Solomon Volkov is a Russian musicologist with a particular interest in artists personally terrorized by Josef Stalin. In 1979 he published what he claimed were memoirs dictated to him by composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) that portrayed Shostakovich as covertly criticizing the Stalinist state that he appeared eagerly to serve. Testimony was extremely controversial and not just among musicologists. Volkov was accused of making it all up.

Since the collapse of the Soviet state, the representation of Shostakovich as a quasi-dissident has been endorsed by many who knew him, including his widow and children, though his widow denied that Testimony was authentic. Whether Shostakovich was parodying populist communist art or peddling it to survive remains a subject of debate, with one rather flat-footed academic biographer, Laurel Fay, rejecting anything based on memories by Shostakovich associated (and, certainly, Testimony, and taking at face value anything in writing, even what should be highly suspect official pronouncements from the Soviet cultural/propaganda offices.

Volkov's 2004 book, Shostakovich and Stalin: Great Composer and the Brutal Dictator (why only one definite article? for once Epinions has added an article, though coining a new compound noun: "brutaldictator"), draws heavily on Soviet archival material that has become available, and hardly at all on Testimony, though the representation of Shostakovich subverting the message(s) he was supposed to be conveying is the same.

The book is not a biography of Shostakovich--or of Stalin. It focuses on what I would call (but Volkov does not) "the weapons of the weak," particularly seeming acquiescence and on Stalin's personal interest in music and other arts. Volkov makes frequent comparison of Stalin's interventions in alternately censuring and rewarding Shostakovich with Stalin's personal interventions in the banning and publishing of poets Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak and of authorizing productions and banning productions of plays by Mikhail Bulgakov.

In conditioning theory, what Stalin did to all four was provide (cause to be provided) highly unpredictable "variable reinforcement," which is more effective (I'm sure I remember my introductory behavioral psychology on this) than regular, predictable reinforcement (positive or negative). He kept them guessing and tormented with fear, while many others perished in the Great Terror (including Osip Mandelstam, Isaac Babel, and the theatrical director Vsevolod Meyerhold, who worked with Shostakovich).

The conscious model, Volkov argues fairly convincingly, for both the autocrat and the artist dependent on the autocrat's patronage was that of Alexander I and Alexander Pushkin, the most revered Russian poet. In both 19th and 20th-century instances, a leeway was granted an artist whose work brought glory to the country, even while other artists were ruthlessly repressed and liquidated. Volkov sees Shostakovich as following Pushkin as the role of the yurodivy (holy fool), permitted to speak more truth to power than others are, but personally censored/supervised by the absolute ruler and in constant danger of being liquidated.

It is well-known that in 1936 Stalin saw Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which had been playing to full houses for more than a year (actually popular, though not the kind of populist socialist realism art prescribed by the regime) and hated it, and that his repugnance was expressed in a denunciation of "formalism" in Pravda as the opera was banned. Volkov makes a convincing case that "Muddle Instead of Music" was drafted by Stalin himself or that at least the lines to be taken were dictated by Stalin.

"Lie some Western critics," Volkov writes, "the author of the article was particularly offended by the opera's erotic episodes.... Shostakovich's opera was accused simultaneously of formalism and naturalism.... 'Naturalism' applied to the excessively frank passages, and 'formalism' was usually used for complicated works that were too smart [too intellectualized for a mass audience]." The denunciation of "leftist muddle instead of natural human music" that had "nothing in common with simple, accessible music" was portrayed as a "tendency:" "Leftist ugliness in opera is growing from the same source as leftist ugliness in painting, poetry, pedagogy, and science. Petit bourgeois 'inn ovation' is leading away from true art, science, and literature."Shostakovich packed a bag for when he was picked up in the middle of the night. He was not arrested, withdrew his Fourth Symphony, and wrote his most popular symphony, the accessible and stirring Fifth Symphony, of which Stalin approved. Shostakovich was used as an instance of a brave Leningrader in the siege of Leningrad and his Seventh Symphony was sent to the western allies in the war against Hitler and widely admired and played.

After the end of World War II, as Stalin's health was deteriorating, he imposed a second round of intimidation of "formalist" innovation and, in particular of the Soviet composers admired in the West--Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Khatchachurian in 1948. Shostakovich again "redeemed" himself in producing works of which Stalin approved, and condemned himself in the western view as an eager lackey. Clearly, he was not eager and would have far preferred to work without all the political demands made upon him, but he did as he was told, including going to a peace conference at the Waldorf Astoria in New York in which he had to express agreement with attacks in Pravda of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Hindemith.

That too is well known. Still Volkov provides considerable context (and criticism of Pablo Picasso by Shostakovich reported by Flora Litvinova: "You understand that I'm in prison and that I fear for my children and myself be he--he's free, he doesn't have to lie!").

Unlike Fay, Volkov explicates what he hears as musical criticism of Stalin and Stalinist terror in a succession of Shostakovich compositions (with apposite comparison to Akhmatova's ode to Stalin). I don't always hear what Volkov does (particularly in the end of the Fifth Symphony), but even interpretations with which I do not agree strike me as tenable, and the historical examples (czarist and Soviet) fit well with his basic theses about Stalin's intent personal interest in shaping culture, in having internationally recognized great works coming from his state, and in the use of indirection and Aesopian misdirection by the artists.

Although there are too many question-begging "must have" statements, I found the prose of Antonia W. Bous's translation quite readable, and the photos well chosen. I recommend the book not only to anyone interested in the conditions in which Shostakovich had to function but anyone interested in the relationship between artists and tyrants.




© 2006, Stephen O. Murray

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My previously posted reviews of Shostakovich works in consideration of the centenary of his birth:
cello concerti (Schiff)
1st cello concerto, (Harrell)
2nd violin concerto (Vengerov)
2nd piano concerto & Symphony for Strings
1st and 3rd symphonies (Slovák)
1st and 6th symphonies (Jarvi)
4th symphony (Slovák)
7th symphony (Temirakanov)
10th symphony (Rattle)
11th Symphony (Slovák)
13th symphony (Masur)
film adaptation of Testimony




Recommended: Yes