Shostakovich spent a lot of time with Ustvolskaya, who was short and girlish looking. He wrote to her frequently, sometimes twice a day. He confessed to his son, Maxim, that he had never loved anyone as he did her.57 When his wife died suddenly in 1954, Shostakovich proposed to Ustvolskaya but was refused outright, which caused him great grief. Traces of his passion may be found in a melody by Ustvolskaya that Shostakovich used in two major works: the Fifth String Quartet (1952) and the Suite to Poems by Michelangelo (1974), one of his last pieces.
Ustvolskaya did little to promote her music, which therefore was known to only a narrow circle in Leningrad, where it developed cult status. When Ustvolskaya began teaching, the defiantly ascetic character of her life and her works created a great impression on her students. One of them was Boris Tishchenko, who subsequently did graduate work with Shostakovich. In the years when modern Western culture was in effect banned, Ustvolskaya introduced her students to the works of Mahler and Stravinsky, to which Shostakovich had introduced her. Thus was preserved in Leningrad music the sense of an uninterrupted cultural tradition.
Ustvolskaya’s creative energy, devoutness, and personal eccentricity reminded people of the pianist Maria Yudina. Like Yudina, Ustvolskaya spent a lot of time with her students in discussion and listening to music; such “Socratic” sessions had gone on in Leningrad since the days of the Bakhtin circle.
This underground method of passing on culture was typical of Leningrad of that era. Thus, a group of young artists gathered around Vladimir Sterligov—a student of Malevich’s who had returned to Leningrad from the camps, where he had been sent during the Stalin terror after Kirov’s murder—and Sterligov’s wife, Tatyana Glebova, a student of Filonov’s. Sterligov and his group discussed Malevich’s suprematist ideas and Filonov’s “principle of doneness” and declaimed the dadaist poems of the Oberiuts. Here, too, special emphasis was placed on the spirituality of art.
The “principle of doneness” of Pavel Filonov, who died of starvation during the Leningrad siege, held that the artist built a painting out of the tiniest strokes, working with a small brush and creating a complex composition that incorporated seemingly incompatible elements. When the Leningrad artist Mihail Chemiakin first saw Filonov’s works in the late 1950s, the technique stunned him. Chemiakin proceeded to form an art association with his nonconformist friends; they called it Sankt-Peterburg.
The total informational vacuum of the Stalin era gradually broke down but it was a slow and arduous process. It was particularly hard for artists, because the work of the Russian avant-garde was hidden deep in the cellars of museums; the little that came from the West—an occasional album—was worth its weight in gold. Chemiakin collected reproductions of modern art however he could.
I once brought him a German recording of Arnold Schoenberg’s music with a portrait of the composer by Oskar Kokoschka on the album cover. Chemiakin’s room held an ancient harmonium, a press for etchings, a horse’s skull, and a Limoges crucifix. He was wearing black leather pants and a vest with buttons depicting the Russian imperial eagles; the other guests were dressed no less eccentrically. Played with the Leningrad white night outside the window and lit candles inside, Schoenberg’s
The cult of old Petersburg reigned in Chemiakin’s circle. When a film version was being made in Leningrad of Dostoyevsky’s
