The Bumbling Shostakovich?

A look at Europe Central by William T. Vollmann

At first glance, William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central demands respect as a serious and sober historical novel. The book is massive; the cover foreboding. The characters are dark and gloomy, and the incidents related are even darker and gloomier.

Vollmann focuses his attention on the most tragic circumstances of the middle decades of the 20th century—including the Holocaust, the Soviet show trials, the Babi Yar massacre, and the Battle of Stalingrad. And if you had any doubts about Vollmann’s gravitas, just peer over the more than fifty pages of footnotes (for a novel!) filled with references to obscure books and archival documents in various languages.

But don’t be fooled by all this scholarly apparatus. Vollmann is a connoisseur of the grotesque and absurd. So when he peers into the inner workings of world-historical events, he aspires neither to scrupulous accuracy nor philosophical reflection. He forces his characters to serve as puppets in edifying fables. At the novel’s conclusion, in the preamble to the footnotes, Vollmann even admits that his book isn't "rigorously grounded in historical fact"; instead "the goal here was to write a series of parables about famous, infamous, and anonymous European moral actors at moments of decision."

Vollmann occasionally uses the word hero to describe some of these characters, but even the boldest of them find that opportunities for constructive action are severely limited in a world dominated by Hitler, Stalin and their toadying underlings. The most emblematic figure in this entire novel is the German SS officer Kurt Gerstein, a devout Christian who is assigned responsibility for supplying poison gas to the Nazi death camps.

Gerstein is horrified by the regime’s program of genocide, and tries to alert international authorities—at great risk to his own life, he gives an account of the mass extermination program to the Swedish diplomat Göran von Otter, and attempts to meet with representatives of the Swiss government and the Vatican. In his official capacities, he tries to find ways of constraining the supply of cyanide- based Zyklon B to the death camps, but eventually realizes that he has few ways of doing this without having his efforts discovered and halted.

And what is the end result of Gerstein’s 'heroism'? His attempts to notify the international community have no apparent impact, and at the conclusion of the war, he is arrested as a war criminal. In July 1945, he commits suicide while still under custody. Vollmann offers his own verdict on Gerstein in the footnotes to Europe Central, and in many ways it sums up the underlying paradox that haunts the entire novel: “I firmly believe that there was nothing ambiguous about Gerstein's good, unavailing though it proved to be. He is one of my heroes."

Such are the positive role models in this book: they achieve little, and even that comes at the cost of painful moral compromises. Even Vollmann frets over the possibility that “someone who continues to fight evil and gets victimized is from a psychological perspective complicit.” But who are we to say that we would have made wiser, better choices in these circumstances? This is the world of Europe Central, a burned-out landscape where innocence is unattainable and even self-preservation a constant challenge, but that fact does not minimize the importance of striving for a lesser degree of guilt. A theologian might call this a state of original sin; but for Vollmann this complicity is embedded in the sociopolitical realities of Europe during the middle years of the 20th century.

Vollmann tells this same parable over and over again. He relates the story of Russian general Andrey Vlasov who renounces Stalin only to become a tool of Hitler. Then he balances it out by recounting the tale of German general Friedrich Paulus, who abandons Hitler only to become an accessory of Stalin’s regime. They may strut on the stage of world history as proud military leaders with tens of thousands of troops under their control, but in this novel they have only the tiniest ability to control their own destinies. All their options are flawed and involve some degree of hypocrisy, yet they frequently speak of honor, duty and responsibility. Vollmann is at his best when he takes these sad historical figures, so easily dismissed as dupes or turncoats, and shows how they must have viewed their own circumstances and narrow range of choices.

Of all these historical figures, composer Dmitri Shostakovich gets the most attention in this supersized book. He is a genius, a man whose vocation might seem to place him beyond the reverberations of battlefields and political rivalries. Yet Vollman shows that Shostakovich, for all his towering brilliance, can hardly escape the same impossible choices that beset Gerstein, Paulus and Vlasov.

Stalin's hostility to Shostakovich's 1934 opera Lady Macbeth not only prevented the composer from mounting performances of this and other works, but actually put his life at risk. In such an environment, what is the correct moral decision? If Shostakovich stands up for freedom of creative expression, he will be killed and enjoy no freedom or creative expression. If he caters to Stalin’s primitive and clumsy notions of proletariat art, Shostakovich and his family might survive, but his art will be dead.

In this dangerous game, the most illustrious Russian composer of the mid- 20th century is forced into a delicate balancing act. He makes enough concessions to survive, but not so many that he compromises his genius. In other words, this is the perfect story for a Vollmann parable.

Yet our author undercuts the power of this story by portraying Shostakovich as a muddle-headed bumbler. In conversations, the famous composer can hardly finish a sentence without losing his way. His romantic life is a disaster, and he somehow manages to destroy the relationships that would be most sustaining to his psyche. Meanwhile, family and friends are constantly reminding Shostakovich to watch what he says—surely his home and phone are bugged!—and often pressure him into lies or accommodation with the ruling regime. He rarely takes their advice, but the reader never gets the sense that his objections are driving by policy or principle. Rather this great musical mind is terminally clueless whenever pragmatic moves must be made in the real world.

I call this the Amadeus syndrome—in honor of the celebrated play and Oscar-winning movie that depicted Mozart in similar fashion. The basic concept is a simple one: no necessary connection exists between a sublime work of art and the artist, who might just be a shallow joker. I don’t find this position persuasive, but I grasp its appeal to a certain postmodern mindset. What better way to ensure the "autonomy" of a music composition than to dismiss the composer as a dottering fool?

How accurate is Vollmann's depiction of the bumbling, incoherent Shostakovich? Judge for yourself by comparing the biographical record with the fictional reenactment. In Elizabeth Wilson’s detailed biography Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, we encounter the composer’s modest description of his cello concerto: "I took a simple little theme and tried to develop it.”

But in Vollmann’s version of this same conversation, Shostakovich rambles on:

“My dear lady, thank you for your, your, you know, but I, I, well, I simply took a simple little theme and I did my simple, simple best to develop it!”

This is typical of the liberties taken by Vollmann. Yet those who go back to primary sources will find that Shostakovich, in his private communications, was often incisive, frequently ironic and very conscious of double meanings in his words. His close friend Isaak Glikman saw Shostakovich as the master of "veiled" remarks, and noted his skill at conveying his meaning in subtle hints and allusions. He might loosen up after a few drinks, but even then he became more biting, not a blustering fool, as he comes across in much of Europe Central.

And how reliable is Vollmann's account of Shostakovich’s love life? Here again the historical record deviates markedly from the novelistic enactment. Vollmann places the love affair between the composer and Elena Konstantinovskaya at the center of his novel, and shows how it continued to define Shostakovich's emotional temperament until his final days. In real life, Shostakovich had a brief affair with the young translator.

This tryst threatened the composer’s marriage, but did not topple it. A short while later, Konstantinovskaya was married to film director Roman Karmen, and Shostakovich was again acting the part of a dutiful husband. He may have had a lingering attachment for his old flame—some see hidden references to this lover in the Fifth Symphony (1937), but Vollmann's contention that this was the central relationship of Shostakovich’s life, and that his obsession would last forty years, is just a fanciful invention.

These distortions are indicative of Vollmann’s approach to historical fiction. Readers who assume that Europe Central is an accurate rendering of events are advised to read the footnotes carefully. These are filled with admissions of deviations from sources, departures from accepted chronologies, wholesale invention of scenes and relationships, and "retranslation" (a word Vollmann uses at least a hundred times) of texts.

Why is he "retranslating"? Vollmann is rarely specific, but in one instance he claims that he changed a passage from Vladimir Nabokov to avoid paying for reprint rights. I don’t doubt that our author is careful with his budgeting (at several points in the notes he includes bookkeeping figure on what he paid translators for their services), but I suspect that his cavalier attitude toward sources is more than just frugality. He probably believes that artistic freedom gives him the right to tinker with empirical data and original sources. In an odd way, this puts him the same boat as the Stalinists and National Socialists he so caustically attacks in these pages.

As the strange footnotes make clear, Vollmann often veers into the territory of the absurdists and deconstructionists. One long section of the novel, dealing with a Cold War double agent who moves back and forth between West and East Germany, even lingers on the brink of magical realism. Yet even when he stays closer to historical realism, Vollmann invariably pushes for extreme effects, occasionally ridiculous ones.

Vollmann’s language borders on the absurd, even when discussing the gravest subjects. "In the hot darkness above [Stalingrad] the moon shone like Reichenau’s glass eye"; while in "besieged Leningrad, long cattails of smoke [are] hanging as soft and fluffy as an opera diva's boa." Sometimes the similes are deliberately offensive: When a soccer player scores a goal, the fans are “screaming and screaming like kulaks being executed.” But at every junction, the comparisons are pushed beyond the realm of poetic expression into bizarre contortions where meaning is practically obliterated. When Shostakovich is at work on a composition "chords and motifs trolled between his ears like tank-silhouettes probing the dark teeth of antitank concrete." The fourth movement of his Leningrad Symphony glitters “as brightly as the nickel-plated door handle of the late Marshal Tukhachevsky’s automobile.”

And what exactly does that mean? Who knows!

These are not isolated examples, but indicative of the general tone of Vollmann’s novel. On almost every page, the reader will encounter an outrageous analogy, a startling incogruity, or an extravagantly hideous turn of phrase. Yet even as a I shudder over some solecism or mixed metaphor, I am inevitably reminded of the musical works of Vollmann's main character, Shostakovich. This remarkable composer—who, famous as he is, is still insufficiently appreciated, by my assessment—achieved his greatest effects by a willingness to embrace the grotesque. The low and high always rub shoulders in his works (and especially the symphonies). Instrumental groupings seem chosen with a cussed desire to bring out the awkwardness and rudeness of themes. Percussion is employed to horrify as much as propel. Melodies are twisted into parodies of themselves. Who could every recommend this as a methodology for artistic creation? Yet Shostakovich does it, and succeeds again and again. Vollmann, for his part, operates with an almost identical aesthetic vision.

Yes, Vollmann is the Shostakovich of fiction, and those who have interpreted this book as a straightforward work of historical fiction are falling into the same trap as those who tried to assign similar meanings to the Russian composer's pieces. Many will tell you that many of Shostakovich's most famous compositions embody narrative structures drawn from the history of World War II and the ongoing class struggle, just as Europe Central is considered a novel on that same historical period. In both instances, the bombast and absurdities are clearly intentional, and those who try to sweep them aside are missing the most essential parts of their works.

By the way, I’d like to give William Vollmann credit for rewriting the history of World War II as a kind of musical development. What a brave notion! Yet— strange to say!—he is hardly the first to do this. We see the exact same approach realized in Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. Yet it is to Vollmann’s credit that his ambitious novel, for all its quirks (or perhaps because of these very same eccentricities) can be mentioned in the same breath as these two modern masterpieces. No, I don’t have much faith in this book as a historical novel, and especially not as a description of a war or life of a great composer, but it succeeds as something different, as a narrative more in the style of a myth. I am thinking in particular of those myths in which protagonists battle against cruel destiny, forced to pursue some grand task, but lacking even the most basic tools for success. They must journey into the underworld and win a struggle against death itself, or push the boulder endlessly up the slope only to watch it tumble down again. Such are the heroes—if heroes they be—who populate Europe Central.

And myth is hardly inferior to history. As Claude Levi-Strauss reminds us a "myth always refers to events alleged have taken place long ago. But what gives the myth an operational value is that the specific pattern described is timeless; it explains the present and the past as well as the future." That sense of timelessness permeates these pages, even as our cranky author distorts events and inserts little receipts for services rendered into his tale. The end result is lopsided and even sometimes distasteful, but never boring and, more often than not, brilliant.