How Shostakovich suffered under Stalin's symphony of tyranny
The Noise of Time - Julian Barnes' first novel after he won the Booker in 2011 for The Sense of an Ending - opens with a man waiting by the lift of his Leningrad apartment in the small hours of the night. He is smoking his fifth cigarette and his mind is skittering. If it appears to his neighbour that his wife humiliatingly throws him out, night after night. Or he is someone who indecisively sneaks out of his home, but shamelessly keeps returning back.
He doesn't care.
What he's afraid of is being killed, that at any moment the NKVD will storm out of the lift, and drag him to the "Big House". He sits upright, solemnly dressed for his impending doom, along with a suitcase. Such is his torment that he wants to save himself the humiliation of being arrested in his pyjamas.
The year is 1937. The man, it is revealed to us, is the famous Russian composer Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich. His undoing is "self evidently" his own, or Stalin's. His opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, hailed a success, is a disaster the evening Stalin and his entourage attend the performance. The next morning - a day he will remember until the day of his death - Shostakovich finds an editorial in Pravada while he's on a railway station, blithely denouncing him and his work, under the chilling title "Muddle Instead of Music".
The anonymous critique deems him as a danger to Soviet music. He fears the piece is authored by Stalin himself.
It takes almost a year for the "Power" to finally summon him. Although Shostakovich has issued no public apology, apart from withdrawing his fourth symphony, his career seems to be over. His interrogator reveals to him that his "intimate friend" Marshal Tukhachevsky, the Red Napoleon, has been killed in a conspiracy to assassinate Stalin. It dawns on him that he, too, is a "dead man".
As it turns out, by his next scheduled meeting with the Power, his interrogator mysteriously vanishes. He is spared only in the frail, ghostly sense of the word, and thus begins his nightly vigil, anticipating the worst, marking an end to the first of the three-part novel.
Barnes, in the midst of sketching this looming ordeal, recreates the life of the Russian composer, from an infant to an adult, through scattered reflections and thoughts.
The skittering and repetitive narrative, much like Shostakovich's own neurosis, outlines the artist's tortured existence, punctuated by three defining events that hammer at the ribcage of his artistic integrity. Time coarsely sieves back and forth like a blunt needle, weaving the lacerated tapestry of his soul. The horrors of the Soviet Union hem the slim novel as a dark unforgiving shadow.
Shostakovich's second conversation with the Power takes place 12 years after Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. In 1948, Stalin calls him on the phone and coerces him into representing the Soviet Union at the Cultural and Scientific for World Peace in New York. The irony is ineluctable, the humour pitch black. Shostakovich manages to slip it in, somewhat audaciously, that America still performs his music. "No, we didn't give that order," the voice of Power reasons with him. "None of your work has been forbidden. This has always been the case." Shostakovich is confronted with questions on life and music.
Whether irony can preserve him from the cruel clasp of the tyranny. He cannot even commit suicide. He is afraid they will steal his story and rewrite it. Unlike Lenin, who said that music belongs to the people, Shostakovich believes that art belongs to everybody and nobody. "Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time."
In New York, Shostakovich is forced to read a long speech, not written by himself obviously. He denounces his idol Stravinsky, which he later recounts as "the worst moment of his life". A man in the audience, Nicolas Nabokov (a cousin of the famous writer, on the CIA payroll) shames him. He submits, he betrays, he returns home, broken.
If the first and the second part of the novel take place outside of a lift and on a plane, the third takes place in a car. His mind continues to skitter.
Stalin is dead, Shostakovich has been spared. Why, he'll never be sure. Many around him have been arrested, exiled and murdered. Times though have improved, he swims in honours "like a shrimp in shrimp-cocktail sauce", but he's reduced to a shadow of himself. He no longer fears for his life, but life itself. He is being driven to meet Nikita Khrushchev, who invites him to join the party. If they were first testing his courage, ruminates Shostakovich, now they're testing his cowardice.
The Noise of Time is a heartbreaking novel. It is neither about death nor survival, but the destruction of the soul. Though by no means is it a standalone biography. Barnes, in the author's note, elucidates that Shostakovich was a "multiple narrator of his own life". The monologue and the composition - similar to The Sense of an Ending - helps us see the great composer in the refracted light, condemned and alone under the incessant mild rain of tyranny, soaking in tears. Barnes pulls the skin off the countless retellings ever so gently, exposing the human condition of wanting to be left alone.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)