Symphony Of The Dead Quotes

never stop trying and never try stopping

What are our conductors giving us year after year? Only fresh corpses. Over these beautifully embalmed sonatas, toccatas, symphonies and operas the public dance the jitterbug. Night and day without let the radio drowns us in a hog-wash of the most nauseating, sentimental ditties. From the churches comes the melancholy dirge of the dead Christ, a music which is no more sacred than a rotten turnip.

Some love is so powerful after all, that it must always include sadness, because encrypted within it is the knowledge that someday it will come to an end.

Holy water cannot help you now A thousand armies couldn’t keep me out See, I’ve come to burn your kingdom down I’ve come to smoke you out Seven devils all around you Seven devils in my house See, I was dead when I woke up this morning, And I’ll be dead before the day is done And now all your love will be exorcised And we will find your sayings to be paradox And it’s an even sum It’s a symphony It’s a battle cry They can keep me alive ‘Til I tear the walls ‘Til I slave you heart And they take your soul And what have we done?

Strangely enough, doctors and nurses noted that activity actually prolonged life, when it should have shortened it. Those who lay down and tried to conserve energy often were the ones who trailed off and died first.

When we read tales of atrocity, we all want to be the ones who stood firm, who would not bend, who shouted the truth in the face of the dictator ... It is easy for us all to imagine we are heroes when we are sitting in our kitchens, dreaming of distant suffering.

Because I do not know how to give more without having nothing left for myself!

Gradually, like the emigration of an insidious, phantom population, Leningrad belonged more to the dead than to the living. The dead watched over streets and sat in snow-swamped buses. Whole apartment buildings were tenanted by them, where in broken rooms, dead families sat waiting at tables. Their dominion spread room by room, like lights going out in evening.

On the artillery shells produced in Leningrad, workers stenciled messages to the Germans: “For the blood of our workers,” “For our children’s anguish,” and “For our murdered friends.

The universe deepened at that moment, the music of the spheres grew from a mere chorus to a symphony as triumphant as Beethoven’s Ninth, and I knew that I would always be able to hear it when I wished or needed to, always be able to Use it to take the step I needed to see the one I loved, or, failing that, step to the place where I had been with the one I loved, or, failing that, find a place to love for its own beauty and richness. The energy of quasars and exploding stellar nuclei filled me then. I was borne up on waves of energy more lovely and more lyrical even than the Ouster angels’ wings seen sliding along corridors of sunlight. The shell of deadly energy that was my prison and execution cell seemed laughable now, Schrödinger’s original joke, a child’s jump rope laid around me on the ground as restraining walls. I stepped out of the Schrödinger cat box and out of Armaghast System.

We got to the moment when I wake up from being "mostly dead" and say: "I'll beat you both apart! I'll take you both together!", Fezzik cups my mouth with his hand, and answers his own question to Inigo as to how long it might be before Miracle Max's pill begins to take effect by stating: "I guess not very long." As soon as he delivered that line, there issued forth from Andre' one of the most monumental farts any of us had ever heard. Now I suppose you wouldn't expect a man of Andre's proportions to pass gas quietly or unobtrusively, but this particular one was truly epic, a veritable symphony of gastric distress that roared for more than several seconds and shook the very foundations of the wood and plaster set were now grabbing on to out of sheer fear. It was long enough and loud enough that every member of the crew had time to stop what they were doing and take notice. All I can say is that it was a wind that could have held up in comparison to the one Slim Pickens emitted int eh campfire scene in Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles, widely acknowledged as the champion of all cinematic farts. Except of course, this one wasn't in the script.

partially digested. Like someone ate them from the inside out.” The room went silent for a minute, then I said, “That is creepy.” “I’ll say,” Vic said with a nod. “Maybe some kind of animal ate the body parts, after they were dead,” I suggested. “Yeah, sure, I’d say it was a gerbil but it’s the wrong hole,” Tate said.

History is not simply the great tumults and tragedies but the accumulation of tiny moments and gestures.

The middle of the night is just as advantageous as the middle of the day.

Perfection is a made-up construct. It is much like time: it cannot be held, and only fools would waste sands falling in an attempt to try.

In a regime where words are watched, lies are rewarded, and silence is survival, there is no truth. - Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

Most symphonies, however, are wordless. They are built only of tones, nonlinguistic sounds vibrating in the air, and somehow, we take them to heart and feel that they speak to us more deeply than words ever could. Cultures make up certain rules for music that we learn without even recognizing them; for example, in the West, we have decided that music in minor keys tends to sound sad or anxious, while music in major keys conveys confidence, triumph. Other cultures have made other decisions.

Even the basic facts of Dmitri Shostakovich’s life are often contested, as a glance through the end notes of this book attests. How do we reconstruct the story of someone who lived in a period in which everyone had an excuse to lie, evade, accuse, or keep silent?

Stalin was not merely trying to remove political enemies. He was not merely trying to terrorize the country into submission. He was trying to break down all social structure that did not emanate from him, and to create a new people, no longer Homo sapiens, but Homo sovieticus, the New Man of Communism.

What was the human animal in the midst of the siege? An herbivore that crawled on all fours, browsing on dirty grasses. A predator that hunted alone or in packs. A social animal that spoke of noble art and wound violin strings from the guts of dead sheep and pigs. A creature with canine teeth for tearing, but with a tongue for speaking. A mouth that could devour or sing.

its heart, it is a story about the power of music and its meanings — a story of secret messages and doublespeak, and of how music itself is a code; how music coaxes people to endure unthinkable tragedy; how it allows us to whisper between the prison bars when we cannot speak aloud; how it can still comfort the suffering, saying, “Whatever has befallen you — you are not alone.

Woman lost (skin deep) like a damn fine thread in the fire Woman of the world caught up in your black machinations I was a woman who cried alone at night, who gave it all away when she saw the good heart of the man inside Woman caught standing up; her open parts are broken - Someone's armour broke right through, it was you, you For some reason I've been thinking about you, your light Today, you poured out all the tension, the ego underground Hibernating inside my heart. I was so close to it, to the flicker Of love in a lonely street and I turned my head and walked Away from the flame in your arms. As I put away the fun in A house of fight I came across you and a mechanism in My brain shifted chemically, walls caved in like the cadence In your words and I was lost in the darkness. Even now in Middle age I remember when desire was a popular drug And everyone was selling it but I don't live to explore to be Able to illuminate the proof of my existence, live to burn Vicariously though the diamond mouth of sleeping stars. From so much love, pictures of death arrived in black and White photographs and you're perfect, you always were - Illusions have no flaws; they're dangerous beings, smoke. Could I take the moon back and still live with my great Expectations of nostalgia, laughter, tears and suffering - But they are all a part of me not the people of the stars, Long dead videotape, the past has stained the symphony Of my soul (like the wind through the trees) throughout Me finding myself, my two left feet as a female poet The warning was there of the noise of eternity, signs That said, don't anger the sea, you have an ally in her. When men grow cold listen to their stories and bask in The glory of their genuine deaths, their winters, put Them away so you can read them like the newspaper. Once in a while you can go back to where you stood In youth with your afternoon tea, the sun of God in our Eyes - I am that kind of woman who lives in the past

Daniel Levitin is one of the world’s leading experts on how music influences the brain. He would be appearing with the conductor Edwin Outwater and the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra, which would play Beethoven. Levitin would explain how the music was affecting the audience’s collective brain. Levitin was no disinterested academic. He had had a serious career as a musician, performing with Sting, Mel Tormé, and Blue Öyster Cult, consulting with Stevie Wonder and Steely Dan, and having been recording engineer for Santana and the Grateful Dead. Then he—like Kahn—made a big switch and become a research psychologist, investigating how music interacts with the brain. He was now head of McGill University’s Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition and Expertise and author of This Is Your Brain on Music.

The tornadic bundle of legs and arms and feet and hands push farther into the kitchen until only the occasional flailing limb is visible from the living room, where I can’t believe I’m still standing. A spectator in my own life, I watch the supernova of my two worlds colliding: Mom and Galen. Human and Syrena. Poseidon and Triton. But what can I do? Who should I help? Mom, who lied to me for eighteen years, then tried to shank my boyfriend? Galen, who forgot this little thing called “tact” when he accused my mom of being a runaway fish-princess? Toraf, who…what the heck is Toraf doing, anyway? And did he really just sack my mom like an opposing quarterback? The urgency level for a quick decision elevates to right-freaking-now. I decide that screaming is still best for everyone-it’s nonviolent, distracting, and one of the things I’m very, very good at. I open my mouth, but Rayna beats me to it-only, her scream is much more valuable than mine would have been, because she includes words with it. “Stop it right now, or I’ll kill you all!” She pushed past me with a decrepit, rusty harpoon from God-knows-what century, probably pillaged from one of her shipwreck excursions. She waves it at the three of them like a crazed fisherman in a Jaws movie. I hope they don’t notice she’s got it pointed backward and that if she fires it, she’ll skewer our couch and Grandma’s first attempt at quilting. It works. The bare feet and tennis shoes stop scuffling-out of fear or shock, I’m not sure-and Toraf’s head appears at the top of the counter. “Princess,” he says, breathless. “I told you to stay outside.” “Emma, run!” Mom yells. Toraf disappears again, followed by a symphony of scraping and knocking and thumping and cussing. Rayna rolls her eyes at me, grumbling to herself as she stomps into the kitchen. She adjusts the harpoon to a more deadly position, scraping the popcorn ceiling and sending rust and Sheetrock and tetanus flaking onto the floor like dirty snow. Aiming it at the mound of struggling limbs, she says, “One of you is about to die, and right now I don’t really care who it is.” Thank God for Rayna. People like Rayna get things done. People like me watch people like Rayna get things done. Then people like me round the corner of the counter as if they helped, as if they didn’t stand there and let everyone they love beat the shizzle out of one another. I peer down at the three of them all tangled up. Crossing my arms, I try to mimic Rayna’s impressive rage, but I’m pretty sure my face is only capable of what-the-crap-was-that. Mom looks up at me, nostrils flaring like moth wings. “Emma, I told you to run,” she grinds out before elbowing Toraf in the mouth so hard I think he might swallow a tooth. Then she kicks Galen in the ribs. He groans, but catches her foot before she can re-up. Toraf spits blood on the linoleum beside him and grabs Mom’s arms. She writhes and wriggles, bristling like a trapped badger and cussing like sailor on crack. Mom has never been girlie. Finally she stops, her arms and legs slumping to the floor in defeat. Tears puddle in her eyes. “Let her go,” she sobs. “She’s got nothing to do with this. She doesn’t even know about us. Take me and leave her out of this. I’ll do anything.” Which reinforces, right here and now, that my mom is Nalia. Nalia is my mom. Also, holy crap.

You look beautiful,” my dad said as he walked over to me and offered his arm. His voice was quiet--even quieter than his normal quiet--and it broke, trailed off, died. I took his arm, and together we walked forward, toward the large wooden doors that led to the beautiful sanctuary where I’d been baptized as a young child just after our family joined the Episcopal church. Where I’d been confirmed by the bishop at the age of twelve. I’d worn a Black Watch plaid Gunne Sax dress that day. It had delicate ribbon trim and a lace-up tie in the back--a corset-style tie, which, I realized, foreshadowed the style of my wedding gown. I looked through the windows and down the aisle and could see myself kneeling there, the bishop’s wrinkled, weathered hands on my auburn hair. I shivered with emotion, feeling the sting in my nose…and the warm beginnings of nostalgia-driven tears. Biting my bottom lip, I stepped forward with my father. Connell had started walking down the aisle as the organist began playing “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” I could close my eyes and hear the same music playing on the eight-track tape player in my mom’s Oldsmobile station wagon. Was it the London Symphony Orchestra or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir? I suddenly couldn’t remember. But that’s why I’d chosen it for the processional--not because it appeared on Modern Bride’s list of acceptable wedding processionals, but because it reminded me of childhood…of Bach…of home. I watched as Becky followed Connell, and then my sister, Betsy, her almost jet-black hair shining in the beautiful light of the church. I was so glad to have a sister. Ms. Altar Guild gently coaxed my father and me toward the door. “It’s time,” she whispered. My stomach fell. What was happening? Where was I? Who was I? At that very moment, my worlds were colliding--the old world with the new, the past life with the future. I felt my dad inhale deeply, and I followed his lead. He was nervous; I could feel it. I was nervous, too. As we took our place in the doorway, I squeezed his arm and whispered, “I love thee.” It was our little line. “I love thee, too,” he whispered back. And as I turned my head toward the front of the church, my eyes went straight to him--to Marlboro Man, who was standing dead ahead, looking straight at me.

St. Just lifted his mug and peered into the contents. “Higgins explained that Goliath is a horse of particulars. Westhaven, did Valentine spit in my mug?” Westhaven rolled his eyes as he glanced at first one brother then the other. “For God’s sake, nobody spat in your damned mug. Pass the butter and drop the other shoe. What manner of horse of particulars is Sophie’s great beast?” “He does not like to travel too far from Sophie. He’ll tool around Town all day with Sophie at the ribbons. He’ll take her to Surrey, he’ll haul her the length and breadth of the Home Counties, but if he’s separated from his lady beyond a few miles, he affects a limp.” “He affects a limp?” Vim picked up his mug and did not look too closely at the contents. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.” “I’ll tell you what I’ve never heard of.” Westhaven shot him a peevish look. “I’ve never heard of my sister, a proper, sensible woman, spending a week holed up with a strange man and allowing that man unspeakable liberties.” Lord Val paused in the act of troweling butter on another roll. “Kissing isn’t unspeakable. We know the man slept in my bed, else he’d be dead by now.” And thank God that Sophie hadn’t obliterated the evidence of their separate bedrooms. “I have offered your sister the protection of my name,” Vim said. “More than once. She has declined that honor.” “We know.” Lord Val put down his second roll uneaten. “This has us in a quandary. We ought to be taking you quite to task, but with Sophie acting so out of character, it’s hard to know how to go on. I’m for beating you on general principles. Westhaven wants a special license, and St. Just, as usual, is pretending a wise silence.” “Not a wise silence,” St. Just said, picking up Lord Val’s roll and studying it. “I wonder how many cows you keep employed with this penchant you have for butter. You could write a symphony to the bovine.” Lord Val snatched his roll back. “Admit it, St. Just, you’ve no more clue what’s to be done here than I do or Westhaven does.” “Or I do.” The words were out of Vim’s mouth without his intention to speak them. But in for a penny… “I want Sophie to be happy. I do not know how to effect that result.” A small silence spread at the table, a thoughtful and perhaps not unfriendly silence. “We want her happy, as well,” Westhaven said, his glance taking in both brothers.

There is no way to write a biography of Shostakovich without relying on hearsay and relaying the memories of people who have many private reasons to fabricate, mislead, and revise.

He said the stadium was the only place you could express yourself openly. When a player scores, you can cheer, ‘Hurray!’ because you’re happy, not because you’re forced. You can’t lie all the time!

There was one important exception, however: after Hitler secretly sent death squads to assassinate all his rivals in the Nazi Party — a bloodbath known as the Night of Long Knives — Stalin couldn’t help but admire his enemy’s ingenuity. “Did you hear what happened in Germany?” he gushed to an adviser. “Some fellow, that Hitler! Splendid! That’s a deed of some skill!

As historians have pointed out, there was some irony to this agreement. Hitler wanted to attack and subdue Russia as well as Europe. He knew that Germany could not wage war on a global scale with its small reserves of raw materials such as oil, rubber, and grain. Hitler arranged for the Russians to furnish him with everything he would need to invade Russia. Stalin essentially agreed to supply the attack on his own country.

As musicologist Richard Taruskin has said, “What made Shostakovich’s music the secret diary of a nation was not only what he put into it, but what it allowed listeners to draw out.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Whatever his intentions for the piece might have been originally, this was the direction people were pushing him in: to understand the growing work as a testimony of Leningrad’s struggles and strength.

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.

As the bulb of black cloud, lit by both sun and flame, hovered above the storehouses, the people of Leningrad looked on in choked awe. “It was an immense spectacle of stunning beauty,” wrote Lyubov Shaporina. The air smelled sweet as tons of sugar burned.

A few scenes have etched themselves into my memory,” wrote Skrjabina, “probably until I die: a house demolished almost to its foundations, but one wall remained, still papered in the favorite cornflower design. There is even a picture hanging on it, as straight as ever. Above a heap of bricks, cement, and beams, a whole corner of an upper apartment of another house was preserved.

The same day that the Bedayev warehouses were destroyed, Hitler’s high command called in a nutritionist, Ernst Ziegelmeyer, to discuss the food situation in Leningrad. Ziegelmeyer made a studied assessment of the rationing that would probably go into effect in the city. He calculated that the population would starve to death quite soon. His recommendation to the Führer, therefore, was that the German army should not invade the city at all but simply wait in a choking noose around it. “It is not worth risking the lives of our troops. The Leningraders will die anyway. It is essential not to let a single person through our front line. The more of them that stay there, the sooner they will die, and then we will enter the city without trouble, without losing a single German soldier.

The frontal attacks puzzled me. Why advance straight into German machine-gun fire? Why not make flank attacks?” These suicidal charges worked occasionally only because Stalin did not care how many of his own soldiers died.

In the light of recent scholarship, Shostakovich’s anti-Stalinism no longer seems surprising or controversial, and was not unusual for the intelligentsia of Moscow and (in particular) Leningrad.

As one Shostakovich biographer put it, “Testimony is a realistic picture of Dmitri Shostakovich. It just isn’t a genuine one.

While he wrote the fourth and final movement of the symphony, an artist who lived in the apartment above him started sculpting a bust of him. Shostakovich sat uneasily while he was being sculpted. He couldn’t sit still. His fingers kept tapping as he played scales and chords on his cheeks.

Shostakovich and another composer banged out trashy songs on the piano while people danced in the corridor.

This interpretation became popular many decades later, after the publication of Solomon Volkov’s supposed memoirs of Shostakovich, Testimony. In that book, Volkov has Shostakovich say, The Seventh Symphony had been planned before the war and consequently it simply cannot be seen as a reaction to Hitler’s attack.

There are several problems with this passage in the Volkov memoir, though. For one thing, only one page earlier, Volkov has Shostakovich say the opposite: “I wrote my Seventh Symphony, the ‘Leningrad,’ very quickly. I couldn’t not write it. War was all around. . . .

A symphony is built not just by the composer, the conductor, and the musicians, but by the audience. The wartime audience heard the approach of the German Wehrmacht. A more recent post-Soviet audience wants to hear the cruel antics of Stalin and believe that Shostakovich was speaking in code.

It is as if there is no syntax, no grammar, that can contain their suffering. Only a list of things perceived.

Just within the limits of besieged Leningrad, there where days when more than ten thousand people died. Over the course of January and February alone, there were roughly two hundred thousand deaths. We cannot know the numbers exactly. All authority in the city had broken down. No one recorded deaths anymore. No one removed the bodies from the streets.

Beyond fatigue, there was another good reason to delay taking the dead out of an apartment: until the death was declared, the family could still collect rations in the name of the deceased.

These ghastly decisions were made in a welter of starvation, which sharpened the senses but confused thought. “The brain is devoured by the stomach,” said one sufferer.

The Nazis asked carefully about when precisely people stopped helping one another in the streets, about how many people were being arrested for cannibalism.

The symphony, a biographer wrote in 1942, tells the man who hears it, not the story of a stranger, but his own story. It makes him the hero of it; it cries out his own sorrows and celebrates his own victories. . . . Shostakovich states that at the beginning of the Seventh he depicts the peaceful life before the war in the quiet homes of Leningrad. But to a listener in Iowa it could mean the meadows and the rolling hills around his home. After the fantastic theme of war, Shostakovich has put into his music a lament for the dead — and the tears of a Russian mother and of an American mother are the same.

As historian Max Hastings wrote, “Both Hitler and Stalin displayed obsessive stubbornness about Leningrad. That of Stalin was finally rewarded, amid a mountain of corpses. A people who could endure such things displayed qualities the Western Allies lacked, which were indispensable to the destruction of Nazism. In the auction of cruelty and sacrifice, the Soviet dictator proved the higher bidder.

It is one of the sick ironies of the war that they probably would not have been able to if they had not learned to absorb loss in the nightmare of Stalin’s purges.

Now western movies, western novels, and western music were all forbidden again. Russian nationalism was on the rise. French bread was renamed “city bread.

On June 26, a thousand Jews were beaten to death in a garage. The SS arranged for locals to perform the massacre. They thought it might look distasteful if they carried it out themselves.

By noon on the first day of Operation Barbarossa, the Germans had destroyed more planes than they did in a whole year of their air assault on Britain. The Russian air force had been neutralized almost without firing a shot. The Western Front’s air force commander, staggered at the overwhelming futility of the loss, took out his gun and killed himself.

And everyone understood that Stalin was one thing and the country was another.

Zhukov was stunned. Unlikely as it might seem, most of the Leningrad tank force was made up of motionless decoys, nailed together by Shostakovich’s colleagues in the set-design team at the Mariinsky Theater.

It was still dangerous to disagree with Stalin. This fact was disastrous for the war effort. His generals were terrified of telling him bad news; it was safer to lie. For the first several months of the Great Patriotic War, therefore, he often didn’t know the real strategic situation. Even worse, military experts couldn’t question his amateur civilian judgment without fear of death.

Collapsed roofs “hung at an angle and looked as if they were still sliding down, perpetually falling, like a waterfall.” Leningrad now literally resembled one of the fractured Cubist landscapes of the 1920s avant-garde — or, as Ginzburg remarked, one of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s stage sets.

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.

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.

When he was dead, his body was cremated. The remains were thrown in a ditch marked “Common Grave Number One — unclaimed ashes 1930–42 inclusive.

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.

His fingers are as fat as grubs And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips. His cockroach whiskers leer And his boot tops gleam. . . . And every killing is a treat For the broad-chested [Stalin].

all that is heroic, bright, and beautiful.

Vladimir Mayakovsky was the Futurist poet Shostakovich had gone to watch when he was a boy. Vsevolod Meyerhold was one of the country’s most famous (or infamous) stage directors.

When he was directing some comedies by the revered nineteenth-century Russian playwright Chekhov, he started to notice how often people in nineteenth-century Russian plays faint — very often — so he called the production 33 Swoons and focused on all the fainting. Whenever someone fainted, a band played a fanfare. There was a different fanfare for men and women.

This sounded, even to the Russians of the time, like a fairy tale out of some opera in St. Petersburg’s gilded theaters; but the hunger, the poverty, and the desperation were real. The

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.

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.

The Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians demanded, “The orchestra must become like a factory.

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.

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.

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.

people were moving in droves into the city to get new manufacturing jobs. Apartments that once had housed a single family and their servants, surrounded by their comfortable settees, their ferns, and their china, now were broken up and subdivided, with each room housing a whole family.

Though he never went as far as some of the extremists, his music of the next several years had many of the same elements of the wider artistic revolution: a joy in angularity; a pleasure in surprising effects; an addiction to the grotesque; irony, sarcasm, and satire; an emphasis on bright color and flat, hard surfaces.

If music without words can have “characters,” then Shostakovich’s characters are like those in the absurdist stories of his Leningrad writer friends: broad and bizarre and almost cartoonish at times, full of vivid eccentricities.

He even wrote a ballet about soccer, in which crooked capitalist soccer players face off against clean-living Soviets who perform startling slowmotion gymnastics.

Or to put it another way: Should “the people” be raised up through education and literacy so that they were full participants in the Revolutionary experiment? Or should music, writing, painting, and drama be simplified to the point where anyone could understand them?

now they complained that the crazed music was too bizarre, and even worse, “irrelevant to students [and] metal- and textile-workers.

What is all this? What did we fight for? Why did we shed our blood, if I can’t dance to my heart’s content — and I’m supposed to be a leader of the new society!

The rest of Mayakovsky’s body was placed in a coffin on a red cube. Later it was taken to a cemetery on a flatbed truck. Beside it stood a wreath made of sledgehammers, screws, and gears. Everything was calculated and precise, as it should be when the future arrives.

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.

What was this formalism? It literally means music, art, or writing that pays more attention to form and technique than to content. This definition seems vague and confusing, but perhaps that was the point. No one knew what it meant, any more than they knew exactly what its opposite, Socialist Realism, meant. They could mean anything

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.

The soldiers leaned into the windows and said that they were requisitioning the car for the Revolution.

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.

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.

Over the mob, Lenin called out, “The world-wide Socialist revolution has already dawned. . . . Any day now the whole of European capitalism may crash. . . . Long live the worldwide socialist revolution!

There are definitely problems with the story. For one thing, Lenin did not arrive at the train station during the day, but in the middle of the night. Shostakovich could not have simply scampered over from the schoolyard.

Reconstructing a Soviet life is often difficult. Many of the details of Shostakovich’s youth we know only because his aunt Nadejda Galli-Shohat collaborated on a biography years later, against his wishes. She is not an entirely reliable source; an American interviewer called her “one of those wonderfully frank Russians who can drop into fantasy as easily as most of us find our way into the subway.

While these terms — Bolshevik, Communist, Marxist, socialist, and Soviet — are sometimes used interchangeably, many people have died to make distinctions among them.

Most important, it seems Stalin wanted to use the example of Shostakovich to scold and worry all of the Soviet Union’s cultural leaders, rebuking them for turning away from “real art, real science, and real literature.” He wanted to assert the infinite power of his regime and to show them that no one was safe.

The newspaper concluded: “Now tradition takes over, masks are the rule, and the carnival begins.

the hints of some pensive character crushed and beaten by brutal marches — the orchestra warding off the blows . . . cruel, clumsy waltzes, like some Russian dancing bear willing to maul a partner . . . And perhaps most chilling of all, they recognized the moments after these assaults, when stillness arrives, and it does not feel like peace, but a stunned, appalled hush . . . as if someone, in the wake of a beating, first opens their eyes to a cold and crystalline new world in which they do not know how to feel.

Shostakovich later said, Even before the war, in Leningrad there probably wasn’t a single family who hadn’t lost someone, a father, a brother, or if not a relative, then a close friend. Everyone had someone to cry over, but you had to cry silently, under your blanket, so that no one would see. Everyone feared everyone else, and the sorrow oppressed and suffocated us. This requiem allowed them to mourn together, in public.