{"product_id":"shostakovich-and-stalin-the-extraordinary-relationship-betw-0375410821","title":"Shostakovich and Stalin: The Extraordinary Relationship Betw","description":"\n        \u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eISBN:\u003c\/strong\u003e 0375410821\u003c\/p\u003e\n        \u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/strong\u003e Volkov, Solomon\u003c\/p\u003e\n        \u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eCondition:\u003c\/strong\u003e new\u003c\/p\u003e\n        \u003cp\u003eMusic 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 Shostakovichs controversial 1979 memoir, Testimony-describes how this lethal uncertainty affected the composers 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 Shostakovichs contemporaries-Mandelstam, Bulgakov, and Pasternak among them-fell victim to Stalins 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 centurys greatest composers and one of its most infamous tyrants.\u003c\/p\u003e\n        \u003cul\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003c\/ul\u003e\n        ","brand":"Miakarts Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51301247844640,"sku":"NEW0375410821","price":49.98,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0980\/7426\/3840\/files\/81mw6sUgx2L.jpg?v=1772724246","url":"https:\/\/miakarts.com\/products\/shostakovich-and-stalin-the-extraordinary-relationship-betw-0375410821","provider":"Miakarts Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}