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PARTISAN REVIEW
out. This absolves the individual of any responsibility for their cor–
rectness, for the Party is always right.
The artist especially is forced to resort to double-entry book–
keeping by the theory of socialist realism, with its accent on ex–
pediency; officially he writes marching songs and privately he
composes formalistic music. The little chamber from which his
spiritual nourishment derives saves him from the fate of many
others, who denied themselves but never succeeded in doing so
wholeheartedly. Vladimir Mayakovsky, who attacked his less rigorous
fellow poet Yessenin with the full sharpness of his scorn, believed that
he had succeeded; "I stepped on my own song's throat." No doubt,
his Lenin-Epos, his
Khorosho,
is poetry of genius. But Mayakovsky
ended in suicide, .and his opponent Yessenin committed suicide almost
at the same time. He who surrenders even that last private chamber
will one day find his life idling in neutral; he throws himself into
gear anew, because he can no longer bear a quiet moment. He no
longer has a private, inner life; he expends himself running away from
himself. A self? Remains of the past! The coming generation will
conquer them.
Anyone who has met a Soviet citizen like Dmitri Shostakovich
and has noticed his nervous irritability, his depressed shyness when
visiting a foreign country, can imagine the sufferings of this highly
gifted composer. His
Song of Peace
expresses the inner yearnings of
the musician and the poet in the Soviet state: " ... bread and wine
shall conquer powder and lead." From his own painful experience he
knows that the Soviet system does not incarnate the victory of
bread and wine over fire and sword, yet he supports it by works
like
Song of Peace.
Stalin knows why he sends a Shostakovich or a
Konstantin Fedin on a tour abroad. But he who watches Shostakovich
at the grand piano, or while reading a peace speech, also knows
enough, and Shostakovich himself knows even more. The Kremlin
gambles on the fact that most men will not observe closely, that they
will see only that this quiet, unassuming man, the gifted interpreter
of his own works, represents the Soviet system now at the keyboard,
now at the lectern.
His works, like those of Prokofiev, Khachaturian, as well as
Gorki's, Tolstoy's, and Fedin's books and those of many others, like
the essays of Ehrenburg, and the poems of Shchipachev and Ragim-
