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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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