In the era of total war, coddling musicians might appear to be a weakness. But our apparatchiks knew better. Music inspired harder work and distracted the toilers from dangerous thoughts. Besides, music was all we could offer just now. The Seventh and Seventy-third Armies of the Northern Front, the Eighth, Eleventh and Twenty-seventh Armies of the Northwestern Front--thirty-nine divisions and two brigades in all--they held the line against the Fascists, but they were dwindling by the thousands. (Many had been liquidated by the SS Death's-Head Division.) And those squat, propeller-driven MIG-3s in formation over Leningrad, they weren't ready just yet; first we had to relocate our airplane factories out of Hitler's reach, and then we'd need to so to speak, you know. Where were the T-34 tanks? Wait two years; we had no tank armies yet. That was why loudspeakers chanted from every street corner (Akhmatova was on the radio); that was why even along the White Sea Canal, on whose construction a hundred thousand people died, there'd occasionally been convict orchestras huddled on concrete slabs, their horns drooping down like the beaks of perishing ravens as they played inspirational melodies.Europe Central
It was Nina's fate to always give, but hurriedly and quick-temperedly, so her gifts were not received with gratitude. He for his part was a generous man without anything to give.
He knew that he could hold on until death. He'd always been brave; he'd endured many discomforts: but this miserable and quite possibly hopeless struggle had stripped away everything but truth: He was ready; he was worthy; he believed fully in himself. How grateful he felt to Coca for believing in him all these years! He had needed her faith; if this beautiful, passionate woman of royal blood stood willing to be his comrade for life, then his rejection by the Navy, his father's dreary career, his own reserve in friendship, could be regarded with the smiling tolerance with which a man remembers the missteps of boyhood. He'd won the prize!
He told the boys the tale of Simple Hans, whose princely brothers despised him for a fool but who won the princess in the end because he saved the ants, ducks and bees from harm, a favor they requited by coming to his aid when he was set humanly impossible magic tasks in the castle of stone effigies: The ants gathered up and counted all the scattered pearls, the ducks dove down to find the lost key, and the bee queen tasted the lips of each sleeping princess to find out which girl was the most charming.
A month later he was summoned back to Prague, to receive another suitcase. He had two hours before his train. (There went his colleagues, marching in a light as straight and grand as the Doric columns of Schinkel's Neue Wache.) This time his footsteps guided him to an antique store's ticking clock, bare-breasted porcelains, fake pearl necklaces and dead women's black gowns. Something for his wife...He allowed himself to imagine how Christian's face would have lit up had he dropped around his neck that eighteenth-century Cross of the Order of the White Eagle which Captain Wirth had forced on him; boys always love militaria, and this was an eight-pointed star of gold, garnished with silver and diamonds! Actually, what he should have done was to sell it and feed his family. Instead, he buried it in the Polish earth, praying softly for its former owner, the grey-green trees going ethereal beyond his tears as they would have done in any rain. Rain of blood, rain of steel, rain on the rich green grass of Auschwitz! Tears and prayers are both supposed to refresh one's soul.
Elena was conscious of him, of course; she knew that he was reading what she was reading; but later on, years later, he suspected that she had been oblivious of his pain; for who are we to think ourselves of such interest to others, even to our spouses, that they can truly read us?
Operation Citadel commenced at 0430 hours on 5.7.43. It concluded on 19.7.43, after seventy thousand of us were dead.
I remember the fairytales that Grandmother Elsa used to tell me that it's necessary to follow without the slightest deviation the advice of the fox, fish, sleepwalker, raven, telephone, ragged dwarf; moreover, this advice grows all the more valid as it disguises itself as nonsense: When stealing the golden horse, saddle him up in the worn tackle, not the jeweled harness which hangs on the other peg. When stealing the Golden Princess, who offers to come with you willingly on condition that you permit her to say goodbye to her parents, you must forbid her precisely this. Be firm; let her weep! In other words, the reward will fall only to him who obeys blindly and faithfully.
When four dozen ebony men in chains appear, you must not reply when they ask who you are. You must allow them first to beat you, then to cut off your head. When T-34s converge on you, you must gaze steadily up at their snouts. Don't yield a single square centimeter to them! IF you follow these orders faithfully, then the talking serpent will change back into a princess for you to marry, and you'll become King of the Golden Castle.
She's too high, too far away. That's how I've felt about each woman in my life. For their part, women have tried to understand me, but what is there to understand? I am nothing more than I am.
A pyramid of flame (to pick a familiar wartime example) possesses a specific shape at any given isntant, adn a general shape over time; we call it a pyramid only for convenience; it's writhing upward, getting nowhere in particular, doomed to subsidence.
All magic spells fail without belief. We enforced belief. In place of ruins we offered the wide white monumentality of Stallinallee, arched, windowed, black and white, fading magnificently into the East.
(In the street he saw a man slip his arm around a woman and that was extremely painful.)
Maybe the only person that an artist can be faithful to is himself. Maybe he's got to betray everybody else. Will you kindly get that martyred look off your face? That's just how it goes. Sometimes I think you're not even conscious of it. A pair of dark eyes comes floating toward you, adn you can't help yourself; you follow them like a sleepwalker--
Elena, you see how lucky it is that you didn't marry me.
What's that sound? Have you ever seen the expressionless faces of people in a queue to send parcels to their spouses in prison camps? They mask themselves out of knowledge that the 'organs' are watching. Or perhaps they've developed this habit simply because our Soviet Union is a cold country; one learns to hide oneself simply to, so to speak, stay warm, to, to, to, well. In this opera, however, we're in the ancient times of Russian bear-hunters: Swamps and forest of Russian misery press all around, besieging the walls which jail Katerina. In our time life will be more, so to speak, JOYFUL: The walls will grow higher; the Fifth Symphony will end with hordes of perfidiously bristling bug-legged notes and chords strung on the music paper's barbed wire; Opus 110 will scream like invalids in a burning hospital (by teh way, screaming is also the task of an intellectual in crisis); unfortunately, 'Lady Macbeth' remains trapped in the prerevolutionary era; poor Katerina's on her way to Siberia! But she's happy, she sings Seryosha's name. What is it that those idiots always say about Zoya? Not long but beautifully did she live! Ha, and then those Fascists hanged her! Beautifully, all right! Sometimes I want to spew. And Katerina's just another, you know. They'll want me to compose her in a major key: Not long but JOYFUL. What a...It might have been well for her had she troubled to consider the studied blankness of her fellow prisoners' faces, because then she might ahve found the mockery interred so shallowly beneath the twitching earth of their grey lips--buried alive! Well, that's par for the course in Opus 110.
And from a Polish father, a Jewish mother, how could you not know what goes on in this world? And then what happened to your mother, you, well, that's how it is for all of us. Irinochka, please, please forgive me for my, for, for speaking to you in this monstrous fashion; I know I'm a...Poor child! What a lot of pain I've caused you! And you knew it anyway, didn't you?
is the closest thing I've ever found to a novel written in the second person plural. Vollmann writes a novel we live. Focusing on many historical actors--D D Shostakovitch, Roman Karmen, the Soviet general Vlasov, the Nazi general Paulus, the German artist Kathe Kollwitz, the Christian member of the SS Kurt Gerstein, and others--Vollmann tells the story of all the hurting people of central Europe. It's a story that comes at time when we need to hear what we are living. Vollmann tells the story of we because we are at risk of not recognizing our membership in we.Vollmann puts more flesh and bloody rags on the structure of history than many author's I've read. He takes the history we think we know, and turns it into the stories of people and makes us realize that it isn't like anything we knew. Since the general attitude towards WW2 is pleasant--because we're far enough from it now, because we won it, because it was a white war, because we have to have something to be proud of--we rarely dwell on the atrocity of that bloody period. It's shocking to thick that more gruesome atrocities were being committed seventy years ago in Europe than we hear about in most troubled areas of Africa. From the Holocaust to Stalingrad to Dresden to the Soviets, people proved to be wildly inventive at inflicting fiendish pain on each other. So much for WW2.
Through all of it, there is the nerve-twisting music of Shostakovitch. Shostakovitch might be the central character of Europe Central
and what a central character he is: weak, cowardly, stuttering, soft, tormented, adulterous, yet capable of courage for his art, and with the heart of a lover to bring fame to love. The story of Shostakovitch, dreary, sad, tormented, terrified, beautiful, is the story of his times. For a generation that has come into adulthood in the 2000s, it is hard to imagine the awful destruction and poverty and pain that Central Europe spent most of the 20th Century slogging through. How could we not know what goes on in this world? Well, if we're as insulated as I feel, as insulated as the people I meet seem, as insulated as the media proves, it seems that the answer is quite easily. We are privileged because we can choose to not know what goes on in the world. Exercising this right of ours, do we risk losing our ability to choose? What if we live in chosen ignorance so long we no longer realize the choice? We have access to more information than any generation before us; we have the ability to travel more freely, we have the calm of a country whose land has been at peace for over a century: How could we not know what goes on in this world?
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