Gleb’s notebook:
April 20, 1942
It’s warm outside, even hot, but the room and my heart are icy. Even the stove won’t light: the smoke won’t move from cold air to warm, and no amount of effort can warm me inwardly. And there’s nothing that can be done about it.
What I am about to write is very important, and not just for me.
For a long time we thought that we were threatened by an external force—at first, a force of repression and tyranny, inducing fear, then a military force, striving overtly to exterminate, giving us no chance to take cover. We forgot that the enemy is not outside, but inside every one of us.
I, who at one time believed in the Revolution and welcomed it as the dawn of national and religious liberation, and spoke so much about all this during those delirious months with Sergei Chetvertinsky—about the inner kinship uniting many of us—and was then surprised that this impulse to blossoming was supplanted by soulless bureaucracy, and afterward, even when Sergei and Savromatov were already in Paris, continued to work stubbornly at connecting up the various strands of our musical, religious, and political thought (Nikander subsequently replied to a book of essays printed under the eye of the Revolutionary Military Censor with a sardonic letter from Paris: my dear Glebushka, he asked, why all this effort—one can write about all this or simply write the music. It’s easy for him, he has the gift of genius as a composer, but he was not granted any capacity for sympathetic understanding)—even then I was aware that my soul was also clad in a gray greatcoat and soldier’s leg wrappings, that it was there, with the indigent, homeless crowd of Red Army men sent to the slaughter, who in 1919 were left with the choice of dying or—if they held out—thwarting the triumph of the notorious opponents of our revolt. But were these militant opponents not themselves part of the revolt? It is terrible even to think what man of the center—the revolution was anything but the work of “men of the center”—would have come to power in a restoration of the heaven of the intelligentsia. And what a fierce blast would have ripped apart everything around it following that brief triumph!
We were what gave the forward impulse balance, a basis in memory and knowledge.
But then came the Young Communists. What did they know about the musty breath of restoration? And when they stopped our mouths and took the brakes off the flywheel of the revolution, the meat grinder ground them up as well. Renewal without the memory that we retained, but they did not, produced only an endlessly accelerating rotation around our own axis. It seemed as if the worst would continue to be replaced by the even worse never-endingly, and when the desire suddenly arose for a sobering blow from without, the Germans came.
Naïve as we were, we thought the Young Communists were different, not us. But didn’t we also reproach ourselves for our own indecisive rejection of the past? Then why disown those who followed through consistently, to the end? We thought the Germans were an absolutely external force, intent on destroying our way of life. But did we really like our way of life? And if we had been prepared to block their way immediately and firmly, would they really have got this far and encircled us? We thought the German were “not us” to the power of two.
But it was all us.
April. There is no date or year. Time has stopped.
The music paper has run out, and I have no desire to draw lines on huge sheets of Whatman paper that no one needs any longer. But ironically enough, there is more ink and pencil lead than I could use. And heavy-duty drafting paper too (it simply burned very badly in winter). And in general I am exhausted. But the most important, the final thing, is what has become irrevocably clear as the horror wanes: in the silence, with no air raids or artillery bombardments, with no aching hunger—in my brain. The series of variations that rang out, accompanied by the sirens of the first air raids an eternity ago—in that fantastical autumn—was conceived correctly. What dialectic of I and not-I, of we and not-we, can there be, when the external and the internal are one, when our enemy and our comrade are only the masks of our own fear, self-deception, valor, and shame?
There can be no contrasting themes, no voices with different tones.
And there must be no instruments.
The only active elements are fundamental phenomena and states in their multifarious combinability:
|
City |
Hunger |
Snow |
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River |
Sun |
Faith |
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Death |
Despondency |
Life |
|
Variation I: |
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Sun |
Hunger |
Despondency |
|
Snow |
Vera |
River |
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Life |
City |
Death |
|
Variation II: |
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|
Despondency |
Snow |
Sun |
|
Vera |
River |
Life |
|
Hunger |
City |
(I don’t know) |
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Variation III: |
||
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Death |
Despondency |
Hunger |
|
Hunger |
Despondency |
Death |
|
Despondency |
Hunger |
Despondency |
|
Variation IV: |
||
|
Vera |
(I don’t know) |
Vera |
|
Despondency |
Snow |
(I don’t know) |
|
Snow |
Snow |
River |
|
Variation V: |
||
|
Life |
Life |
Death |
|
Sun |
Sun |
Hunger |
|
Hunger |
Hunger |
Snow |
But I know what the title of my life’s work—my death’s work—is, and for the first time I am not ashamed to utter it. I, who avoided it for eighteen years, hoping for the resurrection of a vibrant, resonant shadow. But that shadow suddenly started devouring the sun, consuming my heart, which has been sucked dry by hunger and poisoned by endless sadness.
The music retreats underground and proliferates in a stifling conflagration, blotting out the visible light.
And so—it is called “Leningrad.” Nothing more or less: Leningrad.