Shostakovich: String Quartet No.1 in C major Op.49 [July 1938]

LIGHTS UP: SUNNY IF SOMEWHAT JAUNDICED

Interior: a small apartment with simple furnishings.

The composer sits at a table toying with a Belomorkanal cigarette.

He stands and walks to the window and stares out through blinds which are slightly opened. 

I am certain.

Of uncertainty.

He clears his throat.

I am alive.

And strongly supported by Slavic optimism.

Tilts his head to one side, stares directly at the audience and smiles.

Not everyone is equipped for that.

If Slavic optimism manifested itself in the West

You’d hardly consider it uplifting.

Particularly if you tried to hyper-rationalize.

Slavic optimism is a riddle told by time.

He crosses back to the table.

There’ll be time.

For talking.

He sits, carefully laying the cigarette diagonally across the pack.

To one’s self.

To who else?

Raises an index finger, as if proposing a toast.

To Franz Josef Haydn.

He listens.

Pause.

Very quiet in the bright sun off the water,

Inconspicuous on the streets of Petrograd—excuse me, Leningrad.

He removes his spectacles, rubs his forehead, then stares at his fingertips absently as if to see if anything came away with them.

Don’t talk to me. Don’t even look at me.

My name is...

I live and try to work inside of a fantastic tragicomedy

They tell me all sorts of unbelievable things

These people here

Silence, as he replaces his spectacles and bites the cardboard tube of the papirosa cigarette, stands and walks to the window where he stares once more through the blinds.

To quote my good friend Mikhail Zoshchenko,

Writer of stories which are utterly saturated in Slavic optimism:

I don’t hate anybody—that’s my precise ideology.

BLACKOUT

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