Yevtushenko’s awe of Shostakovich is an indication of the reverence in which the composer was held in the Soviet Union. The poet later describes how he first heard Shostakovich’s music as a 9-years-old. Working at a grenade factory in 1942, production was halted and all the working boys were ushered outside into the snow to listen to Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony which was being broadcast across the USSR. The composer’s success within the strictures of Soviet Realism was undeniable. The piece was a favorite of Stalin’s who believed it to be truly patriotic in its homage to Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), a city then under Nazi siege. As will be discussed later, this early prominence underscores the risk Shostakovich was taking in asserting his artistic integrity. As the composer and poet spoke, ideas for four other movements emerged (Wilson 356). Shostakovich commissioned Yevtushenko to write text for each of them and set about expanding his standalone choral piece into to an entire symphony. Bringing poetry and music into conversation in a manner intended to confront audiences with the callousness and failures of the state was both aesthetically and politically risky. They were collaborating when Soviet symphonic settings were mostly instrumental. If they did include lyrics, they typically sang the patriotic praises of the USSR’s achievements. In Yevtushenko’s original lyrics (he would change them after the first two performances), his speaker observes the absence of a memorial at Babi Yar and is prompted to empathetically consider the implications of both the site and its disregard for Jewish people: “I’m frightened, / I feel as old today / as the Jewish race itself.” This empathetic gesture continues throughout, as the speaker “feels” the experience of various representatives of Judaism, from those who fled Egypt, to Jesus Christ, to the speaker’s Jewish contemporaries: I feel myself a Jew Here I tread across old Egypt Here I die, nailed to the cross And even now I bear the scars of it (lines 5-9). Adopting this perspective, Yevtushenko’s speaker comes to experience the horrors at Babi Yar in their collective and individual dimensions: I become a gigantic, soundless scream Above the thousands buried here. I am every old man shot dead here. I am every child shot dead here (lines 53-56). 3 Transcribed and lightly edited by the author. 75
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