175
It was after the premiere of The Nose—in concert form, in June 1929—that
Shostakovich found himself first accused of “formalism.” The word was Soviet
shorthand for any style that smacked too strongly of Western modernism. The
strike came from the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM),
which had made it its mission to extirpate all remnants of bourgeois musical
culture. The Nose vanished from Soviet stages, not to be seen again on
Russian soil until 1974. Shostakovich buried himself in film and theater work,
dutifully using his music to portray the eternal battle between good Soviets and
their “class enemies.” The ballets The Golden Age and The Bolt expose,
respectively, the decadence of Western competitors at a football match and the
nefarious activities of “slackers,” “tipplers,” and “saboteurs.” The films The
Golden Mountains and The Counterplan unmask capitalist bosses and wreckers
of industry. Kozintsev and Trauberg’s film Alone
In November 1931, Shostakovich made what seemed a brave move. Fed up
with the agitations of the proletarians, he issued a manifesto, “Declaration of a
Composer’s Duties,” stating that demands for songfulness in Soviet music and
theater were having a ruinous effect on composers. In fact, as Shostakovich
may well have been aware, the Party was about to disavow the proletarian line;
the following April, RAPM was dissolved, and the new Union of Soviet
Composers took its place. You can sense a certain cackling quality in the music
that Shostakovich wrote for Nikolai Akimov’s irreverent 1932 production of
follows a Leningrad
schoolteacher into farthest Siberia, where landowning peasants are obstructing
the Soviet experiment. Stalin approved these films for wide release in late 1931,
and Shostakovich’s name probably first came to his attention at the screenings.
The dictator is known to have loved “The Song of the Counterplan,” which went
on to become one of the iconic melodies of the Soviet age.
Hamlet,
After years of collectivization, industrialization, and famine, the Soviet populace
was feeling rebellious, and in the early thirties Stalin tried to placate his subjects
by promising new comforts and freedoms. Artists were deputized to broadcast
the message that “life is getting better,” as Stalin eloquently put it. To this end,
artists’ lives were made better, at least in the material sense. The Union of
Soviet Composers supplied composers with health plans, sanatoriums, and a
cooperative building in Moscow. At an October 1932 gathering at Maxim
Gorky’s Moscow mansion, Stalin mused aloud that writers should be “engineers
of human souls,” and the writers debated among themselves what he meant.
From the meeting emerged the concept of socialist realism, according to which
Soviet artists would depict the people’s lives both realistically and heroically, as
if from the standpoint of the socialist utopia to come. Established nineteenth-
century forms such as the novel, the epic drama, the opera, and the symphony
were deemed suitable vehicles of expression, although they required thorough
renovation in line with Soviet thought. The Party theorist Nikolai Bukharin, at the
Writers’ Congress of 1934, offered a more elaborate definition of socialist
which opened in Moscow a month after the demise of RAPM. In Act III,
Scene 2, Hamlet accuses Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of trying to play him
like a pipe, and in the Akimov production the prince dramatized his contempt by
lowering a flute to his buttocks. At that moment, Shostakovich had a piccolo in
the orchestra pipe out Alexander Davidenko’s mass song “They Wanted to Beat
Us, to Beat Us,” a favorite of the proletarian faction.