"The Noise of Time"

[fiefoe]

Yet another gloomy read, about life under tyranny with Bolshevik characteristics. Julian Barnes is fine as ever. Of all the difficulties from the Power Shostakovich had to endure, the final one of being asked to join the party is perhaps the hardest to read.

• No information was given out, and they knew not to ask. Enquiring about the movement of trains—even if you were a passenger on one—could mark you as a saboteur.
• Destiny. It was just a grand term for something you could do nothing about. When life said to you, “And so,” you nodded, and called it destiny.
• So workers must be trained to become composers, and all music must be instantly comprehensible and pleasing to the masses. Tchaikovsky was decadent, and the slightest experimentation condemned as “formalism.”
• There were three phrases which aimed not just at his theoretical misguidedness but at his very person. “The composer apparently never considered the problem of what the Soviet audience looks for and expects in music.” That was enough to take away his membership in the Union of Composers. “The danger of this trend to Soviet music is clear.” That was enough to take away his ability to compose and perform. And finally: “It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly.” That was enough to take away his life.
• Well, there had been 100,000 labourers, so it was possible that some of them might have been morally improved; but a quarter of them were said to have died, and those clearly had not been reforged. They were just the chips that had flown while the wood was being chopped. And the NKVD would light up their Belomory and picture in the rising smoke new dreams of wielding the axe.
• And then the phrase from which there was no recovery began to appear in the newspapers, inserted into the most normal sentence. For instance: “Today there is to be held a concert of works by the enemy of the people Shostakovich.” Such words were never used by accident, or without approval from the highest level.
• Writers were condemned on page one of Pravda, composers on page three. Two pages apart. And yet it was not nothing: it could make the difference between death and life.
• The engineers of human souls: a chilly, mechanistic phrase. And yet…what was the artist’s business with, if not the human soul?
• His scrapbook. What kind of a man buys a scrapbook and then fills it with insulting articles about himself? A madman? An ironist? A Russian? He thought of Gogol, standing in front of a mirror and from time to time calling out his own name, in a tone of revulsion and alienation. This did not seem to him the act of a madman.
• His official status was that of a “non-Party Bolshevik.” Stalin liked to say that the finest quality of the Bolshevik was modesty. Yes, and Russia was the homeland of elephants.
• When Galina was born, he and Nita used to joke about christening her Sumburina. It meant Little Muddle. Muddlikins. It would have been an act of ironic bravado. No, of suicidal folly.
• Still, he used to remind himself that Brahms had played the piano at a sailors’ brothel in Hamburg.
• He imagined his mother sitting in a cinema while pictures of his girlfriends were projected onto the screen. Tanya—his mother applauds. Nina—his mother applauds. Rozaliya—his mother applauds even harder. Cleopatra, the Venus de Milo, the Queen of Sheba—his mother, ever unimpressed, continues to applaud unsmilingly.
• A journalist—foolish? hopeful? sympathetic?—described the Fifth as “A Soviet Artist’s Creative Reply to Just Criticism.” He never repudiated the phrase; and many came to believe it was to be found in his own hand at the head of the score. These words turned out to be the most famous he ever wrote—or rather, never wrote. He allowed them to stand because they protected his music. Let Power have the words, because words cannot stain music. Music escapes from words: that is its purpose, and its majesty.
• What if he had ended it pianissimo and in the minor? On such things might a life—might several lives—turn.
• The brown plague included Wagner—a composer who had always been put to work by Power... When the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed, Mother Russia had embraced its new Fascist ally as a middle-aged widow embraces a husky young neighbour, the more enthusiastically for the passion coming late, and against all reason.
• And therefore he imagined the following conversation: Power: “Look, we have made the Revolution!” Citizen Second Oboe: “Yes, it’s a wonderful revolution, of course. And a great improvement on what was there before. It really is a tremendous achievement. But I just wonder, from time to time…I might be completely wrong, of course, but was it absolutely necessary to shoot all those engineers, generals, scientists, musicologists? To send millions to the camps, to use slave labour and work it to death, to make everyone terrified, to extort false confessions in the name of the Revolution?
• But this was not an ideal world, and so irony grew in sudden and strange ways. Overnight, like a mushroom; disastrously, like a cancer.
• Sarcasm was dangerous to its user, identifiable as the language of the wrecker and the saboteur. But irony—perhaps, sometimes, so he hoped—might enable you to preserve what you valued, even as the noise of time became loud enough to knock out windowpanes.
• Rather, what happened to human illusions was that they crumbled, they withered away. It was a long and wearisome process, like a toothache reaching far into the soul. But you can pull out a tooth and it will be gone. Illusions, however, even when dead, continue to rot and stink within us. We cannot escape their taste and smell. We carry them around with us all the time. He did.
• How was it possible not to love Shakespeare? Shakespeare, after all, had loved music. His plays were full of it, even the tragedies. That moment when Lear awakes from madness to the sound of music…
• He wished he had been at that reading by Leningrad poets when Akhmatova came on stage and the entire audience had risen instinctively to applaud her. A gesture which led Stalin to demand furiously: “Who organised the standing up?”
• Proletarian purity was as important to the Soviets as Aryan purity was to the Nazis. Further, he had the vanity, or foolishness, to notice and remember that what the Party had said yesterday was often in direct contradiction to what the Party was saying today.
• Machiavelli said that you should never trust an exile.
• And how many martyrs would it take to prove that the regime was truly, monstrously, carnivorously evil? More, always more. They wanted the artist to be a gladiator, publicly fighting wild beasts, his blood staining the sand. That’s what they required: in Pasternak’s words, “Total death, seriously.” Well, he would try to disappoint such idealists for as long as possible.
• In the imaginary conversations he sometimes had with these disappointed supporters, he would begin by explaining one small, basic fact of which they were almost certainly ignorant: that it was impossible in the Soviet Union to buy manuscript paper unless you were a member of the Union of Composers. Did they know that? Of course not. But Dmitri Dmitrievich, they would doubtless reply, if that is the case, surely you can buy blank paper, and with a ruler and pencil make your own?
• Yes, he could still write unperformed and unperformable music. But music is intended to be heard in the period when it is written. Music is not like Chinese eggs: it does not improve by being kept underground for years and years.
• And yes, music might be immortal, but composers alas are not. They are easily silenced, and even more easily killed.
• It was a question even he could have answered. Revisionism was so loathsome and heretical a concept that the word itself practically had horns growing out of its head. The girl reflected for a while, and then answered confidently, “Revisionism is the highest stage in the development of Marxism-Leninism.” Whereupon he had smiled, and given her the best mark possible.
• But when a composer is bitter, or in despair, or pessimistic, that still means he believes in something. What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves—the music of our being—which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, if it is strong and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history.
• But that was the trouble with “historic meetings.” What was posterity to believe? Sometimes, he thought that there was a different version of everything.
• All through the years of terror, he had been able to say that at least he had never tried to make things easier for himself by becoming a Party member. And now, finally, after the great fear was over, they had come for his soul.
• “Dmitri Dmitrievich, we all know about that unfortunate and—if I may say so—unnecessary appointment of a political tutor. So demeaning for you, and such a characteristic of life under the Cult of Personality. All the more reason to show how times have changed, and that members of the Party are not expected to have a deep grasp of political theory.
• Once that nerve was gone, you couldn’t replace it like a violin string. Something deep in your soul was missing, and all you had left was—what?—a certain tactical cunning, an ability to play the unworldly artist, and a determination to protect your music and your family at any price. Well, he finally thought—in a mood so drained of colour and resolution that it could scarcely be called a mood—perhaps this is today’s price.
• but since he was already committing moral suicide, what would be the point of physical suicide?
• Being a hero was much easier than being a coward. To be a hero, you only had to be brave for a moment—when you took out the gun, threw the bomb, pressed the detonator, did away with the tyrant, and with yourself as well. But to be a coward was to embark on a career that lasted a lifetime. You couldn’t ever relax. You had to anticipate the next occasion when you would have to make excuses for yourself, dither, cringe, reacquaint yourself with the taste of rubber boots and the state of your own fallen, abject character. Being a coward required pertinacity, persistence, a refusal to change—which made it, in a way, a kind of courage.
• So, he was a man who loved chiming clocks and chandeliers.
• In “The Portrait” there was a clear, two-way choice: integrity or corruption. Integrity is like virginity: once lost, never recoverable. But in the real world, especially the extreme version of it he had lived through, things were not like this. There was a third choice: integrity and corruption. You could be both Chartkov and his morally shaming alter ego.
• Now that he had seen more of life, and been deafened by the noise of time, he thought it likely that Shakespeare had been right, had been truthful: but only for his own times. In the world’s younger days, when magic and religion held sway, it was plausible that monsters might have consciences. Not anymore. The world had moved on, become more scientific, more practical, less under the sway of the old superstitions. And tyrants had moved on as well. Perhaps conscience no longer had an evolutionary function, and so had been bred out.
• It was as if, when drawing up their plans for Soviet Russia, the architects had been thoughtful, meticulous and well-intentioned, but had failed at a very basic level: they had mistaken metres for centimetres, and sometimes the other way round. With the result that the House of Communism was built all disproportionate, and lacking in human scale.
• Irony, he had come to realise, was as vulnerable to the accidents of life and time as any other sense. You woke up one morning and no longer knew if your tongue was in your cheek; and even if it was, whether that mattered anymore, whether anyone noticed.
• If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony which had lost its soul.