Shostakovich and Stalin: The Extraordinary Relationship Between the Great Composer and the Brutal Dictator

ISBN: 0375410821

Author: Volkov, Solomon

Condition: New

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 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.