On The noise of time by Julian Barnes

Irina Popova

Moscow State University

On The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes

This book is not for musicologists. Nor is it for the connoisseurs of the music by Shostakovich. They can refer to many other important works concerning themselves with the great composer, among which

are Elizabeth Wilson's Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (1994; revised edition 2006) and Solomon Volkov's Testimony: The Memoirs of Shostakovich (1979), both mentioned by Julian Barnes as his major sources.

In The Noise of Time a few pieces by the composer are just mentioned and only the final part of the Fifth Symphony is provided with some brief comments. For the aims and purposes of Barnes' book it is the reception of Shostakovich's music in the Soviet Union together with its impact on the career and, indeed, the life of the composer which are important. Thus, the situation concerning the article 'Muddle Instead of Music' (the Pravda, Jan. 28, 1936) -Stalin's personal reaction upon the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk - is dealt with rather thoroughly making the central topic of Part 1 of the book, 'On the Landing'. Labelled for his formalistic experiment 'an enemy of the people', Shostakovich is expecting to be arrested and is spending a number of nights on the staircase outside his flat with a small suitcase (some underwear, a toothbrush and toothpowder, papirosy Kazbek), so as not to be captured in the presence of his wife and one-year-old daughter. It should be noticed, though, that an exSoviet or Russian reader will know from the GULAG literature that arrest was usually accompanied with a thorough search of the room or the flat or the house which could not be prevented by greeting the NKVD people outside the door.

Anyway, the smashing of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and the following expectation of punishment - of the prison or labour camp or physical annihilation - as well as the fright for the future of his family prevented Shostakovich from becoming an opera composer, the idea and the protagonist's bitterness about the fact are stressed throughout the book. Yet nothing is said, unfortunately, of another effect of the devastating article, shackling and even mutilating his free creativity: the Fourth Symphony, composed in the same 1936 as the opera (though premiered as late as 1961), a most difficult and innovative major work abounding in formal experimenting, reveals Shostakovich as a great modernist with a huge potential in the High Modernism's direction. That potential was suppressed.

It was his Fifth Symphony which was greeted with a vast ovation and understood as his reply to 'Just Criticism'. Its movements are quite easy to interpret as featuring the life of a Soviet citizen in the 1930s, depressed and terrified with the screeching noise of the lift, indeed with the noise of time. The finale, however, was understood by many as a triumph - reminding of George Orwell's 'He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother' (only 1984 had not yet been written at the time). Soviet critics called the Fifth 'an optimistic tragedy'. And here is what Barnes writes: 'Let Power have the words, because words cannot stain music. Music escapes from words: that is its purpose and its majesty. (...) They missed the screeching irony of the final movement, that mockery of triumph.' [Barnes 2016: 58]. Is not this a powerful counterbalance to the image of a frightened man, trembling on the landing? It is also a counterbalance to the Shostakovich as he will be shown in Parts 2 and 3 of the book - as a man whose attempts at resisting the authorities are always thwarted.

Part 2, 'On the Plane', is focussed on the composer's trouble at the 1948 Peace Conference in the United States. Similarly to Part 1 it opens with the phrase: 'All he knew was that this was the worst time' [Barnes 2016: 61] - only in Part 1 'this' was not italicised. A telephone call from Stalin in person forces Shostakovich to accept membership in the Soviet delegation and meet with the greatest disgrace in his life: he has to read out a speech written by some Soviet speech-writer where not only Western music was condemned, but also Igor Stravinsky, the composer he reveres and regards as the greatest of his contemporaries. Then he answers the questions of an ex-Russian journalist in the way expected of a Soviet orthodox. And then on the plane back he dies of shame and drinks in the futile hope of the oblivion.

It is difficult not to remember here that in the same 1948 he composed the first edition of the mini-opera Anti-Formalist Rayok on his own libretto, a striking satire on the Communist Party's struggle against experimenting in music where the words of the singers included the well-known at the time phrases from the speeches of highest Party authorities. More than that, Singer Number One sings and speaks rubbish with a pronounced Georgian accent and is instantly recognisable as a satirical portrait of Stalin. Singer Number Two is Zhdanov and sings and speaks, among other things, about the way the famous Georgian folk music must be treated and quoted by

Soviet composers - again an allusion to Stalin's criticism of an opera by Vano Muradeli. The latter is mentioned by Barnes, but the existence of Anti-Formalist Rayok is not. Without it the reader has a one-sided - and indeed unjust! - portrait of a weak person Dmitrii Dmitrievich Shostakovich whose sole answer to the regime was heavy drinking.

Part 3, 'In the Car', again starts with the slightly altered opening phrase of the two previous ones: 'All he knew was that this was the worst time of ah' [Barnes 2016:115]. The central biographical fact here is Shostakovich's agreement to become Head of the Composers’ Council of the Russian Federation resulting in his having to join the Communist Party- as always, his hands were wrung and he suffered severely. This was during the 'vegetarian' times of Nikita the Corncob (Khrushchev). And then, according to Barnes, he could not but disgrace himself by signing public letters denouncing Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov. It is necessary to notice, though, that in her notes to the Russian translation of The Noise of Time the translator Yelena Petrova informs us that there is no Shostakovich's signature under the anti-Solzhenitsyn letter (Барнс 2017: 211). Not less interesting is the fact mentioned by the composer's widow: he never signed the antiSakharov letter either, they were trying hard and did manage to escape those seeking his signature, so the signature is a fake (Irina Shostakovich, Moscow News N 31, Aug. 8 -14, 2000). Difficult to check or prove, yet easy to believe - at least for those who like myself who remember the life in the Soviet Union.

It goes without saying, however, that the portrait of the elderly composer who survived two heart attacks and seemed to be tired of life is again not quite satisfying without the story of his main great achievements, one of which is his Thirteenth Symphony. It is composed on the text by the then young Yevgenii Yevtushenko, the first part - on his poem Babii Yar, much criticised at the time for exclusively concentrating on Nazis' murdering the Jews. The triumphant first performance took place in Moscow in 1962 and is still within the memory of not too old people.

Yes, the book is neither for musicologists nor for music lovers. Yet what is a greatest composer without serious consideration of his music? The image of a frightened little person, always acting against his conscience and ready for compromises with the regime, dominates. The image of the giant who dared to oppose the noise of time - grunts and quacks and indecent songs of crippled beggars alongside many tikhons khrennikovs - to oppose those with his music, is seen in the book but rarely and not too distinctly. 'And so, he would put all his remaining courage into his music, and his cowardice into his life.' [Barnes 2016:157]. Thus Barnes declares. His book, however, mostly shows the second part of this truth, the first one actually remaining a declaration.

The book can be perceived not as the Life of the concrete composer D.D. Shostakovich, but as a Survival story of any Artist under totalitarian pressure. Therefore it is not surprising that in Barnes’ most powerful generalizing passages one can recognize the ideas and even language akin to those of George Orwell:

Tyranny had become so expert at destroying that why should it not destroy love as well, intentionally or not? Tyranny demanded that you love the Party, the State, the Great Leader and Helmsman, the People. But individual love - bourgeois and particularist - distracted from such grand, noble, meaningless, unthinking ‘loves’. And in these times, people were always in danger of becoming less than fully themselves. If you terrorized them enough, they became something else, something diminished and reduced: mere techniques for survival. And so, it was not just an anxiety, but often a brute fear that he experienced: the fear that love’s last days had come [Barnes 2016:86-87].

Proletarian purity was as important to the Soviets as Aryan purity was to the Nazis. Further, he had the vanity, or foolishness, to notice and remember that what the Party had said yesterday was often in direct contradiction to what the Party was saying today. He wanted to be left alone with music and his family and his friends: the simplest of desires, yet one entirely unfulfillable. They wanted to engineer him along with everyone else. They wanted him to reforge himself, like a slave labourer on the White Sea Canal. They demanded ‘an optimistic Shostakovich’[Barnes 2016: 89].

These quotations also demonstrate that the book is certainly not for the Russian or ex-Soviet reader: we have read too much about life under Stalin - from Yurii Trifonov in the Soviet times to Varlam Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn and many others during the Glasnost epoch. The book’s target readership are those in whose national memory the experience of totalitarianism is happily absent. Barnes cleverly and with full understanding shows various categories of people from the West, both pro-Soviet and those who wondered why the Russians are not heroic enough to fight the regime. Among the former is Bernard Shaw whose satirical depiction seems strikingly true to life:

Hunger in Russia? he had asked rhetorically. Nonsense, I’ve been fed as well as anywhere in the world. And it was he who said, ‘You won’t frighten me with the word “dictator”’. And so the credulous fool hobnobbed with Stalin and saw nothing. Though why indeed should he be afraid of a dictator? They hadn’t had one in England since the days of Cromwell. He had been forced to send Shaw the score of his Seventh Symphony. He should have added to his signature on its title page the number of peasants who had starved to death while the playwright was gorging himself in Moscow [Barnes 2016: 107].

The latter are also very convincing:

Then there were those who understood a little better, who supported you, and yet at the same time were disappointed in you. Who did not grasp the one simple fact about the Soviet Union: that it was impossible to tell the truth here and live. Who imagined they knew how Power operated and wanted you to fight it as they believed they would do in your position. In other words, they wanted your blood. They wanted martyrs to prove the regime’s wickedness. But you were to be the martyrs, not them [Barnes 2016: 107].

In a similar way Barnes comments upon the behavior of Igor Stravinsky:

And Stravinsky had spent decades sitting on top of his American Mount Olympus, aloof, egocentric, unconcerned when artists and writers and their families were being hunted down in his native land; were imprisoned, exiled, murdered. Did he utter a single public word of protest while breathing the air of freedom? That silence had been contemptible; and just as he revered Stravinsky the composer, so he despised Stravinsky the thinker [Barnes 2016: 133].

Is there a way then to oppose the noise of time, to resist the cacophony which a person - in this case a great composer - hears inside his head, as well as in the outside world? Barnes begins and concludes his book by one and the same episode: in the middle of the wartime, at a railway station in the middle of nowhere Shostakovich and his fellow-traveler get out of the train with a bottle of vodka and three glasses and drink with a crippled beggar. They clink glasses and Shostakovich says: ‘A triad’. And this is the point: to oppose the cacophony with the tonic triad. Barnes ends his book thus:

And yet a triad put together by three not very clean vodka glasses and their contents was a sound that rang clear of the noise of time, and would outlive everyone and everything. And perhaps, finally, this was all that mattered [Barnes 2016: 133 180].