a century before his
* One of these prominent doctors was Isaiah Berlin's uncle Leo, who was accused of passing Kremlin secrets to the British through his nephew on his visit to Moscow in 1945. Severely beaten, Leo attempted suicide and eventually 'confessed' to having been a spy. He was held in prison for a year and released in 1954, shortly after Stalin's death. One day, while still weak from his time in prison, he saw one of his torturers in the street ahead of him, collapsed from a heart attack and died (M. Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London, 1998), pp. 168-9).
+ All citizens of the USSR had a Soviet passport. But inside the passport there was a category that defined them by 'nationality' (ethnicity).
masterpiece was published in his native land. He had asked to be buried in a Jewish cemetery.190
'I had believed that after the Soviet victory, the experience of the thirties could not ever come again, yet everything reminded me of the way things had gone then', wrote Ilya Ehrenburg (one of the few senior Jewish intellectuals to emerge unscathed from the Stalin era) in Men, Years - Life (1961-6).191 Coming as it did after the release of the war years, this new wave of terror must have felt in some ways more oppressive than the old; to try to survive such a thing the second time around must have been like trying to preserve one's very sanity. Ehrenburg visited Akhmatova at the Fountain House in 1947.
She was sitting in a small room where her portrait by Modigliani hung on the wall and, sad and majestic as ever, was reading Horace. Misfortunes crashed down on her like avalanches; it needed more than common fortitude to preserve such dignity, composure and pride.192
Reading Horace was one way of keeping sane. Some writers turned to literary scholarship or, like Kornei Chukovsky, to writing children's books. Others, like Pasternak, turned to translating foreign works.
Pasternak's Russian translations of Shakespeare are works of real artistic beauty, if not entirely true to the original. He was Stalin's favourite poet, far too precious to arrest. His love of Georgia and translations of Georgian poetry endeared him to the Soviet leader. But even though he lived amid all the creature comforts of a Moscow gentleman, Pasternak was made to suffer from the Terror in a different way. He bore the guilt for the suffering of those writers whom he could not help through his influence. He was tortured by the notion that his mere survival somehow proved that he was less than honour-able as a man - let alone as a great writer in that Russian tradition which took its moral values from the Decembrists. Isaiah Berlin, who met Pasternak on several occasions in 1945, recalled that he kept returning to this point, and went to absurd lengths to deny that he was capable of [some squalid compromise with the authorities] of which no one who knew him could begin to conceive him to be guilty'.193
Pasternak refused to attend the meeting of the Writers' Union at which Akhmatova and Zoshchenko were denounced. For this he was expelled from the Union's board. He went to see Akhmatova. He gave her money, which may have led to the attack on him in Pravda as 'alien' and 'remote from Soviet reality'.194 After all his optimism in the war Pasternak was crushed by the return to the old regime of cruelty and lies. He withdrew from the public scene and worked on what he now regarded as his final message to the world: his great novel Doctor Zhivago. Set amidst the horrific chaos of the Russian Revolution and the civil war, it is no coincidence that the novel's central theme is the importance of preserving the old intelligentsia, represented by Zhivago. In many ways the hero's younger brother, the strange figure called Evgraf, who has some influence with the revolutionaries and often helps his brother out of dire straits 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.
