Surprisingly, The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes, a biographical novel about Dmitri Shostakovich, has a harder time in Russia than at home. The English reader expects exclusively emotional and psychological persuasiveness from this book: the appropriateness of a quote from Pushkin or the enigmatic Russian expression “ears wither” is much less important to him than the ability to empathize with the hero as a universal person, as a representative of the same biological species. The Russian reader, in addition to this serious requirement, makes the book one more, no less difficult - fidelity to the described era, the reliability of details, absolute accuracy of intonation, practically unattainable for a foreigner. For an Englishman, The Noise of Time is a book about an abstract artist at a bad time. For us, it is a novel about our native Shostakovich in our bloodline, native hell of the 20th century, and woe to the stranger who, undertaking to talk about it, at least once is out of tune. One inaccuracy, one miserable toast "to health", and no "inner truth" will save the novel in our eyes - it will turn into a spreading "imported cranberry".
Julian Patrick Barnes is a contemporary English writer of postmodernism in literature. He has been shortlisted three times for the Man Booker Prize - Flaubert's Parrot (1984), England, England (1998), and Arthur & George (2005), and won the prize for The Sense of an Ending (2011). He has written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh.
I will say right away that Barnes (a careful and loving connoisseur of everything Russian) copes with this second task surprisingly cleanly. Proverbs, sayings, as well as quotations from Pushkin, Akhmatova or Central Committee resolutions, perhaps, belong to the first - the most obvious for us, the upper layer of erudition, but nevertheless they are irreproachably appropriate, and most importantly, many times exceed expectations. Even the only truly funny blunder (Anapa, where Shostakovich goes to rest with his first lover, suddenly finds himself in the Crimea) - and that one is on the translator's conscience: the Caucasus is listed in the original.
In other words, having breathed a sigh of relief – no, we won’t be embarrassed for Barnes – we can take the first – universal, universal and, in fact, the only important level of “The Noise of Time”. Calling this book a novel is perhaps not entirely accurate: in fact, this is a very personal, almost intimate essay, an outlandish (and at the same time very successful) attempt at the internal reincarnation of the Englishman Barnes into the Russian Shostakovich, the successful writer into a composer and musician. Despite the fact that formally the narration in the book is conducted in the third person, almost instantly the reader moves inside Shostakovich's head - sinks and dissolves in his nervous, twitchy reflection and ceases to distinguish the boundary between himself, the author and the hero, and at the same time between reality and fiction . The indissolubility of this tripartite alliance—reader, author, hero—leads to a strange and exciting effect: there is no room for external, rational criticism, and a composed, through and through artificial text—not a diary, not a memoir, not a confession, not a document at all—becomes the highest, the only possible truth. Yes, of course, Shostakovich was just that. Yes, that's exactly what he thought, just like that. It is impossible to imagine otherwise.
The novel is divided into three spaced apart in time, but equally static parts. In the first of them, Shostakovich reflects on himself and the world, standing at night in 1937 on the stairwell with a suitcase in his hand (inside - a change of linen, tooth powder and two packs of Kazbek cigarettes). After the execution of his long-term patron Tukhachevsky and the debacle in the press of the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, the composer himself is waiting for arrest. In the naive hope of deceiving fate and saving his wife and one-year-old daughter from danger, he tramples on the playground, hoping to intercept the angels of death near the elevator, and along the way he thinks, remembers, argues with himself and with imaginary opponents ... In the second part (its action is attributed to 1948 ) Shostakovich flies from New York, from the world cultural congress, where he had to publicly and shamefully renounce his great contemporary - Stravinsky. And, finally, the third part is devoted to Shostakovich's old age in the relatively "vegetarian" Khrushchev or Brezhnev times: the composer is driving in a personal car, continuing to analyze in his soul, to run around the experience. The leitmotif of the first part is fear, the second is shame, the third is bitterness and longing. Relatively comfortable (they didn’t imprison, didn’t exile, none of the relatives were hurt, orders, a personal driver, six Lenin Prizes, a dacha, an apartment in the center ...) Shostakovich’s biography, as interpreted by Barnes, turns into a deep and multifaceted tragedy of the artist, from whom the epoch, under pain of death, extorts things organically uncharacteristic of him - "optimism", simplicity, betrayal, doublethink...
The Noise of Time is an absolute oasis for a philologist. Arranged composition in Tynyanov's way (the episode that opens the book, random at first glance, is then repeated again, closer to the end, and already from a different angle), two- or even three-layer quotations, a smart and accurate game with structure - it is no coincidence, for example, the static nature of the narrative is opposed to the mobility of the scenery (elevator, plane, car). "The Noise of Time" is a paradise for a music lover too: it is obvious that the ragged, atonic and complex rhythm of the text directly refers to Shostakovich's symphonies, quoting and reproducing their style in words. A magnificent, finely crafted book that allows - moreover, persistently offers - many options for understanding and reading.
However, perhaps the main thing that Julian Barnes's book is valuable here and now is its poignant, almost painful relevance for the Russian reader. How does human honesty and artistic honesty correlate, and is there a boundary between them? What are we willing to pay for a comfortable life for ourselves and loved ones? Is there an ethical justification for irony (spoiler: no, according to Barnes, irony is a miserable and shameful weapon of the weak, corroding society worse than cancer)? Is it possible to write - poetry, music, or anything at all - in a country where everything has long and firmly been turned upside down?.. Is it possible to live in such a country? Not? But what to do if you were born a Russian - namely a Russian - composer?.. Even from this very short list of questions, it is clear: "The Noise of Time" is an exclusively Russian book, much more Russian than English, and the point here is not only the factual and intonation accuracy. Julian Barnes breathed something like that together with his favorite music of our Shostakovich - something exclusively Russian, deep, root. And now it has sprouted out.
This article was sponsored by Arturs Zaharovs
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