Julian Barnes - The Noise of Time

He often thought of Sergei Sergeyevich in wartime exile, selling off his finely-cut European suits in the market at Alma-Ata. They said he was a skilful trader and always got the best price. Whose shoulders would those suits be on now? But it wasn’t just his clothes: Prokofiev enjoyed all the trappings of success. And he understood fame in a Western way. He liked to say things were ‘amusing’. Despite his public praise of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk , when he leafed through the score in its composer’s presence, he had pronounced the work ‘amusing’. It was a word which should have been banned until the day after Stalin’s death. Which Sergei Sergeyevich had not lived to see.

He himself had never been tempted by a life abroad. He was a Russian composer who lived in Russia. He declined to imagine any alternative. Though he had experienced his own brief moment of Western fame. In New York, he had gone to a pharmacy for some aspirin. Ten minutes after he left, an assistant was seen fixing a sign in the window. It read: DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH SHOPS HERE.

He no longer expected to be killed — that fear was long in the past. But being killed had never been the worst. In January 1948 his old friend Solomon Mikhoels, director of the Moscow Jewish Theatre, was murdered on Stalin’s orders. The day the news came out, he had spent five hours being hectored by Zhdanov for distorting Soviet reality, failing to celebrate the nation’s glorious victories, and eating out of the hands of its enemies. Afterwards, he went straight to Mikhoels’s apartment. He had embraced his friend’s daughter and her husband. Then, standing with his back to the crowd of silent, fearful mourners, with his face almost pushing into the bookcase, he said to them, in a quiet, clear voice, ‘I envy him.’ He meant it: death was preferable to endless terror.

But endless terror continued for another five years. Until Stalin died, and Nikita Khrushchev emerged. There was the promise of a thaw, cautious hope, incautious elation. And yes, things did get easier, and some filthy secrets emerged; but there was no sudden idealistic attachment to the truth, merely an awareness that it could now be used to political advantage. And Power itself did not diminish; it just mutated. The terrified wait by the lift and the bullet to the back of the head became things of the past. But Power did not lose interest in him; hands still reached out — and since childhood he had always held a fear of grabbing hands.

Nikita the Corncob. Who would go into tirades about ‘abstractionists and pederasts’ — they being obviously the same thing. Just as Zhdanov had once denounced Akhmatova as ‘both a slut and a nun’. Nikita the Corncob, at a meeting of writers and artists, had said of Dmitri Dmitrievich, ‘Oh, his music’s nothing but jazz — it gives you the bellyache. And I’m to clap my hands? But with jazz — you get colic.’ However, this was better than being told you ate out of the hands of the nation’s enemies. And in these more liberal times, some of those gathered to meet the First Secretary were allowed, if with proper deference, to offer a contrary opinion. There had even been a poet bold — or crazy — enough to maintain that there were great artists among the abstractionists. He had mentioned the name of Picasso. To which the Corncob had replied brusquely,

‘Death cures the hunchback.’

In the old days, such an exchange might have led to the insolent poet being reminded that he was playing a dangerous game which might end very badly. But this was Khrushchev. His rantings made the lackeys with brass faces sway in one direction, then another; but you did not immediately fear for your future. One day the Corncob might announce that your music gave him the bellyache, and the next, after a fancy banquet at the Union of Composers’ Congress, he might actually praise you. That evening he had been holding forth about how, if music were half decent, he could just about listen to it on the radio — except when they transmitted stuff which sounded, well, like the cawing of rooks … And as the lackeys with brass faces were laughing away, his eye fell on the well-known composer of bellyaching jazz. But the First Secretary was in a benign, indeed forgiving, mood.

‘Now, there’s Dmitri Dmitrievich — he saw the light at the very beginning of the war with his … what d’you call it, ah, his symphony.’

Suddenly, he was not in disfavour, and Lyudmila Lyadova, concocter of popular songs, came over and kissed him, then witlessly announced how everyone loved him. Well, it really did not matter either way, because things were no longer as they had once been.

But this was where he made his mistake. Before, there was death; now, there was life. Before, men shat in their pants; now, they were allowed to disagree. Before, there were orders; now, there were suggestions. So his Conversations with Power became, without him at first recognising it, more dangerous to the soul. Before, they had tested the extent of his courage; now, they tested the extent of his cowardice. And they worked with diligence and know-how, with an intense but essentially disinterested professionalism, like priests working for the soul of a dying man.

He himself knew little about visual art, and could hardly argue with that poet about abstractionism; but he knew Picasso for a bastard and a coward. How easy it was to be a Communist when you weren’t living under Communism! Picasso had spent a lifetime painting his shit and hailing Soviet power. Yet God forbid that any poor little artist suffering under Soviet power should try to paint like Picasso. He was free to speak the truth — why didn’t he do so on behalf of those who couldn’t? Instead, he sat like a rich man in Paris and the south of France painting his revolting dove of peace time and time again. He loathed the sight of that bloody dove. And he loathed the slavery of ideas as much as he loathed physical slavery.

Or Jean-Paul Sartre. He’d once taken Maxim to the copyright bureau next to the Tretyakov Gallery, and there, standing at the cashier’s desk, was the great philosopher, counting out his fat wad of roubles with great care. In those days royalties were paid out to foreign writers only in exceptional cases. In a whisper, he had explained those circumstances to Maxim: ‘We don’t deny material incentives if a person leaves the camp of reaction for the camp of progress.’

Stravinsky was a different matter. His love and reverence for Stravinsky’s music had never wavered. And as proof, he kept a large photograph of his fellow composer beneath the glass of his desktop. He looked at it every day and remembered that gilded salon at the Waldorf Astoria; remembered the betrayal, and his moral shame.

When the Thaw came, Stravinsky’s music was played again, and Khrushchev, who knew as much about music as a pig knows about oranges, was persuaded to invite the famous exile to return for a visit. It would be a great propaganda coup, apart from anything else. Perhaps they hoped in some way to turn Stravinsky back from a cosmopolitan into a purely Russian composer. And perhaps Stravinsky for his part hoped to rediscover some remnants of the old Russia he had long ago left behind. If so, both dreams were disappointed. But Stravinsky had some fun. For decades he had been denounced by the Soviet authorities as a lackey of capitalism. So when some musical bureaucrat came towards him with a fake smile and an extended hand, Stravinsky, instead of offering his own hand, gave the official the head of his walking stick to shake. The gesture was clear: who’s the lackey now?

But it was one thing to humiliate a Soviet bureaucrat once Power had grown vegetarian; another to protest when Power was carnivorous. And Stravinsky had spent decades sitting on top of his American Mount Olympus, aloof, egocentric, unconcerned when artists and writers and their families were being hunted down in his native land; were imprisoned, exiled, murdered. Did he utter a single public word of protest while breathing the air of freedom? That silence had been contemptible; and just as he revered Stravinsky the composer, so he despised Stravinsky the thinker. Well, perhaps that answered his question about personal honesty and artistic honesty; lack of the former didn’t necessarily contaminate the latter.