Miaskovsky
or An Inner Exile

Nikolai Miaskovsky was born in 1881, in the agitated Europe that was described by Marcel Gauchet as “the crucible of the years 1880-1914". This word can also be construed in its alchemical meaning, as the melting pot that weaves and brings together what will be the constituting elements of the twentieth century.

This was a particularly difficult process for Russia. In the same year of 1881, Czar Alexander II dies in a bomb attack and the first pogroms are forerunners for future slaughters on a much more massive scale. Russia’s industry is developing rapidly and benefiting from considerable foreign investment, including the famous Russian bonds. Thence emerges a working class and along with it, the social conflicts particular to industrialized societies: the first great strike in Russia bursts out in the cotton plant of Orekhovo-Zuievo in 1885. The composer’s childhood is contemporary to the advent of the alliance system that almost drove the world to war on several occasions, before succeeding in doing so in 1914. Undermined by famine, revolts and sweeping military defeats, Nicholas II’s regime collapses in 1917. Between these two dates, the Great War claimed an astounding six million victims from Russia.

By the time he finished his studies in 1911, Miaskovsky, trained as an engineer officer like his father, who was an atypical, pacifist general, had already left the army to devote himself entirely to music. He only practiced his new activity for a few years. Called up for duty and sent on the front in 1914, the composer is an actor and a horrified witness to the First World War. Wounded in his soul and body – he suffers from a brain concussion –, he witnesses on the battlefield the birth of a century whose brutality he will fully get to feel during his lifetime. After the Czar’s fall and until 1918, Miaskovsky serves at the Soviet military staff, more by patriotism, it seems, than by political conviction. In a tragic paradox, his father is murdered the same year on a railway platform by a revolutionary soldier.

The civil war ends in 1921 with the defeat of the White Russians and the total assumption of power by the Soviets. After the mistakes and the catastrophic economic experiences of the communist era, the NEP (New Economic Policy) seems to herald a return to realism and prosperity. Miaskovsky’s life evolves at the same rhythm as his new country’s. Appointed as a professor at the Moscow Conservatory in 1921 (1919, according to some sources), he settles into his life as a composer and academic. Does the young Soviet Revolution give him hope in a more fair and free society, in a new impulse “in new affection and noise (1)” for this world? Despite its flaws, the new society is a place of artistic and social experimentation, a huge cultural whirlpool. Not so once Stalin comes to power: after the Kulaks – farmers “who own their production tools” and are opposed to collectivization –, the new bourgeoisie generated by the NEP is exterminated, the avant-gardes are brought into line and the “realism adapted to socialism” becomes the official doctrine of the regime. Along with the irreversible advent of totalitarianism, 1930 is also the year of the suicide of poet Vladimir Maiakovsky, who embodied the avant-garde utopia, and the creation of the Gulag.

Can Miaskovsky’s “inner exile” or “emigration”, in the words of musicologist Mikhael Segelman, be traced back to these years? Confronted with the tragedy of history, the composer may remember his father’s advice: “The only form of liberty that I recognize, the general wrote to his son, is the victory over yourself. (…) Only Christ has shown us what [Liberty means]: to master oneself, to surpass oneself. Work towards that goal, and you shall be free.” It is difficult at this point to say anything about the composer’s religious views. But the testimonies show that, at the very least, he adopted what could be branded as a “philosophy of withdrawal”: mastering oneself, being in the world without being part of it and compensating the outer, tragic forces by the inner force. This aloofness and high-mindedness that prevailed during his whole life elevated the composer to a higher moral status among his fellow musicians.

These qualities were more than necessary to Miaskovsky in order to overcome the 1948 persecutions launched by Jdanov against the most prominent Soviet composers, including Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Miaskovsky himself. Jdanov (as in the infamous “Jdanov doctrine”) who, in a tragic and surrealist fashion, serves both as Minister of Police and Minister of Culture, accuses them of formalism – meaning doing “petty bourgeois” musical research “against the People”. He pits the terrified musicians against one another. The Union of Composers is a miniature Soviet Union. Just as in the country at large, the most absurd directives are applied, everyone’s energy is consumed in trying to solve invented contradictions, musicians denounce one another to save their standing or their own lives. In the whole of the Soviet Union, as in the Union of Composers, anguish and lies prevail (2). Sleep itself becomes a fleeting notion. Like many of his countrymen, Shostakovich, his suitcase ready at the foot of the bed, lies down fully dressed and spends his nights listening out for the slightest noise, waiting for an arrest which, in his case, will never come. Stalin is also awake at night, like Macbeth. But not because of guilt or the conscience of what he has done: he spends his nights drawing up the lists of his victims. Miaskovsky does not play into the persecutors’ hands. He refuses self-criticism, public or in writing, and does not attend the “meetings of Muscovite composers and musicologists” or the public humiliation sessions organized at the Conservatory in front of the students.