The compilers of this book tell you exactly what they have done, in one sentence, and the sentence is worth more than the two hundred pages of commentary that surround it: "The compilers have included only material intended for publication by Shostakovich himself, more or less ignoring his personal correspondence." That is the whole volume. Dmitry Shostakovich: About Himself and His Times is not a memoir and does not pretend to be one. It is an anthology of everything a Soviet composer was able to get into print between 1926 and his death in 1975 — newspaper articles, congress speeches, radio interviews, concert-programme notes, obituary tributes — arranged strictly by year, each item footnoted to its source in Pravda, Izvestia, Sovetskaya Muzyka, Literaturnaya Gazeta or a provincial evening paper. L. Grigoryev and Ya. Platek supply, for each year, a short chronicle of premieres, prizes, tours and illnesses. Shostakovich supplies the rest.
The compilers are candid about why the letters are missing. They quote Shostakovich on Chekhov: "I am very sorry that Chekhov's correspondence with Olga Knipper has been published, much of it being so intimate that one would rather not see it in printed form." One can respect the scruple and still notice that in the Soviet case it removes the only body of evidence in which the man says what he thinks. The letters to Isaak Glikman, published later, are a different Shostakovich altogether. What remains here is the public voice — and the public voice of a Soviet artist between 1936 and 1953 was not a voice he owned.
Six years after his death, and two after Solomon Volkov's Testimony appeared in New York in 1979, presenting itself as memoirs dictated to Volkov in the composer's last years, Moscow published a large collection of Shostakovich talking about himself. The timing is not a coincidence, and the book does not admit the connection. Volkov is not named anywhere in it. Neither is Testimony. There is no preface acknowledging a dispute, no rebuttal, no footnote. The reply is the book's existence and the book's method: every item sourced, every date given, nothing that Shostakovich did not put his name to in a Soviet publication.
That method is a real strength and should be said so. As documentation of what was printed under his name, this is a careful and useful compilation, and it can be checked. The dispute over Testimony remains genuinely open. Laurel Fay showed in 1980 (The Russian Review, vol. 39 no. 4) that the opening page of each chapter reproduces the opening of an article previously published under Shostakovich's name in the USSR, and that the pages he is said to have signed were precisely those pages; Allan Ho and Dmitry Feofanov mounted a long defence in 1998; the argument has not been settled, and this introduction does not settle it. But the reader should see what the two books are doing. Testimony claims to give the private man. This volume gives the public record and implies that there was nothing else to give. Both claims are too strong. The truth is that the public record exists, is here, is verifiable — and cannot be read as though it were testimony freely given.
Here is how the book handles the most famous week of his life. From the chronicle for 1936: "While he was there he read an article in Pravda entitled 'Cacophony Instead of Music', which harshly and unfairly criticised the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The composer returned immediately to Leningrad." (The article, of 28 January 1936, is usually rendered in English as "Muddle Instead of Music"; the volume's translators have chosen a different word.) It is unsigned in Pravda and unattributed here. The commentary does not say that Stalin had attended a performance two days earlier and left before the end, does not say the article was understood at once as a death sentence, and does not say what happened to the opera — which disappeared from the Soviet stage for a quarter of a century.
What it says instead is this: "Shostakovich took the unfair criticism very badly, but did not let it lead to depression or a decline in creativity. On the contrary, even under these conditions he sought to analyse his work carefully, to spot his own strengths and weaknesses and to extract a grain of sense even from such groundless and unjustifiably severe criticism."
That last clause is the compilers' governing idea, announced in their introduction, and it deserves to be named for what it is. Their Shostakovich is a man who profits from being denounced. It is a way of describing terror as pedagogy.
Then the Fourth Symphony. The chronicle: "In December the Leningrad Philharmonic, under Fritz Stiedry, prepared the symphony for its premiere, but at the last minute — after the final rehearsal — the composer decided to call off the performance." Decided. It is a sentence with the pressure taken out of it. And the book then, without meaning to, supplies the correction. In Sovetskaya Muzyka No. 9 of 1956, in a long autobiographical piece written on his fiftieth birthday, Shostakovich wrote: "My Fourth Symphony, which has not been performed by an orchestra, was also a failure, although I am pleased with one or two parts of it." Five years later the chronicle for 1961 records: "By agreement with the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, the composer returned to the music, but found no reason to change anything."
Not one note. A man who calls a work a failure in print and then restores it unaltered was not telling you, in print, what he thought of it. This is the most important thing the volume demonstrates, and it demonstrates it against itself.
The chronicle for 1937 opens: "This year marked the start of a period of renewed creative and public activity in Shostakovich's life." It covers the premiere of the Fifth Symphony on 21 November, Alexei Tolstoy's rhapsody in Izvestia — "Glory to our age for showering the world with such an abundance of great sounds and thoughts!" — a piano concerto in Tbilisi, film scores, and a new teaching post. "In short, he was entering a period of maturity and flourishing."
The Terror is not mentioned. Not the word, not the fact, not one name. Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who appears repeatedly in the earlier chronicles as the composer's protector — it was Tukhachevsky who, learning of Shostakovich's "material straits", had the Leningrad command find him work — was shot on 12 June 1937, five months before the Fifth Symphony was played. The book contains a warm and evidently sincere memoir of him, published in Marshal Tukhachevsky (Moscow, 1965), in which the friendship "lasted more than ten years and was terminated by his tragic death". That is the whole account of the execution. Vsevolod Meyerhold, in whose flat Shostakovich lived while writing The Nose, was arrested in June 1939 and shot in Moscow in February 1940. The chronicle for 1940 concerns the Piano Quintet, its rapturous reception, and its nomination for a Stalin Prize. The late recollection of Meyerhold printed here ends on the director's "constant aspiration to move forward, to keep searching, and always to say something new." How he stopped is not stated.
Something else is missing from 1937, and its absence is instructive in the other direction. The Fifth Symphony is universally known by a subtitle — "a Soviet artist's practical creative reply to just criticism" — that appeared in the press around the time of the premiere and has been quoted ever since as though he coined it. It is not in this book. A volume that reprints his published statements for that period item by item, with citations, does not include the most quoted sentence ever attached to his name. Its authorship has never been established, and the compilers, who had the files, evidently could not source it to him.
On the Zhdanov decree the volume gives more than one expects, and less than it should. Andrei Zhdanov is not named in the book at all. The chronicle records the Central Committee's music conference of January 1948, the resolution of February on Muradeli's The Great Friendship, and then this. The resolution, "as well as setting out some correct basic principles", contained "unfair and inexcusably harsh appraisals of the work of several major composers, including Shostakovich" — judgements "which were the result of the conditions surrounding Stalin's personality cult and of his subjective views in the sphere of art", and which "were rectified by a resolution of the Party's Central Committee on 28 May 1958".
This is the post-1956 formula operating exactly as designed. The decree was wrong in its "appraisals" but sound in its "basic principles"; the error belongs to a personality rather than to a system; a later resolution fixed it; the file is closed. Nothing is said about what the decree did — the removals from the conservatoires, the works struck from the repertoire, the public confessions demanded and given. Of Shostakovich's own speech the compilers say only that "as always, he strove to derive benefit from any well-meant criticism, while at the same time renouncing none of his compositions".
Then they print him. From the First All-Union Congress of Composers, April 1948: "...There have been many serious faults and failures in my work, although throughout my career I have thought about the people who listen to my music... I have always heeded criticism directed against me, and tried in every way to work better and harder. Now too, I am paying heed to criticism, and shall continue to do so in the future."
And the following year, at the peace conference in New York to which Stalin personally dispatched him, the book prints his address to the arts section, including this: "The other is formalism, by which we mean art that is devoid of love for the people, anti-democratic art in which form overrules content, art which results from a pathologically disturbed, pessimistic perception of reality and from a lack of faith in the powers and ideals of man."
A year after being condemned as a formalist, he was made to stand in Manhattan and condemn formalism. In 1952 he was made to attack the American critic Olin Downes in print for misreading Prokofiev. The reader who is tempted to hold any of this against him should remember what the alternative was for a man whose patron had been shot, whose friends had vanished, and who is reliably reported to have kept a packed bag by the door. Nothing in this record is evidence of what he believed. All of it is evidence of what was extracted.
It said the obvious thing, immediately, and it was right. George Sanders, in "Josef Stalin, Music Critic" in the American Fourth International (vol. 9 no. 2, March–April 1948) — within weeks of the decree — noted that "the entire document fails to criticize a single specific work by any of these figures", the only named composition being an opera by an obscure Georgian whose sole performance had been "a private affair attended by Stalin and other officials". His conclusion: "The composers involved and several not even mentioned in the decree confessed their crimes and thanked the Central Committee for its 'stern but fatherly care.'" Ernest Mandel, writing as Ernest Germain in "Purge of Soviet Culture" in the same journal (vol. 10 no. 11, December 1949), set the music purge inside the wider post-war purge of the intelligentsia and recorded the consequences the 1981 volume omits. The denunciation of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Myaskovsky, Shebalin and Popov, he wrote, "was joined with their removal from the positions as secretaries of the Union of Soviet Composers or professors in the Moscow Conservatory. Their works were withdrawn completely or in part from operatic and concert repertoires." He set against it the Central Committee's own letter On Proletcult of December 1920, which promised not "to chain the initiative of the workers' intelligentsia in the field of artistic creation", and Trotsky's warning in Literature and Revolution against party bodies ruling on questions they were not competent to decide.
The sharpest verdict came from inside the country. In a 1951 symposium of Soviet émigrés published in the same journal (vol. 12 no. 5, September–October 1951), a participant identified as Babenko was asked how people in the USSR regarded Stalinism, and answered: "Shostakovich, the composer, was accused of formalism which he 'repented' at once. Of course everybody understood this as a proper formality but in their minds or in a limited circle they know this is merely a demand imposed by the Stalinist regime." Ordinary Soviet listeners had worked out in 1948 what the compilers of this book still could not print in 1981.
Two more. On 14 September 1960 "a general meeting of the Party organisation at the Composers' Union accepted him as a candidate member of the Communist Party" — one sentence, presented as an honour, with no hint of the pressure that those close to him have consistently described. A few lines later the same chronicle records that in Dresden that summer he wrote a quartet "to be dedicated to the victims of fascism and war". The Eighth Quartet stands there in the compilers' own paragraph, doing all the commentary that is needed.
And the Thirteenth Symphony. The chronicle notes only that he began it in hospital and that it "was premiered at the Moscow Conservatoire on 18 and 20 December" 1962. The book prints his own announcement of it, movement by movement, "1. Babiy Yar" first — which in a Moscow book of 1981 is not nothing. What it does not print is what happened next: the withdrawal after two performances, the revision of Yevtushenko's lines about the Jewish dead of Kiev, the years of unofficial disfavour. The volume's own chronology gives the Leningrad premiere as 13 December 1966. Four years, unexplained.
None of which touches the music, and none of it should stop anyone reading the book. There is real value in it, and it lies almost entirely in the passages where nobody was watching. The long recollection of the Leningrad Conservatoire — the unheated classrooms of 1919, Glazunov keeping the place alive, Steinberg's four-hand analyses, Sokolov's missed lessons and the student who walked to his house instead — is a first-rate account of a musical training. So is the description of preparing the Fifth with Mravinsky: "Mravinsky subjected me to a veritable interrogation about every bar and every thought, demanding an answer to his every doubt." So is his flat statement on programme music, which cuts against decades of Western commentary: "In my case, as with many other composers of instrumental works, the programme always precedes the composition of the music" — followed by the working titles of the Seventh's four movements. The memoirs of Meyerhold and Mayakovsky are vivid and unforced. The Tukhachevsky piece is moving whatever it leaves out. And there are moments when he pushes back in the open press, in his own idiom, and they are worth marking: "All too hastily, any sign of experimentation is stigmatised as formalism, a term often applied to something which is not quite understandable or not to someone's taste... The arbitrary interpretation and misuse of the concept of formalism often discredits the creative search of a composer in the eyes of the public, obstructing this search or even putting a stop to it altogether."
Read it, then, as the compilers describe it and not as they intend it: "only material intended for publication by Shostakovich himself". That is a definition of a body of evidence, and it is the wrong body of evidence for the question everyone wants answered. The gap between the documents in this book and the man who signed them is not a flaw in the compilation. It is the compilation's subject, and it is the measure of what was done to him.