cemetery at Sainte-Genevievedes-Bois in a Parisian suburb. At that time, political changes began in the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985. Dying, Tarkovsky learned from friends that his previously banned films were at last being shown in Moscow. The news did not please him; the director bitterly saw this as the start of a political struggle for his legacy.

The attempt by the Soviets to appropriate Tarkovsky culminated in 1990, when the director was posthumously given the country’s highest award, the Lenin Prize. Not accidentally, the 1990 Lenin Prize was also offered to Schnittke, who was living in Germany by then: it was an olive branch extended by the state, which had only eighteen months to live.

Schnittke was surprised to learn that the Soviet authorities were intending to award the Lenin Prize for his Concerto for Mixed Chorus, one of his most religious works; he had converted to Catholicism in 1983, at the age of forty-eight. This gave him an excuse for refusing the now unwanted sign of attention; in his letter to the Committee on the Lenin Prizes, he noted, not without irony, that Lenin was an atheist and therefore accepting the award “would be a manifestation of an unprincipled attitude toward both Lenin and Christianity.”²⁰

They say that Schnittke had still vacillated: after all, why not accept the Lenin Prize, as had done in their time (to name only musicians) Shostakovich, Mravinsky, Gilels, Oistrakh, Richter, and Rostropovich, for whom the highest Soviet cultural award (like the Stalin Prize before it) was a form of protection?²¹

Was Schnittke morally superior to these great artists? It’s doubtful he presumed so. The new historical paradigm helped the composer. So did his financial situation; no longer dependent on the Soviet state (all his commissions came from the West by then), he could afford to take the high road.

Material support from the West also helped Tarkovsky and Brodsky. According to the American Dictionary of Literary Biography, the publication of Brodsky’s first book in Russian (which came out in the United States in 1965) was sponsored by the CIA.²² His next book, A Halt in the Desert, was published in 1970 by the New York Chekhov Publishing House, created especially to support nonconformist authors from the Soviet Union.

In America Brodsky got a tenured professorship and also received several prestigious American awards, the most important financially being the MacArthur Foundation “genius award” in 1981 (around $150,000). Brodsky used to joke that being a Russian poet, English-language essayist, and American citizen he held the best of all possible positions in life.

The high point of Brodsky’s Westernization was the announcement that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 1987. Solzhenitsyn had warned after his own Nobel that if the Soviet Union “did not wake up,” the next Swedish prize to a Russian writer would be turned into a huge international political scandal, too. Solzhenitsyn could have been using a crystal ball, but the Gorbachev perestroika changed a few things.

At first, the old Soviet scenario was followed. A secret memorandum from the Culture Section of the Central Committee of the Communist Party to the leadership, using language that was indistinguishable from the reaction to Solzhenitsyn’s award, described Brodsky’s Nobel Prize as “a political action inspired by certain circles in the West. Its goal is to cast a shadow on Soviet policy, on the solution of humanitarian issues in the Soviet Union, to undermine the growing sympathy of the public and primarily of the artistic intelligentsia in the West toward our country.”(Gorbachev saw this document, as evinced by his notation: “Agree.”)²³

But simultaneously another note was heard, reflecting the new policy of appropriating the emigres whose views, not anti-Soviet, but merely non-Soviet, made them potential allies. That is why the KGB, also concerned with Brodsky’s Nobel, in its secret analysis, characterized it as an attempt “to discredit our policy of open dialogue with noted loyal representatives of the creative intelligentsia who left the USSR for various reasons, and also to use every method possible to hinder the process of returning by certain intellectuals who have realized their misapprehensions and mistakes.”²⁴

Another secret memorandum emphasized that Brodsky in his public statements “shows restraint,” stresses his being part of Russian culture, and refrains from anti-Soviet sloganeering. As a result, it was decided—on the highest level—in order “to deprive anti-Soviet propaganda of its main arguments and to neutralize the participation in it of Brodsky himself,”²⁵ to allow Novy Mir (which still retained a reputation as a liberal journal left over from Tvardovsky’s day) to print several of Brodsky’s poems. That was perhaps the first publication in a Soviet journal in almost sixty years of poems by an emigre who still lived abroad.

In the course of the next few years, numerous volumes of Brodsky’s poems were published in the Soviet Union with huge print runs. My collection of “Brodskiana” includes his book Nazidanie [Exhortation], printed in 1990 in Leningrad and Minsk in an edition of 200,000 copies, which sold out instantly and went into a second printing. For Brodsky’s esoteric poetry, that was a fantastic amount. His popularity brought his fellow poets in Leningrad—Dmitri Bobyshev, Yevgeny Rein, and Anatoly Naiman, who with him made up the “magical chorus” of Akhmatova’s students in the 1960s—into the limelight.

Brodsky’s poetry, especially the late works, showed a certain emotional aloofness, as did the oeuvres of Schnittke and Tarkovsky. There was an icy demeanor in Brodsky’s last poems, making them even more difficult than Schnittke’s postmodern works, in which at least the images of evil are more often than not represented by vulgar, albeit vivid and memorable, music. (As Leonard Bernstein once quipped, “If I hear a tango, foxtrot, or waltz in a Schnittke work, I like it very much, but if I don’t, then I’m not so enchanted.”²⁵)

When the ban was lifted in the Soviet Union on performing Schnittke’s polystylistic compositions (that is, combining musical idioms of various eras—from baroque to atonal and dodecaphonic—in the same work), at first audiences literally pushed their way into concert halls and hung from the rafters. The Russian intelligentsia canonized Schnittke, as it had Tarkovsky and Brodsky.

Still, relatively few truly understood and appreciated the work of these new idols. People were buying not the cultural product itself, but the story behind it. They were attracted by the tragic nimbus around the heads of these “non-Soviet” heroes. Their lives were the stuff of legends: they had been attacked by the mighty state, forcing them to flee to distant shores, where they did not get lost but were celebrated for their exploits and then died prematurely far from home.

Of the three, the best candidate for secular saint would be Schnittke, who in person was like Sakharov, just as gentle, calm, attentive, and decent. No excesses here.

Brodsky and Tarkovsky, on the other hand, could drink a lot; the latter once polished off nineteen bottles of cognac in three days with a friend. The perceptive Tvardovsky noted after meeting the young Brodsky in his office at Novy Mir: “A rather repulsive fellow, basically, but definitely talented, perhaps more than Yevtushenko and Voznesensky taken together.”²⁶ Many contemporaries were put off by the arrogance, alleged cruelty, and dictatorial demeanor of Brodsky and Tarkovsky, as well as their priapic appetites. Schnittke could never be reproached for anything of the kind.