Julian Barnes - The Noise of Time

To be Russian was to be pessimistic; to be Soviet was to be optimistic. That was why the words Soviet Russia were a contradiction in terms. Power had never understood this. It thought that if you killed off enough of the population, and fed the rest a diet of propaganda and terror, then optimism would result. But where was the logic in that? Just as they had kept on telling him, in various ways and words, through musical bureaucrats and newspaper editorials, that what they wanted was ‘an optimistic Shostakovich’. Another contradiction in terms.

One of the few places where optimism and pessimism could happily coexist — indeed, where the presence of both is necessary for survival — was family life. So, for instance, he loved Nita (optimism), but did not know if he was a good husband (pessimism). He was an anxious man, and aware that anxiety makes people egotistical and bad company. Nita would go off to work; but the moment she arrived at her Institute, he would telephone to ask when she was coming home. He could see that this was annoying; but his anxiety would just get the better of him.

He loved his children (optimism), but was not sure if he was a good father (pessimism). Sometimes he felt his love for his children was abnormal, even morbid. Well, life is not a walk across a field, as the saying goes.

Galya and Maxim were taught never to lie, and always to be polite. He insisted on good manners. He explained to Maxim at an early age that you preceded a woman upstairs but followed her downstairs. When the two of them acquired bicycles, he made them learn the highway code, and practise it even when riding on the emptiest forest path: left arm out to indicate left turn, right arm out to indicate right turn. At Kuibyshev he also supervised their gymnastic exercises each morning. He would turn on the radio, and all three would follow the hearty-voiced instructions of a fellow called Gordeyev. ‘That’s right! Feet shoulder-width apart! First exercise …’ And so on.

Apart from these parental physical jerks, he did not train his body; he merely inhabited it. A friend had once shown him what he called gymnastics for the intelligentsia. You took a box of matches and threw its contents on the floor, then bent down and picked them up, one by one. The first time he tried it himself, he lost patience and stuffed all the matches back in handfuls. He persevered, but the next time, just as he was bending down, the telephone went, and he was needed at once; so the housekeeper was detailed to pick up the matches instead.

Nita loved skiing and mountaineering; he was put in a state of mortal fear as soon as he felt the treacherous snow beneath his skis. She enjoyed boxing matches; he could not bear the sight of one man beating another nearly to death. He even failed to master the form of exercise closest to his own art: dancing. He could write a polka, he could play one jauntily on the piano, but put him on the dance floor and his feet would be ineptly disobedient.

What he enjoyed was playing patience, which calmed him; or card games with friends, as long as they played for money. And though he was neither robust nor coordinated enough for sport, he liked umpiring. Before the war, in Leningrad, he had qualified as a football referee. During their exile in Kuibyshev, he organised and umpired volleyball competitions. He would announce solemnly, in one of the few English phrases he had somehow picked up, ‘It is time to play volleyball.’ And then add, in Russian, a sports commentator’s favourite phrase: ‘The match will take place whatever the weather.’

Galya and Maxim were rarely punished. If they did anything naughty or dishonest, this immediately reduced their parents to a state of extreme anxiety. Nita would frown and look at the children reproachfully; he would light cigarette after cigarette while pacing up and down. This dumbshow of anguish was often chastisement enough for the children. Besides, the whole country was a punishment cell: why introduce a child so early to what it would see quite enough of in its lifetime?

Still, there were occasionally cases of extreme naughtiness. Once, Maxim had faked a bicycle accident, pretending to be hurt, perhaps even unconscious, only to jump up and start laughing when he saw how distraught his parents were. In such cases he would say to Maxim (for it usually was Maxim), ‘Please come and see me in my study. I need to have a serious talk with you.’ And even these words brought a kind of pain to the boy. In his study, he would make Maxim write down a description of what he had done, followed by a promise never to behave like that again, then sign and date this affidavit. If Maxim repeated his sin, he would summon the boy to his study, take the written promise from the desk drawer, and make Maxim read it aloud. Though the boy’s shame was often such that it felt as if the punishment were being visited back upon the father.

His best memories of wartime exile were simple ones: he and Galya playing with a litter of pigs, trying to hold on to the snorting, bristly bundles of flesh; or Maxim doing his famous impression of a Bulgarian policeman tying his bootlaces. They spent summers on a former estate at Ivanovo, where Poultry Collective Farm Number 69 became an ad hoc House of Composers. Here he wrote his Eighth Symphony on a desk consisting of a piece of board nailed to the inside wall of a converted henhouse. He could always work, regardless of chaos and discomfort around him. This was his salvation. Others were distracted by the sounds of normal life. Prokofiev would angrily chase away Maxim and Galya if they were merely being themselves within earshot of his room; but he himself was impervious to noise. All that bothered him was the barking of dogs: that insistent, hysterical sound cut right across the music he heard in his head. That was why he preferred cats to dogs. Cats were always happy to let him compose.

Those who did not know him, and who followed music only from a distance, probably imagined that the trauma of 1936 now lay well in the past. He had committed a great fault in writing Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk , and Power had properly castigated him. Repentant, he had composed a Soviet artist’s creative reply to just criticism. Then, during the Great Patriotic War, he had written his Seventh Symphony, whose message of anti-Fascism had resounded across the world. And so, he had achieved forgiveness.

But those who understood how religion — and therefore Power — operated would have known better. The sinner might have been rehabilitated, but this did not mean that the sin itself had been expunged from the face of the earth; far from it. If the country’s most famous composer could fall into error, how pernicious must that error be, and how dangerous to others. So the sin must be named, and reiterated, and its consequences eternally warned against. In other words, ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ had become a school text, and formed part of conservatoire courses in the history of music.

Nor could the chief sinner be allowed to continue on his way unshepherded. Those skilled in theolinguistics, who had studied the wording of that Pravda editorial as closely as it deserved, would have noticed an implicit reference to film music. Stalin had expressed a great appreciation of Dmitri Dmitrievich’s soundtrack for the Maxim trilogy; while Zhdanov was known to play ‘The Song of the Counterplan’ to his wife on the piano every morning. It was the view of those at the highest level that Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich was not a lost cause, and capable, if properly directed , of writing clear, realistic music. Art belonged to the People, as Lenin had decreed; and the cinema was of much greater use and value to the Soviet people than the opera. And so, Dmitri Dmitrievich now received proper direction, with the result that in 1940 he received the Red Banner of Labour as a specific reward for his film music. If he continued to tread the right path, this would surely prove the first of many such honours.