Death and the Ravens: Prokofiev, Mandelstam and Shostakovich

Six volunteers grapple with a burial casket which needs to be removed from an apartment near Moscow’s Red Square and delivered to the House of Composers. The route will be by way of lanes and alleys, since all of the city’s main thoroughfares have given over to mayhem. The two-kilometre journey by foot will take them five hours. It is a tiresome task. Often, their burden must be clumsily deposited onto the frozen ground to enable them to rest.

The mass grief for Joseph Stalin cannot be constrained by police blockades. The thrust and shove of unprecedented crowds has had force enough to bend street lights to ludicrous angles and overturn vehicles. A sixteen-year-old, the future poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, records:

The crowd turns into a monstrous whirlpool … I was being carried straight towards a traffic light. The post was coming relentlessly closer. Suddenly I saw a young girl was being pushed against the post. Her face was distorted and she was screaming … a movement of the crowd drove me against the girl; I did not hear but I felt with my body the cracking of her brittle bones as they were broken … When I looked again the girl was no longer to be seen. The crowd must have sucked her under … At that moment I felt I was treading on something soft. It was a human body. I picked my feet up under me and was carried along by the crowd. For a long time, I was afraid to put my feet down again. The crowd closed tighter and tighter. I was saved by my height. Short people were smothered alive, falling and perishing. We were caught between the walls of houses on one side and a row of army trucks on the other.

Yevtushenko reflects later that even in death Stalin ensures that the lives of others are taken. It is never known how many perish in the crush. Word of mouth says thousands. Officialdom will acknowledge a figure in the hundreds.

Elsewhere, the silence in a tenement hallway is broken by the ringing of its telephone. The residents here almost always assume that such calls will be for the violinist they know as Dubinsky, the fortunate one who lives alone. The flats all share the same floorplan; a bed-sitting room and a small kitchen. The one across the corridor from Dubinsky’s accommodates an extended family of sixteen. The sleeping arrangements of the grandmother, her five adult offspring and their ten children are by necessity inventive. A quartet of children sleep on a narrow bed in a corner of the bed-sitting room, while the grandmother, one of her daughters and three other children sleep on a bed in another corner. Another of the matriarch’s daughters, together with three other children, sleep on the kitchen table, while another adult sleeps beneath it. No one considers their situation unusual, nor is it thought odd that during the day—when all of the adult members of the family work in the same factory—these children should be left alone. In the evenings and after they have shared their meal from the one pot, the adults will drink vodka and sing songs. They will also “dance” after a fashion, moving their legs as they remain slumped in their chairs.

Rotislav Dubinsky answers the telephone. A colleague implores him to ready himself: black tie and Tchaikovsky scores. A string quartet is required at the House of Composers. The House of Composers? For Stalin? No! Hasn’t he heard? Sergei Prokofiev! He too is dead! But Prokofiev loathed Tchaikovsky’s music! Tell that to Kholodilin. Who? Kholodilin! The government minister in charge.

The casket has arrived. So too have Dubinsky and his three colleagues. Indeed, they are halfway through the slow movement of Tchaikovsky’s second string quartet when Kholodilin claps his hands briskly. There has been enough music. He and the musicians must now rush to the Hall of Columns. This is where Stalin lies in state. The few mourners who have gathered to remember Prokofiev continue to stand in silence as Kholodilin implores the performers to hurry. Prokofiev’s wife has been unable to attend the funeral. She has been in the Gulag for the past six years serving an eight-year sentence for espionage. She had attempted to send money to her mother in Spain.

Clear passage to the Hall of Columns proves impossible. Rumours have it that the winding flow of mourners extends back for some ten kilometres. A frantic Kholodilin enters a nearby building, finds a working telephone and calls for police assistance. These officers have the idea of forming themselves into a human wedge and repeatedly charge the sea of bodies eager to pay Stalin their last respects. Only in this way is progress possible. At the Hall of Columns, the four musicians are ordered to hastily seat themselves on the stage beside the members of the State Orchestra who are about to play. Kholodilin tells them that they must begin to play immediately after the orchestra ceases and that they are to keep this up (still Tchaikovsky) until the members of the State Orchestra vacate their seats and are replaced by the corresponding members of the Bolshoi. Before long an endless flow of Soviet citizens begins to enter the building. Sobs and intermittent shrieks of concern for the many mourners who have taken to throwing themselves on the ground drown out the music. News begins to circulate that there have been many casualties on the streets. Nikita Khrushchev, the man who will subsequently replace Stalin, rushes from the hall expressing concern for the welfare of his son.

For three days the quartet play the same Tchaikovsky slow movement over and over and over again. They must remain in the Hall of Columns each night. There is nothing to eat or drink. It remains inestimable as to how many Soviet citizens will have paid their last respects. The reaction to Stalin’s death elsewhere is mixed; a reporter for the New York Times has described him as “Genghis Khan with a telephone”.

Seven hundred kilometres east of Moscow, Nadezhda Mandelstam comes to terms with Stalin’s death. When the news broke a neighbour had burst into her apartment. The woman had been pale with shock and almost hysterical. Later, at Nadezhda’s workplace, fellow workers had surrounded her and howled. She knew that these women felt it prudent to do so. Despite this collective and very conscious display of grief, she celebrates internally what she will later describe as “a joy I had never known before in my whole life”. Almost twenty years before this, the Mandelstam home in Moscow had been raided and extensively searched by the secret police. Nadezhda’s husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, was taken away, as was a slim manuscript of his poems. His questioning had proceeded along formal lines until a file was taken from a cabinet and a sheet of paper was placed in front of him on which was written a poem that has since gone by the title “The Stalin Epigram”, which read in part:

Someone whistles, someone whimpers, someone mews,

Only he can point and make the thunder spew,

Tossing orders out like horseshoes, low and high

One in the groin, the forehead, the brow, the eye.

And every hit is a delicious treat

For the broad-chested boss Ossete.

The poem was written in a hand that Mandelstam did not recognise and was not one of those in the confiscated manuscript. It had only been recited a few times to groups of friends. While Mandelstam had erred in referring to Stalin’s background as Ossetian, there could be no doubt as to the poem’s principal subject. It was also obvious, since either an agent had infiltrated Mandelstam’s literary coterie or somebody had betrayed him, that to deny authorship would be pointless. Consequently, he was trundled off to the punishment cells where, after complaining about the brightness of the light, he was placed in a straitjacket. Here, another prisoner taunted the poet by predicting that all of his friends would be herded up, and due to his poems, made to suffer. When the straitjacket was eventually removed, Mandelstam immediately attempted suicide with the razorblade he had kept hidden in his shoe.

Somehow, Mandelstam avoided execution and was given—by the standards of the time—an astonishingly light sentence: three years exile in the Urals. After this, in 1937, he was sent to a state-funded rest home not far from Moscow. He would be arrested again, however—this time for returning to Moscow without permission—and receive a harsher sentence: five years labour in the Gulag. Never physically robust, Mandelstam died on the day after Christmas in 1938.

Not long after Stalin’s death, a 1953 report to the Presidium listed a figure of 2,526,401 political and non-political prisoners still being held in the Gulag. Despite the so-called “Khrushchev thaw” that followed and led to the publication of works such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) there were never any official pronouncements regarding the many millions who had perished in the camps, nor was there talk of reparation for survivors. Maria Vitkevich’s case is one of many documented in Orlando Figes’s The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (2007). Still suffering from irreparable anxiety many years after her incarceration, she told Figes in 2004 that after being detained in 1945 and spending a decade in the Norilsk labour camp, she was still unable to rid herself of fear:

I have felt it all my adult life, I feel it now, and I will feel it on the day I die …

Even now, I am afraid that there are people following me. I was rehabilitated fifty years ago. I have nothing to be ashamed of. The constitution says that they can’t interfere with my private life. But I am still afraid. I know that they have enough information about me to send me away again …

By 1955, the year Vitkevich was released, Nadezhda Mandelstam at last felt it should be safe to return to Moscow. During this year she also received official confirmation of the death of her husband. In the meantime, she had committed all of his poems to memory. He would not be cleared of the initial 1934 charges against him until 1987. This was seven years too late, for the long-suffering Nadezhda had died in 1980.

It was also a significant year for Dubinsky in 1955, since he and his colleagues had decided to call themselves the Borodin Quartet and would soon be met with international acclaim. The members of the Borodin Quartet had known Dmitri Shostakovich since 1948, the year of his second major Soviet denunciation. Labelled variously as a formalist, a traitor, a Trotskyite and even an American spy, his house was vandalised and the windows smashed, yet he escaped the Gulag. In 1960, Shostakovich asked the Borodin Quartet to privately play for him his recently completed eighth string quartet, a work that has since been regarded by critics and scholars as perhaps his most personal musical statement. Dubinsky’s recollection of the occasion is vivid. Once they began to play, “Shostakovich picked up the score and a pencil, and then put both aside, his head bent. What he felt at this moment, we could only guess …” As they played on (the work consists of five unbroken movements), “he sat before us, tormented, listening to his story about himself, his musical confession, the sorrowful cry of a soul, where each note weeps with pain. We tried not to look at him.” Finally:

We finished the quartet and looked at Shostakovich. His head was hanging low, his face hidden in his hands. We waited. He didn’t stir. We got up, quietly put our instruments away, and stole out of the room.

In The Gulag Archipelago (1973), Solzhenitsyn describes the most common form of perfidy during the Stalin purges:

The mildest and at the same time the most widespread form of betrayal was not to do anything bad directly, but just not to notice the doomed person next to one, not to help him, to turn away one’s face, to shrink back. They had arrested a neighbour, your comrade at work, or even your close friend. You kept silence. You acted as if you had not noticed …

In early 2005, the All Russia Centre for the Study of Public Opinion recorded that 60 per cent of respondents aged sixty and above longed for a leader described in the survey as “like Stalin”. Mary McAuley, who interviewed many survivors of the purges for her book Soviet Politics 1917–1991 (1992) made the following observations:

Should you ask the seemingly straightforward question, “How many people did you know who were arrested in 1937?” the response would probably be one of wide-eyed amazement, “Haven’t you read Solzhenitsyn? Don’t you know that everyone was arrested?” If you continue with: “But were any members of your family arrested?” there may well be a pause … “Well no, not in my family, but everybody else was.” Then you ask: “How many people were arrested in the communal apartment you lived in?” There’s a very long pause, followed by, “Well, hmm, I don’t really remember.”

In 1975 in Moscow, the Borodin Quartet play Joseph Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross (1787). Remarkably, it is the premiere performance of this eighteenth-century work in that city. The audience is overwhelmed and the State Concert Office is beset by requests for a repeat performance. The Director of Concerts entertains the idea, but agrees only conditionally. At first, he stipulates that the full name of the work should not be printed in the second concert program, suggesting instead that a title such as Seven Words would suffice. Then he has a better idea. The title in the second concert’s program will read: “J. Haydn, Quartet, Opus 51”.

1975 is also the year in which Shostakovich dies. The funeral takes place at the Moscow Conservatory’s Bolshoi Hall. The journalist and musicologist Solomon Volkov is there and will later write of the smile on the dead man’s face as one that gave an impression of contentment and escape. The official obituary speaks to Shostakovich’s greatness as a composer, lauds the man as a faithful son of the Communist Party and as a “citizen-artist”, one who had reaffirmed “the ideals of socialist humanism and internationalism”. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev has undersigned this, as have (in alphabetical order) most of the Communist Party’s divisional heads. Many of these ideologues are in attendance at the funeral, several of whom have bolstered their own careers at the dead man’s expense. Towards the end of the ceremony, and when they stand to form a guard of honour for Shostakovich, a friend leans towards Volkov and whispers, “The ravens have gathered.”

Barry Gillard, a frequent contributor, lives in Geelong. He wrote on the seventeenth-century English poet John Wilmot in the April issue.