The Rest Is Noise Series: The Art of Fear: Music in Stalin’s Russia. Alex Ross

extra verses for “Die Moritat vom Mackie Messer,” Bertolt Brecht wrote, “There are those who dwell in darkness, there are those who dwell in light.” Most dwell in neither place, and Shostakovich speaks for all.

      Revolution

      Lenin, the prototype of the twentieth-century dictator, had favorite authors and composers, but he was too rigorous a materialist to bother much with art. He had little patience for the avant-garde, and once had a fit when futurists painted May Day colors on the trees in the Aleksandrovsky gardens. Music he regarded as a bourgeois placebo that covered up the sufferings of mankind. In a conversation with Maxim Gorky, he extolled the power of Beethoven, but added, “I can’t listen to music too often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid nice things, and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell.” Nevertheless, he tolerated the activities of various avant-garde factions, which lent a veneer of sophistication to the thuggery of Bolshevism in its early days.

      Lenin’s chief artistic functionary was Anatol Lunacharsky, who from 1917 to 1929 headed the Commissariat of Enlightenment. Lunacharsky was not unlike Leo Kestenberg in Berlin—a peculiarly smart and broad-minded bureaucrat with a poor understanding of political reality. A philosopher by training, an observant critic of Dostoevsky and other authors, something of a mystic, Lunacharsky believed that a revolution in society should go hand in hand with a revolution in art. Communism, in his view, was a new kind of secular rite, for which art should supply the chant, icons, and incense. The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, among the first to join Lunacharsky’s crusade, joined him in believing that Communism could wipe out the “old aesthetic junk.” Mayakovsky’s poetry railed against bourgeois art in all its manifestations: “Spit on rhymes and arias and the rose bush and other such mawkishness from the arsenal of the arts … Give us new forms!” The epoch-making actor and director Vsevolod Meyerhold, who had dismantled the artifice of naturalistic theater shortly after the turn of the century, hoped that the revolution would breathe life into his dream of a “people’s theater.” As in Weimar, artists embraced Communism because it promised to cut the throat of a common enemy, the de cadent bourgeoisie.

      To lead Muzo, the music section of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, Lunacharsky appointed Arthur Lourié, a bohemian composer who was writing dissonant, spiritually charged music in the manner of Alexander Scriabin. Under the aegis of these two unlikely bureaucrats, a period of “anything goes” ensued. Russian composers of the twenties produced some of the wildest sounds of the time, in many cases out-cacophonizing their Western European counterparts. Alexander Mosolov’s orchestral sketch The Iron Foundry used grinding beats and layered rhythms to mimic the action of a factory. Nikolai Roslavetz composed according to a “new system of tone organization,” building dense chromatic textures from “synthetic chords.” Lev Theremin pioneered the eerily wailing electronic instrument that later bore his name. Georgi Rimsky-Korsakov, grandson of the great Rimsky, formed the Society for Quarter-Tone Music. The pièce de résistance of the era was Arseny Avraamov’s Symphony for Factory Whistles, which achieved a memorable performance in the port of Baku in 1922: “The Internationale” and “La Marseillaise” were sounded by an orchestra of factory sirens, artillery, machine guns, bus and car horns, shunting engines, and the foghorns of the Caspian Fleet.

      Lunacharsky’s notion of Communism as an artistically enhanced mass religion violated Leninist thought, and the Bolshevik arts utopia inevitably ran into difficulties. Experimentalism proved to have no propaganda value, except when it came to advertising Soviet culture to the West. Various factions of self-styled proletarian artists attacked the modernist tendency and demanded simple, popular entertainment in its place. Lunacharsky pleaded for multiple perspectives and freedom of expression—“Let the worker hear and evaluate everything, the old and the new”—but he steadily lost ground as the twenties went on. The Commissariat of Enlightenment crumbled into a morass of competing bureaucracies, and the Party eventually shunted the arts apparatus into the ideology and propaganda section.

      When Stalin assumed sole power in 1929, artists found themselves in a more conspicuous and also more dangerous position. Recent biographies, such as Simon Sebag Montefiore’s, have emphasized Stalin’s intelligence and charm alongside his well-known cunning and brutality. He was a well-read man with a taste not only for canonical literature but also for the modern satires of Mikhail Bulgakov and Mikhail Zoshchenko. Although Stalin detested the radical styles that had prospered during the Lunacharsky period, he promoted the idea of a “Soviet modernism,” a school of art that would embody the power and prowess of the new proletarian state. His musical tastes were narrow but not vulgar. He patronized the Bolshoi, listened to classical music on the radio, and sang folk songs in a fine tenor voice. He monitored every recording made in the Soviet Union, writing judgments on the sleeves (“good,” “so-so,” “bad,” or “rubbish”), and accumulated ninety-three opera recordings.

      Stalin liked to use the telephone, and had an unnerving habit of calling artists in the middle of the night. Sometimes, like a Roman emperor in an indulgent mood, he would grant his petitioners an extraordinary favor. Others would be told to expect a call that never came, and they would interpret the silence as an omen of disaster. Soon might come the dreaded knock at the door—“sharp, unbearably explicit,” wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam, in her great memoir Hope Against Hope—which heralded the arrival of the NKVD. Stalin’s manipulations created a new species of fear. “The fear that goes with the writing of verse has nothing in common with the fear one experiences in the presence of the secret police,” Mandelstam wrote. “Our mysterious awe in the face of existence itself is always overridden by the more primitive fear of violence and destruction.” As her husband, Osip, used to say, in the Soviet era the second kind of fear was all that was left.

      Young Shostakovich

      Dmitri Shostakovich made a nerve-racking first impression. His face was ashen in hue, his eyes darting furtively behind thick glasses. His body constantly twitched, as if something were struggling to escape from it. When he talked, his speech doubled back on itself, phrases repeating themselves like anxious mantras. In intimate gatherings, with the aid of a favorite vodka, Shostakovich showed another side of his personality—antic, caustic, passionate. He was capable of puppy-dog-like tenderness and also of forbidding anger.

      Laurel Fay, in her authoritative Shostakovich biography, quotes a verbal portrait that Zoshchenko made of the composer in the early 1940s: “It seemed to you that he is ‘frail, fragile, withdrawn, an infinitely direct, pure child.’ That is so. But if it were only so, then great art (as with him) would never be obtained. He is exactly what you say he is, plus something else—he is hard, acid, extremely intelligent, strong perhaps, despotic, and not altogether good-natured (although cerebrally good-natured) … In him, there are great contradictions. In him, one quality obliterates the other. It is conflict in the highest degree. It is almost a catastrophe.”

      Shostakovich was born on September 25, 1906. From an early age he showed an astounding aptitude for music, grasping basic theory and notation almost without formal instruction. In 1919, at the age of thirteen, he enrolled in what was then called the Petrograd Conservatory, where his abilities mesmerized Alexander Glazunov, the alcoholically dilapidated but still formidable head of the institution. Glazunov made sure that the young man stayed well fed during the lean years of Lenin’s New Economic Policy. In exchange, Shostakovich’s father supplied Glazunov with beverages illegally obtained from the Bureau of Weights and Measures.

      There was a history of radical-left commitment in Shostakovich’s family, and his parents welcomed the Russian Revolution in its initial stages. But they were not Bolsheviks, and took fright when Lenin’s forces swept aside the more liberal government of Alexander Kerensky. Shostakovich, then eleven, imitated his parents’ politics. In the early weeks of the revolution he wrote a Funeral March in honor of fallen anti-tsarist fighters, but the following year he either renamed that piece or wrote a new one in memory of two early victims of Bolshevik terror. Even in prepubescence, it seems, he was ambiguous.

      As a teenager, Shostakovich developed a taste for the iconoclastic poems of Mayakovsky, but not necessarily for the politics behind them. Only toward the end of his studies at the conservatory did Shostakovich finally come face-to-face with the absurdities of Soviet ideology: when a fellow student was asked to explain