Natasha's Dance (82 page)

    Many people cried at the concert. Some people cried because that was the only way they could show their joy; others because they had lived through what the music was expressing with such force; others cried from grief for the people they had lost; or just because they were overcome with the emotion of being still alive.
¹⁵¹

    The war was a period of productivity and relative creative liberty for Russia’s composers. Inspired by the struggle against Hitler’s armies,

    or perhaps relieved by the temporary relaxation of the Stalinist Terror, they responded to the crisis with a flood of new music. Symphonies and songs with upbeat martial tunes for the soldiers to march to were the genres in demand. There was a production line of music of this sort. The composer Aram Khachaturian recalled that in the first few days after the invasion by the German troops a sort of ‘song headquarters’ was set up at the Union of Composers in Moscow.
¹⁵²
But even serious composers felt compelled to respond to the call.

    Prokofiev was particularly eager to prove his commitment to the national cause. After eighteen years of living in the West, he had returned to the Soviet Union at the height of the Great Terror, in 1936, when any foreign connections were regarded as a sign of potential treachery. Prokofiev appeared a foreigner. He had lived in New York, Paris, Hollywood, and had become comparatively wealthy from his compositions for the Ballets Russes, the theatre and the cinema. With his colourful and fashionable clothes, Prokofiev cut a shocking figure in the grey atmosphere of Moscow at that time. The pianist Sviatoslav Richter, then a student at the Conservatory, recalled him wearing ‘checkered trousers with bright yellow shoes and a reddish-orange tie’.
¹⁵³
Prokofiev’s Spanish wife, Lina, whom he had brought to Moscow and had then abandoned for a student at the Literary Institute, was arrested as a foreigner in 1941, after she had refused to follow him and his new mistress when they left Moscow for the Caucasus.* Prokofiev was attacked as a ‘formalist’, and much of his more experimental music, like his score for Meyerhold’s 1937 production of Pushkin’s
Boris Godunov,
remained unperformed. What saved him, however, was his amazing talent for composing tunes. His Fifth Symphony (1944) was filled with expansive and heroic themes that perfectly expressed the spirit of the Soviet war effort. The huge scale of its register, with its thick bass colours and Borodin-esque harmonies, summoned up the grandeur of the Russian land. This same epic quality was to be found in
War and Peace
- an opera whose theme was obviously suggested by the striking parallels between Russia’s war

    * Sentenced to twenty years’ hard labour in Siberia, Lina Prokofiev was released in 1 957. After many years of struggling for her rights as a widow she was finally allowed to return to the West in 1972. She died in London in 1989.

    against Napoleon and the war against Hitler. The first version of the opera, composed in the autumn of 1941, paid as much attention to intimate love scenes as it did to battle scenes. But following criticism from the Soviet Arts Committee in 1942, Prokofiev was forced to compose several revised versions where, in direct contravention of Tolstoy’s intentions, the heroic leadership and military genius of (the Stalin-like) Kutuzov was highlighted as the key to Russia’s victory, and the heroic spirit of its peasant soldiers was emphasized in large choral set pieces with Russian folk motifs.
¹⁵⁴

    As he was working on the score of
War and Peace
Prokofiev was asked by Eisenstein to compose the music for his film
Ivan the Terrible,
released in 1944. Cinema was the perfect medium for Prokofiev. His ability to compose tunes to order and deliver them on time was phenomenal. For Prokofiev the cinema became a sort of Soviet version of the operatic tradition in which he had been schooled under Rimsky Korsakov at the Conservatory. It gave new inspiration to his classical symphonism, allowing him free rein once again to write big tunes for grand
mises-en-scene.
Prokofiev’s collaboration with Eisenstein had begun in 1938, when, after the disaster of
Bezbin Meadow,
the film director was given one more chance to please Stalin with an epic history film,
Alexander Nevsky
(1938), about the prince of Novgorod who had defended Russia from the Teutonic knights in the thirteenth century. Prokofiev was asked by Eisenstein to write the score for his first film in sound. Under the influence of Meyerhold, the two were moving at this time toward the idea of a synthesis of images and sound - an essentially Wagnerian conception which they would apply to opera as well as to film.*

    This theatrical ideal lies at the heart of their conception of
Alexander Nevsky
and
Ivan the Terrible.
These two epic film dramas are essen-tially cinematic versions of the great nineteenth-century history operas. In
Ivan,
especially, the scenes are structured like an opera, and Proko-fiev’s brilliant score would not be out of place in any opera house. The

    * The two men worked together with Meyerhold on the production of Prokofiev’s opera
Setnyon Kotko
in 1939. The next year, following the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact, Eisenstein produced
Die Walkure
at the Bolshoi in Moscow. See further R. Bartlet,
Wagner and Russia
(Cambridge,
1995),
pp. 271-81.

    film opens with an overture whose stormy leitmotif is clearly borrowed from Wagner’s
Die Walkure.
There are orchestrated arias and choral songs; liturgical chants; even, quite incongruously, a polonaise; and symphonic leitmotifs, or the sound of bells, which carry the emotions of the ‘music drama’, as Eisenstein describes it in a note outlining his new Wagnerian cinema. In the final colour scenes, where music, dance and drama are combined, there is even an attempt to reach a complete harmony of sound and colour, as Wagner had once dreamed.
¹⁵⁵

    For Eisenstein these films represented a volte-face in artistic principles: the avant-garde of the 1920s had tried to take the theatre out of cinema, and now here he was putting it back in. Montage was abandoned for a clear sequential exposition of the theme through the combined effect of images and sound. In
Alexander Nevsky,
for example, the central idea of the film, the emotive clash between the peaceful Russians and the Teutonic invaders, is conveyed by the programmatic music as much as by the visual imagery. Eisenstein re-cut the film to synchronize the visual with the tonal images. In the famous battle scene on ice he even shot the film to match the score.
¹⁵⁶
Stalin was delighted with
Alexander Nevsky.
Its emotional power was perfectly harnessed to the propaganda message of heroic leadership and patriotic unity which the Soviet regime needed to boost national morale on the outbreak of war. Indeed, the subject of the film had such an obvious parallel with the Nazi threat that its screening was postponed following the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939.

    Stalin saw Ivan the Terrible as a medieval prototype of his own statesmanship. In 1941, as Soviet Russia went to war, it seemed a good moment to remind the nation of the lessons Stalin drew from Ivan’s reign: that force, even cruelty, were needed to unite the state and drive the foreigners and traitors from the land. The official cult of Ivan took off in the wake of the Great Terror (as if to justify it) in 1939. ‘Our benefactor thinks that we have been too sentimental’, Pasternak wrote to Olga Freidenberg in February 1941. ‘Peter the Great is no longer an appropriate model. The new passion, openly confessed, is for Ivan the Terrible, the
oprichnina,
and cruelty. This is the subject for new operas, plays and films.’
¹⁵⁷
One month earlier, Zhdanov had commissioned Eisenstein to make his film. But Eisenstein’s conception of
Ivan the Terrible
was far removed from the official one. The first part

    of the film to emerge in his imagination was the confession scene (planned for the third and final part of the film), in which Ivan kneels beneath the fresco of the Last Judgement in the Cathedral of the Assumption and offers his repentance for the evils of his reign while a monk reads out an endless list of people executed on the Tsar’s command.
¹⁵⁸

    From the start, then,
Ivan
was conceived as a tragedy, a Soviet version of
Boris Godunov
which would contain a terrifying commentary on the human costs of tyranny. However, because everybody knew what Stalin did with people who made parables like this, the film’s tragic nature and contemporary theme could not be revealed until the end.
¹⁵⁹
In Part One of the film Eisenstein depicts the heroic aspects of Ivan: his vision of a united state; his fearless struggle against the scheming
boyars;
his strong authority and leadership in the war against the Tatars of Kazan. Stalin was delighted, and Eisenstein was honoured with the Stalin Prize. But at a banquet to celebrate his triumph Eisenstein collapsed with a heart attack. Earlier that day he had put the final touches to Part Two of his epic film (not publicly released until 1958). He knew what lay in store. In Part Two the action switches from the public sphere to Ivan’s inner world. The Tsar now emerges as a tormented figure, haunted by the terror to which he is driven by his own paranoia and his isolation from society. All his former allies have abandoned him, there is no one he can trust, and his wife has been murdered in a
boyars’
plot. The parallels between Ivan and Stalin were unmissable. Stalin, too, had lost his wife (she had killed herself in 1932) and the effect of her death on his own mental condition, which doctors had already diagnosed as paranoia and schizophrenia, no doubt contributed to the terror he unleashed.
¹⁶⁰

    When Stalin saw the film he reacted violently. ‘This is not a film -it is some kind of nightmare!’
¹⁶¹
In February 1947 Stalin summoned Eisenstein to a late-night interview in the Kremlin at which he delivered a revealing lecture on Russian history. Eisenstein’s Ivan was weak-willed and neurotic, like Hamlet, he said, whereas the real Tsar had been great and wise in ‘preserving the country from foreign influence’. Ivan had been ‘very cruel’, and Eisenstein could ‘depict him as a cruel man, but’, Stalin explained,

    you have to show why he had to be cruel. One of Ivan the Terrible’s mistakes was to stop short of cutting up the five key feudal clans. Had he destroyed these five clans, there would have been no Time of Troubles. And when Ivan the Terrible had someone executed, he would spend a long time in repentance and prayer. God was a hindrance to him in this respect. He should have been more decisive.
¹⁶²

    Part Two of
Ivan
was banned by Stalin, but Eisenstein was permitted to resume production on Part Three on the understanding that he incorporate approved material from the previous film in it. On Stalin’s instructions, he even promised to shorten Ivan’s beard. At a screening of Part Two at the State Institute of Cinema, Eisenstein gave a speech in which he criticized himself for the ‘formalistic deviations’ of his film. But he told his friends that he would not change his film. ‘What re-shooting?’ he said to one director. ‘Don’t you realize that I’d die at the first shot?’
¹⁶³
Eisenstein, who had never lacked bravura, was evidently preparing an artistic rebellion, culminating in the confession scene of the film’s third and final part, a terrifying commentary on Stalin’s madness and his sins:

    Tsar Ivan bangs his forehead against the flagstones in a rapid sequence of genuflections. His eyes swim with blood. The blood blinds him. The blood enters his ears and deafens him. He sees nothing.
¹⁶⁴

    When they shot the scene the actor Mikhail Kuznetsov asked Eisenstein what was going on. ‘Look, 1,200
boyars
have been killed. The Tsar
is
“Terrible”! So why on earth is he repenting?’ Eisenstein replied: ‘Stalin has killed more people and he does not repent. Let him see this and then he will repent.’
¹⁶⁵

    Eisenstein took inspiration from Pushkin, whose own great drama
Boris Godunov
had served as a warning against tyranny in the wake of the suppression of the Decembrist revolt by Tsar Nicholas I. But there is a deeper sense in which his brave defiance as an artist was rooted in the whole of the Russian humanist tradition of the nineteenth century. As he explained to a fellow director, who had pointed out the connection to
Boris Godunov:

    ’Lord, can you really see it? I’m so happy, so happy! Of course it is Boris Godunov: “Five years I have governed in peace, but my soul is troubled…” I could not make a film like that without the Russian tradition - without that great tradition of conscience. Violence can be explained, it can be legalized, but it can’t be justified. If you are a human being, it has to be atoned. One man may destroy another - but as a human being I must find this painful, because man is the highest value… This, in my opinion, is the inspiring tradition of our people, our nation, and our literature.
¹⁶⁶

    Eisenstein did not have enough strength to complete his film. The heart attack had crippled him. He died in 1948.

    The Leningrad to which Akhmatova returned in 1944 was a shadow of its former self. For her it was a ‘vast cemetery, the graveyard of her friends’, Isaiah Berlin wrote: ‘it was like the aftermath of a forest fire - the few charred trees made the desolation still more desolate’.
¹⁶⁷
Before the war she had been in love with a married man, Vladimir Garshin, a medical professor from a famous nineteenth-century literary family. He had helped her through her son’s arrest and her first heart attack in 1940. On Akhmatova’s return to Leningrad she was expecting to be with him again. But when he met her at the station there was something wrong. During the siege Garshin had become the chief coroner of Leningrad, and the daily horror which he experienced in the starving city, where cannibalism became rife, stripped away his sanity. In October 1942 his wife had collapsed from hunger on the street and died. He had recognized her body in the morgue.
¹⁶⁸
When Garshin met Akhmatova at the station, it was only to tell her that their love affair was over. Akhmatova returned to the Fountain House. The palace had been half-destroyed by a German bomb. Her old apartment had large cracks in the walls, the windows were all smashed, and there was no running water or electricity. In November 1945, her son Lev came to live with her, having been released from the labour camp to fight in the war, and he resumed his studies at the university.