Europe Central (148 page)

706 Description of Nina’s portrait—After the illustration in Gojowy, p. 28 (“Die Ehefrau Dimitri Schostakowitschs, Nina Wassiljewna geb. Warsar”).

707 “Seed corn must not be ground.”—Title of an image by Käthe Kollwitz, 1941-42.

708 The district Party secretary: “This is outrageous! We let Shostakovich join the Party . . .”—Wilson, p. 359 (Kirill Kondrashin).

708 Tale of Ashkenazi as Shostakovich’s divorce intermediary against Nina—Based on Khentova, p. 130, trans. for WTV by Sergi Mineyev.

708 Date of Roman Karmen’s marriage to Maya Ovchinnikova, his telephone number and his preference for hunting and fast cars—
The International Who’s Who, 1977-78
(London: Europa Publications Ltd., 1977), entry on Karmen. The original says “cars,” not “fast cars.” But in Karmen’s “Far and Wide My Country Stretches” there are a huge number of sequences with fast cars in them.

709 Karmen’s private telephone number,
ca.
1965—Andrew I. Lebed, Dr. Heinrich E. Schulz and Dr. Stephen S. Taylor,
Who’s Who in the USSR 1965-66,
2nd ed. (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1966; printed in Spain; orig. comp. by Institute for the Study of the USSR, Munich), p. 346 entry on Karmen, whose address was then Polyanka 34.
The International Who’s Who
gives him a different number in 1977-78, so it seemed no invasion to publish this one.

711 Shostakovich to his wife: “It was blackmail, Irinochka . . . If you love me, you won’t dig that up . . .”—Loosely after Fay, p. 218.

712 Shostakovich to his wife: “You see, I’m such an insensitive criminal type . . .”—Loosely after Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 242 (actually said in reference to the criticisms not of Denisov but of Solzhenitsyn).

712 “A great comrade”: “Anyone in this world who does not succeed in being hated . . .” —Hitler, p. 363.

713 The ditty played by Shostakovich: “Merry singing makes the heart glow . . .”—Von Geldern and Stites, p. 234 (Vasily Lebedev-Kumach and Isaac Dunaevsky, “March of the Happy-Go-Lucky Guys,” 1934), “retranslated” from the following, which rhymes A B C C in the facing Russian text: “Merry singing fills the heart with joy. / It will never let you be sad. / The countryside and villages love singing, / And big cities love singing, too.”

713 Brezhnev: “Socialist art is profoundly optimistic and life-affirming”—Daniels, p. 282 (Report of the CPSU Central Committee to the 23rd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 29 March 1966).

714 The reunion of Shostakovich and Akhmatova (“eighty-eight”)—After Shostakovich and Volkov, pp. 274-75. So far as I know, their meeting was not filmed and Roman Karmen was not present.

717 The bourgeois critic Layton: “At their best, the symphonies . . .”—Simpson, op. cit., p. 198.

717 Shostakovich to Glikman: “I am a dull, mediocre composer”—Glikman, p. 140 (letter of 3 February 1967, abridged).

718 Shostakovich to Glikman: “Slowly and with great difficulty . . .”—Glikman, p. 143 (letter of 8 April 1967).

719 Shostakovich to the orchestra: “On the left and right flanks, the battalion regions are echeloned . . .”—After Glantz and House, p. 277 (Stavka Front Directive No. 12248, 8 May 1943, 0429 hours).

719 Shostakovich to the audience: “Death is terrifying . . .”—Wilson, p. 417 (Mark Lubot-sky, unpublished memoir).

719 Shostakovich to his wife: “Unfortunately, Lebedinsky has grown, how shall I put it, old and stupid”—Wilson, p. 352, Shostakovich-ized.

719 Von Manstein: “Consequently it was now necessary for the Germans . . .”—Op. cit., p. 470.

722 “Our unshakable allies in East Germany” on the Fifteenth: “Strangely reserved and introverted” —Otto-Jürgen Burba, “Repetitio und Memento: Struktur und Bedeutung der Ostinatoformen bei Dmitri Schostakowitsch,” in
Schweizer Musikpädagogische Blätter
(Switzerland), vol. 85, issue 1 (January 1997), pp. 25-30; trans. for WTV by Yolande Korb; “retrans.” here and there by WTV; original p. 28; Korb, unnumbered p. 5.

723 Glikman’s brother’s idea for Shostakovich’s gravesite, and his recapitulation of Irina’s reaction—G. Glikman, in Schmalenberg, p. 178 (trans. by WTV). In this memoir, Glikman says “Petrograd,” not “Leningrad.”

724 Bely: “All of Petersburg is an infinity of the Prospect . . .”
—
Andrei Bely,
Petersburg,
trans. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 12 (slightly altered).

724 “. . . and the living faces the color of dirt, and that severed arm which hung from the garden gate . . .”—Punin, p. 191 (entry for Leningrad, 13 December 1941): “For a long time there hung an arm up to the elbow, attached by someone to the fence of the garden of one of the destroyed buildings. Dark crowds of people walk past with faces swollen and earthlike.”

725 Nadezhda Mandelstam (footnote): “I can testify that nobody I knew fought . . .”—Mandelstam, p. 307.

727 Non-appearance of Shostakovich’s name in the Urals poll—
The Soviet Way of Life,
p. 395 (ch. 9: “The Society of Great Culture”).

A PIANIST FROM KILGORE

728 Epigraph—Jakov Lind,
Soul of Wood,
trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964; orig. German ed. 1962), p. 46 (“Soul of Wood”).

730 Professor Svetlana Boym, who happened to be a fellow at the American Academy during my own brief residence there in 2003, proposes that I’ve misconceived the Russians’ anti-American attitude. In her view they wouldn’t have been anti-Cliburn at all. Instead of Cliburn representing something baleful, she says, he would have simply been isolated and forgotten as his Russian colleagues got drunk and chased women.

730 The juror Oborin: “Good, really very good . . .”—Paperno, p. 209.

731
New York Times:
“A big, percussive attack . . .”—Issue of 11 April 1958, p. 12, col. 5.

732 Sofiya Gubaidulina: “Dmitri Dmitreyvich, you’re the person our generation depends on . . .”—Very loosely based on her retrospective testimony in Wilson, pp. 304-05.

733 The premiere of “Far and Wide My Country Stretches”—I am taking a liberty here, not knowing exactly when this film of Roman Karmen’s first appeared. The
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
tells me only that it was released in 1958, the year that Cliburn won the competition.

736 General von Hartmann: “As seen from Sirius, Goethe’s works will be mere dust . . .” —Craig, p. 373, slightly reworded.

737 Footnote:
Great Soviet Encyclopedia:
“Spontaneity, straightforward lyricism, exultant sound and impetuous dynamism.”—Vol. 12, p. 121 (entry on Harvey Lavan Cliburn, Jr.).

LOST VICTORIES

I would have preferred to set this story in 1958, when “Lost Victories” first appeared, rather than in 1962; then the parallelism with “The Pianist from Kilgore” would have been more exact; unfortunately, the Berlin Wall was not erected until 1961. It seemed best to make the events of the story occur a year later, so that the narrator could consider the Wall a settled injustice rather than a brand new outrage.

738 Epigraph—Von Manstein, p. 29.

739 “Had Paulus only been permitted [by Hitler] to break out and link up with von Manstein’s troops . . .”—Interestingly enough, Paulus seems to have blamed both Hitler
and
von Manstein. The ambiguously kidnapped Jahn had an opportunity to speak with him in 1954, in the office of Herr Weidauer, the Bürgermeister of Dresden. Jahn describes him (pp. 258-61) as a broken man, talking pitiably about his decorations.

740 “A great German”: “The strong man is mightiest alone.”—The great German was Schiller, but Hitler loved to quote this aphorism.

740 Speaking of great Germans, here is what the
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
(vol. 15, p. 436, biographical entry) has to say about von Manstein: “an honorary member of a number of revanchist circles.”
⁴⁹

740 Von Manstein: “When Hitler called for the swift and ruthless destruction of the Polish Army . . .”—Von Manstein, p. 190.

740 Von Manstein: The capitulation of Poland “in every way upheld the military honor . . .”—Ibid., p. 59.

741 Von Manstein: As a result of the impeccable behavior of our troops . . .”—Ibid., p. 151.

742 Von Manstein: “From now on the weapons would speak.”—Ibid., p. 33.

743 “Lili Marlene”—Mr. Thomas Melle would have me write the German “Lili Marleen,” but I have never seen it this way in any Anglo-American World War II source, so I fear it would look wrong to my readers.

743 Von Manstein on the Soviet troop dispositions—“Deployment against every contingency” —Op. cit., p. 181.

743 Von Manstein: “The Soviet command showed its true face . . .”—Ibid., p. 180.

THE WHITE NIGHTS OF LENINGRAD

After completing this story I discovered the following footnote in Moholy-Nagy (p. 15): “The interplay of various facts has caused our age to shift almost imperceptibly toward colour-lessnessand grey: the grey of the big city, of the black and white newspapers, of the photographic and film services; the colour-eliminating tempo of our life today. Perpetual hurry, fast movement, cause all colours to melt into grey.”

748 Ansel Adams: “. . . lightly charmed by the passing landscape . . .”—Ansel Adams,
Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs
(Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 1983), p. 117 (commentary on his photograph of Jacques Henri Lartigue).

AN IMAGINARY LOVE TRIANGLE: SHOSTAKOVICH, KARMEN, KONSTANTINOVSKAYA

For my own narrative purposes I have invented many of the interrelations between these three individuals.

According to Khentova’s
Udivitelyenui Shostakovich,
Konstantinovskaya returned from Spain married to Karmen. He was doing documentary work there in 1936 and 1937.

Konstantinovskaya and Shostakovich were intimate for slightly more than a year, from around June 1934 until some time in 1935, probably the late summer or fall, shortly after which she was expelled from the Komsomol and arrested. She seems to have been in prison for a year or less. So I imagine her as having volunteered for duty in Spain in 1936. I have no way of knowing whether she had the gruesome Gulag experiences which I have imputed to her.

It is a fact that she received the Red Star for bravery in Spain. Very likely she was a combatant. Possibly she saw action with a Soviet tank brigade. However, I have been unable to find out any details about her service in Spain. It is the fact of her Red Star which decided me to give her expertise in sharpshooting and first aid while in the Komsomol.

Karmen’s memoir
Über die zeit und über mich selbst: Erzählungen über mein Schaffen
states that his wife was expecting to give birth on 22 June 1941. The portions of the book which I was able to read in Berlin do not state which wife this was. She might well not have been Elena, because almost immediately after the newlyweds returned to the USSR in 1937 Karmen set out on other long journeys, which doesn’t imply the closest of marriages; on the other hand, good Soviet citizens were accustomed to putting their families second. In
Europe Central
I have supposed that the expectant mother was Elena.

The International Who’s Who, 1977-78
informs us that in 1962 Karmen married Maya Ovchinnikova. So he and Elena must have divorced before then.

Khentova writes that Elena married a Professor Vigodsky, to whom she bore a daughter, but gives no date. Khentova further states that although Elena kept in touch with some of Shostakovich’s relatives, particularly his sister Mariya, she saw Shostakovich only once more. All the same, she saved his letters to the end of her life, which she could have done for any number of reasons, but why not suppose that she held a torch for him?

It is unlikely that Shostakovich never got over Elena, as has been imagined in this book. There is equally no reason to suppose that Elena’s marriage with Karmen failed because she was still in love with Shostakovich. Moreover, Elena was blonde, not darkhaired, and I have no grounds whatsoever for believing her to have been a bisexual cigarette smoker. Shostakovich held somewhat traditional views about women (for instance, he did not express much respect for female composers, which was a point of contention between him and Galina Ustvolskaya), so I can’t be confident that he could have tolerated a bisexual mistress.

When I think of Shostakovich, and when I listen to his music, I imagine a person consumed by fear and regret, a person who (like Kurt Gerstein) did what litttle he could to uphold the good—in this case, freedom of artistic creation, and the mitigation of other people’s emergencies. He became progressively more beaten down, and certainly experienced difficulty saying no—a character trait which may well have kept him alive in the Stalinist years. In spite of the fact that he joined the Party near the end, to me he is a great hero—a tragic hero, naturally. Richard Taruskin writes in
Defining Russia Musically
(p. 537) “How pleasant and comforting it is to portray him as we would like to imagine ourselves acting in his shoes”—in other words, as being a member of some fairytale anti-Soviet Resistance, which would have instantly led him to share Vlasov’s fate.

His marriage to Nina Varzar was unhappy in a number of ways, and I wanted to give him, in fiction, at least, a great love—which he might well have experienced with his last wife, Irina. Because in
Europe Central
his passion for Elena dominates his life to the end, including his years with Irina, I beg her pardon, and likewise his children’s, for any misrepresentations which this book’s objectives required.

Roman Karmen was not a great artist, but he was a brave, adventurous sort whom it would now be all too easy to dismiss as a Stalinist propagandist. He and Käthe Kollwitz may fairly be called fellow propagandists, although to my mind the latter was by far the former’s superior from the “aesthetic” point of view. Karmen’s documentaries deserve more attention than they have received. I imagine him, plausibly I believe, as a passionate “soldier with a camera” who did his best. I suspect that he was also cheerful and likeable. He very well might have tried to assist Shostakovich as I have imagined in “Opus 110,” although here again, by magnifying Shostakovich’s obsession with Elena, I have surely exaggerated the number of thoughts which our composer sent Karmen’s way. In any event, I respect both men’s memories.