Europe Central (137 page)

91 Shostakovich: The First String Quartet is “a particular exercise in the form of a quartet” —
Musik und Gesellschaft,
vol. 34, no. 9 (September 1981), pp. 549-52 (Ekkehard Ochs, “Das Streichquartett im Schaffen von Dmitri Schostakowitch: Zum 75. Geburtstag des Komponisten am 25. September), p. 549 (trans. by WTV).

91 Shostakovich to T. Glivenko: “I have a very clever wife, oh, yes—very clever . . .” —Khentova, p. 131, Mineyev p. 12; Shostakovich-ized by WTV.

91 Shostakovich: “When a critic for
Worker and Theater
or for
The Evening Red Gazette
”. . . —Quoted in Richard Taruskin,
Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000 rev. repr. of 1977 ed.), pp. 480-81 (from
Sovetskaya Muzika,
no. 3 [1933], p. 121).

92 E. Mravinsky: “This masquerade imparts the spurious impression that Shostakovich is being emotional . . .”—Khentova (Mineyev), original p. 114, Mineyev p. 1; slightly reworded for contextual clarity by WTV.

92 Shostakovich: “I can’t forgive myself for not kidnapping my golden Elenochka and bringing her to Baku with me” and “As soon as I’m back in my Lyalka’s arms I’ll have the strength to resolve everything”—After Khentova (Mineyev), original p. 116, Mineyev p. 2 (letter from DDS to EEK, 15 June 1934).

93 “The brilliance here is sinister rather than exhibitionistic”—Emanuel Ax, program notes to the CBS “Masterworks” recording of Shostakovich’s Trio (Opus 67) and Piano Sonata (Opus 40); produced by James Mallinson (code MX 44664); p. 3.

94 Distinction between
motif, leitmotiv
and
theme
—Based partially on a chat with ethno-musicologist Philip Bohlman in September 2003; after thinking for a moment, Professor Bohlman advised me that “theme” would be the right word to use in connection with Shostakovich.

94 Footnote: Moser’s entries on Shostakovich, Sousa, Serbian music, “Glasunow” et al—H. J. Moser’s
Musik Lexikon
of 1933 (Berlin-Schöneberg, Max Hesses Verlag, 1935).

95 Ekkehard Ochs on dialectic in Shostakovich—Ochs, p. 551 (trans. by WTV).

95 Shostakovich to Konstantinovskaya: “I try to stop loving you . . .”—Same document, original pp. 119-20; Mineyev p. 4; slightly “retranslated” by WTV.

96 Arrests “by the tens of thousands”—Conquest’s figure, in his chapter on the Kirov affair. Kirov was murdered by Stalin.

96 A. Ferkelman on Shostakovich: “I never succeeded in getting any other pianist to take such fast tempi . . .”—Elizabeth Wilson,
Shostakovich: A Life Remembered
(London: Faber and Faber, 1995 repr. of 1994 ed.), p. 105 (testimony of Arnold Ferkelman, slightly “retranslated” by WTV.

96 “I don’t believe that I’ll be yours . . .”—pp. 122-23, Mineyev, p. 6 (25 June 1934), slightly “retranslated” by WTV.

98 Shostakovich on Opus 40: “A certain great breakthrough”—Ochs, p. 549 (trans. WTV).

98 Shostakovich to Konstantinovskaya: “Why did I meet you? . . .”—Khentova (Mineyev), original, p. 122, Mineyev, p. 6 (1st, short letter of 25 June 1934).

OPERATION MAGIC FIRE

99 Epigraph—Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 94.

Many of my visual descriptions of the Condor Legion and its acts are based on photographs in the Ullstein archive in Berlin.

101 Wotan: “For so goes the god from you; so he kisses your godhead away”—Libretto booklet to the Solti version of Wagner’s “Siegfried” (James King, Régine Crespin et al performing; Wiener Staatsopernchor, Wiener Philharmoniker, 1985), p. 130 (Act III, Scene 3; German text trans. by WTV).

101 How Loki gave birth to ogres—
Poetic Edda,
p. 139 (“Voluspá hin skamma,” stanza 14).

102 Names and descriptions of various German airplane formations—After a diagram in
Meyers Lexikon,
vol. 4 (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut AG., 1938), pp. 193-94: “Fliegen im Verband.”

104
Meyers Lexikon,
1938: “He is no dictator . . .”—Vol. 5 (1938), p. 1276, trans. and made slightly less ponderous by WTV (end of entry on Adolf Hitler, which then concludes with an encomium from Goebbels).

AND I’D DRY MY SALTY HAIR

105 Epigraph—Combined from
The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova,
expanded ed., trans. Judith Hemschemeyer, ed. Roberta Reeder (Boston: Zephyr Press, 1997), p. 521 (“At the Edge of the Sea” 1914), and
Anna Akhmatova: Selected Poems,
trans. D. M. Thomas (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 31 (same poem, trans. as “By the Seashore”), “retranslated” by WTV as “At the Seashore.”

For many of the details in Akhmatova’s life I’ve relied on Roberta Reeder’s irritatingly reverential
Anna Akhmatova, Poet and Prophet
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994). References to Akhmatova’s heterosexual affairs are in the main based on the truth as I’ve understood it; references to more bizarre sexual practices are the fabrication of my narrator, Comrade Alexandrov.

105 “The equivalent of ten Stalin tanks”—An anachronism; Stalin tanks would not have been available at this juncture. But I wanted to mention Stalin’s name as close to the opening as possible.

106 “One of her postwar odes”: “Where Stalin is, is freedom . . .”—Akhmatova (Hemschemeyer), p. 879 (Appendix, “In Praise of Peace,” 1949), “retranslated” by WTV.

107 Footnote: Punin’s diary—Op. cit., p. 72 (undated entry for 1921, before 28 July).

107 Punin on art casting itself across life “like a shadow”—Ibid, p. 203 (entry for 24 February 1944).

107 Shostakovich: “Basically, I can’t bear having poetry written about my music” —Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 273.

108 N. Berdayev: “The putrefied air of a hothouse”—Quoted in Reeder, p. 25.

111 Gumilyev’s affairs with “Blue Star” (Elena Debouchet) and Tanya Adamovich—Reeder, p. 62.

111 N. Nedobrovo: “Her calmness in confessing pain and weakness”—Ibid., p. 88, slightly abridged.

112 Excerpts from “Poem Without a Hero”—All from Akhmatova (Hemschemeyer), pp. 563-64 (I.4.405, 407-11, 415, 418), “retranslated” by WTV.

113 L. K. Chukovskaya: Akhmatova’s fate was “something even greater than her own person” —Lydia Chukovskaya,
The Akhmatova Journals,
vol. 1, 1938-1941 (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2002 repr. of 1994 Farrar, Straus & Giroux ed.; orig. Russian ed. 1989), pp. 6-7.

114 Tale of the “Stalin Route”—Von Geldern and Stites, pp. 258-61.

114 Addresses of main places of detention (mentioned here and in “Opus 110”)—Dr. Cronid Lubarsky, ed.,
USSR News Brief: Human Rights: List of Political Prisoners in the USSR as on 1 May 1982,
4th issue (Brussels: Cahiers du Samizdat, 1982), p. 37.

115 Chukovskaya: “She herself, her words, her deeds . . .”—Op. cit., p. 6.

116 Akhmatova: “How early autumn came this year.”—Ibid., p. 6. 116 Akhmatova: “It’s extremely good that I’ll be dead soon.”—Ibid., p. 14.

117 Masaryk on Dostoyevsky and on Russian atheism—Thomas Garrigue Masaryk,
The Spirit of Russia
(New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1967; original German ed., 1912), vol. 3, pp. 49, 10.

118 Gumilyev’s nightmares—Diary entry quoted in Reeder, p. 61.

119 Gumilyev: “Your cold, slender hands.”—Ibid., p. 61 (trans. of “Iambic Pentameter,” 1913).

CASE WHITE

121 Epigraph—
Three Märchen of E. T. A. Hoffmann,
trans. Charles E. Passage (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1971), p. 324 (“Master Flea: A Fairytale in Seven Adventures,” composed 1822, published 1908).

121 “The most spectacular scenario ever written”: “Germany can no longer be a passive onlooker! Every political possibility has been exhausted; we’ve decided on a solution by force!”—Watt, pp. 514 (Hitler to Sir Nevile Henderson, 29 August 1939), 534 (Hitler’s Directive No. 1 for the Conduct of the War, 31 August 1939).

OPERATION BARBAROSSA

123 Epigraph—Marie-Louise von Franz,
Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales,
rev. ed. (Boston: Shambala Publications [A C. G. Jung Foundation Book], 1995), p. 45.

Some of the technical terms relating to telephones have been extracted (and, I hope, used correctly) from the
Great Soviet Encyclopedia,
vol. 25, p. 476 (entry on telephone communication). These words and information have to a lesser extent also been deployed in “Steel in Motion” and in “The Palm Tree of Deborah”’s description of the Leningrad broadcast of the Seventh Symphony.

125 “Lyalka, you filled my heart until it was ready to explode.”—Closely after Khentova, p. 123, Mineyev p. 6 (letter of 25 June 1934).

THE SLEEPWALKER

126 Epigraph—George Bernard Shaw,
The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung’s Ring
(New York: Dover Publications, 1967, repr. of 1923 4th ed.), p. 2.

126 Gunnar, Hogni and Guthrún—So they are named in the “Greenlandish Lay of Atli” in the
Elder Edda,
from which the
Nibelungenlied
in part derives. In the latter version of the tale, Gunnar is Gunther, Hogni becomes the balefully noble Hagen, and Guthrún, who never wanted her brothers to come to their destruction, is now Kriemhild, who lures them to it in order to take revenge for their murder of Siegfried.

127 Göring: “The Czechs, a vile race of dwarfs without any culture . . .”—Quoted in John Toland,
Adolf Hitler
(New York: Bantam, 1976), p. 646.

129 Hitler’s interest in the directing at Bayreuth—Albert Speer,
Inside the Third Reich,
trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Avon, 1970, trans. of 1969 German ed.), p. 185.

131 “We’re getting old, Kubizek,” &c (conversation at Bayreuth)—After Toland, p. 854 (slightly altered).

131 “Siegfried and Gunnar hadn’t even laid eyes on the princesses they pined for”—So we infer from the
Nibelungenlied,
in which Gunnar has actually become Gunther, as already noted; I have kept his Norse name to retain consistency with the opening of “The Sleepwalker.”

139 “On the day following the end of the Bayreuth Festival, I’m gripped by a great sadness . . .”—From the “secret conversations,” quoted in William Shirer,
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960)
,
p. 102.

139 The golden figures, the far-famed ones . . .”—
Voluspá
(The Prophecy of the Seeress”), stanza 60; in
The Poetic Edda,
p. 12.

THE PALM TREE OF DEBORAH

140 Epigraph: Shostakovich on musical means and ends—Fay, p. 258.

140 Russian casualties of the Leningrad siege—Contemporary Soviet sources estimated around 1,000,000 victims. Western figures were substantially lower; usually they claimed 6-700,000 killed. However, as late as the end of Shostakovich’s life, the American historian William Craig wrote that “more than a million besieged Russian civilians had starved to death during the nightmarish winter of 1941” alone.—
Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad
(New York: Reader’s Digest Press / E. P. Dutton & Co., 1973), p. 18. The
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
[
Bol’shaia Sovetskaia Entisklopediia,
ed. A. M. Prokhorov, 3rd ed. (Moscow: Sovetskaia Entisklopediia Publishing House, 1973)], ed. and trans. Jean Paradise et al. (New York: Macmillan, Inc., 1976), settled on the following statistics: 641,803 people died of hunger and 17,000 of bombings and shellings. The Germans dropped 150,000 artillery shells on Leningrad during the siege, 100,000 incendiary bombs, 5,000 high explosives (vol. 14, p. 383; entry on Leningrad). I decided to use the higher figures for reasons analogous to my use of Gerstein’s inflated figures on the Holocaust in “Clean Hands” (see note, below); this is what people would have believed at the time.

142 A. Glazunov: “Then this is no place for you. Shostakovich is one of the brightest hopes for our art”—Wilson, p. 29 (testimony of Mikhail Gnessin, slightly “retranslated” by WTV).

143 N. L. Komarovskaya: “A small pale youth . . .”—Ibid., p. 17.

143 Cousin Tania: “His compositions are very good . . .”—Victor Ilyich Seroff, in collaboration with Nadejda Galli-Shohat, aunt of the composer,
Dmitri Shostakovich: The Life and Background of a Soviet Composer
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1943), p. 102 (letter from Tania to Nadejda Galli-Shohat).

147 N. Malko: “As compressed as chamber music,” “he certainly knows what he wants,” etc.—Somewhat after Wilson, pp. 48-49. The anecdotes of the shoes and of the mating behavior of insects (the second one slightly altered from what actually took place) have been moved here for the sake of narrative effect. Both events occurred during his later Kharkov recital with Malko.

148 Comrade M. Kaganovich: “The ground must tremble . . .”—Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, ed.,
Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison
(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 45 (Ronald Grigor Suny, “Stalin and His Stalinism: Power and Authority in the Soviet Union, 1930-53).

148
Proletarian Musician:
“His work will infallibly reach a dead end.”—Fay, p. 55 (slightly altered).

151 Shostakovich to Sollertinsky: “Overcoming the resistance of an orchestra . . .” —Closely after Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 75 (another context).

152 Mitya to Glikman: Joke about Stalin & Co. in the sinking steamship—Von Geldern and Stites, p. 329 (“Anecdotes”).

154 Shostakovich to
The New York Times: “
Thus we regard Scriabin . . .”—Seroff, p. 157
(New York Times,
December 20, 1931).

154
Rabochii i Teatr:
“A last warning to its composer”—Wilson, p. 90. The 1979 edition of the
Great Soviet Encyclopedia,
which came out after the composer had won several Stalin Prizes and then safely died, confined itself to the dry statement that this ballet as well as “Dyanmiada” “did not remain in the theatrical repertoire.”