In that coded language, references to the revolutionary past—in a novel, play, or film about the Decembrists or nihilists, for instance—took on a special meaning. Words like “liberty,” “tyrant,” and “prison,” while formally referring to the past, were signals of the present situation as well. This technique became particularly popular after Stalin’s death, in the fifties and sixties. In that period even some of the revolutionary films of the twenties and thirties provoked an emotional impact of another sort. The romantic image of “revolutionary Petersburg” was juxtaposed with the contemporary drab and faceless Leningrad, where the slightest sign of nonconformity was eradicated and punished severely. Struggles against tsarist gendarmes, distribution of underground leaflets, and antigovernment demonstrations were elements of that contrast, formed in part by the film trilogy of Kozintsev and Trauberg about the ever-hopeful “fellow from the suburb,” Maxim.
It is against this cultural background that we must examine the appearance in 1957 of Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony, which came to be known as
Mandelstam had written about Bloody Sunday as a tragedy that
could have unfolded only in Petersburg—its plan, the disposition of its streets, the spirit of its architecture left an ineradicable mark on the nature of the historical event. The ninth of January would not have happened in Moscow. The centrifugal force of that day, the proper movement along radii, from the outside to the center, that is to say, the entire dynamic of January ninth was determined by the architectural and historic meaning of Petersburg.
Even in 1922 when he wrote these words, Mandelstam realized the significance of Bloody Sunday for the creation of a new legend of Petersburg, when “the liberated new soul of Petersburg, like a tender orphaned Psyche, wandered along the snows.” Thirty-five years later the memory of Bloody Sunday fit organically into the underground mythos of Petersburg the martyr city.
Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony was a grand portrait of that city. A master of symphonic development, Shostakovich here, somewhat unexpectedly, extended his hand to the Mighty Five, basing the symphony on revolutionary folk songs. By using these familiar melodies, the words of which were known to most people, Shostakovich introduced the multifaceted imagery of revolutionary romanticism into his symphony. The sound of the songs inevitably elicited freedom-loving associations, or, as Soviet cultural bureaucrats used to put it, “incorrect allusions.”
Hearing the refrain of a well-known Russian prison song in the first movement, the audience could recall its words.
The same effect ensued in the finale with the revolutionary melody “Rage on, Tyrants.”
Intimations of code words like “prison” and “tyrants” created a charged environment for Soviet audiences of those years, attuned as they were to the slightest dissident hint. Even Akhmatova, a strict critic and no idealizer of revolution, was strongly moved by Shostakovich’s use of the revolutionary songs. According to Lydia Chukovskaya, Akhmatova responded with delight to the Eleventh Symphony: “The songs fly across the horrible black sky like angels, like birds, like white clouds!”22
For more aware listeners, the music elicited a contemporary parallel, one intended by the composer: the cruel suppression by Soviet tanks of the 1956 Hungarian anti-Communist uprising. In the second movement Shostakovich ostensibly depicts the shooting on the Petersburg demonstrators on Bloody Sunday. But at the Leningrad premiere of the symphony, one woman was heard to say, “Those aren’t rifle shots, that is the roar of tanks crushing people.”23
