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Name: Shostakovich and Stalin

Author: Solomon Volkov
Year: 2005
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Genres/categories:
Music, History, Non Fiction, Biographies
Culture: Russia

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"Music illuminates a person and provides him with his last hope; even Stalin, a butcher, knew that." So said the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose first compositions in the 1920s identified him as an avant-garde wunderkind. But that same singularity became a liability a decade later under the totalitarian rule of Stalin, with his unpredictable grounds for the persecution of artists. Solomon Volkov--who cowrote Shostakovich's controversial 1979 memoir, Testimony--describes how this lethal uncertainty affected the composer's life and work.

Volkov, an authority on Soviet Russian culture, shows us the "holy fool" in Shostakovich: the truth speaker who dared to challenge the supreme powers. We see how Shostakovich struggled to remain faithful to himself in his music and how Stalin fueled that struggle: one minute banning his work, the next encouraging it. We see how some of Shostakovich's contemporaries--Mandelstam, Bulgakov, and Pasternak among them--fell victim to Stalin's manipulations and how Shostakovich barely avoided the same fate. And we see the psychological price he paid for what some perceived as self-serving aloofness and others saw as rightfully defended individuality.

This is a revelatory account of the relationship between one of the twentieth century's greatest composers and one of its most infamous tyrants.

From the Hardcover edition.