No longer does the march sound cute. Its full brutality has been revealed, and then it comes to a climax in a gesture Shostakovich used often: a brief intake of breath followed by huge, held, ghastly chords, tremulous with hatred — a vision of evil unveiled.
Little Maxim Shostakovich, attending his first concert, could not stop thinking about the menace in that theme later in the evening, once he had been taken home. “I kept on hearing this music even when I was asleep at night. The drums starting from afar, then getting louder and louder. . . .” He awoke in a panic, jumped out of bed, and ran to the old woman who took care of him and Galina. She soothed him by making the sign of the cross over his head and whispering an illegal prayer.
The rise of this march in the first movement, the so-called invasion theme, is what most people remembered about the symphony as it was heard all over the world in the year to follow.
The first movement ends with a quiet return of the original peacetime melodies. Shostakovich once described their transformation and repetition as a “requiem,” though perhaps they sound more exhausted than sorrowful. Just when they seem to have come to rest, we hear a distant echo of the ugly march, with a trumpet playing an echo of the hideous, perky tune offstage.
War is not over. It is simply distant for the moment.
The orchestra was deeply committed to the piece as they played. Samosud wrote, “Never in my thirty-three years as conductor have I ever seen professional musicians perform a work in a state of agitation verging on tears.”
Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony is more than seventy minutes long. After the oddly lilting second movement, the stark, lonely fanfares of the third, the watchfulness and brave struggle of the fourth — the piece ends in final triumph. Suddenly, in the midst of euphoria, the confident melody that started the whole symphony strides forward again, now potent and in control.
With that, the massive piece comes to a spectacular close.
As before, with the Fifth Symphony, the audience was overwhelmed. Shostakovich had told their story in music. He was forced up onto the stage. As his neighbor Tatyana Litvinova described it, “Nobody who saw him taking his bows on the platform after his music had been performed could forget his crooked figure, his grimace of misery and the fingers that never stopped drumming on his cheek. It was torture just to watch him! He minced his steps and bowed like a circus pony. There was something robot-like in his movements.”
He didn’t need to be nervous. The symphony was immediately a huge success. The authorities were thrilled with it; the intelligentsia was moved by it. Conductors all over the world clamored to perform it.
Perhaps more important to Shostakovich was some good news he had just heard: the government was going to try to help his mother, his sister, and his nephew escape from Leningrad — across the ice of frozen Lake Ladoga.
SOURCES
Lake Ladoga hemmed Leningrad in from the east. It was part of the noose around the city. Now that it had frozen completely and solidly, however, it was the only escape route.
It had frozen in November, blocking the last attempts to ship food to the encircled city by water. Only a few days later, scouts were sent out across the ice with long poles, tapping to find out how much weight the expanse could support. Roped together and wearing white camouflage, they struggled against the wind. One of them fell through but was quickly pulled out before he died of hypothermia or drowned. They reported back to Leningrad Party Headquarters: there was still an area that was not frozen, but it would not be long before the lake would support heavy shipments.
By late November, the ice was thick enough for horse-drawn sleighs to bring food to the city. Soon, the city sent out huge, arrow-shaped plows to forge what was essentially a six-lane highway from the port of Osinovets to the town of Kobona. Trucks began running the route, taking supplies toward Leningrad and carrying refugees toward the eastern shore, away from the city of the dead. This route was called the Road of Life. Thousands were fleeing across it each day. At the beginning of March, Dmitri and Nina Shostakovich’s families got word that they had spots reserved.
Once the Road of Life became fully active, it saved countless lives. Almost a million people escaped across Lake Ladoga in 1942, and 270,900 tons of food made it to the city over the ice that winter.
It was not an easy crossing, however. Tens of thousands died in the attempt. Some cynics called it the Road of Death.
The road started at Finland Station, in Leningrad, where refugees caught the train to Osinovets, on the shores of Ladoga. A woman who lived near the station described the scene: “Having dragged sleds to the station, piled with their possessions tied up in bundles, people would settle down in small packs in the cold, shabby, unheated little station, or on the platform out in the open, if there wasn’t a shelling going on. They would sit down and wait. . . . They waited for a long time, sometimes for several days, and sometimes they never even managed to leave.”
Shostakovich’s relatives had dysentery. They would have had to conceal this from guards at the station. Security forces wouldn’t allow the sick to travel.
Though the distance from Finland Station to the shore was not great — only thirty miles — it often took the trains several days. The rinky-dink, small-gauge track was not made for much traffic. There were constant delays.
Once the train reached the processing centers at Osinovets, refugees swarmed out of the carriages and started fighting for places on trucks that would cross the ice. When the route was first established, Osinovets was full of screaming mobs. People had to bribe drivers even to get the spot they had already reserved. Circulating through the crowds were bandits who stole the few possessions the weak still clutched and, if anyone resisted, killed them and plunged them under the ice. By the time the Shostakoviches’ relatives were evacuated, the system had become more streamlined, and the port was less chaotic.
The most deadly part of the journey still lay ahead: the crossing itself.
The Germans held the southern shore of the lake. They had a clear view and a clear shot to the Road of Life. The trucks made easy targets. German guns blasted at the convoys day and night. Occasionally, Luftwaffe planes flew over and dropped bombs, opening up huge wounds in the surface of the ice.
Red Army soldiers skated back and forth on fan-propelled sleds, patrolling in case the Germans launched an infantry attack on the food deliveries, fuel tankers, and refugees that were trundling past.
Hundreds of thousands risked their lives on what one survivor described as “this worn-out, bombed, tormented road which knows no peace, day or night.” She said, “Its snow is turned to sand. Wrecked machines and spare parts are lying everywhere — in ruts, pot-holes, ditches, in bomb craters, there are wrecked vehicles.”
The crossing took hours, sometimes a full night, and was long, loud, frigid, and deadly.
Though a few buses were heated, most of the trucks carrying refugees were not. People squatted on flatbeds or cowered under canvas tarps as a night wind whipped across the snowy plain, bringing temperatures down to –40°F. Some nights, blizzards raged. The refugees were encrusted in snow and ice. Many died of exposure on the route to safety.
The trucks usually chose to drive with their lights on. Even though the lights attracted German fire, the hazards of driving in the dark were greater. Gouges and fissures in the ice loomed out of the night, and drivers had to be quick to swerve. Some were not quick enough. They shot into the water, their headlights glowing eerily as they sank into the darkness.
The trucks behind them did not stop to help; they careened around the holes in the ice and sped up. Stopping was too dangerous. If an engine cooled, the truck would often not start again, and no one wanted to be a sitting target for the Germans.
At first, especially, drivers made the trip with their doors wedged open so they could jump out if the truck was hit or went into a hole in the ice. Those sitting in the canvas-hooded seats in back had to decide whether they would huddle closer to the cabin, where it
was warmer, or toward the back, where it was dangerously cold but closer to a quick escape route.
Lone figures, swaddled in fur hats and winter camouflage capes, stood out on the ice, waving poppy-red flags to direct traffic away from holes and wrecks.
Drivers on the Road of Life liked to boast about how many trips they could make in one shift. Typically, they only made one. It became a contest, though. Soon drivers were bragging that they were two-trip men, three-trip men, four-trip men. This hectic speed meant more people could escape the city and more food could make it into the city. It also meant that the trip got more and more rough for weak evacuees, as the wind knifed over them and they were jolted and juddered mercilessly.
The Road of Life brought together privileged Party members and citizens who had suffered enormous deprivations. One woman remembered having to bite her tongue on the long ride across the lake as a high-ranking couple brayed about all the food they’d secured since the siege had started. “During the blockade we ate better than before the war. We had everything,” the man said.
His girlfriend piped up: “We ate whole boxes of butter and chocolate. Of course, I didn’t see any of that before the war.”
They were speaking to a truckful of people with eyes wide from hunger and dystrophy, families who had watched children die or who had made decisions to leave beloved grandmothers and great-aunts behind to starve so that their own children would have a chance of escaping alive.
The boyfriend drawled that he was leaving Leningrad because it was getting so boring there. No one, he complained, went out dancing anymore.
On the far side of Lake Ladoga, at Kobona, all the refugees who had survived the trip so far were given rations to revive them.
Even this had its dangers. Some of the evacuees could not stop themselves from devouring everything they were given at once. Their stomachs were no longer used to solid food. There was a rash of deaths before a doctor realized that the rations given out had to be decreased so people wouldn’t gorge and die.
From Kobona, the refugees were driven in convoys a few final miles to railway stations. From there, they were shipped out east or south to other destinations, to find new lives.
Many, weakened by the voyage, succumbed to death on the far shore. At each station, corpses were unloaded from trains. This was also the point at which many passengers developed dysentery and other stomach ailments and spent much of their journey shivering by the cargo doors to the freight cars they rode in, ready to slide open the doors and squat in the wind when the need overtook them.
Sofia, Maria, and little Dmitri got off a train at Cherepovets. From there, Sofia sent a telegram to Shostakovich: “Got away safely from Leningrad longing to see you soon love to all Grandma.”
Shostakovich was overjoyed. Incredibly, his family had made it. He was nervous, too, however. “How will they be?” he kept repeating. “I wonder what state they’ll be in.”
On March 19, 1942, the three finally arrived in Kuibyshev. They were sick and emaciated. Shostakovich wrote to his friend Glikman that Maria and young Dmitri were all right but that Sofia was “nothing but skin and bone.”
Shostakovich brought the three of them back to his apartment. He was living in a slightly larger place now, which was good: only a few days later, in Moscow, he picked up Nina’s father and mother, who would also be living with them in Kuibyshev. After he met the Varzars, Nina’s parents, at the station, he wrote to his friend Glikman, “Vasily Vasilyyevich [Nina’s father] looked absolutely terrible and his wits seemed to be wandering. . . . I now face a big problem which is seriously worrying me: how to feed and care for all the members of my family who have come to be with me.” There were now nine people in the Shostakoviches’ apartment. Soon, there were thirteen: Nina’s sister, brother-in-law, niece, and old nurse arrived.
Still, it was a triumph: they were all together again. The conversations around the cramped dinner table, however, were not easy. As their neighbor Flora Litvinova described it, Shostakovich “was churned up by their stories of the cold and the hunger, deaths of their friends and near and dear ones. He nervously drummed his fingers against the table.” In secret, Maria divulged: “You know, once we ate a cat. Of course, I didn’t tell Mother or little Mitya.”
The news from the city was not good. A quarter of Shostakovich’s colleagues in the Leningrad Composers’ Union had already died. One of the dead was his student Venjamin Fleishman, whom he had gone with to sign up for military service right after the announcement of Operation Barbarossa. Fleishman died in combat on September 14, 1941, valiantly blowing up a tank and himself with a string of grenades. Shostakovich was deeply moved by Fleishman’s death. The young man had almost finished an opera, and Shostakovich felt he was very promising. Shostakovich mourned, “He went into the People’s Volunteer Guard. They were all candidates for corpsehood. They were barely trained and poorly armed, and thrown into the most dangerous areas. A soldier could still entertain hopes of survival, but a volunteer guardsman, no.”
Later, Shostakovich would finish his dead student’s opera, called Rothschild’s Violin, for him, and would see it staged.
The house was full, but it was good to have everyone out of danger. Shostakovich later wrote to his friend Glikman: “Everybody in my family is well, and spends the whole time talking in a loud voice about things to eat. As a result of these conversations I have forgotten a large part of my vocabulary, but I have excellent retention of the following: bread, butter, half a kilo, vodka, two hundred grams, ration card, confectionary department, and several other words.”
There was another mouth to feed now, too. Maxim and Galina had adopted a shaggy street dog. “We hadn’t the heart to shoo him away,” Shostakovich explained, “so now he lives with us. The children call him Ginger (Ryzhik). He seems to like his name.” Galina remembered Ginger fondly. “He was lively and undemanding — a typical mongrel.”
They did not record the story of their previous dog, eaten in the Siege of Leningrad.
Now that his family was safely with him, Shostakovich could turn his attention to another feat of transportation: the international efforts to get copies of his Seventh Symphony. “It seems to have become a very fashionable piece just now,” he told his friend Glikman. “Couriers arrive from all over the place, asking me to help them get a copy of the score. . . . Couriers, couriers, couriers. Nothing but couriers, thirty-five thousand of them!”
Shostakovich didn’t know how to help all the people requesting the music. Copies were difficult to come by. Paper was scarce. (At this point, Shostakovich was out of paper himself and wrote his letters on small white pieces of old cardboard.) The initial printing of three hundred copies of the score had already expanded to seven hundred.
The government was intent on three special performances of the piece, which they wanted to stage for propagandistic purposes: a performance in London, a performance in the United States, and, last, a performance in the besieged city of Leningrad itself. Shostakovich was particularly insistent about wanting the piece to be played back in his home city “in the not-too-distant future.”
State copyists were writing out the parts of the piece as quickly as they could. (The score includes the music for the whole orchestra stacked up so a conductor can see how the whole piece is supposed to work; the parts include just the music each individual instrumentalist needs.) The parts were done hastily and were full of errors.
The government took the score and all the orchestral parts and photographed them. The photographs were reduced and put on single strips of microfilm — 2,750 pages on one hundred feet of film. The rolls of microfilm were stowed in small wooden boxes. These were to be sent to the West.
The copy for North America was supposed to travel to the United States on a flight chartered by the American ambassador. We don’t know what happened; somewhere in the Soviet bureaucracy, the microfilm got rerouted and disappeared. It was never handed over to the plane’s pilot. It was to take a much more surprising route acr
oss the oceans.
Meanwhile, Shostakovich wanted the piece to be sent to the orchestra of his alma mater, the Leningrad Conservatory. They were now hiding out in Tashkent. The faculty of the Conservatory had huddled around a shabby radio and heard the piece broadcast from Kuibyshev. They knew they wanted to have it performed. Shostakovich soon sent a telegram inviting his friend Isaak Glikman to travel by train to Kuibyshev and pick up a copy.
Sending someone on a train journey during wartime was difficult. Special permission had to be granted for train voyages, and somehow, food had to be found for the courier to eat on his travels. To this end, the faculty of the Leningrad Conservatory had a meeting to determine how many pies to give Glikman for his voyage. One faction argued that it was a ten-day journey and that he should therefore receive ten pies. Another faction demanded twenty. The train might get stuck somewhere, “in which case [Glikman] would be reduced to gnawing the wood of [his] sleeping berth.” The twenty-pie faction won.
Glikman set off on the train for Kuibyshev on April 5. When he woke on the first morning of the journey, he pulled out the first of his pies. It was stale and had to be knocked around to break it open. He was disgusted to find that “Horror of horrors! It was alive with little Tashkent ants, like poppy-seeds.”
Glikman stared at his twenty ant-infested pies with growing despair. They were all he had to eat for the next week and a half.