Julian Barnes’ new novel imagines Shostakovich’s ordeal
Divisive composer’s weaknesses laid bare
On Jan 26, 1936, Joseph Stalin attended a performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s much-acclaimed opera Lady Macbeth Of Mtsensk at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, and the composer was disturbed to see that the Soviet leader and his government companions abruptly left their box before the final act. Two days later, there appeared in Pravda a scathing denunciation of the evening under the headline “Muddle Instead of Music”. The review castigated Shostakovich’s opera as tickling “the perverted taste of the bourgeois with its fidgety, neurotic music”.
It was, people speculated, an artistic death warrant (if not the real thing) and possibly penned by Stalin himself. The composers’ union quickly condemned the opera, too, and one-time supporters began berating Shostakovich in speeches and statements.
Shostakovich was so convinced that the secret police would come to take him away in the middle of the night that he reportedly kept a packed suitcase ready for his arrest.
Julian Barnes makes this traumatic event central to his fictionalised portrait of Shostakovich in his ambitious but claustrophobic new novel, The Noise Of Time. It’s a book that attempts to turn the composer’s complex relationship with the Soviet authorities into an Orwellian allegory about the plight of artists in totalitarian societies — and a Kafkaesque parable about a fearful man’s efforts to wrestle with a surreal reality, even as he questions his complicity with the system.
In the book that first brought him to prominence, Flaubert’s Parrot (1985), Barnes also created a novel around the biography of a prominent artist. But whereas he used a collage-like technique in that volume to give us glimpses of his hero from a variety of angles, he opts here to try to take us into Shostakovich’s own mind — a suffocating place, it turns out, which is part of the problem.
Through the years, there have been intense debates over both the enduring importance of that composer’s music (some sing his praises, while others regard him as second-rate, hardly fit to be mentioned alongside the likes of Prokofiev, never mind Stravinsky) and his stance toward the Soviet regime. Some have depicted Shostakovich as a coward who caved to Stalin after the “Lady Macbeth” episode, and who compromised his aesthetic and moral principles; others have defended him as a brave dissident who lived under constant fear of persecution and who cleverly smuggled a message of defiance into his music.
Barnes’ book internalises these debates, turning them into conversations within Shostakovich’s own head. On one hand, defending his need to survive and protect his family; on the other, cursing himself as a cowardly worm, who compromised all his principles, going so far as to denounce his hero, Stravinsky, as a deviant modernist. One minute, telling himself that he has cleverly used irony to subvert his apparent embrace of the regime’s prescription of optimistic, old-fashioned music; the next, filled with self-disgust at having allowed himself to be displayed as a figurehead of Soviet values at a cultural conference in the United States or being bullied into joining the party.
By internalising these debates, Barnes avoids the polarised either-or, black-or-white characterisations of Shostakovich as noble dissident or spineless government patsy, but he also traps us inside the composer’s mind, where we soon tire of the narcissistic musings and self-pitying rationalisations.
Being a hero, he thinks, requires only a moment of courage “when you took out the gun, threw the bomb, pressed the detonator, did away with the tyrant and with yourself as well”. Being a coward, in contrast, meant a lifetime of anticipating “the next occasion when you would have to make excuses for yourself, dither, cringe, reacquaint yourself with the taste of rubber boots and the state of your own fallen, abject character”. And yet he accepts the perks granted by the government to its obedient and favoured citizen-artists — a nice apartment, a dacha, a car and driver, servants, fame.
In recent books like The Lemon Table and The Sense Of An Ending, Barnes has become increasingly preoccupied with characters looking back over the receding vistas of their lives. Here, he has tried to echo Shostakovich’s work with an aphoristic, irony-laden style of his own. His composer is so given to bellyaching and navel-gazing, however, that the novel gains power and resonance when it steps outside its hero’s head, and instead uses Shostakovich’s story to probe such favourite themes as the relativity of history and the subjectivity of experience (the same themes that animated earlier Barnes novels like The Porcupine and A History Of The World In 10 1/2 Chapters), and to chronicle the absurdities that artists suffer under totalitarianism.
Barnes’ Shostakovich reads a speech recanting his own work; he should have known better than to write a symphony that acknowledged the tragedies of war, when any good Soviet citizen knew that war was glorious. And he promises to renounce formalism and “unhealthy individualism”, and instead write melodic music for the Soviet people. He submits to lessons in Marxism-Leninism from a tutor — a sociologist — and agrees to hang a portrait of Stalin in his study. He reads articles that appear under his name to find out what he was thinking.
Eventually, Shostakovich hopes, time will liberate his music. “History, as well as biography, would fade,” Barnes writes. “Perhaps one day Fascism and Communism would be merely words in textbooks. And then, if it still had value — if there were still ears to hear — his music would be ... just music.”
He avoids the polarised either-or, black-or-white characterisations