Cold War Themes

Utz by Bruce Chatwin

Charles Bruce Chatwin (13 May 1940 – 18 January 1989) was an English travel writer, novelist, and journalist. His first book, In Patagonia (1977), established Chatwin as a travel writer, although he considered himself instead a storyteller, interested in bringing to light unusual tales. He won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel On the Black Hill (1982) and his novel Utz (1988) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2008 The Times named Chatwin no. 46 on their list of "50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945."

Chatwin was born near Sheffield, England. At 18 he went to work at  Sotheby's in London, where he gained an extensive knowledge of art and eventually ran the auction house’s Antiquities and Impressionist Art departments. In 1966 he left Sotheby’s to read archeaology at the University of Edinburgh, but he abandoned his studies after two years to pursue a career as a writer.

The Sunday Times Magazine hired Chatwin in 1972. He travelled the world for work and interviewed figures such as the politicians Indira Gandhi and André Malraux. He left the magazine in 1974 to visit Patagonia, which resulted in his first book. His work is credited with reviving the genre of travel writing, and his works influenced other writers.  Married and bisexual, Chatwin was one of the first prominent men in Great Britain known to have contracted HIV and to have died of an AIDS-related illness, although he hid the details. Following his death, the gay community criticised Chatwin for keeping his diagnosis secret.

Utz follows the fortunes of Kaspar Utz who lives in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War. Utz is a collector of Meissen porcelain and finds a way to travel outside the eastern bloc to acquire new pieces. Whilst in the West, Utz often considers defecting but he would be unable to take his collection with him and so, a prisoner of his collection, he is unable to leave.

Continuing with the Cold War theme, in The Noise of Time Julian Barnes gives a short fictional account of the life of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. It is a narrative in which nothing much happens: a man waits for a lift; a man sits on a plane; a man sits in a car. All the action takes place in Shostakovich’s head; in each of these three sections we find him at a moment of reflection amid a larger crisis, the “skittering” of his mind represented by short bursts of text that flit between memories and the present.

Crisis Number One is the Great Terror. The story begins with Shostakovich on the landing of his apartment block in the middle of the night waiting for the lift that will bring the secret police. This is 1936 and Stalin’s great purge is under way. Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk has met with Stalin’s personal disfavour and the composer has been denounced in the press: a clear sign that the cogs of murderous bureaucracy have been set to grind. It can only end one way: in an interrogation cell in which a “confession” awaits a signature, and a bullet the back of a neck.

As Shostakovich waits, he thinks of his childhood, of past lovers and, compulsively, of the train of circumstances that led to his fall. He remembers the disaster of the debut of his First Symphony at an open-air venue in Kharkov, when the music had set the local dogs barking. The louder they played, the more dogs barked. “Now his music has set bigger dogs barking,” Barnes writes. “History was repeating itself: the first time as farce, the second time as tragedy.”

Waiting for the lift, Shostakovich recalls being summoned to “the Big House” where he is interrogated by an agent called Zakrevsky. They want to know about his relationship with his patron Marshal Tukhachevsky, who stands accused of plotting to assassinate Stalin. Shostakovich realises that he is a dead man. But even during the Great Terror you can get lucky; Zakrevsky is himself purged, leaving Shostakovich reprieved, for a while at least.

Shostakovich’s next crisis – his second “conversation with Power” – occurs 12 years later, in 1948, when he is blackmailed into attending a Soviet-funded Peace Conference at the Waldorf Hotel in New York. As the star of the Russian delegation, he is a target for the anti-communist intellectuals who have infiltrated the conference, specifically Nicolas Nabokov (the novelist’s cousin), an exiled Russian composer who humiliates Shostakovich by asking questions that expose how obediently he is forced to follow the party line.

The third crisis occurs after a gap of another 12 years, in 1960, by which time things have loosened up a little under Khrushchev. Shostakovich no longer fears for his life but faces a new attack on his integrity. It has been decided that he must join the Communist Party as an endorsement of the new direction taken by the Soviet Union. He had avoided joining the party while Stalin was alive but now, try as he might, he cannot escape what has been ordained.

In writing his account of Shostakovich's life Barnes does know what he is talking about. While Barnes is known for his Francophilia, he also studied Russian at school and university. Soviet Communism was a subject of frequent debate among his famous Friday lunch club. In the late Seventies a group of ambitious young writers assembled for boozy lunches at a Turkish-Cypriot kebab house on the fringes of Bloomsbury distinguished by its proximity to the offices of The New Statesman. The literary editor of that magazine, Martin Amis, was by all accounts the star of a show that included James Fenton, Christopher Hitchens, Clive James and Ian McEwan.

Barnes, for his part, had first-hand experience of what life was like in the Soviet Union, having taken a road trip through Eastern Europe to Leningrad in 1965. He continued to visit the Warsaw Pact states in the following decades.  

In The Noise of Time, Shostakovich is forced to reconcile his own fragmented memories of his life with the story the state wants to tell about him. He is forced to participate in the degradation of his public self, as his family and his music are held hostage, and is tormented by his own complicity and duplicity. He clings to his music, hoping it will drown out the noise around him.

Towards the end, Shostakovich realises “he had lived long enough to be dismayed by himself”.This was often the way with artists,” Barnes writes, “either they succumbed to vanity, thinking themselves greater than they were, or else to disappointment… The self-doubt of the young is nothing compared to the self-doubt of the old.”