# Of Music and Mountains of Corpses **URL:** **By** Robert Formaini **Published:** April 2, 1980 --- “The substance of this book is reminiscence, memories of the living hell that is Soviet Russia.” _Testimony, by Dmitri Shostakovich. Harper and Row, 289 pp., $15.00._ > “Resistance! Why didn’t you resist?” Today those who have continued to live on in comfort scold those who have suffered. Yes, resistance should have begun.... But it did not begin. —Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn _The Gulag Archipelago_ The substance of this book is reminiscence, memories of the living hell that is Soviet Russia, told to and edited by musicologist Solomon Volkov. It is not an easy book to read for many reasons. First, there is the constant stream of names that need footnotes, since most western readers are not familiar with Russian history. Second, there is little coherence in the ordering of the material, or in the sequences of events; it is almost a stream-of-consciousness memoir. Shostakovich’s mind wanders from memory to historical events, to theories of art and philosophies of life, with few rational bridges to connect these ramblings of an aging, pessimistic, and bitter man. Why then should one bother to read this book? Because it is, simply, one of the most important testaments to life in the Soviet Union that has yet emerged from that closed society. There is, of course, no shortage of books about the horrors of the collectivist superstate. On a theoretical level, there is Orwell’s _1984_ or Koestler’s _Darkness At Noon_. On the historical side, there are Conquest’s _The Great Terror_, Lyon’s _Workers’ Paradise Lost_, and, of course, Solzhenitsyn’s _Gulag Archipelago_. Yet this book repays the reader in ways these others cannot. Like Solzhenitsyn, Shostakovich lived it; the immediacy of the experience is powerful and real, with characters that actually existed, real human beings who were sacrificed to the irrationality of power run mad. When Shostakovich remembers his life, he sees “a mountain of corpses.” Yet the great sadness and horror of such an existence has become internalized within him, the only outlet being his musical compositions. Shostakovich’s life is a monument to the way socialism “works” in Russia; yet, do not think for a moment that Shostakovich says libertarian things, or praises the West. Like Solzhenitsyn, Shostakovich has much contempt for Western democracy. Unlike him, however, he has not been taken to the bosom of American hardliners. The mention of this book in _National Review_ is typical. It seems to say, “Okay, so he was unhappy and his work was used by the Soviet government for propaganda purposes; why then didn’t he become a dissident like Sakharov?” Yet the history of mankind is a continuing canvas of individuals buckling under to state power. The martyrs are always in the minority, precisely because most people value their own lives and the lives of their beloved ones above political resistance. There is also the love Russians have for their homeland, an affection that often leads them to remain and struggle quietly against the state, rather than flee to the West. I think most of this type of criticism is beside the point. In the comfort of our own existences, we may criticize others less fortunate than ourselves without the extent of our own commitments ever needing objective verification. If such conditions as Shostakovich describes come to the United States, then we can, with Thomas More, “clamor like champions, if we have the spittle for it.” But just who would clamor, and who would not, will remain, I hope, forever untested. Shostakovich makes the same type of argument against Sakharov: > Some major geniuses and future famous humanists are behaving extremely flippantly, to put it mildly. First they invent a powerful weapon and hand it over to the tyrants and then they write snide brochures. But one doesn’t balance out the other. There aren’t any brochures that could balance the hydrogen bomb. If a nuclear war comes between Russia and the United States, it will be small comfort to know that the bombs exploding on American soil were developed and refined by a dissident, a man at odds with the Soviet state machinery. Shostakovich’s active distaste for what he calls “humanists” is a recurring theme in this book. In this regard, the contempt he showers on western liberal intellectuals is no less intense than Solzhenitsyn’s. Just then, in 1949, the Jewish poet Itsik Fefer was arrested on Stalin’s orders. Paul Robeson was in Moscow and in the midst of all the banquets and balls, he remembered that he had a friend called Itsik. Where’s Itsik? “You’ll have your Itsik,” Stalin decided, and pulled his usual bare trick. Itsik Fefer invited Paul Robeson to dine with him in Moscow’s most chic restaurant. Robeson arrived and was led to a private chamber in the restaurant, where the table was set with drinks and lavish _zakuski_. Fefer was really sitting at the table, with several unknown men. Fefer was thin and pale and said little. But Robeson ate and drank well and saw his old friend. After their friendly dinner, the men Robeson didn’t know returr Fefer to prison, where he soon died. Robeson went back to America, where he told everyone that the rumors about Fefer’s arrest and death were nonsense and slander. He had been drinking with Fefer personally. And really, it’s a lot easier living that way, it’s more convenient to think that your friend is a rich and free man who can treat you to a luxurious dinner. Thinking that your friend is in prison is not pleasant. You have to get involved, you have to write letters and protests. And if you write a protest you won’t be invited the next time and they’ll ruin your good name. The radio and papers pers will smear you with dirt, they’ll call you a reactionary. No, it’s much easier to believe what you see. And you always see what you want to see. The mentality of the chicken—when a chicken pecks, it sees only the one grain and nothing else. And so it pecks, grain by grain, until the farmer breaks its neck. Stalin understood this chicken mentality better than anyone, he knew how to deal with chickens. And they all ate out of his hand. As I understand it, they don’t like to remember this in the West. For they’re always right, the great Western humanists, lovers of truthful literature and art. It’s we who are always at fault. Shostakovich’s bitterness at such myopia on the part of western apologists for Soviet tyranny rivals the bitterness he holds for the regime itself. Why the double standard? he asks. I’m the one who gets asked, “Why did you sign this and that?” But has anyone ever asked André Malraux why he glorified the construction of the White Sea Canal, where thousands upon thousands of people perished? No, no one has. Too bad. They should ask more often. After all, no one can keep these gentlemen from answering, nothing threatened their lives then and nothing threatens them now. And what about the no less famous humanist George Bernard Shaw? It was he who said, “You won’t frighten me with the word ‘dictator.’” Naturally, why should Shaw be frightened? There weren’t any in England, where he lived. I think their last dictator had been Cromwell. Shaw just came to visit a dictator. It was Shaw who announced upon his return from the Soviet Union, “Hunger in Russia? Nonsense. I’ve never been fed as well anywhere as in Moscow.” Millions were going hungry then and several million peasants died of starvation. And yet people are delighted by Shaw, by his wit and courage. I have my own opinion on that, even though I was forced to send him the score of my Seventh Symphony, since he was a famous humanist. And what about Romain Rolland? It makes me sick to think about him. I get particularly nauseated because some of these famous humanists praised my music. Shaw, for one, and Romain Rolland. He really liked _Lady Macbeth_. I was supposed to meet this famous humanist from the glorious pleiad of lovers of truthful literature and just as truthful music. But I didn’t go. I said I was ill. Once I was tormented by the question: why? why? Why were these people lying to the entire world? Why don’t these famous humanists give a damn about us, our lives, honor, and dignity? And then I suddenly calmed down. If they don’t give a damn, then they don’t. And to hell with them. Their cozy life as famous humanists is what they hold most dear. That means that they can’t be taken seriously. Western liberals and other proselytizers for “detente” have no followers within the Soviet Union itself. Here, such individuals are lauded in the media, universities, and editorial pages of our great newspapers as “concerned individuals” and “advocates of human rights.” The judgment of the Soviet people is somewhat different: > The moral is clear. There can be no friendship with famous humanists. We are poles apart, they and I. I don’t trust any of them and not one of them has ever done anything good for me. I do not acknowledge their right to question me. They do not have the moral right and they dare not lecture me. I never answered their questions and I never will. I never took their lectures seriously and I never will. I am backed up by the bitter experience of my gray and miserable life. And I’m not happy in the least that my students have adopted my suspiciousness. They don’t believe the famous humanists either and they’re right. Within these pages, those who are curious about musical matters will find a wealth of useful information as to the opinions and meanings Shostakovich tried to put into his music. One finds, for instance, the following on Toscanini: > Toscanini sent me his recording of my Seventh Symphony and hearing it made me very angry. Everything is wrong. The spirit and the character and the tempos. It’s a lousy, sloppy hack job. I wrote him a letter expressing my views. I don’t know if he ever got it, maybe he did and pretended not to—that would be completely in keeping with his vain and egotistical style. Why do I think that Toscanini didn’t let it be known that I wrote to him? Because much later I received a letter from America: I was elected to the Toscanini Society! They must have thought that I was a great fan of the maestro’s. The relationship Shostakovich had with Prokofiev was never close, and he feels free to denigrate Prokofiev’s abilities: Once, Prokofiev was showing his assignments in orchestration to Rimsky-Korsakov. This was always done in front of the entire class. Rimsky-Korsakov found a number of mistakes in Prokofiev’s work and grew angry. Prokofiev turned to the class triumphantly—there, the old man is mad. He thought that it somehow increased his esteem. But as he later told it, his friends’ faces remained serious; he didn’t find support in this instance. And by the way, he never did learn how to orchestrate properly. Many of Shostakovich’s opinions are contained within stories about incidents in Russia. This gem on Stravinsky stands out: The invitation to Stravinsky was the result of high politics. At the very top it was decided to make him the number one national composer, but this number didn’t work. Stravinsky hadn’t forgotten anything— that he had been called a lackey of American imperialism and a flunky of the Catholic Church — and the very same people who had called him that were now greeting him with out-spread arms. Stravinsky offered his walking stick instead of his hand to one of those hypocrites, who was forced to shake it, proving that he was the real lackey. Another kept hanging around, but didn’t dare come up to him. He knew that he was at fault, so he stayed in the foyer the whole time, just like a lackey. “Lackey, stay in the foyer, I’ll deal with your master,” as Pushkin once said. Over and over through these stories we are treated to the insanity of the Soviet regime’s attempts to control art and artists. The futility and stupidity of what happens under dictatorships, it would seem, cannot be overstated. Gachev was a good musicologist, and after completing some difficult work he decided to take a rest and went to a sanatorium, where he shared a room with several others. Someone found an old French newspaper. To his misfortune, Gachev read French. He opened the paper and began reading aloud, just a few sentences, and stopped—it was something negative about Stalin. “Ah, what nonsense!” But it was too late. He was arrested in the morning. Someone from the room turned him in, or perhaps they all did. Before his arrest, Gachev had corresponded with Romain Rolland, who liked the work Gachev had written on him. Rolland praised Gachev. I wonder, did the great French humanist ever inquire what happened to his admirer and researcher? Where he suddenly disappeared to? I think Gachev got five years. He was a strong man and he got through the five years of hard labor, naïvely hoping that he would be released when his term was up. A few days before the end Gachev was told that he had got an additional ten years. It broke him and he died soon after. Everyone wrote denunciations then. Composers probably used music paper and musicologists used plain. And as far as I know, not one of the informers has ever repented. In the middle of the 1950s some of the arrested began returning, the lucky ones who survived. Some of them were shown their so-called files, which included the denunciations. Nowadays the informers and former prisoners meet at concerts. Sometimes they bow. Forced labor, communal apartments (“May they rot in hell”), “special distributors” of food for party functionaries, disappearances in the middle of the night, incomprehensible directives, sudden denunciations followed by sudden praise—all these Shostakovich details in an agonizingly realistic chronicle. The “fluid reality” that always characterizes a totalitarian system is exposed time and again— Tukhachevsky’s future at that moment seemed radiant. Only a few months earlier he had become Marshal of the Soviet Union. Sounds impressive? And a year and a half later he was shot. And by chance I remained alive. Which of us was luckier? —as is the 1984 existence, where simple jokes are told under rather strange, if understandable, circumstances: Even then you had to take a guest to the bathroom to tell him a joke. You turned on the water full force and then whispered the joke. You even laughed quietly, into your fist. This marvelous tradition did not die out. It continues in our day. How can we Americans understand this type of existence? In Russia, it is not a question of understanding, but of survival. Collectivism has run wild, beyond reason, beyond humanity itself. How would we react if a man disappeared without a trace? The director was arrested but the work went on as though nothing had happened. This was one of the terrible signs of the age, a man had disappeared but everyone pretended that nothing had happened. A man was in charge of the work, it had meaning only with him, under his direction. But he was no longer there, he had evaporated, and no one said a word. The name Meyerhold immediately disappeared from conversations. That was all. Was this in the “Stalinist period?” Yes, but also no— for these things continue today under the ever-chang-ing faces of Soviet leadership. The root cause is power lust, and Shostakovich is eloquent in examining that cause: Tyrants like to present themselves as patrons of the arts. That’s a well-known fact. But tyrants understand nothing about art. Why? Because tyranny is a perversion, and a tyrant is a pervert. For many reasons. The tyrant sought power, stepping over corpses. Power beckoned, he was attracted by the chance to crush people, to mock them. Isn’t the lust for power a perversion? If you’re consistent, you must answer that question in the affirmative. At the moment when the lust for power arises in you, you’re a lost man. I am suspicious of every candidate for leadership. I had enough illusions in my misty youth. And so, having satisfied his perverted desires, the man becomes a leader, and now the perversions continue, because power has to be defended, against madmen like yourself. For even if there are no such enemies, you have to invent them, because otherwise you can’t flex your muscles completely, you can’t oppress the people completely, making the blood spurt. And without that, what pleasure is there in power? Very little. Stalin, Lenin, Brezhnev... the names are immaterial, for in the name of ideology, the policies never change. Lenin had only one complaint against Stalin, that he was “rude” (surely a case of euphemism carried to an infinite extreme). Shostakovich remarks: “As we know all too well, the Party leadership didn’t feel the need to remove Stalin from his post as head of the Party because, in their opinion, what kind of a fault was ‘rudeness?’ On the contrary, it seemed almost like valor.” Of course, many of Shostakovich’s works have been used by the Soviet state as propaganda. The Seventh Symphony comes immediately to mind. Written during the siege of Stalingrad, and rushed by airplane to a waiting NBC Symphony broadcast, it vividly tells the story of the invasion of Russia by the Nazi “Blitzkreig,” and of the final triumph of the Soviet forces. Similarly, the Fifth Symphony, known as “the triumph of a personality,” and ideologically as “the triumph of the socialist personality, the new Soviet Man,” with its typically Shostakovichian martial first movement and triumphant finale, has often been used by the Russian government, and by western “humanists” as well, as a classic example of what art under socialism can achieve. Yet these works have been misinterpreted, according to the man who wrote them. The program puff pieces, as he sees it, are precisely that, meaningless ideological fantasies written by those with a vested interest in their promulgation. The “triumph” in both symphonies, according to Shostakovich, is “forced rejoicing…rejoicing under threat.” The truth of this can be easily heard in both works, and is obscured primarily by the quicker tempo the Fifth is usually given by American conductors, and by the prepro-grammed aspirations and predilections of American audiences. No one cries upon hearing the conclusion of the Fifth in American concert halls, yet the sadness shines through for the Russians. Music may indeed be the “universal language,” but no two peoples speak it in unison. That the Soviet state understands the function of art is clear; why else would they take such pains to control it? The propaganda value of art is overwhelming, when done competently; a picture, a poem, or a symphony can have value far beyond anything which vast expenditures for direct political propaganda could buy. And so we have, in the end, a paradox. That Shostakovich and God knows how many more like him suffered and continue to suffer under the repression in Russia, and in countries all over the world, does not help us understand why they don’t follow other options. No, every new day of my life brings me no joy. I thought I would find distraction reminiscing about my friends and acquaintances. But even this undertaking has turned out to be a sad one. I have thought that my life was replete with sorrow and that it would be hard to find a more miserable man. But when I started going over the life stories of my friends and acquaintances, I was horrified. Not one of them had an easy or a happy life. Some came to a terrible end, some died in terrible suffering, and the lives of many of them could easily be called more miserable than mine. And that made me even sad-der. I was remembering my friends and all I saw was corpses, mountains of corpses. I’m not exaggerating, I mean mountains. And the picture filled me with a horrible depression. I’m sad, I’m grieving all the time. I tried to drop this unhappy undertaking several times and stop remembering things from my past, since I saw nothing good in it. I didn’t want to remember at all. Such is the nature of the Soviet artist. To create under such conditions, it seems to me, dwarfs virtually all the “poverty stricken, aspiring artist” myths that run through the history of European and Western art in general. What would the Russian artist give to live in poverty, but with artistic freedom? To cut all ties with the state, the unions of inferiors who judge your works, the bureaucrats you depend on for food and housing, the political hacks who write the reviews for the state-con-trolled press... what would they give? Perhaps not enough. Robert Formaini, a professional musician, is Vice President for Policy Research and Public Affairs at the Cato Institute.