Home > Work > Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad
61 " The moment Shostakovich spoke over the radio, the story of the Seventh Symphony started to sparkle and to effervesce into myth. It became a public story used by others for their own ends. This does not mean that people lied — but people blurred details; they tugged; they nudged. "
― M.T. Anderson , Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad
62 " Shostakovich hated the way propaganda amplified his life and sought to make it heroic. It galled him. He was naturally shy. Fame was deadly in Stalin’s Russia. It marked you out for destruction. "
63 " All the nations involved in the war used what we might call propaganda to change their citizens’ moods. What is the line between art and propaganda? Art is, after all, supposed to affect our mood, is supposed to win us over to some understanding. And “propaganda” is often just what we call another nation’s pride of country. "
64 " Young Dmitri was impressed. "
65 " The Fourth Symphony, one of his most fascinating and ingenious works, both brutal and intricate, would go unheard for a quarter of a century, silenced by fear. "
66 " In the first year and a half of Shostakovich’s life, roughly 4,500 government officials were injured or killed in assassination attempts by radicals. In his toddler years, the government recorded 20,000 terrorist acts across the empire, with more than 7,500 fatalities. "
67 " Halfway through the performance, she saw that one of the Musketeers had died of hunger. He lay on the floor with a shattered cup in his hand. The show, quite incredibly, went on. "
68 " Artistic flourishes like this may have seemed like a waste of energy, but they were central to the survival of the city and the pride of its inhabitants. "
69 " After having rambled through the country in the midst of the Great Depression, Ilf and Petrov wrote that for them, the United States represented “the most advanced technology in the world and a horrifyingly oppressive, stupefying social order. "
70 " Gone were the landscape paintings of the past, the pictures of ancient Greek heroes, the portraits of women in their silks and feathers. Painters began to reduce everything to simple squares and circles, the intersection of triangles. They were thrilled by geometry. They talked about achieving weightlessness, of painting pictures that were no longer mired in the world. They wanted to leave the earth behind. "
71 " Composers, too, wanted to celebrate Russia’s new modernity. The most avant-garde among them now created pieces full of dark, knotted chords and thunderous declarations, or music like sculptures of crystal: sharp, hard structures with jutting spikes and dazzling surfaces. "
72 " Inside the wooden box was a strip of microfilm that, when unrolled, would stretch over a hundred feet long. It contained hardly any words: just lines and dots and ancient monastic symbols in complicated arrangements. The Russians hoped it would help change the course of the war. "
73 " The Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians demanded, “The orchestra must become like a factory. "
74 " The soldiers leaned into the windows and said that they were requisitioning the car for the Revolution. "
75 " Many artists of all kinds wanted to make their artistic work useful to people in everyday life — and so the new, geometrical visual style was turned into plates, clothing, furniture, and, most famous of all, posters that revolutionized the world of art and brought the new art to the people. Russia suddenly was on the forefront of the future. "
76 " That year, it was as if the city was built of ideas and argument: People walked across a pavement of propaganda, and the walls were plastered with posters. Buildings were coated in debates. Type ran in every direction. Newspapers sprang up, printed a few issues in flurries, then died. "
77 " The economy was in a shambles, despite Lenin’s best efforts to fix it. So the Communist Party demanded that people look forward and remember that their own sacrifices would one day flower in the perfect society for their children or their children’s children. "
78 " 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. "
79 " Out of this political turmoil rose a man who called himself Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. That was not his name, but revolutionaries often didn’t call themselves by their names. "
80 " He was not very fond of music. Not because it didn’t move him — but because it did. “It makes me want to say kind things, stupid things, and pat the heads of people,” he admitted. “But now you have to beat them on the head, beat them without mercy. "