The Noise of Time

by Julian Barnes

Overview

A compact masterpiece dedicated to the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich: Julian Barnes’s first novel since his best-selling, Man Booker Prize–winning The Sense of an Ending.

In 1936, Shostakovich, just thirty, fears for his livelihood and his life. Stalin, hitherto a distant figure, has taken a sudden interest in his work and denounced his latest opera. Now, certain he will be exiled to Siberia (or, more likely, executed on the spot), Shostakovich reflects on his predicament, his personal history, his parents, various women and wives, his children—and all who are still alive themselves hang in the balance of his fate. And though a stroke of luck prevents him from becoming yet another casualty of the Great Terror, for decades to come he will be held fast under the thumb of despotism: made to represent Soviet values at a cultural conference in New York City, forced into joining the Party and compelled, constantly, to weigh appeasing those in power against the integrity of his music. Barnes elegantly guides us through the trajectory of Shostakovich’s career, at the same time illuminating the tumultuous evolution of the Soviet Union. The result is both a stunning portrait of a relentlessly fascinating man and a brilliant exploration of the meaning of art and its place in society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9785389121812
Publisher:	Inostranka
Publication date:	08/31/2016
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	603 KB
Language:	Russian

About the Author

JULIAN BARNES is the author of twenty previous books including, most recently, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art. He has received the Man Booker Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the David Cohen Prize for Literature, and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in France, the Prix Médicis and the Prix Femina; in Austria, the State Prize for European Literature. In 2004 he was named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He lives in London.

www.julianbarnes.com

Hometown:

London, England

Date of Birth:

January 19, 1946

Place of Birth:

Leicester, England

Education:

Degree in modern languages from Magdalen College, Oxford, 1968

Read an Excerpt

And so, it had all begun, very precisely, on the morning of the 28th of January 1936, in Arkhangelsk. He had been invited to perform his first piano concerto with the local orchestra under Viktor Kubatsky; the two of them had also played his new cello sonata. It had gone well. The next morning he went to the railway station to buy a copy of Pravda. He had looked at the front page briefly, then turned to the next two. It was, as he would later put it, the most memorable day of his life. And a date he chose to mark each year until his death.

Except that—as his mind obstinately argued back—nothing ever begins as precisely as that. It began in different places, and in different minds. The true starting point might have been his own fame. Or his opera. Or it might have been Stalin, who, being infallible, was therefore responsible for everything. Or it could have been caused by something as simple as the layout of an orchestra. Indeed, that might finally be the best way of looking at it: a composer first denounced and humiliated, later arrested and shot, all because of the layout of an orchestra.

If it all began elsewhere, and in the minds of others, then perhaps he could blame Shakespeare, for having written Macbeth. Or Leskov for Russifying it into Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. No, none of that. It was, self-evidently, his own fault for having written the piece that offended. It was his opera’s fault for being such a success—at home and abroad—it had aroused the curiosity of the Kremlin. It was Stalin’s fault because he would have inspired and approved the Pravda editorial—perhaps even written it himself: there were enough grammatical errors to suggest the pen of one whose mistakes could never be corrected. It was also Stalin’s fault for imagining himself a patron and connoisseur of the arts in the first place. He was known never to miss a performance of Boris Godunov at the Bolshoi. He was almost as keen on Prince Igor and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko. Why should Stalin not want to hear this acclaimed new opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk?

And so, the composer was instructed to attend a performance of his own work on the 26th of January 1936. Comrade Stalin would be there; also Comrades Molotov, Mikoyan and Zhdanov. They took their places in the government box. Which had the misfortune to be situated immediately above the percussion and the brass. Sections which in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk were not scored to behave in a modest and self-effacing fashion.

He remembered looking across from the director’s box, where he was seated, to the government box. Stalin was hidden behind a small curtain, an absent presence to whom the other distinguished comrades would sycophantically turn, knowing that they were themselves observed. Given the occasion, both conductor and orchestra were understandably nervous. In the entr’acte before Katerina’s wedding, the woodwind and brass suddenly took it upon themselves to play more loudly than he had scored. And then it was like a virus spreading through each section. If the conductor noticed, he was powerless. Louder and louder the orchestra became; and every time the percussion and brass roared fortissimo beneath them—loud enough to knock out windowpanes—Comrades Mikoyan and Zhdanov would shudder theatrically, turn to the figure behind the curtain and make some mocking remark. When the audience looked up to the government box at the start of the fourth act, they saw that it had been vacated.

After the performance, he had collected his briefcase and gone straight to the Northern Station to catch the train for Arkhangelsk. He remembered thinking that the government box had been specially reinforced with steel plates, to protect its occupants against assassination. But that there was no such cladding to the director’s box. He was not yet thirty, and his wife was five months pregnant at the time.
 
1936: he had always been superstitious about leap years. Like many people, he believed that they brought bad luck.

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Those who did not know him, and who followed music only from a distance, probably imagined that this had been his first setback. That the brilliant nineteen-year-old whose First Symphony was quickly taken up by Bruno Walter, then by Toscanini and Klemperer, had known nothing but a clear, clean decade of success since that premiere in 1926. And such people, perhaps aware that fame often leads to vanity and self-importance, might open their Pravda and agree that composers could easily stray from writing the kind of music people wanted to hear. And further, since all composers were employed by the state, that it was the state’s duty, if they offended, to intervene and draw them back into greater harmony with their audience. This sounded entirely reasonable, didn’t it?

Except that they had practised sharpening their claws on his soul from the beginning: while he was still at the Conservatoire a group of Leftist fellow students had tried to have him dismissed and his stipend removed. Except that the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians and similar cultural organisations had campaigned from their inception against what he stood for; or rather, what they thought he stood for. They were determined to break the bourgeois stranglehold on the arts. So workers must be trained to become composers, and all music must be instantly comprehensible and pleasing to the masses. Tchaikovsky was decadent, and the slightest experimentation condemned as “formalism.”

Except that as early as 1929 he had been officially denounced, told that his music was “straying from the main road of Soviet art,” and sacked from his post at the Choreographic Technical College. Except that in the same year Misha Kvadri, the dedicatee of his First Symphony, became the first of his friends and associates to be arrested and shot.

Except that in 1932, when the Party dissolved the independent organisations and took charge of all cultural matters, this had resulted not in a taming of arrogance, bigotry and ignorance, rather in a systematic concentration of them. And if the plan to take a worker from the coal face and turn him into a composer of symphonies did not exactly come to pass, something of the reverse happened. A composer was expected to increase his output just as a coal miner was, and his music was expected to warm hearts just as a miner’s coal warmed bodies. Bureaucrats assessed musical output as they did other categories of output; there were established norms, and deviations from those norms.
 
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At Arkhangelsk railway station, opening Pravda with chilled fingers, he had found on page three a headline identifying and condemning deviance: muddle instead of music. He determined at once to return home via Moscow, where he would seek advice. On the train, as the frozen landscape passed, he reread the article for the fifth and sixth times. Initially, he had been shocked as much for his opera as for himself: after such a denunciation, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk could not possibly continue at the Bolshoi. For the last two years, it had been applauded everywhere—from New York to Cleveland, from Sweden to Argentina. In Moscow and Leningrad, it had pleased not just the public and the critics, but also the political commissars. At the time of the 17th Party Congress its performances had been listed as part of the Moscow district’s official output, which aimed to compete with the production quotas of the Donbass coal miners.

All this meant nothing now: his opera was to be put down like a yapping dog which had suddenly displeased its master. He tried to analyse the different elements of the attack as clearheadedly as possible. First, his opera’s very success, especially abroad, was turned against it. Only a few months before, Pravda had patriotically reported the work’s American premiere at the Metropolitan Opera. Now the same paper knew that Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk had only succeeded outside the Soviet Union because it was “non-political and confusing,” and because it “tickled the perverted taste of the bourgeois with its fidgety, neurotic music.”

Next, and linked to this, was what he thought of as government-box criticism, an articulation of those smirks and yawns and sycophantic turnings towards the hidden Stalin. So he read how his music “quacks and grunts and growls”; how its “nervous, convulsive and spasmodic” nature derived from jazz; how it replaced singing with “shrieking.” The opera had clearly been scribbled down in order to please the “effete,” who had lost all “wholesome taste” for music, preferring “a confused stream of sound.” As for the libretto, it deliberately concentrated on the most sordid parts of Leskov’s tale: the result was “coarse, primitive and vulgar.”

But his sins were political as well. So the anonymous analysis by someone who knew as much about music as a pig knows about oranges was decorated with those familiar, vinegar-soaked labels. Petit-bourgeois, formalist, Meyerholdist, Leftist. The composer had written not an opera but an anti-opera, with music deliberately turned inside out. He had drunk from the same poisoned source which produced “Leftist distortion in painting, poetry, teaching and science.” In case it needed spelling out—and it always did—Leftism was contrasted with “real art, real science and real literature.”

“Those that have ears will hear,” he always liked to say. But even the stone deaf couldn’t fail to hear what “Muddle Instead of Music” was saying, and guess its likely consequences. There were three phrases which aimed not just at his theoretical misguidedness but at his very person. “The composer apparently never considered the problem of what the Soviet audience looks for and expects in music.” That was enough to take away his membership in the Union of Composers. “The dan­ger of this trend to Soviet music is clear.” That was enough to take away his ability to compose and perform. And finally: “It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly.” That was enough to take away his life.

Reading Group Guide

The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes’s masterly meditation on the meaning of art and artists in society, explored through a vivid reimagining of the life of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

1. Discuss the passage that opens The Noise of Time. How does this story set the tone for the novel? What indicators does it give about class and social politics in the Soviet Union?

2. The first line of Part I reads: “All he knew was that this was the worst time.” Examine this statement. How does this sentiment echo throughout the novel? Consider Shostakovich’s level of anxiety and fear in this passage as compared to what he feels during his interactions later in life with Power. How does he cope with these feelings?

3. Discuss the circumstances around the debut performance of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. How did the presence of Stalin and his government officials create an environment of apprehension? How did the media work with the state to create a smear campaign against Shostakovich?

4. After the performance of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Shostakovich waits for what he thinks will be his inevitable arrest. How did you interpret his late-­night elevator stakeouts? Was his fear warranted? Discuss the brief interaction with his neighbor on page 18. How did the nod between them indicate a much deeper commentary on interpersonal reactions in Soviet Russia?

5. Discuss the notion of selfhood and identity, and how those concepts are expressed differently in a capitalistic and a communistic society. How does the communist system as described in The Noise of Time discourage assertion of the self? How does Shostakovich’s relationship with Power create a sort of “fractured self,” in which his private and public identities are at odds with each other?

6. Describe the evolution of Shostakovich’s perspective on romantic love. Why does he subscribe to the idea of Free Love as a young man? What changes his perception of it?

7. In the first section of the book, it is revealed that Shostakovich’s parents intended to name him Yaroslav rather than Dmitri. How did you interpret this revelation? How does the question that follows on page 8—­“What did a name matter?”—­relate to Shostakovich’s own conception of selfhood as explored throughout The Noise of Time?

8. Throughout the novel, Shostakovich seemingly views himself as a puppet of Power. How does he differentiate himself from Power—­particularly when he submits to the Party’s will? What does he view as his greatest rebellion?

9. Discuss Shostakovich’s relationship with his first wife as compared to his subsequent ones. What does he value in a marriage? How is he affected by the loss of Nita?

10. Throughout The Noise of Time, Shostakovich is placed in social situations in which he must publicly denounce cultural institutions, capitalistic policies, and the careers of his fellow artists and musicians. Which public denunciation causes Shostakovich the greatest distress? How does public opinion toward Shostakovich shift over time?

11. How would you describe Shostakovich’s relationship with his children? What example does he try to set as a parent?

12. Discuss Shostakovich’s trip to the United States in Part II. What surprises him most about the United States? As a reader, did you ever get a sense that he was going to go “off script” and rebel against Power?

13. The Noise of Time is structured in three sections, each revealing Shostakovich in various states of his career. Compare Shostakovich the composer in Part I versus the composer in Part III. As his position becomes more greatly entangled with the goals of Power, how does his creative output change?

14. What would you say is Shostakovich’s lowest point in The Noise of Time? His greatest regret?

15. How is the relationship between art and power explored in The Noise of Time? Discuss Shostakovich’s own creative process and his creative goals. How is Power’s mandate that art must be “for the people” in direct opposition to the creative process?

16. Were you familiar with Shostakovich’s work prior to reading The Noise of Time? If so, how did this novel help to contextualize his music? If not, are you now interested in seeking out more information about his career?

Editorial Reviews

Night after night, in the year 1936, a man stands on the landing outside his Moscow apartment. Dressed for travel, with a small suitcase at his feet, he waits for the lift doors to open, " . . . for the sight of a uniform . . . and the clamp of fist on wrist." Across the city, terrified individuals keep a similar nocturnal vigil, knowing that in Stalin's Russia, "They always came for you in the middle of the night." Better to meet them than to be dragged from your bed. Particularly if you are the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, " . . . a meticulous man," living in a time of madness. Throughout Julian Barnes's meditative biographical novel, The Noise of Time, Shostakovich works in the midst of terror, heartbreak, and war. "He could always work," Barnes writes, "regardless of chaos and discomfort around him. That was his salvation."

Redemption is another matter. Shostakovich was often condemned for remaining in the USSR, denouncing fellow artists, and writing patriotic works on demand, none of which Barnes overlooks. "In all, he had won the Stalin Prize six times," we learn. "He also received the Order of Lenin at regular ten-year intervals . . . He swam in honors like a shrimp in shrimp-cocktail sauce. And he hoped to be dead by the time 1976 came around." Because the axe is always poised to fall, even on the lucky. Toward the end of his life, the composer observes, "They had come for him every twelve years," starting in 1936 when an ill-received opera made him "an enemy of the people." This is when Barnes's compressed narrative begins. Divided into three sections — prosaically titled On The Landing, On The Plane, and In The Car — the novel alights on three critical years: 1936, when Shostakovich's arrest, even execution, seems imminent; 1948, when he visits the USA as part of a Soviet delegation; and 1960, when he is forced to join the Communist Party. Inside this elegant frame, Barnes creates an impressionistic portrait of an astonishing mind confronting a monstrous era.

"Faces, names, memories . . . Fields of sunflowers . . . Sweat coming off a widow's peak . . . " Remembered characters and images flash across the novel's early pages while Shostakovich waits in the dark, his mind "skittering." In these abbreviated paragraphs, we can only glimpse a man who seems to keep his distance. And Barnes's allusive, epigrammatic style keeps us at arm's length as he dramatizes Shostakovich's life in a series of potent scenes and muted reflections. Brian Hall, in his superb 2008 novel, Fall of Frost, took a similarly oblique approach to Robert Frost, but Hall seemed to penetrate the poet's heart, whereas Barnes enters this composer's consciousness, it often seems, purely as an observer. (The other obvious comparison is with Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, whose theme echoes through The Noise of Time but whose labyrinthine structure could not be more different.)

Childhood, first love, three marriages, children. The Bolshevik Revolution, World War II, Stalinism. With cerebral precision, Barnes depicts a life encased by history and defined, from the outset, by music. "Like his sisters, he had first been put in front of a keyboard at the age of nine. And that was when the world became clear to him." In 1926, the premiere of his First Symphony brings the nineteen year-old Shostakovich not only fame but also the political scrutiny that shadows him until his death in 1975. By which time, Barnes imagines the composer's pessimism curdling into desolation when he instructs that " . . . the first movement of his Fifteenth Quartet should be played 'so that flies drop dead in mid-air, and the audience start leaving the hall in sheer boredom.' "

The novel is leavened throughout by this kind of self-mockery and ironic wit. Each New Year's Eve, for example, since "Paradise had been created, or would be created quite soon when . . . a few hundred thousand more saboteurs had been shot," Shostakovich makes the same toast: "That things don't get any better!" Elsewhere, a brief rumination on cigarettes, (interrogators favor Belomory, intellectuals Kazbeki) prompts an image of Stalin crumbling his own brand into his pipe, making his desk "a terrible mess of discarded paper and cardboard and ash," followed by this observation: "No one else would smoke a Herzegovina Flor in Stalin's presence — unless offered one, when they might slyly attempt to keep it unsmoked and afterward flourish it like a holy relic."

Prokofiev and Stravinsky materialize briefly and with startling clarity alongside legendary soldiers like Marshal Tukhachevsky, "The Red Napoleon," tortured and executed in 1937. For all its turmoil, however, Barnes's novel remains a quiet meditation. "Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time," he concludes. And the artist? Growing old and enduring the humiliation of fame and totalitarian favor, "What he hoped for was that death would liberate his music: liberate it from his life . . . his music would be . . . just music." The final note in this elegiac and ultimately affecting novel is the simple sound of three vodka glasses clinking, " . . . .a perfect triad" Shostakovich notes, as he and a companion, waiting on a railway platform in midwinter in the middle of war, raise a toast with a crippled beggar.

Anna Mundow, a longtime contributor to The Irish Times and The Boston Globe, has written for The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, among other publications.

Reviewer: Anna Mundow

The Barnes & Noble Review

2016-02-11
A fictional treatment of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) and his long history of humiliation and persecution under Soviet rule."Muddle instead of music," read the headline in Pravda after the 1936 performance of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Under Stalin's rule, this signified more than just a bad review—it was a loudly broadcasted command to stick to the Communist Party line and, amid purges and gulags, tantamount to a death threat. This brief novel from the Man Booker Prize-winning Barnes (The Sense of an Ending, 2011, etc.) captures the cloud of fear the composer lived under until his death, regardless of whether he was in or out of favor with "Power" with a capital P. He delivered speeches he didn't write that made claims he didn't agree with, and he acceded to demands he allow a tutor to school him in Soviet doctrine, while laboring to compose music that wouldn't offend but still indulged his creative spirit. All of this took a toll on him, of course, and Barnes captures his subject's stress and dark humor with his signature grace. There's plenty of sharp imagery depicting Shostakovich's bind: "He swam in honours like a shrimp in shrimp-cocktail sauce" captures the putrescence of acclaim that's a function of politics; elsewhere, he conceives of life as "the cat that dragged the parrot downstairs by its tail; his head banged against every step." But this portrait also feels too restrained at times. While Barnes willingly gets into Shostakovich's head when it comes to his painful submission, he generally elides how he composed music under those circumstances. That softens the sense of artistic loss in a story that might have sent a stronger signal about what happens to creativity in repressive circumstances. A moody, muted composition about art under the thumb of tyranny.

Kirkus Reviews