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WRITING ABOUT SHOSTAKOVICHOpus 143,Six Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva as Cycle

DSCH JOURNAL No. 33 July 2010

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by Olga Peters Hasty, Princeton University

During a sojourn in the United States in the summer of 1973, Shostakovich learned from doctors of the

National Institute of Health that there was no hope for recovery from his progressive neurological disorder

and heart ailment. As he did in situations of special strain[1], he turned to songs and in the first week of

August composed his suite for contralto and piano Six Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva[2] . The cycle is aptly

described as Shostakovich striving finally to sort out and identify the essential issues and attitudes which

will help him approach death, rather than railing against it[3]. These essential issues revolve around the

familiar triad of life, art, and death, considered now in the exceptional circumstances of the composers need

to take stock of his life. As he confronted the impending solitude of death from within the atomised society

of a totalitarian state, Shostakovich needed to deal with his isolation, to make sense of his life as an artist, and

to contemplate the worth of art in the pressured conditions of a repressive regime and his own approaching

death.

This article studies how Tsvetaevas poems make this possible. Shostakovichs selection of texts for his song

cycle suggests that the composer was evaluating decisions he had made over the course of his life through the

prism of how others responded when faced with similar trials Tsvetaeva herself, but also those addressed

in her poems and those whom the poems invoke for him metonymically. The Russian tradition is well-schooled

in the art of aesopic language and meaningful allusion. Literary works of all times and places are routinely

invoked for what they can say about immediate circumstances and to register dissent. The distinction between

the created and actual worlds is blurred as textual references become indicators of personally held views. This

helps us understand how Shostakovich uses Tsvetaevas poems. As we will see when we consider what each

of her texts contributes to his project, the composer draws Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Pushkin, Pasternak,

Akhmatova and Hamlet into the created world of his cycle where they speak on his behalf and draw other artists

into the discourse.

Tsvetaevas works display a breadth of emotion and intellect made all the more compelling by the harsh cir-

cumstances in which she made it a point of honour to continue writing. Steeped in ideals of the German

Romantics, Tsvetaeva situated life not in the actual world, but in the creative sphere. Insisting that inimical

circumstances be not simply resisted, but used to advantage, she persistently translated the hostility of the sur-

rounding world into sources of creative energy and signs validating the poet. Her dedication to the poetic call-

ing prevailed in the aftermath of the civil war (when her husband, an officer in the White Army, went miss-

ing for years and her youngest daughter died of starvation), through migr life on the outskirts of Prague and

Paris, and finally, ill-starred repatriation in 1939. In the Soviet Union her migr past and family ties to ene-

mies of the people (her sister was already under arrest, Tsvetaevas husband and daughter were arrested

shortly after their return) made her a pariah, barring her from appearing in print and inhibiting help from

fearful friends. Evacuated to the remote village of Yelabuga with her son, and left with no prospect of publi-cation or means of support (her application for the position of dishwasher in a cafeteria for evacuated writ-

ers was rejected), Tsvetaeva hanged herself in 1941.

Khrushchevs Thaw made it possible for a posthumous collection of Tsvetaevas poems to come out in

Moscow in 1961, to be followed in 1965 by a more substantial volume in the Poets Library (Biblioteka poeta)

series[4 ]. That Tsvetaevas works now gained the readership in Russia from which they had been barred for

over three decades was due to the efforts of her daughter Ariadna Efron, who, upon returning from Siberian

exile, dedicated herself to the preservation and dissemination of her mothers poetic legacy. Although Tsve-

taevas writings could be accessed in the West or via their clandestine circulation in the USSR, it was only

after their officially sanctioned publication that Soviet artists could publicly engage them.

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Tsvetaevas poetry is characterised by its strong, distinctive rhythms, richly associative energy,

and a rigorous deployment of the acoustic potential of language. This fosters a strong affinity

between her verse and music not in the Symbolist sense of conveying the ineffable, but in a more

concrete similarity of organising principles that are rooted in repetition and variations on acoustic,

rhythmic, and motivic gestures. The affinity lies, in other words, in the way her poems cohere and

signify. Tsvetaevas demanding poems (she speaks of the exhausting co-creativity she expects from

her readers) thus exhibit a structural readiness to join music. Shostakovich, who was already famil-

iar with some of Tsvetaevas writings before the ban on them was lifted, had taken an interest in her biography and in

the musical possibilities that her poems offered before he began Opus 143. The Three Songs on Verses of Tsvetaeva, op.

48 (1970, pub. 1977) by his student Boris Tishchenko was a work which he played and sang over and over again[5].

In the spring of 1971, while composing his Fifteenth Symphony, he began a setting for bass and piano of Yelabuga Nail

(1967), Yevgeny Yevtushenkos then still unpublished poetic commemoration of Tsvetaevas suicide[6].

We can thus understand why Shostakovich would turn to Tsvetaevas poetry at this stage in his life. Why he chose the

poems that he did is less apparent, but clearly the composer had something at stake when he made a cycle of his own

rather than set one of the many that the poet herself created[7]. To appreciate Shostakovichs assemblage of Tsvetaevas

poems, it is necessary to consider the significance they assume when they are brought forward in time and read in the

context of Shostakovichs world[8]. If we attend not only to what the poems say, but also to how they signify for

Shostakovich, we can observe a compelling network of associations emerge from the texts he brings together. It is in the

new dimension opened by these associations that the poems cohere into a unified cycle. While I do not maintain that the

poets words are more important than the music which accompanies them[9], my focus here will remain on the poems

how Shostakovich read them, what they bring to his cycle, and how they reflect the composers stock-taking. It is gen-

erally acknowledged that Shostakovichs music is not illustrative of Tsvetaevas poems and that his music provides them

with emotional colouring. It is plausible to suggest that the underlying dimension of the cycle that we will explore herehas some bearing on Shostakovichs musical settings. If this is indeed the case, my approach to the texts can promote

another way of thinking about the music and how it might relate not simply to the words, but to the particular way

Shostakovich was reading the poems.

The poems that Shostakovich sets in Opus 143 date from 1913 to 1931, and thus span most of Tsvetaevas poet-

ic career [10]. They address the artists perennial struggles with the uncompromising demands of her art, the

indifference of the surrounding world to the artefacts on which she stakes her existence, the political duress

that genius attracts, and death, which cuts short the artists creativity. These issues are germane to Shostakovichs

probing of possible responses to pressures that erode human dignity and compromise moral and artistic val-

ues. They are also important to his questioning of what place genuine art can have in times like those of the

Marina Tsvetaeva


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Stalinist years that exert such pressures. But Tsvetaevas poems do more than address

shared concerns: they steadily loosen Shostakovich from the confines of the here-and-

now and help the isolated artist confronting the solitude of death connect with other cre-

ative individuals. Easily crossing the tenuous boundary between art and biography and

impervious to the constraints of time and place, the poems extend the issues Shostakovich

addresses beyond the parameters of his own life. From this broadened perspective, doubts

in the value of art are dispelled and its efficacy to counter the indignity of totalitarianism

both of the Stalinist regime and of death itself is upheld. For Redepenning [t]he theme of the Six Poems

of Marina Tsvetayeva is the moral integrity of great artists... [11]. More precisely, the cycle explores what con-

stitutes creative integrity to arrive at a means for its recuperation.

Shostakovich opens Opus 143 with My Verses, an early (1913), much-anthologised poem that Tsvetaeva

counted among her most important poetic self-presentations and later described as:

( ) (Formula napered vsei moei pisatelskoi (i chelovech-

eskoi) sudby The formula in advance for my entire creative (and human) fate. [12] Tsvetaevas assess-

ment of her poem is reproduced in the notes to the 1965 collection of her poems that Shostakovich was using

and draws particular attention to this poem. The lyric is generally regarded as the twenty-one-year-old poets

exuberant expression of confidence in her verse and disregard for public opinion. Undaunted by the neglect

of her books that gather dust in stores, she asserts: , ,/

(Moim stikham, kak dragotsennym vinam,/Nastanet svoi chered) My poems, like precious wines,/ Will

come into their own (p. 57).

Shostakovich had witnessed the concrete fulfilment of this prophecy. Tsvetaevas claim was vindicated by the

appreciative readership and cultural significance her life and writings assumed when her works were pub-

lished in Russia some twenty years after her death. Yet there is nothing celebratory in the subdued setting of

this poem. Tsvetaevas life story doubtless contributes to this, but the gravity is in the lyric itself and derives

specifically from the way the poet is presented in it. (This is why Tsvetaeva found the poem so important in

retrospect.) The poets freedom from her immediate surroundings that this poem proclaims, raises the poet above

them, but it also leaves her bereft of acknowledgement and community in her own time. For Shostakovich, who

was confronting his own death, the promise of posthumous appreciation is but cold comfort, made all the cold-

er by the posthumous rehabilitations of Khrushchev era with their poignant absences of the rehabilitated indi-

viduals themselves. As Tsvetaeva indicates in her evaluation of her early poem, human and writerly fates do

not coincide.

My Verses opens with the statement: , ,/ ,

(Moim stikham, napisannym tak rano,/ Chto i ne znala ia, chto ia poet) My poems written so early/ That

I still did not even know I was a poet (p. 57). Palpable here is Tsvetaevas tacit acknowledgment that she is a

poet not of her own volition but at the behest of a transpersonal fate. The creative artist is torn between the

demands of her art and her human needs, and the I and the poet stand separated[13]. Under a regime deter-

mined to subjugate the arts this split is exacerbated and can exceed endurance. Thus Tsvetaeva later described

Vladimir Mayakovskys suicide in 1930 as the consequence of an insuperable tension between the man and the

poet.

This tension is complicated by the view of time this poem advances. Tsvetaevas assertion that her poems willcome into their own at some future date effectively harnesses passing time to creative advantage. In place of

futile resistance to time, which moves the poet toward death and the surcease of creative activity, is the poets

embrace of temporal passage as a phenomenon that continually enriches her poems and ensures their unend-

ing vitality. The poems endurance, in other words, rests not on a claim to permanence, but on the certainty of

change that is afforded by the ceaseless flow of time. Her poems are thus nourished by the very passage of time

that carries the poet to her death. If there is any consolation to the poet herself in this essentially self-sacrifi-

cial model, it is in the notion that over the course of time her own life and even her death will similarly take

on ever-new meaning. Like her poems, the poet remains in flux and is commemorated not with a static mon-

ument, but in the vivacity of continual change. And yet for all that, the fact remains that the body housing the

poet must succumb irreversibly to death.

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Tsvetaevas early poem is a rewarding point of departure for Shostakovichs cycle. The

divided self of the artist it presents is the crux of his self-evaluation, while its view on time

informs his engagement of all of the lyrics in his cycle. In the time that elapses between

Tsvetaevas composition of the poems and Shostakovichs setting of them, the poems and

the poet who authored them have taken on new meaning and associative potential. My

Verses stands as a programmatic statement for Shostakovichs cycle, which both con-

templates and puts into practice the basic premises of this poem.

The second poem of Shostakovichs cycle is Whence such tenderness?, a singular love poem that sings not

the exceptionality of the beloved but the superior qualities of previous lovers and that expresses not desire,

but tenderness and bewilderment. Although it is not immediately apparent from the text, Shostakovich would

have known from Efrons notes that this lyric of February 1916 was written to the poet Osip Mandelstam, whom

Tsvetaeva met during her visit to St. Petersburg that winter. Well-suited for musical setting, the gentle, slight-

ly ironic text with its four-fold repetition of the opening question permits Shostakovich to weave another

tragic poetic fate into his cycle. With it comes another perspective on the triad of art, life, and death that he

contemplates in it.

In keeping with the horrific norm of the times, the auspicious beginning of Mandelstams creative biography

that Tsvetaeva witnessed in 1916, subsequently took a hideous turn. If in Tsvetaevas poem Mandelstam is but

one in a series of lovers, in history he is but one of a series of poets who suffer at the hands of the Stalinist

regime. The tenderness and the fragility of the youthful, almost maidenly Mandelstam in Tsvetaevas poem

stands in jarring contrast to the criminalised poet whose posthumous rehabilitation Shostakovich was wit-

nessing. Initiated in 1956, this rehabilitation was only just now, in 1973 when Shostakovich was composing

this song, being crowned with the publication of a posthumous collection of his verse. In keeping with Tsve-

taevas prediction, Mandelstams verse had come into its own thirty-five years after the poets death.

Mandelstams presence in the cycle subtly advances the closely interrelated themes of the divided self of the

artist and suicide. Mandelstam helps to foreground the fact that in Stalinist Russia the practice of ones art

could be (and this in a chillingly literal sense) a means for taking ones life. In the autumn of 1933, Mandel-

stam, who was under increasing pressure to conform to the demands of the regime, composed an epigram on

Stalin, whose sixteen lines gave more than enough length to hang the poet. Mandelstams arrest followed

some six months later. He then attempted suicide by more direct means first slashing his wrists in prison

and then leaping from a hospital window during his exile to Cherdyn. This last gesture brought mitigation of

what was already a stunningly mild sentence. Such reprieve demanded recompense, and the poets odes to Stal-

in followed. By 1937 Mandelstams good fortune (if that is what it was) gave out, and he became the target

of public vilification of the kind Shostakovich was himself to experience. Mandelstam died in transit to a

GULAG labour camp in 1938. That his writings survived is due primarily to the efforts of his wife Nadezh-

da Iakovlevna who committed her husbands poems to memory, hid them with friends, and found ways to con-

vey them to the West for publication. Like Tsvetaevas daughter Ariadna Efron, Nadezhda Mandelstam ded-

icated herself to the preservation of a poetic legacy that was threatened by the state. Poets small comfort in

posthumous acknowledgement is enlarged by the posthumous defiance of the state that poems make possi-

ble.

Shostakovich next turns to Hamlets Dialogue with His Conscience, a poem of 1923, in which Tsvetaeva pre-sents a guilt-ridden Prince of Denmark contemplating Ophelias watery death[14]. The reference to Shake-

speares Hamletis both the impetus for an entire array of associations and the focal point of the cycle[15].

Shakespeares tragedy stands at the centre of Opus 143 for much the same reason it occupies a central posi-

tion in Russian culture.Hamletoffers Shostakovich a distillation of concerns that preoccupied Russian artists

and intellectuals since the nineteenth century and that were addressed with increasing urgency in the twenti-

eth[16]. In a tradition continually chafed by state control and a socio-political setting where the private and

public selves were pried ever further apart, the issues Hamlet addresses assumed direct relevance. The rot-

tenness of the state of Denmark and the criminality of its ruler, Hamlets railing against a time that is out of

joint, his desperation that ever he was born to set it right resonated with individuals who endured social and

political ills that they were powerless to redress. Hamlets vacillation between open rebellion and withdraw-


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al, the double life into which he escapes, and his tragic ineffectuality fostered readings of

recognition and prompted self-identification with the unhappy prince. Interest in Hamlet

intensified roughly in proportion to the increase of state control over the arts, and the

Danish prince made frequent appearances in the Russian arts, poetry in particular. Not only

Tsvetaeva, but all of the poets referred to either directly or obliquely in Opus 143 had

something to say about him. Any mention of the Danish prince triggers associations with

a panoply of creative artists.

Shostakovich was among those who saw themselves in Hamlet[17], and his creative output is rich in music

relating to Shakespeares tragedy. Most immediate to Opus 143 is Ophelias Song in Seven Romances on

Alexander Blok, op. 127[18]. Earlier treatments include incidental music for two theatrical productions ofHam-

let, one in 1932, then one in 1954 that was staged by Grigori Kozintsev, who also directed the 1964 film ver-

sion of the tragedy for which Shostakovich composed the score. Kozintsev died in May of 1973, that is, only

a few months before Shostakovich wrote Opus 143, and Shostakovichs reference to the film score in the

opening of Hamlets Dialogue[19] suggests that the death of his friend was on the composers mind as he

was coming to terms with his own.

Tsvetaeva wrote Hamlets Dialogue with his Conscience in 1923, when she was in the midst of an intense

epistolary exchange with Boris Pasternak, to whom many of her poems of the period are addressed. Even apart

from this, for Shostakovich any reference to Hamlet would naturally bring Pasternak to mind. Resorting, as

many did around the time of the Great Purge, to the relatively safe haven of translation, Pasternak included

Hamletamong his translation projects and, in 1940, completed a Russian version of the tragedy. (This was

the translation on which Kozintsev based his screenplay.) Like Blok, Pasternak identified closely with Ham-

let, and Shakespeares tragedy figures importantly in his 1959 autobiography I Remember. His famous

poem Hamlet of 1946 (which Vladimir Vysotski set to music the same year) became one of the poems

ascribed to Yuri Zhivago in the autobiographical novel that in 1958 brought Pasternak the Nobel Prize abroad

and vilification at home. Banned in the USSR, together with the novel in which it appeared, Pasternaks

Hamlet was recited at his funeral in 1960 by the poet Andrei Voznesenski who had committed it to memory.

Pasternak arguably plays a part in shaping Shostakovichs response to Tsvetaevas poem. For Pasternak,

ShakespearesHamletis the tragedy of a reluctant individual called to duty by a transpersonal fate. In his lyric

Hamlet, a Christ-like actor bows to destiny and, in full knowledge of the tragic script, resigns himself to enact-

ing the role that is written for him. As in Tsvetaevas My Verses, the split in the artist whom Pasternak por-

trays is along the fault l ine between human needs and the demands of a transcendent power. Having committed

himself to these demands, Pasternak suggests in the poem, the artist is duty-bound to play out his part to the

end. This is a statement of Pasternaks position on a central issue of Shakespeares tragedy that ran particu-

larly high in Stalinist times and that is at the heart of the stock-taking that motivates Shostakovichs compo-

sition of this cycle: the tension between the stoic model of endurance and suicide the classical model of hon-

our taken up by the Romantics and complicated by Christian prohibition. The theme of suicide provides the

internal, if not immediately apparent, logic to following Tsvetaevas poem to Mandelstam with her Hamlet

poem. In a state where physical survival was predicated on destroying the artist in ones self, and where the

very act of writing could be a form of self-slaughter, the question to be or not to be is significantly com-

plicated. In such times, as Shostakovich knew, endurance could be heroic, but it could also smack of collu-

sion with the state and entail compromise and guilt. Having survived both his own urge to take his life andthe death he feared at the hands of Stalins henchmen, Shostakovich now contemplating the approach of a

natural death turns to reflect on his own choice and to respond to Tsvetaevas poem[20].

Tsvetaevas treatments of Hamlet and Ophelia in three lyrics of the early 1920s stand out from the vast array

of Russian responses to Shakespeare. Identifying with Ophelia, she takes the prince to task for his inability

to act decisively, for the insufficiency of his passion, and for his excessive self-absorption. Allowing no quar-

ter for either the rottenness of the state of Denmark or the out-of-jointedness of the time into which he was

born, Tsvetaeva blames Hamlet for Ophelias doubtful death and refuses to absolve him from guilt. In the

Dialogue, Hamlet tries to counter his consciences obsessive insistence on Ophelias death with protestations

of love that, in keeping with Shakespeares tragedy, is alleged to exceed that of forty thousand brothers. In


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Russian, the repeated rhyming of , (Na dne ona, gde il) She is on

the bottom in the sil t and Hamlets protestation (No ia ee liubil) But

I loved her [24041] places emphasis on the past tense of the verb to love and con-

demns Hamlet for the inadequacy of his emotions. Giving no credence to his ever weak-

er rejoinders, the implacable conscience delivers a final blow: ,/ -,

(Menshe,/ Vse-zh, chem odin liubovnik) Less,/ However, than one

lover [241]. At the end of Tsvetaevas poem, Hamlets love is discredited, and he stands

condemned. In the course of withdrawing from an objectionable surrounding world, Hamlet fails Ophelia

and is responsible for her death.

The questioning to which his conscience subjects Hamlet resonates with exceptional force in the context

of the re-evaluation of the Stalinist years during the Khrushchev era. Redepenning may be right to suggest

that when he was sett ing Hamlets Dialogue Shostakovich was thinking of his wife Nina Vasilievna, who

died of cancer in 1954[21], but the fact remains that a superfluity of deaths and those of Tsvetaeva and

the artists clustered around this song cycle in particular left ample room for survivors guilt. Yevtushenkos

poem Yelabuga Nail ends with the lines , ./

. (Est lish ubiistva na svete, zapomnite./Samoubiistv ne byvaet voobshche.) There are

only murders in this world, remember this./Suicides do not exist at all. The persistent rumour that Tsve-

taeva was forced to kill herself by NKVD agents is invoked here to indict the soviet state, but the guilt spills

over to everyone who stood by, afraid to help the stigmatised poet. After Tsvetaevas suicide, readers of

Hamlets Dialogue were susceptible to entering the role of a guilty Hamlet opposite Tsvetaevas Ophe-

lia. Pasternak felt this culpability especially keenly. Shostakovich pulls back from doing so. In his setting

of the poem, he replaces the question mark with which she discredits the princes love with a period that

gives it credence. With this alteration he counters Tsvetaevas condemnation of Hamlet and alleviates the

guilt attendant on it. As Shostakovich would have it, it isnt that Hamlet did not love Ophelia, but that he

was powerless to save her. In his setting, the tension between Hamlet and his conscience is generated by

persistent dissonances that intensify over the course of the song. The affirmation of Hamlets love allows

for the resolution with which the song ends. Hamlets absolution opens the way for the more affirmative

second half of the cycle.

The next two poems that Shostakovich sets come from a set of six poems that Tsvetaeva wrote in 1931, hon-

ouring the great nineteenth-century poet Alexander Pushkin (17991837), progenitor of modern Russian lit-

erature and gold standard against whom all Russian poets measure themselves. Shostakovich, who had set

a number of Pushkin poems over the course of his career, selects two poems in which Tsvetaeva forceful-

ly asserts Pushkhins ascendancy over the state. The Poet and the Tsar presents Nicholas I as the pathet-

ic gendarme of Pushkins glory whose pomp and despotism foreground his triviality. The autocrats efforts

to subjugate Pushkin are presented as signs of his brutality and moral degeneracy, vividly conveyed by the

parallel Tsvetaeva establishes between the tsars slashing of Pushkins manuscripts and his butchering of

Poland. While Pushkin retains cultural authority and vitality unto the present day, the poem maintains,

Nicholas I is relegated to history as a tsar remembered only as the murderer of Russias greatest poet [22].

The second of the Pushkin poems, No, the drum did beat, continues the affirmation of the poet over the

state. It centres on the autocrats dread of the poet, a dread which is shown to persist beyond the poets

demise. This singular twist on the commonplace of the poet living on after his death is rooted in fact: fear-ing unrest among the crowds that would gather at Pushkins funeral, Nicholas I had the poets body car-

ried away in the dead of night for secret, heavily policed burial. In Tsvetaevas poem the terrified tsars chat-

tering teeth are the drum roll that pays homage to Pushkin. That repression by the state signals not its

power over the poet but its craven fear of him received similar confirmation in communist times. After

Pasternak died of lung cancer in 1960, soviet authorities attempted to suppress news of his death and saw

to it that only one small notice of his funeral appeared in print. Official measures notwithstanding, thou-

sands of people attended Pasternaks burial in affirmation of the states small-minded ineffectuality and the

poets value as a rallying point for resistance. Tsvetaevas The Poet and the Tsar is a way to reference the

more recent incident. The weight of Tsvetaevas argument transfers smoothly to Soviet times, and the rel-

evance of both Pushkin poems to Shostakovichs own time is evident. These are poems Tishchenko observes,


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that allow him to give free reign to his rage[23]. The real object of the musical

rage Shostakovich vents at Nicholas I and his gendarmes is not difficult to guess.

Six Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva closes with O, Muse of weeping, a lyric from a 1916

cycle dedicated to Anna Akhmatova that draws another larger-than-life poetic destiny

into Shostakovichs cycle. Akhmatovas presence in Opus 143, specifically in the way

Tsvetaeva presents her, offers another perspective on the central concerns charted in

Shostakovichs cycle and provides them with closure. Akhmatova and Shostakovich

held one another in esteem, but none of her verse found itself into his music. His tribute to her comes in

his setting of Tsvetaevas dedicatory poem, which remains one of his most solemn and imposing musi-

cal monuments[24]. Tishchenko observes that [t]he tranquillity and majesty of this music evoke memo-

ries of the stately f igure of Akhmatova in her declining years [25]. As in the first three songs of the cycle,

Shostakovich invokes the fate of the poet subsequent to the youthful beginning given in Tsvetaevas poems.

He and the Akhmatova who appears in his song share the experience of repression and vilification by the

state. (Akhmatova was found ideologically harmful by the Central Committee of the Communist Party in

1946. Shostakovich was denounced, together with Sergei Prokofiev, in 1948.) But they also share the eva-

sion of arrest, imprisonment, and execution. Aiming to save her son she, too, wrote in praise of Stalin. Like

Shostakovich, Akhmatova probably owed her survival of the purges to international acclaim and the vagaries

of a regime that, typically, resorted to arbitrariness to both demonstrate and solidify its control. The vari-

ous chastisements and mercies doled out to them were a constant reminder of their precarious position and

demanded awkward negotiation between resistance and acquiescence, between integrity and capitulation

to political demands. Akhmatovas biography provides another perspective on these concerns.

The Akhmatova whom Tsvetaeva addressed as the Muse of weeping was a slightly older and bet ter estab-

lished poet than she was both role model and rival which made the address sound inappropriate. By the

time Tsvetaevas poem made its way into Shostakovichs cycle, the apostrophe was a fitting one: Akhma-

tova had endured the execution of her first husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilev, and the repeated arrests and

sentencings of their only son Lev Gumilev. She had run Zhdanovs gauntlet, suffered penury, cold, and star-

vation. All this adds up to considerably more than what Nicholas I meted out to Pushkin: harassment of the

poet had escalated into full-blown terror, and it would seem that the states fear of the artist had mounted

considerably since tsarist times.

Akhmatova drew strength from this fear. Through years of adversity she maintained a disdainful attitude

toward her detractors and a haughty detachment from her impoverishment. Already an established poet

when Stalin came to power, she retained a loyal following and continued to befriend and mentor other

poets notably Mandelstam and his wife whom she helped to preserve his poetic legacy. Akhmatova devot-

ed considerable care to shaping a self-presentation that increasingly derived authority from the persecution

to which she was subjected. Determined to document her time and to give voice and identity to its silent,

anonymous victims, she expressly refused to countenance flight be it into emigration or into self-inflict-

ed death[26]. Defiantly, she assumed the role that at the end of Shakespeares tragedy Hamlet consigns to

Horatio: Absent thee from felicity awhile,/And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain/To tell my

story. [V:ii] It was on the strength of this form of resistance that Akhmatova earned the title of the con-

science of the age.

Opus 143 thus closes with a paean to a poet who refused to consider suicide, written by a poet who tookher own life. Shostakovich has no ready answer for his own question of whether it is better to make a qui-

etus with a bare bodkin or to endure slings and arrows of a fortune more outrageous than anything Ham-

let could dream of. It is life-affirming to end the cycle with Akhmatova and music that Tishchenko describes

as the synthesis of beauty, simplicity, tranquillity, eternity comparable to some of Bachs symbolic

themes[27]. And yet the words of the song are Tsvetaevas. Survival is itself a form of resistance, but the

question at what cost? continues to haunt, and survivors guilt is not easily assuaged. Shostakovichs set-

ting of O, Muse of weeping hints at the music that accompanies Hamlets bad conscience in the earlier

poem.


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Yet though the dilemma to be or not to be cannot ultimately be resolved, by the end

ofSix Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva the transcendent power of art is unequivocally estab-

lished. In O Muse of weeping, Tsvetaeva speaks of Akhmatovas arrow-like voice that

pierces her listeners and moves them to swear allegiance to the poet. She describes

Akhmatovas followers as profoundly affected by her verse and insists that immortali-

ty is granted not only to the poet, but to all those wounded by her deadly fate. The

effects of art are indelible, the poem argues, and transcendence is open not only to the

poet, but to her readers as well. The expanding creative alliance that emerges over the course of

Shostakovichs cycle culminates with this extensive unity. Rich in figurative meaning, this conclusion has

more immediate, concrete significance as well. Akhmatova favoured the mottoDeus conservat omnia. She

dedicated herself to preserving Gumilevs poetic legacy and helped Nadezhda Mandelstam in her work to

preserve that of her husband. We have spoken already of Tsvetaevas daughter Ariadna Efrons preserva-

tion and dissemination her mothers work. Beyond these prominent figures are thousands who risked arrest

in the name of conserving one poem at a time a culture threatened with annihilation. Resistance to evil

need not come in the form of violence and destruction. It can come in the form of dedication to preserv-

ing what is good.

Through Tsvetaevas poems Shostakovich learns to read possibility into a world of drastically limited free

choice. With his song cycle he documents this reading. The alliance of artists that arises from the poems

he chooses to set embraces his destiny as well and removes the sting of singularity from his ordeals. In con-

ditions that promote mistrust and alienat ion, the creative unity engendered by art makes it possible to resist

dehumanisation and preserve creat ive and personal integrity. Any doubts in the worth of art in reigns of ter-

ror are cast aside. Poet, reader, and conserver come together in a vital interdependency that Six Poems of

Marina Tsvetaeva both thematises and enacts. Although it cannot delay the fell Sergeant, death, Opus 143

testifies to the endurance of art and its capacity to preserve human dignity.

Endnotes

I would like to thank Lt. Katherine A. Hasty for valuable comments on drafts of this essay.

[1] D. Redepenning, And art made tongue-tied by authority Shostakovichs song-cycles, in D. Fan-

ning (ed.), Shostakovich Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 207.

[2] L. Fay, Shostakovich: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 276. Shostakovich orchestrated

the songs the following January (Op. 143a).

[3] M. MacDonald, Words and Music in Late Shostakovich, in C. Norris (ed.), Shostakovich: The Man

and his Music (Boston: Marion Boyars, 1982), 139.

[4] . , (-: , 1965). Inas-

much as the 1961 edition of Tsvetaevas selected poems does not include three of the poems Shostakovich

sets in this cycle ( Whence such tenderness, Hamlets Dialogue with His Conscience, and O, Muse of

weeping), it is apparent that the composer was using this larger edition of her work together with its

introductory essay on the poet by Vladimir Orlov and the commentary to the poems provided by the poets

daughter Ariadna Efron and Anna Sakiants. All subsequent references to Tsvetaevas poems will rely on

this edition. Page numbers will be indicated in the text of the article. Translations of the Russian texts aremy own.

[5] op.cit., 277.

[6] D. Redepenning, Autobiographische Reflexionen Schostakowitschs Zwetajewa-Zyklus (Op. 143),

in Musica, xliv (1990), 164.

[7] I am not the first to address this question, and a variety of frameworks have been suggested to explain

Shostakovichs puzzling grouping of poems . Among studies in which this cycle receives attention are: C.

Emerson, Shostakovich, Tsvetaeva, Pushkin, Musorgsky: Songs and Dances of Death and Survival, in R.

Bartlett (ed.), Shostakovich in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 19198; C. Emerson,

The Tsvetaeva songs: pure poeticity and transcendence, in L.Fay (ed.), Shostakovich and His World


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(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 209212; F. Maes, Between reality and

transcendence: Shostakovichs songs, in P. Fairclough and D. Fanning (eds.), The Cam-

bridge Companion to Shostakovich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009),

24158; M. MacDonald, op.cit., 12547; M. Mishra, I Lived Onin the Hearts of My

True Friends, in M. Mishra (ed.),A Shostakovich Companion (Westport: Praeger, 2008)

261312; V. Pavlova, Dva dara, inMuzykalnaia zhizn, vii-viii (1992), 1920; Rede-

penning 1990, op.cit.., 15568; and Redepenning 1995, op.cit., 20528; B. Tishchenko,

Razmyshleniia o 142-m I 143-m opusakh, in Sovetskaia myzyka, ix (1974), 4047.

My approach differs from these valuable studies in that I focus on the poetic texts not as they stand in iso-

lation on the page, but as they are read and actively engaged by Shostakovich, who uses them to make sense

of his life and art and to comment, often critically, on his surrounding world. Such a reading is consistent

with the Russian literary tradition and accords with the view of time Tsvetaeva presents in the opening poem

of the cycle.

[8] Along similar lines, Emerson perceptively speaks of what she calls the temporal layering of the two

poems that frame the cycle. See The Tsvetaeva songs: pure poeticity and transcendence, op.cit.

[9] D. Redepenning, (1995), op.cit., 207.

[10] This leads Pavlova, op.cit., to speak of the cycle as a biography of the poet.

[11] D. Redepenning, 1995, op.cit., 217.

[12] Tsvetaeva made this statement in a 1931 questionnaire. Shostakovich would have been aware of the

importance she assigned this poem because the statement is reproduced in the notes in the 1965 edition that

he was using, op. cit., 571. We can observe here that, decades after writing My Verses, Tsvetaeva con-

tinues to speak of her poetic and her human fate as distinct from one another.

[13] In the original the division between the I and the poet stands out more strongly because it is sup-

ported graphically by the hyphen that in Russian stands in for the verb to be.

[14] For an extended analysis of this poem, see O.P. Hasty, Tsvetaevas Orphic Journeys in the Worlds of the

Word(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), Chapter 3 Hamlet the Antipoet and Ophelia, 56-82.

[15] If we follow F. Maess suggestion to take the two poems about Pushkin together, as the attaca indi-

cates then Hamlets Dialogue with his Conscience appears at the exact middle of the cycle. Op.cit., 251.

[16] For a study of the importance of Shakespeares tragedy in Russia, see E. Rowe,Hamlet: A Window on

Russia (New York: New York University Press, 1976).

[17] C. Norris speaks of the composers psyche and its Hamlet-like characteristics. See Shostakovich:

Politics and musical language, in Shostakovich: The Man and his Music, op.cit., 190.

[18] Blok, a poet Tsvetaeva deified in verse, was also prone to self-identification with Hamlet. He acted

the role of the Danish prince in private stagings of the play and referred to the tragedy in numerous poems.

[19] M. Frolova-Walker, Six Poems by Marina Tsvetaeva, op. 143, Carnegie Hall Insights,

www.carnegiehall.org/article/sound_insights/Shostakovich/art_poems_shostakovich , accessed 12.03.2010, 1.

[20] Given the unspeakable pressures to which Shostakovich was subjected, and which must certainly have

undermined his health, it is perhaps inaccurate to speak of his approaching death as natural.

[21] Redepenning, (1990), op.cit., 167.

[22] Pushkin died in a duel he fought in defence of his wifes honour, but because of the slights and taunts

that goaded him into fighting it, responsibility for the poets death was laid at the feet of the autocrat.

[23] op.cit., 23. ....

[24] I. MacDonald, The New Shostakovich (London: Fourth Estate, 1990), 272.

[25] Tishchenko, op.cit., 43. , - ....

[26] I am grateful to Dr. Sonia Ketchian, an Akhmatova specialist with whom I consulted on Akhmatovas

views on suicide and who kindly provided me with helpful information in private correspondence.

[27] Tishchenko, op.cit., 43. ... , , ,

- .


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