I
watched the movie, The Death of Stalin, last week. It is a grim, but intelligent and funny
comedy about the scramble for power–and survival–by his inner circle of
scheming toadies like Beria, Krushchev, and Molotov. It highlights the
corrosive effects of totalitarianism and government by fear and death. It
reveals the pettiness and small-mindedness of the people motivated by fear and
the pursuit of power. And it shows the potency of any kind of groupthink while
mocking how absurd such thinking looks from the outside.
In
the midst of all of this, but also living outside of it, there is one character
who does not play the game, who is not motivated by fear or the desire for
power. She is the pianist, Maria Yudina. At one point, Krushchev asks Yudina if
she is afraid–as he believes she should be. Like he and everyone is. She says
she is not because she has faith in God and believes in everlasting life. That baffles
Krushchev. But, if frees her. Free from fear she is also free to speak the truth, even to Stalin. She
lives by a different set of rules, a different narrative, a different pattern. As St. Paul encourages in his letter to the Romans, she is not conformed to the pattern of this world, but has been transformed by the renewing of her mind. In short, she
demonstrates a sort of holiness.
Several
years ago I read a book in which the shape of Maria Yudina’s holiness is told.
What follows is from The Ladder of the Beatitudes by Jim Forest which I highly recommend.
It
was Maria Yudina’s fate to live through the Russian revolution and its
aftermath, seeing many of her dearest friends and colleagues disappear into the
Gulag. A fearless Christian, she wore a cross visibly even while teaching or
performing in public – an affirmation of belief at a time when the price of a
display of religious faith could be one’s work, one’s freedom, even one’s life.
She lived an ascetic life, wearing no cosmetics, spending little on herself,
and dressing simply. “I had the impression that Yudina wore the same black
dress during her entire long life, it was so worn and soiled,” said
Shostakovich.(50) [this and other references are from Testimony: The Memoirs of Shostakovich, Solomon Volkov, ed.]
For
Maria Yudina, music was a way of proclaiming her faith in a period when presses
were more carefully policed than pianos. “Yudina saw music in a mystical light.
For instance, she saw Bach’s Goldberg Variations as a series of illustrations
to the Holy Bible,” said Shostakovich. “She always played as though she were
giving a sermon.”(51)
She
not only performed piano works but paused during concerts to read the poetry of
such writers as Boris Pasternak, who were unable to publish at the time.
She
was notorious among friends for her inability to keep anything of value for
herself. “She came to see me once,” Shostakovich recalled, “and said that she
was living in a miserable little room where she could neither work nor rest. So
I signed a petition, I went to see various bureaucrats, I asked a lot of people
to help, I took up a lot of people’s time. With great difficulty we got an
apartment for Yudina. You would think that everything was fine and that life
could go on. A short time later she came to me again and asked for help in
obtaining an apartment for herself. ‘What? But we got an apartment for you.
What do you need another one for?’ ‘I gave the apartment away to a poor old
woman.’”(52)
Shostakovich
heard that friends had made a loan to Yudina of five rubles. “I broke a window
in my room, it’s drafty and so cold, I can’t live like that,” she had told
them. “Naturally, they gave her the money—it was winter. A while later they
visited her, and it was as cold in her room as it was outside and the broken
window was stuffed with a rag. ‘How can this be, Maria Veniaminovna? We gave
you money to fix the window.’ And she replied, ‘I gave it for the needs of the
church’”(53)
Shostakovich,
who regarded religion as superstition, didn’t approve. “The church may have
various needs,” he protested, “but the clergy doesn’t sit around in the cold,
after all, with broken windows. Self-denial should have a rational limit.” He
accused her of behaving like a yurodivye,
the Russian word for a holy fool, a form of sanctity in the eyes of the church.
Her
public profession of faith was not without cost. Despite her genius as a
musician, from time to time she was banned from concert halls and not once in
her life was she allowed to travel outside Russia. Shostakovich remembered:
Her religious position was under constant . . .
attack (at the music school in Leningrad). Once [some officials] rushed into
Yudina’s class and demanded of Yudina: “Do you believe in God?” She replied in
the affirmative. “Was she promoting religious propaganda among her students?”
She replied that the Constitution didn’t forbid it. A few days later a
transcript of the conversation made by “an unknown person” appeared in a
Leningrad paper, which also printed a caricature—Yudina in nun’s robes
surrounded by kneeling students. And the caption was something about preachers
appearing at the Conservatoire. . . Naturally, Yudina was dismissed after that.
(54)
From
time to time she all but signed her own death warrant. Perhaps the most
remarkable story in Shostakovich’s memoir concerns one such incident:
In his final years, Stalin seemed more and more
like a madman, and I think his superstition grew. The “Leader and Teacher” sat
locked up in one of his many dachas, amusing himself in bizarre ways. . . .
[He] didn’t let anyone in to see him for days at a time. He listened to the
radio a lot. Once Stalin called the Radio committee . . . and asked if they had
a record of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23, which had been heard on the radio
the day before. “Played by Yudina,” he added. They told Stalin that of course
they had it. Actually, there was no record, the concert has been live. But they
were afraid to say no to Stalin, no one ever knew what the consequences might be.
A human life meant nothing to him. All you could do was agree, submit, be a
yes-man, a yes-man to a madman.
Stalin demanded that they send the record with
Yudina’s performance of the Mozart to his dacha. The committee panicked, but
they had to do something. They called in Yudina and an orchestra and recorded
that night. Everyone was shaking with fright, except for Yudina, naturally.
But, she was a special case, that one, the ocean was only knee-deep for her.
Yudina later told me that they had to send the
conductor home, he was so scared he couldn’t think. They called another
conductor who trembled and got everything mixed up, confusing the orchestra.
Only a third conductor was in any shape to finish the recording.
I think this is a unique event in the history of
recording-I mean, changing conductors three times in one night. Anyway, the
record was ready by morning. They made one single copy in record time and sent
it to Stalin. Now that was a record. A record in yes-ing.
Soon after, Yudina received an envelope with
twenty thousand rubles. She was told it came on the express orders of Stalin.
Then she wrote him a letter. I know about this letter from her, I know that the
story seems improbable. Yudina had many quirks, but I can say this – she never
lied. I’m certain that her story is true. Yudina wrote something like this in
her letter: “I thank you, Joseph Vissarionovich, for your aid. I will pray for
you day and night and ask the Lord to forgive your great sins before the people
and the country. The Lord is merciful and He’ll forgive you. I gave the money
to the church that I attend."
And Yudina sent this suicidal letter to Stalin.
He read it and didn’t say a word, they expected at least a twitch of the
eyebrow. Naturally, the order to arrest Yudina was prepared and the slightest
grimace would have been enough to wipe away the last traces of her. But Stalin
was silent and set the letter aside in silence. The anticipated movement of the
eyebrows didn’t come. Nothing happened to Yudina. They say that her recording
of the Mozart was on the record player when the “Leader and Teacher” was found
dead in his dacha. It was the last thing he had listened to.(55)
Shostakovich
found Yudina’s open display of belief foolish, yet one senses within his
complaints both envy and awe. In a time of heart-stopping fear, here was
someone as fearless as St. George before the dragon, someone who preferred
giving away her few rubles to repairing her own broken window, who “published”
with her own voice the poems of banned writers, who dared to tell Stalin he was
not beyond God’s mercy and forgiveness. She had a large and pure heart. No
wonder her grave in Moscow has been a place of pilgrimage ever since her death.
May
we, in our day, have the faith and courage of Maria Yudina and live with the
holy abandon in light of the Truth and Love that sets us free.
I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters,
by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and
acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this
world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may
discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.
(Romans 12:1-2)
