In that heady atmosphere of modernism, Shostakovich took a decisive step in the direction of the avant-garde. He burned a pile of his early, traditional works, including an opera based on Pushkin’s
Shostakovich’s Third Symphony (1929) was called “First of May,” after the day of international solidarity of the proletariat, an official holiday in the Soviet Union. It too had a choral finale, with a text that included these words:
Any translation would only improve the quality of this “poem,” which in Russian sounds like poorly rhymed slogans. Shostakovich understood that, of course, and he wrote to a friend as he began to compose the “Dedication to October” symphony, “I received Bezymensky’s poetry, which upset me very much. Very bad poetry.”
Why then did Shostakovich feel the need to use this “very bad poetry” in his avant-garde symphony? The answer is simple: the symphony was written on commission from the Propaganda Department of the music sector of the State Publishing House (that is, the Soviet government) especially for the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. The commission was an honor and a well-paying one, and Shostakovich, who needed the money, tried to complete it on time and without friction with his employer. There could be no question of rejecting the text for the finale, which had been proposed from above. The “Dedication to October” was immediately performed in Leningrad and Moscow.
Reading the art articles and creative manifestos of the twenties, one is struck by the constant reappearance of just a few cultural terms. The most common are “proletarian culture,” “fellow travelers of the revolution,” and “social commission.” At different times, different people endowed these terms with different meanings. At first the creation of proletarian culture was the official goal of the Communist Party, which proclaimed that in the new state of workers and peasants, the corrupt bourgeois civilization would wither away, making way for proletarian art for the proletariat.
Many theoreticians of socialism sincerely believed that the creative powers of “liberated” people would instantly produce thousands of proletarian Shakespeares and Beethovens and that very little would be left of the old culture. Entry into the Communist paradise was closed to Tchaikovsky’s Petersburg works, for example. “Tchaikovsky’s music is melancholy, imbued with a specifically intellectual psychology, and expresses the yearnings of a frustrated life; we do not need it.”65
However, it soon became obvious that a mass manifestation of proletarian geniuses was not to be expected in the near future. In practice, the term “proletarian culture” came to mean merely politically correct—from the point of view of the authorities—works done by people who managed to prove their proletarian origins. Naturally, it was but a small part of the general flow of contemporary Russian culture. But it was these works, though mostly of very poor quality, that were used as a model by the leaders of the Russian Association of Proletarian writers (RAPP) and its sister organization in the music field, the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM), founded in the 1920s. All other culture in Soviet Russia loyal to the new regime was created by “fellow travelers of the revolution,” in the Bolshevik definition. When the term was introduced by Leon Trotsky, one of the new leaders, it had positive overtones. But the never-ending attacks by “proletarian” cultural figures on the “fellow travelers” made their status unstable and ambiguous.
The cultural administration in Soviet Russia manipulated the term “fellow traveler” quite arbitrarily. In fact, most of the intelligentsia that remained in the country were “fellow travelers” to some degree. The only ones who protested loudly against the Bolsheviks were Russian émigrés in the West, who did not risk their lives by doing so. Inside Russia, the opportunity for open political protest was rapidly being reduced to nought. But the range of ideological and cultural cooperation with the state was still broad: from utter servility to a false service that barely disguised the author’s subversive intentions.
