And this was despite the fact that Shostakovich, like Tynyanov, whose fiction and theoretical works the composer read avidly, used the ruse of calling his opera “a satire on the era of Nicholas I.” The critics sensed something was wrong. Of course, they were irritated by the frankly avant-garde character of Shostakovich’s opera. (Analogous criticisms were often aimed at Tynyanov.) And in fact, along with Mussorgsky’s Marriage, also based on Gogol, The Nose is probably the most experimental work in Russian operatic literature, with uncompromising vocal demands, a complex polyphonic orchestration in which the percussion instruments play a great part (one of the entr’actes is written only for percussion), and a breathless tempo, with one surrealistic episode quickly following another.
The production added to the impression of the work’s boldness. The movie director Kozintsev recalled, “To dashing gallops and lively polkas Vladimir Dmitriev’s settings whirled and spun: Gogol’s phantasmagoria became sound and color. The youthful Russian art, boldly experimental and tied to urban folklore—hanging signs of shops and taverns, tacky art, cheap dance bands—has burst into the kingdom of Aida and Trovatore. Gogol’s grotesque imagery throbbed: what was farce here, what was prophecy?”82 Dmitriev, who had just recently been the guiding spirit of Balanchine’s avant-garde group Young Ballet, had become the leading designer for Leningrad’s musical productions and Shostakovich’s favorite theater artist. He would soon design the premiere for Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.
But critics were made wary not only by the opera’s stunning avant-garde aesthetics. The satire of Shostakovich’s Nose, like Tynyanov’s satire, was uncomfortably directed not so much against the era of Nicholas I as against contemporary life, in which the police, secret and otherwise, were taking bribes and enjoying unlimited power to decide whether someone was a clerk “in a state position and a rather significant one” or was simply a runaway “nose,” a phantom subject to removal from the system. Shostakovich also depicted the terrible force of mass psychosis, the mechanism of rumors and fears that arise in the atmosphere of the near total censorship.
The Leningrad critics must have also been challenged by Shostakovich’s announcement that one of the coauthors of The Nose’s libretto was Zamyatin. He had just been derided in the Soviet press as “an open enemy of the working class” for the publication abroad of his novel We, which was officially characterized as a “lampoon of communism and slander of the Soviet system.” Though Zamyatin’s actual participation in the writing of the libretto was rather insignificant, including him in the list of coauthors was a gesture that cost Shostakovich dearly. After sixteen performances, The Nose was removed from the repertoire, not to reappear on the Soviet stage for more than forty years.
Soon after the premiere of The Nose, Shostakovich, discouraged by the hostile reviews, wrote to the director of the production: “The articles will do their work and no one who’s read them will go to see The Nose. I’ll get over that in about a week, another two months for the gloating of ‘friends and acquaintances’ that The Nose was a failure, and then I’ll calm down and start working again, but I don’t know on what. I’d really like to do The Carp.”83
The libretto for the projected opera was to be written by a leading Leningrad dadaist, the poet Nikolai Oleinikov, a handsome man with rosy cheeks and blond curly hair, who possessed, according to some, a demonic charm.84 Oleinikov, like Leningrad’s other avant-gardists of the time, approved of Shostakovich’s music, while Shostakovich was smitten by Oleinikov’s absurdist poem “The Carp,” which, although unpublished, was nevertheless popular in Leningrad’s elitist circles.85 It was a parody of a passionate Gypsy love song that recounted the tragic story of the unrequited love of a carp for the “marvelous madame,” a smelt. The rejected carp throws himself into a net and ends up in a frying pan. The poem concludes with a requiem for the passionate lover:
Roil on, murky
Waters of the Neva.
The little carp
Won’t be swimming anymore.
The plots of “The Carp” and The Nose, for all their superficial dissimilarity, are united by the way a tragic theme is rendered as a parody. In Oleinikov’s poems, Shostakovich saw parallels with Zoshchenko’s prose.86 Both authors wrote in brief, intentionally primitive phrases, using and mocking the clumsy language of urban masses. Both hid behind the mask of a frightened and almost retarded observer.
Lydia Ginzburg, who knew Oleinikov well, wrote that he
