Natasha's Dance (85 page)

    Shostakovich first used Jewish themes in the finale of the Second Piano Trio (1944), dedicated to his closest friend, the musicologist Ivan Sollertinsky, who had died in February 1944. It was composed just as the reports were coming in of the Red Army’s capture of the Nazi death camps at Majdanek, Belzec and Treblinka. As Stalin

    * It is not entirely clear when Shostakovich wrote
Rayok.
Sketches of it seem to date from 1948, but with the constant threat of a house search, it seems unlikely that he would have dared to compose the full score until after Stalin’s death (see further M. Yakubov, ‘Shostakovich’s Anti-formalist
Rayok:
A History of the Work’s Composition and Its Musical and Literary Sources’, in R. Bartlett (ed.),
Shostakovich in Context
(Oxford, 1000), pp. 135-58).

    initiated his own campaign against the Jews, Shostakovich voiced his protest by adopting Jewish themes in many of his works: the song cycle
From Jewish Poetry
(1948), courageously performed at private concerts in his flat at the height of the Doctors’ Plot; the Thirteenth Symphony (1962), the ‘Babi Yar’ with its requiem, the words composed by the poet Yevtushenko, for the Jews of Kiev who were murdered by the Nazis in 1941; and virtually all the string quartets from No. 3 (in 1946) to the unforgettable No. 8 (in 1961). The official dedication of the Eighth Quartet was ‘To the Victims of Fascism’, but, as Shostakovich told his daughter, it was really ‘dedicated to myself’.
¹⁹⁹
The Eighth Quartet was Shostakovich’s musical autobiography - a tragic summing up of his whole life and the life of his nation in the Stalinist era. Throughout this intensely personal work, which is full of self-quotation, the same four notes recur (D-E flat-C-B) which, in the German system of musical notation, make up four letters of the composer’s name (D-S-C-H). The four notes are like a dirge. They fall like tears. In the fourth and final movement the grief becomes unbearable as these four notes are symbolically combined with the workers’ revolutionary funeral lament, ‘Tortured by a Cruel Bondage’, which Shostakovich sings here for himself.

    On 4 October 1957 the first beeps from space were heard as Sputnik I made its pioneering flight. A few weeks later, just in time for the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution, the dog Laika ventured into space in Sputnik II. With this one small step, it suddenly appeared that the Soviet Union had leaped ahead of the Western world in science and technology. Khrushchev made the most of the success, claiming that it heralded the triumph of the communist idea. The next year a red flag was planted on the surface of the moon, and then, in April 1961, Yury Gagarin became the first man to leave the earth’s atmosphere.

    The Soviet system was defined by its belief in science and technology. After 1945 the regime made a huge investment in the scientific establishment, promoting not just nuclear physics and other disciplines that

    were useful to the military but academic sciences and mathematics, too. The state made science a top priority, elevating scientists to a status on a par with that of senior industrial managers and Party officials. The whole Marxist core of the system’s ideology was an optimistic faith in the power of man’s reason to banish human suffering and master the forces of the universe. The Soviet regime had been founded on the sort of futuristic visions imagined by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, whose writings were more popular in Russia than in any other country of the world. Wells was one of the first Western writers to visit Soviet Russia, in 1919, and even then, in the midst of the country’s devastation from civil war, he found Lenin in the Kremlin dreaming about journeys into space.
²⁰⁰

    Russia had its own prodigious range of science fiction which, unlike that of the West, formed part of its mainstream literature from the very start. Science fiction served as an arena for Utopian blueprints of the future society, such as the ‘Fourth Dream’ in Chernyshevsky’s novel
What Is to Be Done?
(1862), from which Lenin drew his communist ideals. It was a testing ground for the big moral ideas of Russian literature - as in Dostoevsky’s science-fiction tale, ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ (1877), in which the vision of salvation through scientific and material progress advanced by Chernyshevsky is dispelled in a dream of Utopia on a perfect twin of earth: the cosmic paradise soons breaks down into a society of masters and slaves, and the narrator wakes up from his dream to see that the only true salvation is through Christian love of one’s fellow human beings.

    Mixing science fiction with mystical belief was typical of the Russian literary tradition, where the path to the ideal was so often seen in terms of the transcendence of this world and its mundane realities. The Russian Revolution was accompanied by a huge upsurge of apocalyptic science fiction. Bogdanov, the Bolshevik co-founder of Proletkult, took the lead with his science-fiction novels,
Red Star
(1908) and
Engineer Menni
(1913), which portrayed the communist Utopia on the planet Mars sometime in the middle of the third millennium. This cosmic vision of socialist redemption fuelled the boom of science fiction writing in the 1920s, from Platonov’s Utopian tales to Aleksei Tolstoy’s bestselling novels
Aelita
(1922) and
The Garin Death Ray
(1926), which returned to the Martian theme of science in the service of

    the proletariat. Like its nineteenth-century antecedents, this fantastic literature was a vehicle for the great philosophical and moral questions about science and conscience. Zamyatin’s science fiction drew from the Russian tradition to develop a humanist critique of the Soviet technological Utopia. His dystopian novel
We
derived much of its moral argument from Dostoevsky. The central conflict of the novel, between the rational, all-providing high-tech state and the beautiful seductress I-3 30, whose deviant and irrational need for freedom threatens to subvert the power of that absolutist state, is a continuation of the discourse which stands at the centre of ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ in
The Brothers Karamazov
about the unending conflict between the human needs for security and liberty.*

    Science fiction largely disappeared in the 1930s and 1940s. Socialist Realism left no space for Utopian dreams, or any form of moral ambiguity, and the only science fiction that was not stamped out was that which extolled Soviet technology. But the space programme of the 1950s led to a resurgence of science fiction in the Soviet Union, and Khrushchev, who was a devotee of the genre, encouraged writers to return to the traditions of the pre-Stalin years.

    Ivan Efremov’s
Andromeda
(1957) was perhaps the most important work in this new wave, and certainly one of the bestselling (with over 20 million copies sold in the Soviet Union alone). Set in a distant future, when the earth has been united with the other galaxies in a universal civilization, it portrays a cosmic paradise in which science plays a discreet role in providing for all human needs; but what emerges above all else as the purpose of existence is the eternal need of human beings for ethical relationships, freedom, beauty and creativity. Efre-mov was bitterly attacked by communist hardliners: his emphasis on spiritual values was uncomfortably close to a fundamental challenge

    * It may be that the title of Zamyatin’s novel We was drawn at least in part from Dostoevsky - in particular from Verkhovensky’s words to Stavrogin (in
The Devils,
trans. D. Magarshack (Harmondsworth, 1971), p. 42.3) where he describes his vision of the future revolutionary dictatorship (‘[W]e shall consider how to erect an edifice of stone… We shall build it, we, we alone!’). Perhaps more obviously, the title may have been a reference to the revolutionary cult of the collective (the Proletkult poet Kirillov even wrote a poem by the title of ‘We’). See further G. Kern,
Zamyatin’s
We:
A Collection of Critical Essays
(Ann Arbor, 1988), p. 63.

    to the whole materialist philosophy of the Soviet regime. But he was not alone. Science fiction was rapidly becoming the principal arena for liberal, religious and dissident critiques of the Soviet world view. In Daniel Granin’s
Into the Storm
(1962), the physicist hero is a humanist, a Pyotr Kapitsa or an Andrei Sakharov, who understands the need to harness science to spiritual human goals. ‘What,’ he asks, ‘distinguishes people from animals? Atomic energy? The telephone? I say - moral conscience, imagination, spiritual ideals. The human soul will not be improved because you and I are studying the earth’s magnetic fields.’
²⁰¹

    The science fiction novels of the Strugatsky brothers (Arkady and Boris) were subversively conceived as contemporary social satire in the manner of Gogol and, drawing much from Dostoevsky, as an ideological critique of the Soviet materialist Utopia. That, to be sure, is how they were received by millions of readers in the Soviet Union who had grown accustomed from years of censorship to read all literature as allegory. In
Predatory Things of the Century
(1965) the Strugatskys portrayed a Soviet-like society of the future, where nuclear science and technology have delivered every conceivable power to the omnipresent bureaucratic state. Since there is no longer any need for work or independent thought, the people are transformed into happy morons. Sated with consumer goods, the citizens have become spiritually dead. This same idea was taken up by the dissident writer Andrei Sinyavsky in his
Unguarded Thoughts (1966),
a collection of aphoristic essays which renounce science and materialism for a Russian faith and native soil-type nationalism that could have come directly from the pages of Dostoevsky.

    Science fiction films were equally a vehicle for challenging Soviet materialism. In Romm’s
Nine Days
(1962), for example, some scientists engage in long debates about the moral questions posed by atomic energy. They philosophize about the means and ends of science as a whole - to the point where this very verbal film begins to resemble a scene out of Dostoevsky in which characters discuss the existence of a God. In Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece
Solaris
(1972) the exploration of outer space becomes a moral and spiritual quest for self-knowledge, love and faith. The cosmic traveller, a scientist called Chris, journeys to a space station in the distant galaxies where scientists

    have been researching the mysterious regenerative powers of a huge burning star. His journey becomes a more personal quest, as Chris rediscovers his capacity to love, when Hari, his ex-lover, whom he had driven to suicide through his emotional coldness, is brought back to life, or a mirage of it, by the powers of the star. Hari’s sacrifice (she destroys herself again) releases Chris from his emotional dependence on her and allows him to return to earth (an oasis which appears in the burning star). In a spirit of atonement he kneels before his father to beg forgiveness for his sins. The earth thus emerges as the proper destination of all journeys into space. Man ventures out not to discover new worlds but to find a replica of earth in space. This affirmation of the human spirit is wonderfully conveyed in the scene on the space station where Hari looks at Bruegel’s painting
Hunters in the Snow
which helps her to recall her former life on earth. The camera scans in detail over Bruegel’s painting as Bach’s F minor Choral Prelude, interspersed with the sounds of the forest and the chimes of the Rostov bells, rejoices in the beauty of our world.
Solaris
is not a story about space in the literal sense of Stanley Kubrick’s
2001,
with which it is so frequently compared. Whereas Kubrick’s film looks at the cosmos from the earth, Tarkovsky’s looks from the cosmos at the earth. It is a film about the human values in which every Christian culture, even Soviet Russia’s, sees its redemption.

    In his cinematic credo,
Sculpting in Time
(1986), Tarkovsky compares the artist to a priest whose mission it is to reveal the beauty that is ‘hidden from the eyes of those who are not searching for the truth’.
²⁰²
Such a statement is in the tradition of the Russian artist stretching back to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and beyond - to the medieval icon painters such as the one whose life and art Tarkovsky celebrated in his masterpiece,
Andrei Rublev
(1966). Tarkovsky’s films are like icons, in effect. To contemplate their visual beauty and symbolic imagery, as one is compelled to do by the slowness of their action, is to join in the artist’s own quest for a spiritual ideal. ‘Art must give man hope and faith’, the director wrote.
²⁰³
All his films are about journeys in search of moral truth. Like Alyosha in
The Brothers Karamazov,
Andrei Rublev abandons the monastery and goes into the world to
live
the truth of Christian love and brotherhood among his fellow Russians under Mongol rule. ‘Truth has to be lived, not taught. Prepare for battle!’

    Tarkovsky said that Hermann Hesse’s line from
The Glass Bead Game
(1943) ‘could well have served as an epigraph to
Andrei Rublev’.
²⁰⁴

    The same religious theme is at the centre of
Stalker
(1979), which, in Tarkovsky’s own description, he meant to be a discourse on ‘the existence of God in man’.
²⁰⁵
The stalker of the film’s title guides a scientist and a writer to ‘the zone’, a supernatural wilderness abandoned by the state after some industrial catastrophe. He is straight out of the Russian tradition of the Holy Fool. He lives alone in poverty, despised by a society where everyone has long ceased to believe in God, and yet he derives a spiritual power from his religious faith. He understands that the heart of ‘the zone’ is just an empty room in a deserted house. But, as he tells his travelling companions, the basis of true faith is the
belief in
the Promised Land: it is the journey and not the arrival. The need for faith, for something to believe in outside of themselves, had defined the Russian people, in their mythic understanding of themselves, since the days of Gogol and the ‘Russian soul’. Tarkovsky revived this national myth as a counter to the value system of the Soviet regime, with its alien ideas of rational materialism. ‘Modern mass culture’, Tarkovsky wrote, ‘is crippling people’s souls, it is erecting barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.’
²⁰⁶
This spiritual consciousness, he believed, was the contribution Russia might give to the West - an idea embodied in the last iconic image of his film
Nostalgia
(1983), in which a Russian peasant house is portrayed inside a ruined Italian cathedral.