Leningrad полностью

Churchill, on hearing the news, immediately grasped that to sell this U-turn to the public he needed to draw a distinction between the Russian people and their government. He first did so in a speech broadcast on the very evening of Barbarossa, memorably declaring support for ordinary Russians — ‘I see the ten thousand villages of Russia. . where there are still primordial joys, where maidens laugh and children play’ — while continuing to condemn the regime — ‘No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I. . I will unsay no word I have spoken about it.’^* Government information agencies were instructed to follow suit, but it was a hard balance to strike. The BBC, obliged to broadcast a generous quota of Russian material but to steer clear of ideology, stuck mostly to the nineteenth-century classics (a radio adaptation of War and Peace, starring Celia Johnson as Natasha and Leslie Banks as Pierre, was a hit), folk songs and Rimsky-Korsakov. It took the corporation six months to get permission to broadcast the ‘Internationale’ (‘we were asked not to overdo it’), and ‘talkers’ were restricted to distant historical topics, especially if left wing. Of Bernard Pares, distinguished founder of London University’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies, it was decided that he couldn’t ‘do much harm on Peter the Great etc’.1 Mass starvation in Leningrad — beyond the occasional observation that the city was ‘in a bad way for food’ — was not mentioned at all. Stressed instead were the city’s cultural losses (Inber wrote a moralising article, for foreign consumption, about shell damage to a bust of Roentgen, inventor of the X-ray) and its stout defence. A Professor Ogorodnikov broadcast fraternal greetings — ‘wearing an infantryman’s greatcoat, with a rifle in my hands’ — to the Astronomer Royal.2 A proposal that the BBC broadcast its own Russian-language programmes direct to the Soviet Union got nowhere: when the suggestion was put to Maisky, according to Anthony Eden, the Soviet ambassador ‘shied like a young colt’.3

In early 1942 news arrived of something that promised brilliantly to transcend all these difficulties — a new symphony, written in besieged Leningrad, by Dmitri Shostakovich. Though he looked younger with his cowlick and owlish spectacles, Shostakovich was thirty-four when the war broke out. A child prodigy, he had entered the Leningrad (then Petrograd) Conservatoire at the age of thirteen and joined the Soviet musical establishment six years later, when his First Symphony was taken up by the great German conductor Bruno Walter. In 1936 his career went dramatically into reverse, when his Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, successfully premiered two years earlier, was suddenly denounced by Pravda as ‘muddle instead of music’. Having spent the late 1930s in constant fear of arrest, he was (like Anna Akhmatova) brought back into the fold with the German invasion. As well as writing songs for the troops he very publicly joined in trench-digging, applied to join the People’s Levy and was photographed, wearing an absurd, old-fashioned brass fireman’s helmet, on the roof of the Conservatoire. On 17 September — just over a week after the siege began — he was summoned to the Radio House to make a national broadcast, from a text closely echoing Leningradskaya Pravda’s ‘The Enemy is at the Gates’ editorial of the previous day. He was speaking, he told listeners, from the front line. But though a battle to the death was joined outside the city walls, inside life went on as normal, as proven by the fact that two hours ago he had completed the first movement of a new symphony.

The first person to hear the symphony’s outline, on a ‘steel-grey, depressing sort of day’ six weeks before, had been his secretary, Isaak Glikman:

He told me that he wanted me to hear the first pages of his new work. After a moment’s hesitation he played the exposition and variation of the theme depicting the Fascist invasion. We were both extremely agitated; it was a rare event for Shostakovich to play with such manifest emotion. Afterwards we sat for a while in silence, which Shostakovich finally broke with the words (I wrote them down) ‘I don’t know what the fate of this piece will be.’ After another pause he added, ‘I suppose that critics with nothing better to do will damn me for copying Ravel’s Bolero. Well, let them. That’s how I hear war.’4

Equally moved was the composer Bogdanov-Berezovsky, who was among a group of musicians Shostakovich invited to his flat to hear a fuller run-through two days after his broadcast.

Unanimously we asked him to play it again. But the sirens rang out — another air-raid alert. Shostakovich suggested that we take a short break while he helped his wife and children, Galina and Maksim, down to the air-raid shelter. Left to ourselves, we sat in silence. No words seemed appropriate to what we had just heard.5