A Time For Change

Towards the end of The Noise of Time, Barnes’s latest novel, he writes: “Being a hero was much easier than being a coward. To be a hero you only had to be brave for a moment — 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 required pertinacity, persistence, a refusal to change — which made it, in a way, a kind of courage.” In other words, to live courageously is sometimes to stick with it, to stay the course, to, as Barnes suggested in Staring at the Sun, endure. These reflections on heroism and cowardice, though Barnes may agree with them entirely, are those of the great Russian (and, pertinently, Soviet) composer Dimitri Shostakovich.

The Noise of Time is structured as an agonised meditation, Shostakovich’s bruising self-audit, recounted in a claustrophobic third person, of his relationship to what is characterised in the novel as the “Power”, the compromises he made to live and compose in the Soviet Union of Stalin and, at the end, Khrushchev. Shostakovich’s life has long been the subject of impassioned debate, the so-called ‘Shostakovich Wars’, “nonsensically polarized arguments”, as Alex Ross put it in the New Yorker, “over whether Shostakovich was a Party ideologue or an anti-Communist dissident.” Barnes, in this fictionalised biography, leaves the reader in no doubt about Shostakovich’s unease, distaste for and sheer terror of the Power. The novel’s frightening and blackly comic opening places Shostakovich outside the lift in his apartment building, his mind “skittering… Faces, names, memories… Faces, names… The faces and names of the dead too.” It is in the middle of Stalin’s Great Purge, the state-sponsored execution of hundreds of thousands, perhaps even over a million, people — officials, Party members, writers, musicians, artists, ordinary people — suspected of nefarious plots, or of supporting nefarious plotters, or secretly nurturing thoughts of nefarious plots, or perhaps living in the vicinity of those secretly nurturing thoughts of nefarious plots. And Shostakovich waits nervously by the lift to greet the men he anticipates will come to spirit him away in the middle of the night.

Shostakovich, close to the now out-of-favour Marshal Tukhachevsky, finds himself summoned to The Big House, the headquarters of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, to be interrogated about the closeness of his links to those who would plot against Stalin. “It had all begun, very precisely”, he tells himself, “on the morning of the 28th of January 1936, at Arkhangelsk railway station.” On that day he reads an editorial in Pravda headlined ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ that condemns his hitherto successful opera, Lady Macbeth of Mstensk as “non-political and confusing.” Unsigned, (though a rumour persists that Stalin himself wrote the piece, for who else would be allowed to get away with so many grammatical errors) the editorial concludes with a threat, “it is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly.”

Afraid for his life, Shostakovich withholds his Fourth Symphony, and when he allows his Fifth Symphony to premiere in November 1937 he subtitles it ‘A Soviet Artist’s Response to Just Criticism’. The performance is greeted with tears, critical hosannas and an hour-long standing ovation. Just like that Shostakovich is restored to his status as the most beloved, most famous Soviet composer. Was the subtitle craven or ironic? Does it matter?

Each of this slim novel’s three sections begins with variations of the sentence, “All he knew was that this was the worst time.” Each section is about a specific humiliation suffered by Shostakovich — the Pravda editorial; having to denounce his musical idol Stravinsky in a speech written for him at an event in New York and being exposed as a Stalinist stooge by a CIA-sponsored Russian emigre; finally joining the Communist Party as an old man in a Soviet Union now ruled by Khrushchev. On each occasion, Shostakovich, as imagined by Barnes, appears to hope that his passivity, his ironic resignation, will be recognised as such by the world and by Soviet dissidents. Instead, he understands, increasingly embittered, he will probably be seen as a coward. And while Shostakovich might accept such a judgment from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Andrei Sakharov, what sticks in his craw are what he sees as the true enablers of Soviet tyranny, the likes of Picasso, Sartre and George Bernard Shaw.

Shostakovich knows there is a difference between artistic integrity and personal moral integrity. He sees this as a major failing of, say, Stravinsky. Shostakovich’s only defence against accusations of a similar lack of personal integrity is that he lived in the Soviet Union, he endured, and he did what he had to do to survive. It’s an unarguably strong defence. All that said, The Noise of Time is an odd exercise. A rehash of dated arguments mired in the Cold War when, despite the renewal of hostilities between Russia and the West, the Cold War is irrelevant.