Julian Barnes: The Noise of Time

And then Nita fell pregnant, and everything of necessity stabilised. Except that, with Nita into her fourth month, the leap year of 1936 began, and on its twenty-sixth day Stalin decided to go to the opera.

The first thing he had done after reading the Pravda editorial was to telegraph Glikman. He asked his friend to go to the Central Leningrad Post Office and open a subscription to receive all the relevant press cuttings. Glikman would bring them round to his apartment each day, and they would read them through together. He bought a large scrapbook and pasted ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ onto the first page. Glikman thought this unduly masochistic, but he had said, ‘It has to be there, it has to be there.’ Then he pasted in every new article as it appeared. He had never bothered keeping reviews before; but this was different. Now they were not just reviewing his music, but editorialising about his existence.

He noted how critics who had consistently praised Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk over the past two years suddenly found no merit at all in it. Some candidly admitted their own previous errors, explaining that the Pravda article had made the scales fall from their eyes. How greatly they had been duped by the music and its composer! At last they saw what a danger formalism and cosmopolitanism and Leftism presented to the true nature of Russian music! He also noted which musicians now made public statements against his work, and which friends and acquaintances chose to distance themselves from him. With equal apparent calm he read the letters which came in from ordinary members of the public, most of whom just happened to know his private address. Many of them advised him that his ass’s ears should be chopped off, along with his head. And then the phrase from which there was no recovery began to appear in the newspapers, inserted into the most normal sentence. For instance: ‘Today there is to be held a concert of works by the enemy of the people Shostakovich.’ Such words were never used by accident, or without approval from the highest level.

Why, he wondered, had Power now turned its attention to music, and to him? Power had always been more interested in the word than the note: writers, not composers, had been proclaimed the engineers of human souls. Writers were condemned on page one of Pravda , composers on page three. Two pages apart. And yet it was not nothing: it could make the difference between death and life.

The engineers of human souls: a chilly, mechanistic phrase. And yet … what was the artist’s business with, if not the human soul? Unless an artist wanted to be merely decorative, or merely a lapdog of the rich and powerful. He himself had always been anti-aristocratic, in feeling, politics, artistic principle. In that optimistic time — really so very few years ago — when the future of the whole country, if not of humanity itself, was being remade, it had seemed as if all the arts might finally come together in one glorious joint project. Music and literature and theatre and film and architecture and ballet and photography would form a dynamic partnership, not just reflecting society or criticising it or satirising it, but making it. Artists, of their own free will, and without any political direction, would help their fellow human souls develop and flourish.

Why not? It was the artist’s oldest dream. Or, as he now thought, the artist’s oldest fantasy. Because the political bureaucrats had soon arrived to take control of the project, to leach out of it the freedom and imagination and complication and nuance without which the arts grew stultified. ‘The engineers of human souls.’ There were two main problems. The first was that many people did not want their souls to be engineered, thank you very much. They were content with their souls being left as they were when they had come into this world; and when you tried to lead them, they resisted. Come to this free open-air concert, comrade. Oh, we really think you should attend. Yes, of course it is voluntary, but it might be a mistake if you didn’t show your face …

And the second problem with engineering human souls was more basic. It was this: who engineers the engineers?

He remembered an open-air concert at a park in Kharkov. His First Symphony had set all the neighbourhood dogs barking. The crowd laughed, the orchestra played louder, the dogs yapped all the more, the audience laughed all the more. Now, his music had set bigger dogs barking. History was repeating itself: the first time as farce, the second time as tragedy.

He did not want to make himself into a dramatic character. But sometimes, as his mind skittered in the small hours, he thought: so this is what history has come to. All that striving and idealism and hope and progress and science and art and conscience, and it all ends like this, with a man standing by a lift, at his feet a small case containing cigarettes, underwear and tooth powder; standing there and waiting to be taken away.

He forced his mind across to a different composer with a different travelling case. Prokofiev had left Russia for the West shortly after the Revolution; he returned for the first time in 1927. He was a sophisticated man, Sergei Sergeyevich, with expensive tastes. Also a Christian Scientist — not that this was relevant to the story. The customs officers at the Soviet border were not sophisticated; further, their minds were filled with notions of sabotage and spies and counter-revolution. They opened Prokofive’s suitcase and found on the top an item which baffled them: a pair of pyjamas. They unfolded them, held them up, turned them this way and that, looking at one another in astonishment. Perhaps Sergei Sergeyevich was embarrassed. At any rate, he left the explaining to his wife. But Ptashka, after their years in exile, had forgotten the Russian word for night-blouse. The problem was eventually resolved by dumbshow, and the couple were allowed through. But somehow, the incident was entirely typical of Prokofiev.

His scrapbook. What kind of a man buys a scrapbook and then fills it with insulting articles about himself? A madman? An ironist? A Russian? He thought of Gogol, standing in front of a mirror and from time to time calling out his own name, in a tone of revulsion and alienation. This did not seem to him the act of a madman.

His official status was that of a ‘non-Party Bolshevik’. Stalin liked to say that the finest quality of the Bolshevik was modesty. Yes, and Russia was the homeland of elephants.

When Galina was born, he and Nita used to joke about christening her Sumburina. It meant Little Muddle. Muddlikins. It would have been an act of ironic bravado. No, of suicidal folly.

Tukhachevsky’s letter to Stalin received no answer. Dmitri Dmitrievich himself did not follow the advice of Platon Kerzhentsev. He made no public statement, no apology for the excesses of youth, no recantation; though he withdrew his Fourth Symphony, which to those without ears to hear would assuredly sound like a medley of quacks and grunts and growls. Meanwhile, all his operas and ballets were removed from the repertoire. His career had simply stopped.

And then, in the spring of 1937, he had his First Conversation with Power. Of course, he had talked to Power before, or Power had talked to him: officials, bureaucrats, politicians, coming with suggestions, proposals, ultimata. Power had talked to him through newspapers, publicly, and had whispered in his ear, privately. Recently, Power had humiliated him, taken away his livelihood, ordered him to repent. Power had told him how it wanted him to work, how it wanted him to live. Now it was hinting that perhaps, on consideration, it might not want him to live any more. Power had decided to have a face-to-face with him. Power’s name was Zakrevsky, and Power, as it expressed itself to people like him in Leningrad, resided in the Big House. Many who went into the Big House on Liteiny Prospekt never emerged again.