Natasha's Dance

by making calls to the right people, is the very type of saviour figure that Pasternak himself would have liked to have been. Pasternak regarded the novel as his greatest work (much more important than his poetry), his testament in prose, and he was determined that it should be read by the widest possible audience. His decision to publish it abroad, after it was delayed and then turned down by the journal Novyi mir, was his final act of rebellion against the bullying of the Soviet regime.*

    Shostakovich found another way to save his sanity. In 1948 he was dismissed from his teaching posts at the conservatories in Moscow and Leningrad - his pupils were also forced to repent for having studied with the ‘formalist’. Fearing for his family, Shostakovich admitted his ‘mistakes’ at a Congress of Composers in April: he promised to write music which ‘the People’ could enjoy and understand. For a while, Shostakovich contemplated suicide. His works were banned from the concert repertoire. But, as in former times, he found a refuge and an outlet in the cinema. Between 1948 and 1953, Shostakovich wrote the music for no less than seven films.195 ‘It allows me to eat’, he wrote to his friend Isaak Glickman, ‘but it causes me extreme fatigue.’196 He

    * Smuggled out of Russia and first published in Italy in 1957, Doctor Zhivago became an international bestseller, and Pasternak was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1958, but under pressure from the Writers’ Union, and a storm of nationalist abuse against him in the Soviet press, he was forced to refuse the prize. Pasternak died in 1960.

    told fellow composers that it was ‘unpleasant’ work, to be done ‘only in the event of extreme poverty’.197 Shostakovich needed all the money he could earn from this hack work. But he also had to show that he was taking part in the ‘creative life of the Party’. Five of the film scores he composed in these years were awarded the prestigious Stalin Prize, and two of his songs from Alexandrov’s Meeting on the Elbe (1948) became hits, with enormous record sales. The composer’s own political rehabilitation and a modicum of material comfort for his family were secured.

    Yet all the time Shostakovich was writing secret music ‘for the drawer’. Some of it was musical lampoon, like Rayok, or The Peep Show, a cantata satire on the Zhdanov era, with music set to the pompous speeches of the Soviet leaders, which finally received its premiere in Washington in 1989.* More than any other artist, Shostakovich laughed (inside) to save his sanity: that was why he so loved the writings of Gogol and Zoshchenko. But most of the music which he composed at this time was deeply personal, especially that music with a Jewish theme. Shostakovich identified with the suffering of the Jews. To some extent he even assumed a Jewish identity - choosing to express himself as a composer in a Jewish idiom and incorporating Jewish melodies in his compositions. What Shostakovich liked about the music of the Jews, as he himself explained in a revealing interview, was its ‘ability to build a jolly melody on sad intonations. Why does a man strike up a jolly song? Because he feels sad at heart.’198 But using Jewish music was a moral statement, too: it was the protest of an artist who had always been opposed to fascism in all its forms.

    Shostakovich first used Jewish themes in the finale of the Second Piano Trio (1944), dedicated to his closest friend, the musicologist Ivan Sollertinsky, who had died in February 1944. It was composed just as the reports were coming in of the Red Army’s capture of the Nazi death camps at Majdanek, Belzec and Treblinka. As Stalin

    * It is not entirely clear when Shostakovich wrote Rayok. Sketches of it seem to date from 1948, but with the constant threat of a house search, it seems unlikely that he would have dared to compose the full score until after Stalin’s death (see further M. Yakubov, ‘Shostakovich’s Anti-formalist Rayok: A History of the Work’s Composition and Its Musical and Literary Sources’, in R. Bartlett (ed.), Shostakovich in Context (Oxford, 1000), pp. 135-58).

    initiated his own campaign against the Jews, Shostakovich voiced his protest by adopting Jewish themes in many of his works: the song cycle From Jewish Poetry (1948), courageously performed at private concerts in his flat at the height of the Doctors’ Plot; the Thirteenth Symphony (1962), the ‘Babi Yar’ with its requiem, the words composed by the poet Yevtushenko, for the Jews of Kiev who were murdered by the Nazis in 1941; and virtually all the string quartets from No. 3 (in 1946) to the unforgettable No. 8 (in 1961). The official dedication of the Eighth Quartet was ‘To the Victims of Fascism’, but, as Shostakovich told his daughter, it was really ‘dedicated to myself’.199 The Eighth Quartet was Shostakovich’s musical autobiography - a tragic summing up of his whole life and the life of his nation in the Stalinist era. Throughout this intensely personal work, which is full of self-quotation, the same four notes recur (D-E flat-C-B) which, in the German system of musical notation, make up four letters of the composer’s name (D-S-C-H). The four notes are like a dirge. They fall like tears. In the fourth and final movement the grief becomes unbearable as these four notes are symbolically combined with the workers’ revolutionary funeral lament, ‘Tortured by a Cruel Bondage’, which Shostakovich sings here for himself.

7

    On 4 October 1957 the first beeps from space were heard as Sputnik I made its pioneering flight. A few weeks later, just in time for the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution, the dog Laika ventured into space in Sputnik II. With this one small step, it suddenly appeared that the Soviet Union had leaped ahead of the Western world in science and technology. Khrushchev made the most of the success, claiming that it heralded the triumph of the communist idea. The next year a red flag was planted on the surface of the moon, and then, in April 1961, Yury Gagarin became the first man to leave the earth’s atmosphere.

    The Soviet system was defined by its belief in science and technology. After 1945 the regime made a huge investment in the scientific establishment, promoting not just nuclear physics and other disciplines that

    were useful to the military but academic sciences and mathematics, too. The state made science a top priority, elevating scientists to a status on a par with that of senior industrial managers and Party officials. The whole Marxist core of the system’s ideology was an optimistic faith in the power of man’s reason to banish human suffering and master the forces of the universe. The Soviet regime had been founded on the sort of futuristic visions imagined by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, whose writings were more popular in Russia than in any other country of the world. Wells was one of the first Western writers to visit Soviet Russia, in 1919, and even then, in the midst of the country’s devastation from civil war, he found Lenin in the Kremlin dreaming about journeys into space.200

    Russia had its own prodigious range of science fiction which, unlike that of the West, formed part of its mainstream literature from the very start. Science fiction served as an arena for Utopian blueprints of the future society, such as the ‘Fourth Dream’ in Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done? (1862), from which Lenin drew his communist ideals. It was a testing ground for the big moral ideas of Russian literature - as in Dostoevsky’s science-fiction tale, ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ (1877), in which the vision of salvation through scientific and material progress advanced by Chernyshevsky is dispelled in a dream of Utopia on a perfect twin of earth: the cosmic paradise soons breaks down into a society of masters and slaves, and the narrator wakes up from his dream to see that the only true salvation is through Christian love of one’s fellow human beings.

    Mixing science fiction with mystical belief was typical of the Russian literary tradition, where the path to the ideal was so often seen in terms of the transcendence of this world and its mundane realities. The Russian Revolution was accompanied by a huge upsurge of apocalyptic science fiction. Bogdanov, the Bolshevik co-founder of Proletkult, took the lead with his science-fiction novels, Red Star (1908) and Engineer Menni (1913), which portrayed the communist Utopia on the planet Mars sometime in the middle of the third millennium. This cosmic vision of socialist redemption fuelled the boom of science fiction writing in the 1920s, from Platonov’s Utopian tales to Aleksei Tolstoy’s bestselling novels Aelita (1922) and The Garin Death Ray (1926), which returned to the Martian theme of science in the service of

    the proletariat. Like its nineteenth-century antecedents, this fantastic literature was a vehicle for the great philosophical and moral questions about science and conscience. Zamyatin’s science fiction drew from the Russian tradition to develop a humanist critique of the Soviet technological Utopia. His dystopian novel We derived much of its moral argument from Dostoevsky. The central conflict of the novel, between the rational, all-providing high-tech state and the beautiful seductress I-3 30, whose deviant and irrational need for freedom threatens to subvert the power of that absolutist state, is a continuation of the discourse which stands at the centre of ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ in The Brothers Karamazov about the unending conflict between the human needs for security and liberty.*

    Science fiction largely disappeared in the 1930s and 1940s. Socialist Realism left no space for Utopian dreams, or any form of moral ambiguity, and the only science fiction that was not stamped out was that which extolled Soviet technology. But the space programme of the 1950s led to a resurgence of science fiction in the Soviet Union, and Khrushchev, who was a devotee of the genre, encouraged writers to return to the