By RICHARD TARUSKINAUG.
The composer Dmitri
Shostakovich in 1938. Credit Sovfoto/UIG, via Getty Images
Novelists have every right
to use historical data to lend their works verisimilitude, and they are free to
go beyond the facts, wherever their fancy leads them. Historians, though, are
bound by circumstances, condemned to whatever partial, obstructed view their sources
grant them. Their only recourse is to keep on looking and pray. Meanwhile,
novelists can soar and gain an untrammeled vista.
But what are they actually
seeing? Sometimes they deliberately describe what never was. Sometimes they
claim more. In a draft for “War and Peace,” Tolstoy wrote that he really wanted
to tell the history of Russia’s Napoleonic war but that if he undertook the
task without fictional admixture, it would “force me to be governed by
historical documents rather than the truth.”
What is that truth, which
goes beyond the documents? Whatever it is, Tolstoy’s pursuit of it gave us “War
and Peace,” so it can’t be such a bad thing. But more recently, it has given us
Julian Barnes’s novel “The Noise of Time,” which pretends to give us the truth,
not just the facts, about the composer Dmitri Shostakovich.
This book, I think, is a
beautifully written botch, and it has me wondering anew about truth. People
have been doing that, of course, for a long time — at least since Pilate
confronted Christ. And the wrangling over what the truth might be about
Shostakovich and his experiences under Stalin has been going on, it sometimes
seems, almost as long.
Contention — between those
who believe that Shostakovich was a blameless martyr, opposed to and victimized
by the Soviet government, and those of us who believe he made pragmatic
compromises to survive and prosper — reached such a pitch that if you search
for “Shostakovich wars” on Google, it will fetch thousands of hits.
Shostakovich warriors, those who have sought to portray him as disaffected and
tacitly hostile to the Soviets, distinguish the literal truth of the letters,
journals and memoirs we have, from the essential truth that only inspired
speculation can reveal.
“The Noise of Time” by Julian Barnes. Credit
Patricia Wall/The New York Times
The fallacy of such
thinking is to regard that essential truth as something revealed rather than
created. Tolstoy did not make that mistake. He knew that the difference between
real and fictional worlds is that a fictional world is wholly known. Nothing
could remain hidden from Tolstoy about his imaginary Napoleonic Russia and its
Natashas, Pierres and Andreis. But no matter how diligently he or we may burrow
in the archives, there will always be more documents somewhere; some may
contradict the ones we know, and there is no end to what was never recorded to
begin with.
Mr. Barnes has not fully
lived up to the calling he professes. He might have invented his own
Shostakovich — his marvelous novel “The Porcupine” fictionalizes Todor Zhivkov,
the fallen Communist ruler of Bulgaria, and lets us hear his inner voice as he
faces trial. The owner of that voice is given a fictional name in the book,
which frees the author from the factual record, and frees us from expectations
based upon it.
So why, then, is
Shostakovich given his own name in “The Noise of Time” (as are all the other
characters)? If Mr. Barnes had called his hero, say, Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov and
let the reader divine the resemblance to Shostakovich, I would accept his work
without demur. But Mr. Barnes evidently wanted to capitalize on the interest
that frenzied debate has drummed up in his subject and to claim implicitly to
have settled the issues concerning the composer’s relationship with Soviet
power, which scholars continue to dispute. In an author’s note appended to the
novel, he advertises his fidelity to his sources and his superior insights. He
is trying to have it both ways: He wants the novelist’s freedom and also the
historian’s authority. But in trying for both, he achieves neither.
Mr. Barnes’s view of
Shostakovich conforms in every detail to the sentimental Cold War fable of a
passive, pathetic yet saintly figure buffeted by an obtuse, implacable force.
This stereotype goes beyond Shostakovich and beyond his music, all the way to
music itself, imagined as pure and spotless, utterly truthful the way
mathematics is truthful, unresistant to martyrdom and co-option but ultimately
triumphant. These are the naïve assumptions of pop Romanticism.
The sources on which Mr.
Barnes most conspicuously relies are the two canonical texts of the
Shostakovich wars. One is “Testimony,” a best-seller that appeared in 1979
whose subtitle is “The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as Related to and Edited
by Solomon Volkov”; the other is the invaluable “Shostakovich: A Life
Remembered” (1994) by Elizabeth Wilson, a compendium of third-person accounts
by people who knew the composer. Mr. Volkov’s book (despite the seductive,
still widely believed stories it promulgates) has been exposed as a mixture of
recycled material that Shostakovich had approved for republication and
fabrications that were inserted after his death. The other makes no truth
claims but presents a great gabble of conflicting viewpoints from which we are
invited to draw our own conclusions.
“Muddle Instead of Music,”
the anonymous Pravda editorial of Jan. 28, 1936, which denounced Shostakovich’s
wildly successful opera “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.”
Mr. Barnes has done just
that. But the remarkable, disappointing fact is that his fictional Shostakovich
is not his own invention. He has adopted a ready-made: the sinless version of
Shostakovich peddled by “Testimony,” supplemented by the most lurid tales from
Ms. Wilson’s argosy and a published letter or two. The resulting narrative
predictably recycles three mangy tales from the Shostakovich wars.
The first concerns the
anonymous Pravda editorial of Jan. 28, 1936, “Muddle Instead of Music,” which
denounced Shostakovich’s wildly successful opera “The Lady Macbeth of the
Mtsensk District.” It not only led to a ban on the opera but also, according to
legend, put the composer under a cloud of suspicion that brought him within a
hair’s breadth of being “repressed,” as the saying went, in the Stalinist
purges of 1936-38.
The second recycled tale
relates to the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, held in
March 1949 at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, where Shostakovich, fresh
from a second denunciation at the hands of Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s culture
czar, was supposedly sent against his will as part of the Soviet delegation,
only to be humiliated again in a confrontation with the composer Nicolas
Nabokov.
A decade later, as the
third saga would have it, Nikita Khrushchev had Shostakovich browbeaten into
joining the Soviet Communist Party so that he could serve as titular head of
the Russian Federation’s Union of Soviet Composers, after which the composer
was supposedly so demoralized and filled with shame that he wrote a string
quartet about it: his Eighth, often regarded as his masterpiece. All of its
themes are derived from Shostakovich’s initials, bearing witness to his own
standing among the 20th century’s “victims of war and fascism,” in the words of
the quartet’s dedication.
These three tales — the
three books, so to speak, of the Shostakovich Apocrypha — correspond exactly to
the three chapters of “The Noise of Time,” and there is nothing in Mr. Barnes’s
account that cannot be found in the dubious sources he cites. His open
fictionalization achieves nothing beyond what previous covert
fictionalizations, like Mr. Volkov’s, did.
Joseph Stalin. Julian
Barnes has his Shostakovich wonder whether Stalin had not only ordered up the
editorial that attacked his opera, but also “perhaps even written it himself.”
Credit Hulton Archive/Getty Images
These episodes from
Shostakovich’s life contain abundant fodder for novelization, were the author
more enterprising and inquisitive about his subject. Mr. Barnes has his
hackneyed Shostakovich wonder whether Stalin had not only ordered up the
editorial that attacked his opera but also had “perhaps even written it
himself.” Nobody thought that in Russia in 1936: It was Mr. Volkov who raised
the possibility for gullible Westerners in “Testimony.” But now we know who
wrote it: a terrified former Yiddish writer named David Zaslavsky, who had
become one of Stalin’s most reliable literary hit men. His interior monologue
would have made a great novel.
To see Shostakovich as a
passive pawn in Stalin’s clutches at the Waldorf does scant justice to a man
whose collisions with power had taught him to play a complicated game with
exceeding, self-concealing skill. In his one well-documented person-to-person
encounter with Stalin, the phone call through which the dictator sought to
coerce the composer’s presence in New York, Shostakovich leveraged the world
fame that made him indispensable to secure a lifting of the ban on his own and
his colleagues’ works that followed the “formalist” denunciations the previous
year.
After his return from
abroad, Shostakovich paid the powers back with a pair of often derided tribute
works, an oratorio called “Song of the Forests” and the soundtrack score for
the film “The Fall of Berlin.” As the British musicologist Pauline Fairclough
has shown in a patient analysis, they are no worse than the works of
Shostakovich we now treat with respect. The Shostakovich of history did not
write badly for them and well for himself. No one writes badly on purpose, nor
could anyone make a career as successful as the one Shostakovich made in Soviet
Russia while maintaining the kind of moral and aesthetic purity his
mythologizers attribute to him. No one makes a successful career anywhere
without learning and executing an intricate social dance.
As for his official
co-option, there is no reason to think that Shostakovich sought either the
Party membership or the Union leadership that the government thrust upon him.
But once in possession of political power, Shostakovich behaved not like a
saint but like a politician. As his recently published official correspondence
shows, he was not above settling scores.
In 1948, one of the worst
things anyone said about him at the hearings that preceded the Central
Committee’s “Resolution on Music” came from Vladimir Zakharov, the director of
the Pyatnitsky Choir, the Soviet Union’s leading song-and-dance ensemble. “From
the point of view of the People,” Zakharov taunted, Shostakovich’s Eighth
Symphony “is not a musical work at all; it is a ‘composition’ which has nothing
whatever to do with the art of music.”
At the very first Union
meeting over which he presided as chair, Shostakovich paid back his tormentor
(posthumously) with a scorching attack on the choir’s repertory, which still
consisted mainly of Zakharov arrangements. To one of the ensemble’s then-active
arrangers he wrote that the hapless fellow’s setting of one particularly famous
song “has nothing in common with the art of music,” echoing nearly verbatim
Zakharov’s old insult. Yes, his hands, too, were dirty. Everyone’s were.
The author of “The
Porcupine” knew that. What lured Mr. Barnes into hagiography when Shostakovich
became his subject? Were I a novelist, I would speculate.
Richard Taruskin is
professor emeritus of music at the University of California, Berkeley. His
“Russian Music at Home and Abroad” will appear this fall.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/arts/music/julian-barnes-the-noise-of-time-shostakovich.html?rref=collection%2Fspotlightcollection%2Fclassical-music-reviews&_r=0
