St Petersburg полностью

The 1934 premiere in Leningrad was a great success; in its first five months the opera was performed thirty-six times to sold-out houses. The happy Shostakovich could allow himself to write to a friend, “The audience listens very attentively and makes a run for their galoshes only after the curtain falls.”106 Lady Macbeth was staged triumphantly in Moscow, too, but with catastrophic consequences. In January 1936 Stalin attended a performance. The opera infuriated him and he left before the end.

The best barometer of Stalin’s reaction was the editorial that appeared in the Party newspaper, Pravda, two days later, called “Muddle Instead of Music,” almost certainly dictated by Stalin:

The listener is stunned almost from the first minute by the opera’s intentionally dissonant and muddled avalanche of sounds. Snatches of melody, embryos of musical phrases drown, escape, and vanish once more in clangs, creaks, and squeals. Following this “music” is difficult, remembering it is impossible…. The music quacks, grunts, pants, and gasps, the more naturally to depict the love scenes…. The predatory merchant woman, who seized wealth and power by murder, is presented as some kind of “victim” of bourgeois society…. This glorification of merchant lust has been called satire by some critics. But there isn’t even a breath of satire here. By all available means of musical and dramatic expression the author is trying to elicit the audience’s sympathy for the crude and vulgar desires and actions of the unscrupulous Katerina Izmailova.

It is not hard to believe that Stalin was personally offended by the music’s expressionistic excesses, its unprecedentedly frank, erotic character, and the opera’s strongly feminist statement. But Stalin had more in mind than public expression of personal dissatisfaction. That became clear when Pravda’s editorials followed, fiercely attacking all kinds of “formalists” and “pseudo innovators” in Soviet art. The headlines—crude, peremptory, sounding like harsh sentences—are characteristic: “Balletic Falsity,” “Cacophony in Architecture,” “About Dauber Artists,” “External Shine and False Content.”

The campaign that followed these publications was unparalleled in its ferocity and scope. Articles from Pravda were reprinted by every newspaper in the country. “Discussions” of the articles were mandatory, and terrified writers, composers, and artists accused one another of formalism, alienation from the people, and other mortal sins, and exercised knee-jerk self-criticism. Virtually no major figure in Soviet art was spared public humiliation in some degree. Accounts of hundreds of such meetings were also obligatorily printed in national and regional newspapers and broadcast on the radio.

The Pravda editorial that started the avalanche clearly presented the official harsh formula not only for the arts but for cultural expression in the broadest sense: “Leftist freakishness in opera grows from the same source as leftist freakishness in painting, poetry, pedagogy, and science. Petit bourgeois ‘innovation’ leads to a break with real art, science, and real literature.” One phrase in particular sounded a very Stalin-like threat: “This is playing with nonsensical things, which could end very badly.”

The articles in Pravda were correctly perceived as direct instructions. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was immediately taken out of the repertory in both Leningrad and Moscow. Criticized books were removed from libraries and destroyed, plays were banned, art exhibits shut down. One cultural bureaucrat later recalled being sent “to set things straight” at the Leningrad Russian Museum, which had a valuable collection of Russian avant-garde art. At the museum, he found piles of garbage in the halls, works by Malevich and Filonov sticking out. His orders were to destroy the paintings. Risking his neck, he hid them in deep vaults, saving them for future generations.107

The cultural convulsions of 1936 were the culmination of a lengthy process in the course of which Stalin, the supreme manipulator of public opinion, shaped Soviet art and literature according to his far-reaching propaganda goals. By 1932 he had dissolved all literary and artistic associations, including the omnipotent Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), which had been a pillar of support for him until then. The terms “proletarian culture” and “fellow travelers of the revolution,” which RAPP juggled so deftly, were replaced by new ones—“Soviet culture” and “Soviet writers.” The sole organization allowed was the new Union of Soviet Writers, created as a model for the bureaucratic coordination of all “creative” professions, including composers, artists, and architects.