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Rule of the Plowman
Howard Grady Brown
[January 2005.]
In that place where nothing was permitted, everything
mattered. Certain notes on the E-flat clarinet
could grate upon ungrateful ears.
The Plowman
might decide to publish his displeasure. Then a man
would disappear; his compositions, reference to his life
and work, his name, all that was
of him
would vanish. His wife, removed to Khabarovsk, in time remarried;
his children forgot his face. After twenty years the man
returned, but not to Moscow. No,
internal exile
dumped him in a town between the Volga and the Don,
where he became director of the local concert band.
Everyone understood
he knew
a lot about the E-flat clarinet. It’s no surprise
that, during the Eleventh Symphony’s dress rehearsal,
Maxim Shostakovich whispered,
“Papa,
what if they hang you for this?”
Plowman was an irreverent nickname for Josef Stalin,
see The First Circle by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Cast of
Characters preceding the first chapter (current ed. Northwestern University
Press); for Maxim’s concerns see Shostakovich, A Life Remembered by
Elizabeth Wilson (Princeton University Press, p. 317).
[More by Howard Grady
Brown.]
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