St Petersburg полностью

Nevertheless, the first Soviet reviewers described the Fifth Symphony rather accurately, discovering “traits of physiological horror” and the “coloring of mortality and despair.” “The thrust of suffering in a number of places is taken to a naturalistic scream and howl. In some episodes the music is capable of eliciting an almost physical sense of pain,” stated a critic. Another critic maintained that in Shostakovich’s symphony “the emotion of dazed mourning is elevated to the heights of tragedy.”

The paradox is that these critics were not trying to help Shostakovich. At the height of the Great Terror their perceptive judgments were in fact intended as political denunciations of the composer who dared to create a tragic work in the paranoic atmosphere of enforced optimism. Shostakovich’s symphony truthfully reflected the emotions of the populace, exhausted by mass arrests and executions, yet the press rebuked the work for its “concentratedly gloomy musical colors” and its “horror of numbness.” But precisely because the Fifth Symphony continued to be performed and to be discussed in the press, it became the subject of public debates, unlike Akhmatova’s Requiem. And so Shostakovich’s work played a certain role in the crystallization of the mythos of Leningrad as a martyr city.

Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony could be called the Bronze Horseman Symphony because, like Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, it deals with the eternal question for Russia about the conflict between the individual and the state. Like Yuri Tynyanov in his prose, Shostakovich reinterpreted the problem under Soviet conditions. In his symphony the basic conflict occurs in the finale, which caused the greatest arguments. The critics, especially those in the West, saw an unconditional apotheosis in the finale, an anthem to the status quo. Yet the first Soviet listeners perceived the music quite differently. One of them noted that the start of the last movement is “the iron tread of a monstrous power trampling man.” Upon first hearing the symphony, Alexander Fadeyev wrote in his diary, “The end does not sound like an outcome (and ever less like a triumph or victory), but like a punishment or revenge of someone.”

The finale of the Fifth Symphony is tied in its imagery with Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, in which poor Yevgeny entered in vain battle with the awesome statue of Peter the Great, the embodiment of the idea of the Russian state. Yevgeny lost his mind and died, and the state triumphed. But Pushkin, as we recall, refused to make a final judgment, as if “suspending” the conclusion of his poem. This allowed various and often contradictory interpretations of his work, depending on the critic’s ideological persuasion. Symphonic music tends to ambiguity more than literature does, allowing even more room for various interpretations. This gave Shostakovich the chance to “speak out” in an atmosphere that otherwise made open public discussion impossible for Soviet intellectuals.

The ambiguity of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony helped it to surface, while Akhmatova’s Requiem continued to exist in the underground. All critical attacks on the music’s “horror,” its “mortality and despair” were of a general character. Its detractors were not able to provoke a political scandal, and the discussion of the Fifth Symphony was largely confined to an aesthetic realm. The name of Leningrad, for understandable reasons, was not mentioned in connection with the symphony. The new Petersburg mythos of the city as martyr remained hidden. The decisive push toward its public acceptance—both in the USSR and in the West—came from the war with Nazi Germany.

On June 22, 1941, Shostakovich was chairman of the final examinations for pianists at Leningrad Conservatory, where he had been a professor since 1937. The exam was interrupted by terrible words resounding in the hall: “War with Germany!”

Many Soviet people had feared that Hitler would one day invade their country. A Leningrader recalled the mood of those years, “Somewhere in Europe the war is on, for several years now—so what? Our country is outside the war; we were told that it was good that the capitalists were fighting among themselves, we could only profit from that.” This same person continued, “It was not considered appropriate to worry about international events, to exhibit, as they used to call it, ‘unhealthy moods.’ We were lulled by a popular song that went: “Our favorite city can sleep peacefully, and dream, and grow green in spring.’”126

The shock was great. The Germans had striking success in the early days of the war, causing unprecedented damage to the Soviet Army and occupying huge chunks of Soviet territory. By July 14 German troops were at the gates of Leningrad. On September 8 they completed their encirclement of the city. On September 22, 1941, German Naval headquarters issued a secret directive called “On the Future of the City of Petersburg,” which stated,