WRITING ABOUT SHOSTAKOVICH

Opus 143, Six Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva as Cycle

by Olga Peters Hasty, Princeton University

During a sojourn in the United States in the summer of 1973, Shostakovich learned from doctors of the
National Institute of Health that there was no hope for recovery from his progressive neurological disorder
and heart ailment. As he did in ‘situations of special strain[1]’, he turned to songs and in the first week of
August composed his suite for contralto and piano Six Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva[2]. The cycle is aptly
described as ‘…Shostakovich striving finally to sort out and identify the essential issues and attitudes which
will help him approach death, rather than railing against it[3]’. These essential issues revolve around the
familiar triad of life, art, and death, considered now in the exceptional circumstances of the composer’s need
to take stock of his life. As he confronted the impending solitude of death from within the atomised society
of a totalitarian state, Shostakovich needed to deal with his isolation, to make sense of his life as an artist, and
to contemplate the worth of art in the pressured conditions of a repressive regime and his own approaching
death.

This article studies how Tsvetaeva’s poems make this possible. Shostakovich’s selection of texts for his song
cycle suggests that the composer was evaluating decisions he had made over the course of his life through the
prism of how others responded when faced with similar trials – Tsvetaeva herself, but also those addressed
in her poems and those whom the poems invoke for him metonymically. The Russian tradition is well-schooled
in the art of aesopic language and meaningful allusion. Literary works of all times and places are routinely
invoked for what they can say about immediate circumstances and to register dissent. The distinction between
the created and actual worlds is blurred as textual references become indicators of personally held views. This
helps us understand how Shostakovich uses Tsvetaeva’s poems. As we will see when we consider what each
of her texts contributes to his project, the composer draws Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Pushkin, Pasternak,
Akhmatova and Hamlet into the created world of his cycle where they speak on his behalf and draw other artists
into the discourse.

Tsvetaeva’s works display a breadth of emotion and intellect made all the more compelling by the harsh cir-
cumstances in which she made it a point of honour to continue writing. Steeped in ideals of the German
Romantics, Tsvetaeva situated life not in the actual world, but in the creative sphere. Insisting that inimical
circumstances be not simply resisted, but used to advantage, she persistently translated the hostility of the sur-
rounding world into sources of creative energy and signs validating the poet. Her dedication to the poetic call-
ing prevailed in the aftermath of the civil war (when her husband, an officer in the White Army, went miss-
ing for years and her youngest daughter died of starvation), through émigré life on the outskirts of Prague and
Paris, and finally, ill-starred repatriation in 1939. In the Soviet Union her émigré past and family ties to ‘ene-
mies of the people’ (her sister was already under arrest, Tsvetaeva’s husband and daughter were arrested
shortly after their return) made her a pariah, barring her from appearing in print and inhibiting help from
fearful friends. Evacuated to the remote village of Yelabuga with her son, and left with no prospect of publi-
cation or means of support (her application for the position of dishwasher in a cafeteria for evacuated writ-
ers was rejected), Tsvetaeva hanged herself in 1941.

Khrushchev’s ‘Thaw’ made it possible for a posthumous collection of Tsvetaeva’s poems to come out in
Moscow in 1961, to be followed in 1965 by a more substantial volume in the Poet’s Library (Biblioteka poeta)
series[4 ]. That Tsvetaeva’s works now gained the readership in Russia from which they had been barred for
over three decades was due to the efforts of her daughter Ariadna Efron, who, upon returning from Siberian
exile, dedicated herself to the preservation and dissemination of her mother’s poetic legacy. Although Tsve-
taeva’s writings could be accessed in the West or via their clandestine circulation in the USSR, it was only
after their officially sanctioned publication that Soviet artists could publicly engage them.

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 Tsvetaeva’s poetry is characterised by its strong, distinctive rhythms, richly associative energy,
and a rigorous deployment of the acoustic potential of language. This fosters a strong affinity
between her verse and music – not in the Symbolist sense of conveying the ineffable, but in a more
concrete similarity of organising principles that are rooted in repetition and variations on acoustic,
rhythmic, and motivic gestures. The affinity lies, in other words, in the way her poems cohere and
signify. Tsvetaeva’s demanding poems (she speaks of the exhausting co-creativity she expects from
her readers) thus exhibit a structural readiness to join music. Shostakovich, who was already famil-
iar with some of Tsvetaeva’s writings before the ban on them was lifted, had taken an interest in her biography and in
the musical possibilities that her poems offered before he began Opus 143. The Three Songs on Verses of Tsvetaeva, op.
48 (1970, pub. 1977) by his student Boris Tishchenko was a work which ‘he played and sang over and over again[5]’.
In the spring of 1971, while composing his Fifteenth Symphony, he began a setting for bass and piano of ‘Yelabuga Nail’
(1967), Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s then still unpublished poetic commemoration of Tsvetaeva’s suicide[6].

Marina Tsvetaeva

We can thus understand why Shostakovich would turn to Tsvetaeva’s poetry at this stage in his life. Why he chose the
poems that he did is less apparent, but clearly the composer had something at stake when he made a cycle of his own
rather than set one of the many that the poet herself created[7]. To appreciate Shostakovich’s assemblage of Tsvetaeva’s
poems, it is necessary to consider the significance they assume when they are brought forward in time and read in the
context of Shostakovich’s world[8]. If we attend not only to what the poems say, but also to how they signify for
Shostakovich, we can observe a compelling network of associations emerge from the texts he brings together. It is in the
new dimension opened by these associations that the poems cohere into a unified cycle. While I do not maintain that ‘the
poet’s words are more important than the music which accompanies them[9]’, my focus here will remain on the poems
– how Shostakovich read them, what they bring to his cycle, and how they reflect the composer’s stock-taking. It is gen-
erally acknowledged that Shostakovich’s music is not illustrative of Tsvetaeva’s poems and that his music provides them
with emotional colouring. It is plausible to suggest that the underlying dimension of the cycle that we will explore here
has some bearing on Shostakovich’s musical settings. If this is indeed the case, my approach to the texts can promote
another way of thinking about the music and how it might relate not simply to the words, but to the particular way
Shostakovich was reading the poems.

The poems that Shostakovich sets in Opus 143 date from 1913 to 1931, and thus span most of Tsvetaeva’s poet-
ic career [10]. They address the artist’s perennial struggles with the uncompromising demands of her art, the
indifference of the surrounding world to the artefacts on which she stakes her existence, the political duress
that genius attracts, and death, which cuts short the artist’s creativity. These issues are germane to Shostakovich’s
probing of possible responses to pressures that erode human dignity and compromise moral and artistic val-
ues. They are also important to his questioning of what place genuine art can have in times – like those of the

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Stalinist years – that exert such pressures. But Tsvetaeva’s poems do more than address
shared concerns: they steadily loosen Shostakovich from the confines of the here-and-
now and help the isolated artist confronting the solitude of death connect with other cre-
ative individuals. Easily crossing the tenuous boundary between art and biography and
impervious to the constraints of time and place, the poems extend the issues Shostakovich
addresses beyond the parameters of his own life. From this broadened perspective, doubts
in the value of art are dispelled and its efficacy to counter the indignity of totalitarianism
– both of the Stalinist regime and of death itself – is upheld. For Redepenning ‘[t]he theme of the Six Poems
of Marina Tsvetayeva is the moral integrity of great artists... [11]’. More precisely, the cycle explores what con-
stitutes creative integrity to arrive at a means for its recuperation.

Shostakovich opens Opus 143 with ‘My Verses’, an early (1913), much-anthologised poem that Tsvetaeva
counted among her most important poetic self-presentations and later described as: ‘Формула – наперед – всей
моей писательской (и человеческой) судьбы’ (‘Formula – napered – vsei moei pisatel’skoi (i chelovech-
eskoi) sud’by’ ‘The formula – in advance – for my entire creative (and human) fate. [12]’ Tsvetaeva’s assess-
ment of her poem is reproduced in the notes to the 1965 collection of her poems that Shostakovich was using
and draws particular attention to this poem. The lyric is generally regarded as the twenty-one-year-old poet’s
exuberant expression of confidence in her verse and disregard for public opinion. Undaunted by the neglect
of her books that gather dust in stores, she asserts: ‘Моим стихам, как драгоценным винам,/Настанет свой
черед’ (‘Moim stikham, kak dragotsennym vinam,/Nastanet svoi chered’) ‘My poems, like precious wines,/ Will
come into their own’ (p. 57).

Shostakovich had witnessed the concrete fulfilment of this prophecy. Tsvetaeva’s claim was vindicated by the
appreciative readership and cultural significance her life and writings assumed when her works were pub-
lished in Russia some twenty years after her death. Yet there is nothing celebratory in the subdued setting of
this poem. Tsvetaeva’s life story doubtless contributes to this, but the gravity is in the lyric itself and derives
specifically from the way the poet is presented in it. (This is why Tsvetaeva found the poem so important in
retrospect.) The poet’s freedom from her immediate surroundings that this poem proclaims, raises the poet above
them, but it also leaves her bereft of acknowledgement and community in her own time. For Shostakovich, who
was confronting his own death, the promise of posthumous appreciation is but cold comfort, made all the cold-
er by the posthumous rehabilitations of Khrushchev era with their poignant absences of the rehabilitated indi-
viduals themselves. As Tsvetaeva indicates in her evaluation of her early poem, human and writerly fates do
not coincide.

‘My Verses’ opens with the statement: ‘Моим стихам, написанным так рано,/Что и не знала я, что я – поэт’
(‘Moim stikham, napisannym tak rano,/ Chto i ne znala ia, chto ia – poet’) ‘My poems written so early/ That
I still did not even know I was a poet’ (p. 57). Palpable here is Tsvetaeva’s tacit acknowledgment that she is a
poet not of her own volition but at the behest of a transpersonal fate. The creative artist is torn between the
demands of her art and her human needs, and the ‘I’ and the ‘poet’ stand separated[13]. Under a regime deter-
mined to subjugate the arts this split is exacerbated and can exceed endurance. Thus Tsvetaeva later described
Vladimir Mayakovsky’s suicide in 1930 as the consequence of an insuperable tension between the man and the
poet.

This tension is complicated by the view of time this poem advances. Tsvetaeva’s assertion that her poems will
come into their own at some future date effectively harnesses passing time to creative advantage. In place of
futile resistance to time, which moves the poet toward death and the surcease of creative activity, is the poet’s
embrace of temporal passage as a phenomenon that continually enriches her poems and ensures their unend-
ing vitality. The poem’s endurance, in other words, rests not on a claim to permanence, but on the certainty of
change that is afforded by the ceaseless flow of time. Her poems are thus nourished by the very passage of time
that carries the poet to her death. If there is any consolation to the poet herself in this essentially self-sacrifi-
cial model, it is in the notion that over the course of time her own life and even her death will similarly take
on ever-new meaning. Like her poems, the poet remains in flux and is commemorated not with a static mon-
ument, but in the vivacity of continual change. And yet for all that, the fact remains that the body housing the
poet must succumb irreversibly to death.

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 Tsvetaeva’s early poem is a rewarding point of departure for Shostakovich’s cycle. The
divided self of the artist it presents is the crux of his self-evaluation, while its view on time
informs his engagement of all of the lyrics in his cycle. In the time that elapses between
Tsvetaeva’s composition of the poems and Shostakovich’s setting of them, the poems and
the poet who authored them have taken on new meaning and associative potential. ‘My
Verses’ stands as a programmatic statement for Shostakovich’s cycle, which both con-
templates and puts into practice the basic premises of this poem.

The second poem of Shostakovich’s cycle is ‘Whence such tenderness?’, a singular love poem that sings not
the exceptionality of the beloved but the superior qualities of previous lovers and that expresses not desire,
but tenderness and bewilderment. Although it is not immediately apparent from the text, Shostakovich would
have known from Efron’s notes that this lyric of February 1916 was written to the poet Osip Mandelstam, whom
Tsvetaeva met during her visit to St. Petersburg that winter. Well-suited for musical setting, the gentle, slight-
ly ironic text with its four-fold repetition of the opening question permits Shostakovich to weave another
tragic poetic fate into his cycle. With it comes another perspective on the triad of art, life, and death that he
contemplates in it.

In keeping with the horrific norm of the times, the auspicious beginning of Mandelstam’s creative biography
that Tsvetaeva witnessed in 1916, subsequently took a hideous turn. If in Tsvetaeva’s poem Mandelstam is but
one in a series of lovers, in history he is but one of a series of poets who suffer at the hands of the Stalinist
regime. The tenderness and the fragility of the youthful, almost maidenly Mandelstam in Tsvetaeva’s poem
stands in jarring contrast to the criminalised poet whose posthumous rehabilitation Shostakovich was wit-
nessing. Initiated in 1956, this rehabilitation was only just now, in 1973 when Shostakovich was composing
this song, being crowned with the publication of a posthumous collection of his verse. In keeping with Tsve-
taeva’s prediction, Mandelstam’s verse had come into its own – thirty-five years after the poet’s death.

Mandelstam’s presence in the cycle subtly advances the closely interrelated themes of the divided self of the
artist and suicide. Mandelstam helps to foreground the fact that in Stalinist Russia the practice of one’s art
could be (and this in a chillingly literal sense) a means for taking one’s life. In the autumn of 1933, Mandel-
stam, who was under increasing pressure to conform to the demands of the regime, composed an epigram on
Stalin, whose sixteen lines gave more than enough length to hang the poet. Mandelstam’s arrest followed
some six months later. He then attempted suicide by more direct means – first slashing his wrists in prison
and then leaping from a hospital window during his exile to Cherdyn. This last gesture brought mitigation of
what was already a stunningly mild sentence. Such reprieve demanded recompense, and the poet’s odes to Stal-
in followed. By 1937 Mandelstam’s good fortune (if that is what it was) gave out, and he became the target
of public vilification of the kind Shostakovich was himself to experience. Mandelstam died in transit to a
GULAG labour camp in 1938. That his writings survived is due primarily to the efforts of his wife Nadezh-
da Iakovlevna who committed her husband’s poems to memory, hid them with friends, and found ways to con-
vey them to the West for publication. Like Tsvetaeva’s daughter Ariadna Efron, Nadezhda Mandelstam ded-
icated herself to the preservation of a poetic legacy that was threatened by the state. Poets’ small comfort in
posthumous acknowledgement is enlarged by the posthumous defiance of the state that poems make possi-
ble.

Shostakovich next turns to ‘Hamlet’s Dialogue with His Conscience’, a poem of 1923, in which Tsvetaeva pre-
sents a guilt-ridden Prince of Denmark contemplating Ophelia’s watery death[14]. The reference to Shake-
speare’s Hamlet is both the impetus for an entire array of associations and the focal point of the cycle[15].
Shakespeare’s tragedy stands at the centre of Opus 143 for much the same reason it occupies a central posi-
tion in Russian culture. Hamlet offers Shostakovich a distillation of concerns that preoccupied Russian artists
and intellectuals since the nineteenth century and that were addressed with increasing urgency in the twenti-
eth[16]. In a tradition continually chafed by state control and a socio-political setting where the private and
public selves were pried ever further apart, the issues Hamlet addresses assumed direct relevance. The rot-
tenness of the state of Denmark and the criminality of its ruler, Hamlet’s railing against a time that is ‘out of
joint’, his desperation that ever he ‘was born to set it right’ resonated with individuals who endured social and
political ills that they were powerless to redress. Hamlet’s vacillation between open rebellion and withdraw-

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al, the double life into which he escapes, and his tragic ineffectuality fostered readings of
recognition and prompted self-identification with the unhappy prince. Interest in Hamlet
intensified roughly in proportion to the increase of state control over the arts, and the
Danish prince made frequent appearances in the Russian arts, poetry in particular. Not only
Tsvetaeva, but all of the poets referred to either directly or obliquely in Opus 143 had
something to say about him. Any mention of the Danish prince triggers associations with
a panoply of creative artists.

Shostakovich was among those who saw themselves in Hamlet[17], and his creative output is rich in music
relating to Shakespeare’s tragedy. Most immediate to Opus 143 is ‘Ophelia’s Song’ in Seven Romances on
Alexander Blok, op. 127[18]. Earlier treatments include incidental music for two theatrical productions of Ham-
let, one in 1932, then one in 1954 that was staged by Grigori Kozintsev, who also directed the 1964 film ver-
sion of the tragedy for which Shostakovich composed the score. Kozintsev died in May of 1973, that is, only
a few months before Shostakovich wrote Opus 143, and Shostakovich’s reference to the film score in the
opening of ‘Hamlet’s Dialogue’[19] suggests that the death of his friend was on the composer’s mind as he
was coming to terms with his own.

Tsvetaeva wrote ‘Hamlet’s Dialogue with his Conscience’ in 1923, when she was in the midst of an intense
epistolary exchange with Boris Pasternak, to whom many of her poems of the period are addressed. Even apart
from this, for Shostakovich any reference to Hamlet would naturally bring Pasternak to mind. Resorting, as
many did around the time of the Great Purge, to the relatively safe haven of translation, Pasternak included
Hamlet among his translation projects and, in 1940, completed a Russian version of the tragedy. (This was
the translation on which Kozintsev based his screenplay.) Like Blok, Pasternak identified closely with Ham-
let, and Shakespeare’s tragedy figures importantly in his 1959 autobiography ‘I Remember’. His famous
poem ‘Hamlet’ of 1946 (which Vladimir Vysotski set to music the same year) became one of the poems
ascribed to Yuri Zhivago in the autobiographical novel that in 1958 brought Pasternak the Nobel Prize abroad
and vilification at home. Banned in the USSR, together with the novel in which it appeared, Pasternak’s
‘Hamlet’ was recited at his funeral in 1960 by the poet Andrei Voznesenski who had committed it to memory.

Pasternak arguably plays a part in shaping Shostakovich’s response to Tsvetaeva’s poem. For Pasternak,
Shakespeare’s Hamlet is the tragedy of a reluctant individual called to duty by a transpersonal fate. In his lyric
‘Hamlet’, a Christ-like actor bows to destiny and, in full knowledge of the tragic script, resigns himself to enact-
ing the role that is written for him. As in Tsvetaeva’s ‘My Verses’, the split in the artist whom Pasternak por-
trays is along the fault line between human needs and the demands of a transcendent power. Having committed
himself to these demands, Pasternak suggests in the poem, the artist is duty-bound to play out his part to the
end. This is a statement of Pasternak’s position on a central issue of Shakespeare’s tragedy that ran particu-
larly high in Stalinist times and that is at the heart of the stock-taking that motivates Shostakovich’s compo-
sition of this cycle: the tension between the stoic model of endurance and suicide – the classical model of hon-
our taken up by the Romantics and complicated by Christian prohibition. The theme of suicide provides the
internal, if not immediately apparent, logic to following Tsvetaeva’s poem to Mandelstam with her Hamlet
poem. In a state where physical survival was predicated on destroying the artist in one’s self, and where the
very act of writing could be a form of ‘self-slaughter’, the question ‘to be or not to be’ is significantly com-
plicated. In such times, as Shostakovich knew, endurance could be heroic, but it could also smack of collu-
sion with the state and entail compromise and guilt. Having survived both his own urge to take his life and
the death he feared at the hands of Stalin’s henchmen, Shostakovich – now contemplating the approach of a
natural death – turns to reflect on his own choice and to respond to Tsvetaeva’s poem[20].

Tsvetaeva’s treatments of Hamlet and Ophelia in three lyrics of the early 1920s stand out from the vast array
of Russian responses to Shakespeare. Identifying with Ophelia, she takes the prince to task for his inability
to act decisively, for the insufficiency of his passion, and for his excessive self-absorption. Allowing no quar-
ter for either the rottenness of the state of Denmark or the out-of-jointedness of the time into which he was
born, Tsvetaeva blames Hamlet for Ophelia’s ‘doubtful’ death and refuses to absolve him from guilt. In the
‘Dialogue’, Hamlet tries to counter his conscience’s obsessive insistence on Ophelia’s death with protestations
of love that, in keeping with Shakespeare’s tragedy, is alleged to exceed that of forty thousand brothers. In

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 Russian, the repeated rhyming of ‘На дне она, где ил’ (‘Na dne ona, gde il’) ‘She is on
the bottom in the silt’ and Hamlet’s protestation ‘Но я ее любил’ (‘No ia ee liubil’) ‘But
I loved her’ [240−41] places emphasis on the past tense of the verb ‘to love’ and con-
demns Hamlet for the inadequacy of his emotions. Giving no credence to his ever weak-
er rejoinders, the implacable conscience delivers a final blow: ‘Меньше,/ Все-ж, чем
один любовник’ (‘Men’she,/ Vse-zh, chem odin liubovnik’) ‘Less,/ However, than one
lover’ [241]. At the end of Tsvetaeva’s poem, Hamlet’s love is discredited, and he stands
condemned. In the course of withdrawing from an objectionable surrounding world, Hamlet fails Ophelia
and is responsible for her death.

The questioning to which his conscience subjects Hamlet resonates with exceptional force in the context
of the re-evaluation of the Stalinist years during the Khrushchev era. Redepenning may be right to suggest
that when he was setting ‘Hamlet’s Dialogue’ Shostakovich was thinking of his wife Nina Vasilievna, who
died of cancer in 1954[21], but the fact remains that a superfluity of deaths – and those of Tsvetaeva and
the artists clustered around this song cycle in particular – left ample room for survivor’s guilt. Yevtushenko’s
poem ‘Yelabuga Nail’ ends with the lines ‘Есть лишь убийства на свете, запомните./Самоубийств не
бывает вообще.’ (‘Est’ lish’ ubiistva na svete, zapomnite./Samoubiistv ne byvaet voobshche.’) ‘There are
only murders in this world, remember this./Suicides do not exist at all.’ The persistent rumour that Tsve-
taeva was forced to kill herself by NKVD agents is invoked here to indict the soviet state, but the guilt spills
over to everyone who stood by, afraid to help the stigmatised poet. After Tsvetaeva’s suicide, readers of
‘Hamlet’s Dialogue’ were susceptible to entering the role of a guilty Hamlet opposite Tsvetaeva’s Ophe-
lia. Pasternak felt this culpability especially keenly. Shostakovich pulls back from doing so. In his setting
of the poem, he replaces the question mark with which she discredits the prince’s love with a period that
gives it credence. With this alteration he counters Tsvetaeva’s condemnation of Hamlet and alleviates the
guilt attendant on it. As Shostakovich would have it, it isn’t that Hamlet did not love Ophelia, but that he
was powerless to save her. In his setting, the tension between Hamlet and his conscience is generated by
persistent dissonances that intensify over the course of the song. The affirmation of Hamlet’s love allows
for the resolution with which the song ends. Hamlet’s absolution opens the way for the more affirmative
second half of the cycle.

The next two poems that Shostakovich sets come from a set of six poems that Tsvetaeva wrote in 1931, hon-
ouring the great nineteenth-century poet Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), progenitor of modern Russian lit-
erature and gold standard against whom all Russian poets measure themselves. Shostakovich, who had set
a number of Pushkin poems over the course of his career, selects two poems in which Tsvetaeva forceful-
ly asserts Pushkhin’s ascendancy over the state. ‘The Poet and the Tsar’ presents Nicholas I as the ‘pathet-
ic gendarme of Pushkin’s glory’ whose pomp and despotism foreground his triviality. The autocrat’s efforts
to subjugate Pushkin are presented as signs of his brutality and moral degeneracy, vividly conveyed by the
parallel Tsvetaeva establishes between the tsar’s slashing of Pushkin’s manuscripts and his butchering of
Poland. While Pushkin retains cultural authority and vitality unto the present day, the poem maintains,
Nicholas I is relegated to history as a tsar remembered only as the murderer of Russia’s greatest poet [22].

The second of the Pushkin poems, ‘No, the drum did beat’, continues the affirmation of the poet over the
state. It centres on the autocrat’s dread of the poet, a dread which is shown to persist beyond the poet’s
demise. This singular twist on the commonplace of the poet living on after his death is rooted in fact: fear-
ing unrest among the crowds that would gather at Pushkin’s funeral, Nicholas I had the poet’s body car-
ried away in the dead of night for secret, heavily policed burial. In Tsvetaeva’s poem the terrified tsar’s chat-
tering teeth are the drum roll that pays homage to Pushkin. That repression by the state signals not its
power over the poet but its craven fear of him received similar confirmation in communist times. After
Pasternak died of lung cancer in 1960, soviet authorities attempted to suppress news of his death and saw
to it that only one small notice of his funeral appeared in print. Official measures notwithstanding, thou-
sands of people attended Pasternak’s burial in affirmation of the state’s small-minded ineffectuality and the
poet’s value as a rallying point for resistance. Tsvetaeva’s ‘The Poet and the Tsar’ is a way to reference the
more recent incident. The weight of Tsvetaeva’s argument transfers smoothly to Soviet times, and the rel-
evance of both Pushkin poems to Shostakovich’s own time is evident. These are poems Tishchenko observes,

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‘…that allow him to give free reign to his rage…’[23]. The real object of the musical
rage Shostakovich vents at Nicholas I and his gendarmes is not difficult to guess.
Six Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva closes with ‘O, Muse of weeping’, a lyric from a 1916
cycle dedicated to Anna Akhmatova that draws another larger-than-life poetic destiny
into Shostakovich’s cycle. Akhmatova’s presence in Opus 143, specifically in the way
Tsvetaeva presents her, offers another perspective on the central concerns charted in
Shostakovich’s cycle and provides them with closure. Akhmatova and Shostakovich
held one another in esteem, but none of her verse found itself into his music. His tribute to her comes in
his setting of Tsvetaeva’s dedicatory poem, which ‘…remains one of his most solemn and imposing musi-
cal monuments’[24]. Tishchenko observes that ‘[t]he tranquillity and majesty of this music evoke memo-
ries of the stately figure of Akhmatova in her declining years…’ [25]. As in the first three songs of the cycle,
Shostakovich invokes the fate of the poet subsequent to the youthful beginning given in Tsvetaeva’s poems.
He and the Akhmatova who appears in his song share the experience of repression and vilification by the
state. (Akhmatova was found ‘ideologically harmful’ by the Central Committee of the Communist Party in
1946. Shostakovich was denounced, together with Sergei Prokofiev, in 1948.) But they also share the eva-
sion of arrest, imprisonment, and execution. Aiming to save her son she, too, wrote in praise of Stalin. Like
Shostakovich, Akhmatova probably owed her survival of the purges to international acclaim and the vagaries
of a regime that, typically, resorted to arbitrariness to both demonstrate and solidify its control. The vari-
ous chastisements and ‘mercies’ doled out to them were a constant reminder of their precarious position and
demanded awkward negotiation between resistance and acquiescence, between integrity and capitulation
to political demands. Akhmatova’s biography provides another perspective on these concerns.

The Akhmatova whom Tsvetaeva addressed as the ‘Muse of weeping’ was a slightly older and better estab-
lished poet than she was – both role model and rival – which made the address sound inappropriate. By the
time Tsvetaeva’s poem made its way into Shostakovich’s cycle, the apostrophe was a fitting one: Akhma-
tova had endured the execution of her first husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilev, and the repeated arrests and
sentencings of their only son Lev Gumilev. She had run Zhdanov’s gauntlet, suffered penury, cold, and star-
vation. All this adds up to considerably more than what Nicholas I meted out to Pushkin: harassment of the
poet had escalated into full-blown terror, and it would seem that the state’s fear of the artist had mounted
considerably since tsarist times.

Akhmatova drew strength from this fear. Through years of adversity she maintained a disdainful attitude
toward her detractors and a haughty detachment from her impoverishment. Already an established poet
when Stalin came to power, she retained a loyal following and continued to befriend and mentor other
poets – notably Mandelstam and his wife whom she helped to preserve his poetic legacy. Akhmatova devot-
ed considerable care to shaping a self-presentation that increasingly derived authority from the persecution
to which she was subjected. Determined to document her time and to give voice and identity to its silent,
anonymous victims, she expressly refused to countenance flight – be it into emigration or into self-inflict-
ed death[26]. Defiantly, she assumed the role that at the end of Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet consigns to
Horatio: ‘Absent thee from felicity awhile,/And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain/To tell my
story.’ [V:ii] It was on the strength of this form of resistance that Akhmatova earned the title of ‘the con-
science of the age’.

Opus 143 thus closes with a paean to a poet who refused to consider suicide, written by a poet who took
her own life. Shostakovich has no ready answer for his own question of whether it is better to make a qui-
etus with a bare bodkin or to endure slings and arrows of a fortune more outrageous than anything Ham-
let could dream of. It is life-affirming to end the cycle with Akhmatova and music that Tishchenko describes
as the ‘…synthesis of beauty, simplicity, tranquillity, eternity comparable to some of Bach’s symbolic
themes’[27]. And yet the words of the song are Tsvetaeva’s. Survival is itself a form of resistance, but the
question ‘at what cost?’ continues to haunt, and survivor’s guilt is not easily assuaged. Shostakovich’s set-
ting of ‘O, Muse of weeping’ hints at the music that accompanies Hamlet’s bad conscience in the earlier
poem.

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 Yet though the dilemma ‘to be or not to be’ cannot ultimately be resolved, by the end
of Six Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva the transcendent power of art is unequivocally estab-
lished. In ‘O Muse of weeping’, Tsvetaeva speaks of Akhmatova’s arrow-like voice that
pierces her listeners and moves them to swear allegiance to the poet. She describes
Akhmatova’s followers as profoundly affected by her verse and insists that immortali-
ty is granted not only to the poet, but to all those ‘wounded by her deadly fate’. The
effects of art are indelible, the poem argues, and transcendence is open not only to the
poet, but to her readers as well. The expanding creative alliance that emerges over the course of
Shostakovich’s cycle culminates with this extensive unity. Rich in figurative meaning, this conclusion has
more immediate, concrete significance as well. Akhmatova favoured the motto Deus conservat omnia. She
dedicated herself to preserving Gumilev’s poetic legacy and helped Nadezhda Mandelstam in her work to
preserve that of her husband. We have spoken already of Tsvetaeva’s daughter Ariadna Efron’s preserva-
tion and dissemination her mother’s work. Beyond these prominent figures are thousands who risked arrest
in the name of conserving – one poem at a time – a culture threatened with annihilation. Resistance to evil
need not come in the form of violence and destruction. It can come in the form of dedication to preserv-
ing what is good.

Through Tsvetaeva’s poems Shostakovich learns to read possibility into a world of drastically limited free
choice. With his song cycle he documents this reading. The alliance of artists that arises from the poems
he chooses to set embraces his destiny as well and removes the sting of singularity from his ordeals. In con-
ditions that promote mistrust and alienation, the creative unity engendered by art makes it possible to resist
dehumanisation and preserve creative and personal integrity. Any doubts in the worth of art in reigns of ter-
ror are cast aside. Poet, reader, and conserver come together in a vital interdependency that Six Poems of
Marina Tsvetaeva both thematises and enacts. Although it cannot delay the ‘fell Sergeant, death’, Opus 143
testifies to the endurance of art and its capacity to preserve human dignity.

Endnotes

I would like to thank Lt. Katherine A. Hasty for valuable comments on drafts of this essay.

[1] D. Redepenning, ‘“And art made tongue-tied by authority” Shostakovich’s song-cycles’, in D. Fan-
ning (ed.), Shostakovich Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 207.
[2] L. Fay, Shostakovich: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 276. Shostakovich orchestrated
the songs the following January (Op. 143a).
[3] M. MacDonald, ‘Words and Music in Late Shostakovich’, in C. Norris (ed.), Shostakovich: The Man
and his Music (Boston: Marion Boyars, 1982), 139.
[4] М. Цветаева, Избранные произведения (Москва-Ленинград: Советский писатель, 1965). Inas-
much as the 1961 edition of Tsvetaeva’s selected poems does not include three of the poems Shostakovich
sets in this cycle (‘Whence such tenderness’, ‘Hamlet’s Dialogue with His Conscience’, and ‘O, Muse of
weeping’), it is apparent that the composer was using this larger edition of her work together with its
introductory essay on the poet by Vladimir Orlov and the commentary to the poems provided by the poet’s
daughter Ariadna Efron and Anna Sakiants. All subsequent references to Tsvetaeva’s poems will rely on
this edition. Page numbers will be indicated in the text of the article. Translations of the Russian texts are
my own.
[5] op.cit., 277.
[6] D. Redepenning, ‘Autobiographische Reflexionen – Schostakowitschs Zwetajewa-Zyklus (Op. 143)’,
in Musica, xliv (1990), 164.
[7] I am not the first to address this question, and a variety of frameworks have been suggested to explain
Shostakovich’s puzzling grouping of poems . Among studies in which this cycle receives attention are: C.
Emerson, ‘Shostakovich, Tsvetaeva, Pushkin, Musorgsky: Songs and Dances of Death and Survival’, in R.
Bartlett (ed.), Shostakovich in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 191−98; C. Emerson,
‘The Tsvetaeva songs: pure poeticity and transcendence’, in L.Fay (ed.), Shostakovich and His World

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(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 209−212; F. Maes, ‘Between reality and
transcendence: Shostakovich’s songs, in P. Fairclough and D. Fanning (eds.), The Cam-
bridge Companion to Shostakovich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009),
241−58; M. MacDonald, op.cit., 125−47; M. Mishra, ‘I Lived On…in the Hearts of My
True Friends’, in M. Mishra (ed.), A Shostakovich Companion (Westport: Praeger, 2008)
261−312; V. Pavlova, ‘Dva dara’, in Muzykal’naia zhizn’, vii-viii (1992), 19−20; Rede-
penning 1990, op.cit.., 155−68; and Redepenning 1995, op.cit., 205−28; B. Tishchenko,
‘Razmyshleniia o 142-m I 143-m opusakh’, in Sovetskaia myzyka, ix (1974), 40−47.
My approach differs from these valuable studies in that I focus on the poetic texts not as they stand in iso-
lation on the page, but as they are read and actively engaged by Shostakovich, who uses them to make sense
of his life and art and to comment, often critically, on his surrounding world. Such a reading is consistent
with the Russian literary tradition and accords with the view of time Tsvetaeva presents in the opening poem
of the cycle.
[8] Along similar lines, Emerson perceptively speaks of what she calls the ‘temporal layering’ of the two
poems that frame the cycle. See ‘The Tsvetaeva songs: pure poeticity and transcendence’, op.cit.
[9] D. Redepenning, (1995), op.cit., 207.
[10] This leads Pavlova, op.cit., to speak of the cycle as a biography of the poet.
[11] D. Redepenning, 1995, op.cit., 217.
[12] Tsvetaeva made this statement in a 1931 questionnaire. Shostakovich would have been aware of the
importance she assigned this poem because the statement is reproduced in the notes in the 1965 edition that
he was using, op. cit., 571. We can observe here that, decades after writing ‘My Verses’, Tsvetaeva con-
tinues to speak of her ‘poetic’ and her ‘human’ fate as distinct from one another.
[13] In the original the division between the ‘I’ and the ‘poet’ stands out more strongly because it is sup-
ported graphically by the hyphen that in Russian stands in for the verb ‘to be’.
[14] For an extended analysis of this poem, see O.P. Hasty, Tsvetaeva’s Orphic Journeys in the Worlds of the
Word (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), Chapter 3 ‘Hamlet the Antipoet and Ophelia’, 56-82.
[15] If we follow F. Maes’s suggestion to take ‘…the two poems about Pushkin together, as the attaca indi-
cates…’ then ‘Hamlet’s Dialogue with his Conscience’ appears at the exact middle of the cycle. Op.cit., 251.
[16] For a study of the importance of Shakespeare’s tragedy in Russia, see E. Rowe, Hamlet: A Window on
Russia (New York: New York University Press, 1976).
[17] C. Norris speaks of the composer’s ‘…psyche and its Hamlet-like characteristics’. See ‘Shostakovich:
Politics and musical language’, in Shostakovich: The Man and his Music, op.cit., 190.
[18] Blok, a poet Tsvetaeva deified in verse, was also prone to self-identification with Hamlet. He acted
the role of the Danish prince in private stagings of the play and referred to the tragedy in numerous poems.
[19] M. Frolova-Walker, ‘Six Poems by Marina Tsvetaeva, op. 143’, Carnegie Hall Insights,
www.carnegiehall.org/article/sound_insights/Shostakovich/art_poems_shostakovich, accessed 12.03.2010, 1.
[20] Given the unspeakable pressures to which Shostakovich was subjected, and which must certainly have
undermined his health, it is perhaps inaccurate to speak of his approaching death as ‘natural’.
[21] Redepenning, (1990), op.cit., 167.
[22] Pushkin died in a duel he fought in defence of his wife’s honour, but because of the slights and taunts
that goaded him into fighting it, responsibility for the poet’s death was laid at the feet of the autocrat.
[23] op.cit., 23. ‘…позволяющие дать волю гневу...’.
[24] I. MacDonald, The New Shostakovich (London: Fourth Estate, 1990), 272.
[25] Tishchenko, op.cit., 43. ‘Спокойствие, величественность этой музыки вызыват в памяти царст-
венную фигуру Ахматовой на сконе жизни....’
[26] I am grateful to Dr. Sonia Ketchian, an Akhmatova specialist with whom I consulted on Akhmatova’s
views on suicide and who kindly provided me with helpful information in private correspondence.
[27] Tishchenko, op.cit., 43. ‘...синтез красоты, простоты, спокойствия, вечности – как в некоторых
темах-символах Баха.’

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