Into the whisper of history
The lifelong career of a coward in Barnes’ The Noise of Time
In the closing pages of his outstanding new novel, The Noise of Time, his first since the 2011 Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes writes: “Being a hero was so much easier than being a coward. To be a hero, you only had to be brave for a moment. . . . But to be a coward was to embark on a career that lasted a lifetime.”
Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich embarks on his long career of cowardice on Jan. 28 of 1936, after his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District is condemned by Pravda — and therefore by Stalin himself — for being full of “quacks and grunts and growls” and, worse still, a threat to the very idea of Soviet music.
Resigned to his fate — this is, after all, the time of the Great Terror — Shostakovich nightly packs a small suitcase and waits on the landing outside of his flat for the dreaded NKVD (the secret police precursor to the KGB) to arrive and take him away to the Big House.
Better that, he thinks, than “being dragged from the apartment in his pyjamas” and having his daughter packed off “to a special orphanage for children of enemies of the state.”
Only chance keeps Shostakovich from ending up another victim of the purges. But it is a shattering realization for the composer, knowing that he must “become a technique for survival,” because after “a certain point, that was what all men became: techniques for survival.”
There is a wonderful musicality to this compact and powerful novel.
By focusing on three telling moments in Shostakovich’s life — the Pravda article in 1936, his return from a propaganda tour to the United States in 1948 and his final capitulation to the Party in1960 — Barnes offers variations on a theme.
His Shostakovich is a man of great moral complexity who, trapped between passion and politics, finds himself servant to both.
In Stalinist Russia, however, balancing moral integrity with artistic integrity is an all but hopeless task.
In a place where “it was impossible to tell the truth . . . and live,” Shostakovich exists under the constant threat of further denunciation.
And yet he endures, more often than not by submitting himself to humiliation upon humiliation.
But these are sacrifices he is willing to make, because in the end, all that matters is “that music inside ourselves — the music of our being — which . . . over decades, if it is strong and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history.”
Proving, as Barnes recently wrote of Shostakovich in the Guardian newspaper, there “are more forms of heroism than the obvious ones.” Stephen Finucan is a Toronto novelist and short story writer.