Protest and Discipline: Shostakovich and the Revolutionary Self

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Protest and Discipline: Shostakovich and the Revolutionary Self

C.H.M. Kelly

Abstract

This article returns to the topic of Shostakovich's political views, and specifically, his response to the revolutions of 1917. It argues that the view of Shostakovich as certainly neutral if not positively dissident is coloured by the assumptions of the post-Stalin era and the views current at the time of what constituted principled behaviour. If we return to primary documents (e. g. Shostakovich's autobiographical questionnaire or his correspondence), the standpoint is much more elusive, and also heavily nuanced by genre and addressee. The main purpose of the article, however, is to look in detail at what it meant for Shostakovich to experience the revolutions at an extremely young age (only 9). Context for this is provided in an important collection of children's autobiographies collected by the йmigrй charitable association, Zemgor, in 1923-1924. These texts, written in an atmosphere that did not require the expression of revolutionary solidarity (as comparable Soviet autobiographies did), and which was even positively hostile to this, nevertheless often record the euphoria as well as terror that the events of 1917 inspired. A further frame for Shostakovich's later personal development was his exposure to a contradictory and conflicted educational process. The schooling that he received at the Shidlovskaya College, a Montessori-inspired free school, stood in radical contrast to the harsh discipline and regimentation of his education at the Conservatoire, a conflict that also helps to explain some of the cognitive dissonance of his later years.

Keywords: Shostakovich, the history of childhood in Russia, personal development in the early 20^th century, history of culture, history of education.

Аннотация

Протест и дисциплина: Шостакович и революционная субъективность

К. Келли

В данной статье автор возвращается к вопросу о политических взглядах Д. Шостаковича и его восприятии революций 1917 г. Автор доказывает, что представление о Шостаковиче как о политически нейтральном, отчужденном наблюдателе исторических событий и советского строя восходит к послесталинскому времени и продиктовано характерными для данного периода «шестидесятническими» представлениями о «порядочном человеке». Документы 1920-х годов - переписка, «Анкеты» и т.д. - представляют гораздо более сложную и запутанную картину, сильно нюансированную вопросами жанра и адресата. Более того, биографические исследования Шостаковича практически не уделяют внимания психологическому контексту, а прежде всего тому очевидному факту, что революционные события Шостакович видел в 9-летнем возрасте. Богатые материалы проекта собирания детских автобиографий, проведенный эмигрантской ассоциацией Земгор в 1923-1924 гг., позволяют реконструировать характерную для детского наблюдателя смесь восторга и страха, имеющую значение и для психологического развития Шостаковича. Другой очень важный фрейм для понятия личности композитора - его школьные годы, в частности влияние на детское сознание идей «свободного воспитания». С помощью неопубликованных документов из архива училища М. Шидловской, в которых подробно описываются школьная программа и методология преподавания, вырисовывается воспитательное учреждение с идеалами, идущими вразрез с жесткой дисциплиной и муштровкой, характерными для консерватории в годы учебы Шостаковича. Как считает автор, эта двойственность биографических впечатлений имела большое значение для амбивалентного восприятия революционных событий и идеалов раннесоветского периода композитором и в более позднее время, уже в зрелые годы.

Ключевые слова: Д. Шостакович, история детства в России, развитие личности в начале ХХ в., история культуры, история образования.

Main part

One of the odd paradoxes in the secondary literature on Shostakovich is that discussion of the composer's life and work is at one level obsessed with the relationship between this individual figure and history, yet addresses the historical background to the composer's life in a highly selective way. Existing attempts to contextualise the composer's work generally focus on musical history - a subject that has received excellent treatment in the work of Sheila Fitzpatrick, among others, as well as Dorothea Redepenning, Wolfgang Mende, Levon Akopyan, and Stefan Schmidl See e.g.: Fitzpatrick S. The Lady Macbeth Affair // Fitzpatrick S. The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia. Ithaca, 1992; Fairclough P Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony: Context and Analysis. Ph.D Thesis, University of Manchester, 2002; Fitzpatrick S. Voldemort or Stalin? // London Review of Books. 2011. Vol. 33, N 23. 1 December. P. 34-35; Akopyan L.: Dmitrii Shostakovich: opyt fenomenologii tvorchestva. St. Petersburg, 2004; Shostakovich i sovetskaya vlast': istoriia vzaimootnoshenii // D. D. Shosta-kovich: pro i contra. St. Petersburg, 2016. P. 7-51; Schostakowitsch-Aspekte: Analysen und Studien / Hrsg. von D. Redepenning, K. Meyer. Berlin, 2014; Schmidl S. Oper in der “Traumfabrik Kommunismus”: Zum Musiktheater im sozialistischen Ost- und Sьdeuropa der Stalinдra // Цsterreichische Muzikzeitschrift. 2012. Bd. 67, N 7. S. 31-39; Mende W. Musik und Kunst in der sowjetischen Revolutionskultur. Kцln, 2009. This subject also received reasonably neutral treatment in some works of the Soviet period, e.g.: Danilevich L. Dmitry Shostakovich: zhizn' i tvorchestvo. Moscow, 1980..

The importance of cultural history in a wider sense may be acknowledged, but this context is seldom thoroughly examined. Yet Shostakovich was, after all, not simply a musician and a composer: he was also a witness to some of Russian history's most traumatic events; he had a complicated personal life that expressed to the full the Russian late nineteenth - and early twentieth-century predilection for entangled emotional relationships; he saw (reluctant, but conscientious) service as a Deputy of the Supreme Soviet, a task that brought him an enormous and demanding postbag; and like many Russians, he was something of an artistic polymath, taking a considerable interest in ballet, painting, drama, literature, and many other areas of culture The earlier part of Shostakovich's life is well chronicled in: Dmitry Shostakovich v pis'makh i dokumentakh/ ed. by I. Bobykina. Moscow, 2000 (henceforth DSPD). On the later period the edition by Oksana Dvornichenko contains some fascinating primary material related to the composer's work as a deputy, though unfortunately it is presented without scholarly annotations or even proper source notes. Moskva, Kreml'. Shostakovichu / ed. by O. Dvornichenko, Moscow, 2011.. To find an analogy among artistic figures living in the West, one would probably have to go back to the nineteenth century, and then it would likely be a writer such as George Eliot or Charles Dickens, rather than a painter or composer Perhaps Andrй Malraux is the nearest analogy, though at a very different level of talent..

A second issue is the domination of work on Shostakovich by interpretive questions that don't fit the period being addressed. Particularly in the Anglophone world, there is a tendency to place at the centre of discussion the extent to which Shostakovich inwardly conformed to, or assimilated, the dictates of Soviet culture to which he outwardly assented A recent example of this approach is Wendy Lesser's work (Lesser W Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets. New Haven, 2011) and, in the literary world, Julian Barnes's novel based on the life of Shostakovich (Barnes J. The Noise of Time. London, 2011).. With a historical subject who lived on into the late Soviet period and was therefore able to comment retrospectively on his own earlier behaviour, there is a serious danger of back-projecting later attitudes on to earlier eras. In line with this, interpretation of the early Shostakovich has been strongly influenced by memory of the 1960s and 1970s (when many Russian intellectuals saw principled opposition to the regime as central to the claim to be a poryadochnyi chelovek) On this period, see e.g.: Alekseeva L. The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era / Transl. by P. Goldberg. Boston, 1990; Zubok V. Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia. Cam-bridge (MA), 2009. Cf. the comments of another leading oppositionist intellectual of the late Soviet period, Boris Gasparov: “Whatever the validity of Shostakovich's public and private utterances, no one claims, to my knowledge, to have heard from Shostakovich the shrill words of a public denunciation, similar to those that were addressed to him by so many critics, on so many occasions. He might occasionally sign a collective denunciation, joining a crowd of his colleagues (or rather, did not protest when his name appeared in print, alongside many others, sometimes without him having been even asked); but he never engaged in ideologi-cal witchhunting on his own initiative -- a popular and profitable sport that proliferated in Stalin's time, and is not altogether unfamiliar to modern Western criticism. Whatever officious insipidities or subversive buf- fonades came or did not come from Shostakovich's mouth, denunciatory discourses aimed at unmasking the hidden ideological villainy were not among them. When, after a period in which he had been pushed to the brink of extinction, he rose once again in official favor -- as happened more than once during his career -- he never used his regained stature to get even with those who had been demanding his head” (Gasparov B. A Testimony: Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony and the End of Romantic Narrative // Five Operas and a Symphony. New Haven, 2005. P. 165)..

There has been a widespread tendency, in retrospective interpretations of Shostakovich's life and musical career, to see him as caught between the warring forces of expediency and of personal morality. An account by his son Maxim captures this idea in the form of an anecdotal ekphrasis: «High up, over his bed, he had a little reproduction of Titian's painting `Render Unto Caesar' » This painting, held in the Dresden Gemдldegalerie, goes under various titles. In Italian, it is known as Cristo della moneta (Christ of the Money), in English usually as The Tribute Money. The Russian title, however, is The Denarius of Caesar, from the Gospels story represented in Matthew 22:15-22; Mark 12:13-- 17; Luke 20:20--26.. He used often to say to me: «Look how radiant Christ's face is. And below him is that dark nasty Pharisee showing him the coin and saying, `Why on earth do you pay tribute?' And Christ answers: `Render to Caesar the things that are

Caesar's: and to God the things that are God's' » The Russian versions of all three Gospels phrase this slightly differently: “...and unto God what is God's'.. My father used to say that Christ was purity and truth, and the Pharisee was everything false and disgusting» Shostakovich M. O zhizni i muzyke. Chast' 1. (2008) // Russkoe muzykal'noe obshchestvo. URL: http://www.irms.ru/shost04.html (accessed 01.06.2018)..

Given that Maxim was born only in 1938, this memory must come from the last decades of Shostakovich's life. One can compare Solomon Volkov's record, in Testimony, of Shostakovich's tortured internal conflicts with the Moloch of the Soviet state Volkov S. comp. Svidetel'stvo. Vospominaniya Dmitriya Shostakovicha. (1979). Chast' 1. URL: <modernproblems.org.ru/memo/148-shostakovich1.html (accessed 01.06.2018).. Whether or not the text scrupulously records Shostakovich's actual conversations with Volkov (which I, like many, am inclined to doubt, though it may contain some authentic material), Testimony certainly purports to be a true and plausible record of Shostakovich's attitudes; and it does capture a view of the composer that is seen as at least partly authentic by those who knew him in his later years On the dubiety in a textological sense of Svidetel'stvo, see: Fay L. Shostakovich Versus Volkov: Whose “Testimony”? // Russian Review. 1980. Vol. 39. P. 484-493; Shostakovich: A Life. New York, 2005. Meanwhile, as is well known, Maxim Shostakovich has partly endorsed Volkov's portrait of his father, and the underlying assumptions about Shostakovich's attitudes (encoded opposition to Soviet power) have been restated by many of the informants cited in Elizabeth Wilson's interview-based work on the composer: Wilson E. Shostakovich: A Life Remembered. 2^nd ed.; London, 2006. Another insider who has supported Volkov's account is Vladimir Ashkenazy: see Ashkenazi V. Predislovie // Svidetel'stvo: Vospominaniia Dmi- triia Shostakovicha. Chast' 1 / comp by. S. Volkov. URL: <modernproblems.org.ru/memo/148-shostakov- ich1.html> (accessed 01.06.2018)..

Recent work on the early Soviet personality (for example, Thomas Lahusen and Jochen Hellbeck's studies of diaries and other forms of life-writing and self-representation) has suggested different models, where conscious non-conformity and conformity were not at issue Lahusen T. How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin's Russia. Ithaca (NY), 1997); Kozlova N. Sovetskie lyudi: stseny iz istorii. Moscow, 2005; Hellbeck J. Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin. Cambridge (MA), 2006.. Instead, people were caught in a constant examination of their own worthiness, the tropes of which were strongly imprinted by suppressed Christian tradition. In this context, Shostakovich's apparent capitulation in 1936 might take on new resonance.

Another form of interpretation, likely more productive in the case of Shostakovich before 1930, emphasises the performative character of identity, where issues such as the genre in which someone was writing and the anticipated audience were crucial This approach has more often been applied to recent discourse -- see e.g. Utekhin I. Ustnye rasskazy o blokadnom opyte: svidetel'stva raznykh pokolenii // Antropologicheskii forum. 2006. N 5. P. 325-344 -- but its insights would be applicable to first-person recollections in earlier periods as well.. This well suits Shostakovich in the 1920s, given the ludic and wilful character of the work that he was doing, and of the fluctuation in his statements of position. The kinds of things that Shostakovich wrote to his mother in letters, such as: «By the way, I will have to pass elementary courses in political education and social science. Misha, Leva, Shebalin, Nikolsky, Starodumsky, and I are going to study for these exams together. We'll get through them somehow or other», suggest an attitude to political force majeure that was at once resigned and dismissive. Yet they were also situation-dependent, products of the collusive and informal character of a private correspondence Shostakovich: Letters to His Mother, 1923-1927. Selected by Dmitrii Frederiks and Rosa Sadykhova. Introduced, and with Commentary, by Rosa Sadykhova. Translated by Rolanda Norton // Fay L. Shostakovich and His World. Princeton, 2004. P. 10..

In the end, such a letter tells us little more than that Shostakovich liked to posture and tease A point made, for instance, in: Taruskin R. Was Shostakovich a Martyr? Or Is That Just Fiction? // New York Times. August 26, 2016. URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/arts/music/julian-barnes- the-noise-of-time-shostakovich.html (accessed 01.06.2018).. Besides, a distaste for the dogmatic tenets of Communism did not necessarily go with lack of sympathy for the Soviet project in a broader sense. Another document from the 1920s, the questionnaire on his creative life that Shostakovich completed at the request of the musicologist Roman Il'ich Gruber, suggests that at this point, Shostakovich's artistic tastes were in some respects typical of the era. For example, of poetry, Shostakovich observed, «I don't have the slightest understanding of poetry, and I don't rate it either; two poets that I do like, relatively speaking, are Derzhavin and Mayakovsky» Anketa po psikhologii tvorcheskogo protsessa (No. 2 -- 10 September 1927. Detskoe Selo) // DSPD. P. 473. Here and below, translations from Russian sources, where not otherwise credited, are my own..

The coupling seems on the face of it bizarre, and is hardly to be explained by political expediency. Certainly, Mayakovsky was ranked as an outstanding Soviet writer, though one whose status with the proletarian arts wing that Shostakovich himself was later to flirt with was becoming increasingly vexed. But yoking him to Derzhavin immediately abolished any advantage, in ideological terms, that the mention of Mayakovsky could have ensured. From the point of view of early Soviet aesthetics, Derzhavin was a conservative, indeed reactionary, writer from a period where feudal relations still held sway. Had Shostakovich mentioned, say, Aleksandr Radishchev, a notorious radical and thorn in the side of Catherine II, everything would have been clear. As it is, the two figures pull in different political directions. One possible conclusion is that Shostakovich was, at some level, actually saying what he meant; another, that he was simply intending to be outrageous.

Artistically speaking, too, the alliance seems surprising. Derzhavin was the towering figure of late eighteenth-century literature, when genres such as the court ode were still dominant, and when confessional autobiography had yet to emerge as a form of importance. Mayakovsky was a supreme exponent of late Romantic self-declaration. But there is an inward logic, and not just because both writers produced work that reflected the Realpolitik of their day. The point is that neither poet is primarily renowned for lyrical gifts: their work, often combative and challenging in stance and characterised by the jarring use of consonance, is a world away from the work of Pushkin, a writer who evidently left Shostakovich cold. If Pushkin was, as the Cubo-Futurists put it in 1912, to be «tossed from the steamship of modernity» Mayakovsky and Derzhavin were both possible passengers on that ship - even if one, so to speak, rode in steerage, and the other in first class.

This is not the only indication of an affinity of however approximate a kind, between Shostakovich and Mayakovsky. Shostakovich, of course, provided the incidental music for Meyerhold's production of Mayakovsky's The Bedbug in 1929. The alliance with Mayakovsky, loose as it may have been, suggests Shostakovich's general affinities with a «left arts» coalition at this point. This, it should be emphasised, had little to do with «Marxism-Leninism» of an official kind. The very term «Marxism-Leninism» is of dubious relevance at this period: from the late 1930s, the term was in regular use, but in the 1920s, a decade riven by disputes between a whole series of different artistic schools all campaigning for hegemony, the term did not yet have the authority it was later to acquire. As Mikhail Gessen put it in 1931, the problem in the first 15 years of Soviet power was to find out what was wanted at all («What is now Marxist will become non-Marxist next year») Music and Soviet Power / eds M. Frolova-Walker, J. Walker. Woodbridge, 2012. P 315.. The time when writers and artists worried about how to comply with or evade the dictates of an aesthetic on which the Party leadership had conferred hegemony, Socialist Realism, still lay in the future.

The key force in aesthetic disputation in the 1920s was a rhetoric invoking «class war» (klassovaya bor'ba), and expressing a radical populism. For example, Mayakovsky's polemical piece, «Who LEF is Biting» (V kogo vgryzaetsya LEF), which appeared in the Left Front of Arts journal in 1923, sets out a programme that included artistic innovation («we will campaign against the transfer of the methods used by the dead into today's art» [bold type original]), political engagement (among the antagonists named are «those who preach art that is above class and humanity»), and also those who invoke «the will of the people» in order to honour «traditions we have inherited from our great-grandmothers». Mayakovsky also attacked the «foundational slogan of comprehensibility to all» Mayakovsky V. V kogo vgryzaetsya LEF // LEF. 1923. N 1. Cited here from Mayakovsky V. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. Vol. 1. Moscow, 1959. P. 45-46. It is dubious how much Marxism-Leninism in a strict sense can be considered to be of relevance to Soviet art at any period. In the Stalin era, Soviet patriotism and loyalty to the dictates of the Party and the leader as its living embodiment (partiinost') were considerably more important than a command of Marxist theory, as the rout of the so-called “vulgar sociology” movement -- the analysis ofliterary and cultural forms on the basis of classical Marxism -- clearly indicated. In the post-Stalin era, it was academic institutions, such as the Institute of Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences, where Marxist-Leninist principles were of greatest relevance (see e.g. the Soviet contributions to Geller E. (ed.).: Soviet and Western Anthropology. London, 1980). On the other hand, a command of the “classics of Marxism-Leninism' was not considered essential for creative artists. Expressing amused consternation at plans to teach actors the principles of economics, one Leningrad Party official remarked in 1971, “You have to know your limits!” Sometimes it was difficult to get actors to say two words during political discussions, “and ballerinas and opera singers have their little ways as well”. Seminars on Marxist-Leninist aesthetics were replaced, in many theatres, by collective visits to cultural events, followed by discussion (Stenogramma soveshchaniia propagandistov i zamestitelei sekretarei partiinykh organizatsii uchrezhdenii literatury i iskusstva g. Leningrada po teme: “O perspektivakh sovershenstvovaniia partiinogo obrazovaniia tvorcheskoi intelligentsia, 18 November 1971 // Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv istoriko-politicheskikh dokumentov, St. Petersburg (TsGAIPD- SPb). F. 24. Op. 145. D. 12. L. 13, l. 15, l. 8). In the 1920s, the situation was of course different, but the records of the Leningrad film studio indicate that ideological education was primarily used for the purposes of filtration, i.e. the classification of staff into “us and them”: see e.g.: TsGAIPD. F. 1369. Op. 1. D. 84. L. 11: “The work of the Party has been conducted as a vehement struggle with the opposition; it has been essential to use statistical data to highlight the slanderous [sic., klevetnicheskie] squeals of the opposition; take, for instance, the 5-year plan for the development of industry” (Party meeting of the collective of Sovkino, Leningrad, 3 November 1927)..

This view of a radical, engaged art that would challenge, rather than confirm, the tastes of the anticipated audience is clearly of the first importance to the composition of the works that Shostakovich wrote in the late 1920s, such as Conditionally Murdered [Uslovno ubityi]^ls. Central at this period was also Shostakovich's commitment to a left - modernist-oriented artistic dynamism. « `Painting doesn't get across to me, and I think it's a pointless activity. I've made every effort to get to know the museum collections in Leningrad and Moscow, but it hasn't worked: it's the static character of it all that puts me off', he observed to Gruber, insisting, `You'll never find a moment of «standing still» in nature'». From this general condemnation, however, he excepted caricatures, and also the drawings of Yury Annenkov (vivid, angular sketches that give a strong sense of motion, as in the famous street scenes illustrating Blok's revolutionary poem The Twelve) Anketa po psikhologii... P 474..

The emphasis fully accords with the tropes of the time. For example, a 1928 brochure published to aid worker writers who wanted to publish in Soviet newspapers had emphasised the need for «mobility and flexibility» (podvizhnosf i gibkosf), as well as the capacity to «react quickly to the most important events in our country» (bystro otkliknut'sya na vazhneishie yavleniya v zhizni nashei strany) and to «mobilise [the worker mass] for the struggle with evil and the support of good» (mobilizovat' [rabochuyu massu] na bor'bu s plokhim, na podderzhku khoroshego)²⁰. Here one has something in line with the Mani - chean world of Shostakovich's early work for the theatre, which is entirely in the traditions of the agitka, or «agitational sketch».

If «comprehensibility to all» was to be rejected, this did not mean ignoring the needs of a mass audience. Alongside his lukewarm commendation of Mayakovsky and Derzhavin, and far more enthusiastic recognition of the values of writers such as Dostoevsky, Shostakovich also identified himself with the populist aesthetic of Leo Tolstoy: «As an artist, Tolstoy is not very congenial (as a theorist of art, what he says is in many respects convincing» Polotskaya N., Dokunin V. Redkollegiia stennoi gazety i kruzhok rabkorov. Moscow, 1928. P. 7. Anketa po psikhologii... P. 474.. What Shostakovich had in mind was no doubt the treatise What is Art? (1898). Here Tolstoy set out a model of art as emotional exchange - whereby artists' primary task is the transmission of feelings to others. What is Art also vehemently argued for the futility of elite art, and conversely, the superiority of popular (narodnoe) art to excessive sophistication (better a folksong than Beethoven quartets). The fact that folk music was accessible to the public was Tolstoy's primary consideration (though he certainly attacked the cult of Pushkin on the grounds that the common people would not understand it). Rather, Tolstoy held folk art intrinsically superior to elite art: simplicity was an aesthetic virtue in itself.

In sum, what we know about Shostakovich's artistic preferences in the 1920s confirms the 1924 comment from M.O. Shteinberg, one of his teachers at the Conservatoire, that the young Mitya had begun working in an «extreme leftist» manner Shostakovich v dnevnikakh M. O. Shteinberga / ed. by O. Dansker // Shostakovich. Mezhdu mgnoveniem i vechnost'yu: dokumenty, materialy, stat'i / ed. by L. G. Kovnatskaya. St. Petersburg, 2009. P. 99. (Entry of 29 January 1924).. But I would argue, this was less a question of openly articulated and theorised conviction than of the general Zeitgeist. Shostakovich himself, in 1927, represented his own artistic preferences in terms of a battle with the older generation - as personified by Sheinberg himself: «In 1922, I composed a Suite for Two Pianos. Professor M.O. Shteinberg reacted to it with some hostility and told me to correct it. I did not do this. Then he once more insisted that I should correct it. That time I did rework it according to his instructions. In that guise, it was performed at a student concert in LSC [Leningrad State Conservatoire]. After the concert, I destroyed the corrected score, and started to write down the first version again. M.O. [Shteinberg] was not at all pleased about this. It was one of my first attempts at `rebellion' against the dictatorship of `rules' » Anketa po psikhologii. P. 472.. The Russian text of Shostakovich's comments contains an untranslatable play on the thrice-repeated pravit' (to «correct») and pravila (rules). Shostakovich's struggle with these is jokingly given a contemporary political resonance by the words «dictatorship» and «rebellion». Thus we can see that personal self-assertion and the revolutionary struggle could be rhetorically associated.

I would contend that this inchoate identification with «revolutionary struggle» was in many respects attributable to the specific and contradictory effects of experiencing the actual revolution at the precise age when Shostakovich did. He was, after all, only 9 when it began, and his maturity as an artist and high intelligence should not be confused with a detailed awareness of the meaning of the events that he witnessed, let alone their longterm consequences. In other words, to expect from him the kind of horrified reaction characteristic of, say, Anna Akhmatova (born in 1889, and an established artist when the Revolution took place) would be futile. At the same time, to assume that he was automatically uninterested in politics because of his tender age would be equally misplaced. As the psychologist Robert Coles has argued in an impressive study based on interviews with young children, those growing up in highly politicised societies very early acquire sensitivity to the events and discussions around them - even if they see these from a perspective that may not resemble the perspective of adults Coles R. The Political Life of Children. Boston, 1986. Coles's examples include, for instance, Northern Ireland.. This generational factor - to date pretty well ignored in discussion of the composer's biography - deserves detailed analysis. To do full justice to the question would require extensive specialised research, but at least a preliminary investigation seems warranted, and such will be attempted here.

«Children of Revolution»

For most commentators, Shostakovich's childhood experience (before he began studying at the Conservatoire) has been of peripheral interest at best For instance, MacDonald gives Shostakovich's childhood about 10 pages, under the title “Innocence” (MacDonald I. The New Shostakovich. London, 1990. Chapter 1; Laurel Fay, while not declaring her hand so obviously (the chapter has the title simply, “Childhood”), accords this period a similar number of pages (FayL. Shostakovich: A Life... P. 7-16).. What is more, this period of the composer's biography, like other episodes in his life history, has been occluded by tendentious efforts to legitimate an integrated and coherent version of his overall biography as either «pro» or «anti» Soviet by inclination. Sof'ya Khentova's many overlapping accounts of his life are entirely consistent with the ideologies of the period at which they were produced (the revival of the Lenin cult during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years, which was particularly important in Leningrad, officially known as «the cradle of three revolutions»). Khentova's demonstration of Shostakovich's sympathy with the Bolshevik Revolution is primarily circumstantial: she talks at length about the revolutionary credentials of Shostakovich's parents, and of the district of Petersburg in which they lived See e.g.: Khentova S. M. Shostakovich: zhizn' i tvorchestvo. In 2 vol. Leningrad, 1985-1986. Vol. 1. P. 84; Davydenkov L. Shostakovich: zhizn' i tvorchestvo. Moscow, 1980.. She describes young Dima's direct participation in the key events leading up to «October» - in particular, the excited rush to the Finland Station to cheer on Lenin's return to Petrograd on the armoured train, the episode later memorialised in the statue that still stands today on what is still called «Lenin Square» Ibid.. Solomon Volkov's account is, equally characteristically for the governing mythology of his text (a product of the late Soviet cultural underground), a neat inversion of Khentova's Soviet canonisation: Shostakovich greeted the Revolution with a mixture of bemusement and indifference. He remembered standing outside the Finland Station, yes, but had no idea what all the fuss was about. Had he realised at the time what an august personage was causing it, he would have been sure to pay closer attention (here Shostakovich, or Volkov's, sarcasm is palpable) Svidetel'stvo. Vospominaniia,...

Both Khentova and Volkov's versions have since been assailed from the point of view of strict fact. Boris Lossky's meticulous and detailed account of 1917 and 1918, «Our Family in the Savage Years» first published in 1993, pointed out that Lenin had arrived at the Finland Station at around 11 pm, making it exceptionally unlikely that a nicely-brought - up ten-year-old would have been out and about the city streets at the time Lossky B. Nasha sem'ya v poru likholet'ia // Minuvshee. 1992. N 11. P. 169.. Indeed, the version given by Khentova makes it sound as though a crowd of schoolchildren had rushed over together. This makes topographical sense - the school that Shostakovich attended, the Shidlovskaya College at no. 7 ulitsa Shpalernaya, was about 20 minutes' walk away from the Finland Station, across the Liteinyi Bridge - but would be plausible in temporal terms only if the event that they witnessed had happened during school hours Some Petrograd schools operated a “double shift” system after the Revolution (with the second shift finishing around 10 pm in the evening), but it is not clear whether the Shidlovskaia School was one of them.. Lossky also argues that Shostakovich himself probably did not witness the death of a boy in July 1918 that inspired the composition of his early piano piece, «Funeral March for the Victims of Revolution»: instead, it was likely his sister Musya, who had this experience, so that the incident which later came to ornament the composer's account of revolutionary struggle was in fact the product of hearsay LosskyB. Nasha sem'ya... P. 169.. Recent Western accounts, such as Laurel Fay's biography of Shostakovich, published in 2000, have taken a similar standpoint to Lossky's. Fay concedes that Shostakovich's family is likely to have been generally sympathetic to political change, but is disinclined to accept any concrete association of Shostakovich with the revolutionary struggle. At the same time, she uses Lossky's information about Lenin's arrival at the Finland Station in order to call into question Volkov's account of that episode as well Fay L. Shostakovich: A Life..

These scruples are understandable. Neither Khentova nor Volkov's accounts can be termed scholarly in terms either of approach or method. Unannotated, partial, and sometimes careless in their use of evidence, they at best coincide with the truth at some points, rather than attempting to engage with this For instance, I would not at all rule out that both versions ofthe Finland Station are based on what in Russian are termed baiki, or “taradiddles”, told by Shostakovich himself. These self-mythologising anecdotes are a widespread feature of what the anthropologist Nancy Ries has called “Russian talk”: see Ries N. Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika. Ithaca (NY), 1997. Lidiia Chukovskaia's records of her conversations with Anna Akhmatova include many examples from the poet's repertoire: Chukovskaia L. Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi. In 2 vol. St. Petersburg, 1996.. But their critics such as Fay and Taruskin, for all their incomparably greater intellectual authority, also have certain blind spots. To begin with, the process by which the Revolution was mythologised is also a historical fact, and one of the greatest importance in shaping Soviet perceptions of the self. As Frederick Cor - ney's masterful study, Telling October, has shown, the early 1920s was a period when systematic work was done on rescripting the eyewitness testimony of those who had actually participated in the Bolshevik Revolution, and creating canonical versions of the sequence of events and the details of what happened. By 1927 (the tenth anniversary of «October») the process of rescripting was to all intents and purposes complete, and from now on «revolutionary memory» was essentially a constant repetition of the established master-plot Corney F. Telling October. Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution. Ithaca (NY), 2004..

Corney's account perhaps underestimates the potential for modulation in later periods of Soviet power, but the central argument about the governing mythology of «October» is cogent. Put bluntly, if people did not have the «right» memories of «October», they were near-certain to acquire them. It is perfectly possible that Shostakovich genuinely thought, by the 1960s, if not earlier, that he had really witnessed Lenin's arrival in Petrograd. (And, assuming there was any factual basis for this idea, it may have come from understandable confusion with some other large political meeting on Vyborg Side, the district where the Finland Station is situated, which really was a hotbed of revolutionary activity).

With an event so crucial, yet also so amorphous, as the Revolution, memories were in any case likely to become confused and transmuted. Already in 1924, a boy who had also witnessed the events in Petrograd at a tender age wrote in a school essay:

«I can only cite a few impressions of 1917 that have been clearly preserved. Most of them have been effaced by new impressions, or have been forgotten to an extent that I cannot recollect them without distorting them to fit the patterns of today. My impressions of back then are being forgotten to a greater and greater extent, no doubt because they are less and less in tune with my character today. It would seem that my understanding of things now, and my understanding seven years ago, are completely different» Anonymous male pupil in class six of the real'noe uchilishche (Realschule) at Zemun, Yugoslavia // Deti russkoi emigratsii: kniga, kotoruyu mechtali i ne smogli izdat' izgnanniki / ed. by L. I. Petrusheva. Moscow, 1997 [henceforth DRE]. P. 487. On the project from which this testimony stemmed, see further

below..

Many of the commentators on Shostakovich's biography seem to ignore the process of what the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin called «narrative double-voicing». Remembrance is always a dialogical process of interaction between «back then» and «now», and the effaced and forgotten traces of the past may seem more «authentic», in psychological terms, to someone who is in the process of remembering an event, than does anything set out in the documentary records, precisely because the latter are so far removed from the present We might remember in this context also Yosef Yerushalmi's contention (Yerushalmi Y. Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Seattle, 1982) that it is history that is peculiar and requires special historical arguments to explain, not legend or mythology..

In this context, what is significant to Shostakovich's creative processes in the 1920s is not what he «actually» (in inverted commas) did and saw in 1917 and 1918, but what he imagined having done and seen. In his Second Symphony, composed for the tenth anniversary of «October», the historical upheavals of revolution are evoked in a spirit of heroic jubilation. This was, of course, a contribution to precisely the canon-making process of which Corney writes. But at the same time, this does not necessarily make the work «insincere» or «inauthentic» (neiskrennee). Unless a diary or similar extempore record of Shostakovich's reflective processes in his early years comes to light, our judgement on these has to remain speculative. (And even then, we might have cause to doubt the ultimate «truth value» of a diary, given that in public ages, such documents are written with an eye on their public significance) This point is made, for instance, in: Hellbeck J. Revolution on My Mind.. Whichever way, there is quite a lot of evidence that this spirit of heroic jubilation was the one in which large numbers of the «children of the Revolution» - those who, like Shostakovich, witnessed the Revolution when they were still very young - experienced the Revolution and its aftermath.

As Shostakovich's near-contemporary, the poet Olga Berggol'ts (born in 1910) recalled, 30,000 schoolchildren took part in the celebrations for the First of May 1919 held in Petrograd, carrying flags decorated with flowers and garlands to the main building of the People's Commissariat of Enlightenment on ulitsa Chernyshevskaya, and singing the Internationale so loudly that Lunacharsky, who was meant to address the procession, could not make himself heard above the din. And in May 1923, schoolchildren processed through Petrograd as part of a demonstration against Lord Curzon, shouting slogans («We're Bored! With You, Lord!») and singing political songs, first and foremost, the Internationale, then the unofficial national anthem of the new state Berggol'ts O. Dnevnye zvezdy. Leningrad, 1971. P. 152-153..

Since Berggol'ts's recollections of these events come from a memoir published in the Soviet Union in 1972, one might be inclined to dismiss them, though it should be noted that Berggol'ts became, in the post-war years, a brave critic of Soviet power, whose nostalgia for the early days of communes and radical collectivism did not impede her sharp analytical understanding of the history that she had lived through. (Like, one might say, Shostakovich at the same period; and Berggol'ts, too, was regarded by convinced oppositionists, including Anna Akhmatova, as a poryadochnyi chelovek with whom it was possible to associate.) But evidence of children's enthusiastic response to the events of 1917 comes not only from Soviet sources. Extremely interesting in this regard is the collection of essays from which I took the quotation about the peculiarities of memory cited above, the context and contents of which deserve discussion in a little more detail.

In 1924, the Zemgor Association, a welfare organisation founded by participants in the zemstva, or local authorities, of pre-revolutionary days, and which sponsored and promoted a broadly-based programme of philanthropic activities across the Russian diaspora scattered over Western and South-Eastern Europe and Turkey in the aftermath of the Revolution and the Russian Civil War (1918-1921), organised a project aimed at collecting the memories of young people. Schoolchildren studying in a variety of schools run by Russian йmigrй communities were asked to write down what they could remember about their lives as a classroom exercise. This generated hundreds of mini-autobiographies detailing the experiences of individuals who had witnessed the events concerned at anything from three or four up to fifteen or sixteen years old. (Because of the interruptions to education that they had endured, some of these «schoolchildren» were already in their 20s when they wrote up their accounts, but others were considerably younger.)

In 1925, a selection of the autobiographies was published by Zemgor, but most did not see the light of day at this point Deti emigratsii. Prague, 1925. The edition was reprinted in 2001, and is also available online at URL: <rus-skycom/history/library/vospominaniya> (accessed 01.06.2018). In 2001, a further selection of material appeared, presenting autobiographies from children living in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Turkey. Even this is not a complete record, and the texts have evidently been heavily edited in order to adapt them to standard grammar, punctuation, and spelling I base this statement on extensive work with children's testimony for the collection that I edited with Vitaly Bezrogov: Bezrogov V., Kelli K. Gorodok v tabakerke: detstvo v Rossii ot Nikolaya Vtorogo do Borisa Yel'tsina. Vzroslye o detyakh i deti o sebe. In 2 vols. Moscow; Tver', 2008.. But the number of autobiographies produced is quite significant, and the patterns that emerge allow a reasonable degree of generalisation.

As with any sources, children's autobiographies, and especially those produced «to order», for a classroom exercises, have their own pitfalls. Marina Tsvetaeva's daughter, Ariadna Efron, who took part in the exercise when studying at the Gymnasium in Moravska Trebova, Czechoslovakia, was later to allege that many of the children could remember very little of what had happened to them and had simply started to make up increasingly fantastic events, desperate to fill up the piece of paper Efron A. O Marine Tsvetaevoi: Vospominaniia docheri. Moscow, 1989. P. 233.. But the comments of individuals of approximately the same age as Shostakovich who also witnessed the Revolution in Petrograd are all the same quite revealing This is true also of the autobiographies that schoolchildren wrote before 1917, as a compulsory exercise for the graduating classes of educational establishments from primary level up. On those produced at parish schools and other establishments run by the Educational Council of the Holy Synod, see: Kelly C. Kak sdelany vospominaniia: deti i lichnoe proshloe v Rossii nachala XX veka // Istoricheskaia pamiat'i obshchestvo v Rossiiskoi imperii i Sovetskom Soyuze (konets XIX -- nachalo XX veka). Mezhdunardonyi kollokvium. Nauchnye doklady. St. Petersburg, 2007.. It is notable, for instance, that despite the fact that the children concerned came from the homes of well-off, well-educated parents, many of them remember that the first response inspired by the peculiar events of 1917 was euphoria. As the boy whom I earlier quoted put it:

«Suddenly you could hear shots and motor-cars with armed people began passing below our windows. They were shouting something and shooting. Below our windows on the [Palace] Square side stood a patrol of Cossacks, and they were shooting at the motor-cars. It struck me as a complete novelty, good fun, even. I didn't attempt to get to the essence of things, since I didn't understand what was happening anyway. The sense that Tsarist rule was being overthrown didn't occur to me, because I had no idea that you could overthrow it. Instead, I reacted in the same way as I did to any of the festivals and parades that you could often see out of our windows, only this was even more interesting than usual, because there was shooting too» DRE. P. 487..

This sense of having experienced events that were at once bizarre and exciting is typical of accounts from boys who were roughly Shostakovich's age, that is, around ten, when the Revolution took place, and who came from a similar social background (comfortably off materially, but not from the actual aristocracy) An account by an aristocratic girl, N. Gagarina, is very different, recalling the burning of the Nikolaevsky (now Moscow) Station, and hiding inside the house with darkened windows and bolted doors to avoid attracting attention, see: DRE. P. 306-307. Even she, however, remarks that no-one took the Bolsheviks seriously at first: “No-one thought back then that such a tiny gaggle of people could get their hands on political power. Everyone treated the Revolution insouciantly and didn't think about the consequences”. The sense of dread pervades another account by a girl (anonymous, born c. 1907): DRE. P. 355.. In the circumstances, a position of indifference, if one was old enough to be aware of one's surroundings at all, was unlikely. «Politics was everywhere», recalled Igor' Alekseev, who was 14 when the February Revolution took place, about the months leading up to the disorder Igor' Alekseev, born c. 1902: DRE. P. 300..

This testimony from йmigrй children had its own ideological context (the accounts are uniformly anti-Bolshevik). But at the same time, in some respects, the children's memories confirm the testimony of, for example, Berggol'ts. In other words, the claim that at least some children had revolutionary aspirations is not a Soviet fabrication. Yet one needs to bear in mind that children of around ten were, as Leninist terminology puts it, not «conscious», in the sense of politically literate. In 1905-1906, large numbers of school pupils took part in the uprisings that raged all over the Russian Empire. Surviving documents indicate that the juvenile participants had their own agenda (involving the right to smoke at school as well as democratic representation for pupils on school councils and the cession of control over discipline to pupils themselves) See Kelly C. “The Lads Indulged Themselves: They Used to Smoke”: Tobacco and Children's Culture in Twentieth-Century Russia // Tobacco in Russian History and Culture: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present / eds by Matthew P. Romaniello, Tricia Starks. New York, 2009.. Equally, the child participants in the events of 1917 did not always respond to what they saw as adults might have done. Igor' Alekseev remembered that he had sat with Mara, the object of his calf love, while her mother wept hopelessly all night in his mother's bedroom because Mara's father had been arrested. Igor' and Mara had their minds on other things: «turned back into children again, we completely forgot our `flirting' (as the fashionable term among young people then was), and we indulged in childish dreams of saving the Tsar» DRE. P. 300..

Alekseev's later life was testimony to the accelerated development that many experienced during the revolutionary years. By May 1917, he was managing his parents' estate in Kherson province since his father was too ill to cope; in the first half of 1919 (when he was still only 16 or 17) came «dressing up in disguise, going into hiding, terror, arrests, home-distilled vodka and cocaine; some people were murdered and tortured, or imprisoned, friends and relations were arrested» Ibid. P. 301.. This second reminiscence points to another factor in the impressions of those who witnessed the days of revolution as children: the horror inspired by glimpses of violence. It might have been good clean fun to hear the whizz of flying bullets, but when they hit human flesh, reactions were different. A young man who was at cadet school in Petrograd when the Revolution started recalled a horrible sight that he and schoolmates had seen over a fence on the embankment: «There on the ice, where a few days earlier they'd been playing music and people had been happily tobogganing down the ice hills, the bestial shooting of some people (later we found out, it was [Tsarist] policemen) was taking place.» The boys were observed and had to take refuge from bullets themselves Anonymous male, class 6, Realschule, Zemun, age not given (born c. 1902?): DRE. P. 491-492.. As well as witnessing atrocities first hand, children might hear about these from others: one boy recalled how his father had arrived from Petrograd in Odessa, where the family had taken refuge, to report that in the city, «pools of blood were lying everywhere», as well as corpses, and that robberies were rife, as were burnt-out houses as the result of arson Ibid. P. 484.. And of course, children also experienced the terrible material privation of the first post-revolutionary years. As Nikolai Rosenkranz, about 17 when the Revolution took place, remembered, «You could see these depressing scenes on the streets: dead horses, sometimes people collapsed in a faint from hunger. We often didn't have even a crust at home, even the mice vanished» Ibid. P. 298..