Stormy Applause

Rostislav Dubinsky (1923-1997) was the first violinist, musical director, and a founding member of the Borodin Quartet. The group was one of the few leading lights of Soviet classical music - named, like all the others, by the government and forcibly whittled down to only one full-blooded Jewish member (Dubinsky) before it became a success, but nonetheless talented enough that it toured abroad, both east and west of the Iron Curtain. Dubinsky defected in 1975, and in 1989 published his lamentably out-of-print memoirs, Stormy Applause. The book is a marvel. Dubinsky's English education only began in 1955, yet in the ensuing 44 years he accrued sufficient mastery of the language to write an entire book in charming prose that rarely, if ever, suggests that the author might be a non-native speaker.

Dubinsky's portrait of life under a totalitarian regime is a harrowing one. Certainly, the preconceptions held in the free world regarding Soviet power structure are shown to be true - and the book is a pointed rejoinder to anyone who would suggest that life in the United States, whatever its shortcomings, is not free. Dubinsky provides numerous accounts of the suffering inflicted upon those designated enemies of the state (no matter how arbitrarily), from a vocal Jewish actor who was run down by a government truck and whose entire family was sent to the Gulag, to a Canadian socialism enthusiast who immigrated to the USSR following the Revolution, only to be arrested with his family and shot as a Western spy during the Great Purge. A daughter of the latter man, Olya, was released following Stalin's death and met Dubinsky in Moscow, soon teaching him English and assuming an overarching importance in his life; years of malnutrition suffered in prison left her frail and underdeveloped, however, and she shortly passed away while he was on tour in Siberia. The threat of governmental brutality hung over every aspect of Soviet life, and those who didn't follow the party line were severely punished. For instance, after violinist David Oistrakh refused to sign a letter denying that Israel was a true homeland for Soviet Jewry, agents ransacked his apartment and stole only the least valuable and most  irreplaceable of his personal artifacts. Word of threats like these traveled fast, and was enough to keep the vast majority of public figures in line.

Yet Stormy Applause isn't the story of a political regime that "corrodes people the way rust eats into iron," so much as one of those people who lived under it. Inevitably, the paranoiac pressures enforced from above took their toll on all Soviet citizenry, leading to a world in which in addition to one's affairs being in order, one's neighbors' affairs also had to be bad, for the sake of "complete happiness." Following in a grand Russian tradition, the strains of day-to-day living were magnified for Jews, for whom anti-Semitism was so much a fact of life that its manifestations had an astoundingly casual air about them. In the midst of an internal passport check - an inconvenience by no means restricted to Jews alone - policemen would regularly pause at the "Nationality" line (decided by the government) and offer "curious expressions, as if they were wondering, What are you doing in the Soviet Union?" Even among the more socially progressive friends a Jew could make in the Soviet Union, in all likelihood it would only be a matter of time - or in the case of Dubinsky's musician friend Andrei Gorbatov, one heated game of chess - before "strangle [the king]" became "Strangle the Jews."

The emotional release of Stormy Applause comes in the form of music. Dubinsky spent twenty-nine years in the Borodin Quartet, encompassing 3000 concerts, dozens of hours rehearsing for each one spent performing, and very nearly as much time grappling with Soviet bureaucracy over which music he would be allowed to play in public. For composers were subject to the same governmental whims as ordinary citizens, and could, at any time and for any reason, find themselves classified among the Untouchables. Certainly, foreign composers (and especially modern ones) were perennially on thin ice, and such names as "Schönberg, Bern, and Webern were unmentionable words." The stakes were much higher, however, for Soviet composers, for whom official condemnation engendered devastating personal consequences. Dubinsky renders the terror of this kind of life particularly vividly in recounting the life of legendary composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whom he knew personally. Though Shostakovich twice survived ideologically-oriented "civil executions," Dubinsky noted that the "expectation of violent death... became the main theme in [his] music and was stamped forever on his face." Viewed in context, Shostakovich's music was not merely a scathing criticism of totalitarianism, but a very specific outcry against the effects of the Soviet Union on the minds of its citizens - "the destruction of Russian thought and culture, their gradual ruin, which Stalin began and Hitler only wanted to complete." For Dubinsky, to perform Shostakovich was to "[unmask] evil and hypocrisy," to "risk your life for the truth." In writing about his performances, Dubinsky manages to voice these eternal truths as movingly as the composer whose work he so admired. One performance of Shostakovich's Fourth Quartet (a Borodin studio recording of which can be heard below) proved to be one of the most meaningful experiences of his life:

When we sat down, we began playing at once, as if it were the most natural act in the world. We performed the Borodin Quartet No. 2 in D-major, with the unrestrained music-making it required. In Shostakovich's fourth quartet we didn't hold back our emotions. It was surprising that our conversation [with a chauffeur, Helmut, about what took place in concentration camps] had taken place today, because Shostakovich's music was about that very subject - the so-called right of some people to destroy others. With Helmut we had spoken about Hitler's Germany, but now we were playing a piece about Stalin's Russia. By allowing Shostakovich's music to be played, the Soviet authorities had significantly complicated their lives, because the truth about the Soviet regime, concealed so carefully, began to reach the hearts of people all over the world. Judging by the silent hall, it was clear that his tale about twentieth-century tyranny was heard and understood. We ended the concert with Schubert, who, after the Shostakovich, acquired a special philosophical depth: as if regimes and rulers may come and go but another life, pure and elevated, remains undamaged.