Volume 51, Number 10 · June 10, 2004
The Truth About Shostakovich
By Orlando Figes
A Shostakovich Casebook
edited by Malcolm Hamrick Brown
Indiana University Press, 408 pp., $39.95
Shostakovich and Stalin: The Extraordinary Relationship Between the Great Composer and the Brutal Dictator
by Solomon Volkov, translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis
Knopf, 313 pp., $30.00
Dmitry Shostakovich is one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century. But he is also one of its most complex and elusive artists. Shy and reserved by nature, Shostakovich became even more withdrawn following the two great Stalinist assaults against his work (in 1936 and 1948), which bred in him an excessive fear and caution and made him raise his guard against the world. Like many people in the Soviet Union, Shostakovich developed a technique of conversation that revealed very little of himself to people he could not entirely trust. Scarcely anything he said or wrote for the public can be taken as a guide to his private thoughts.
Review, 4610 words
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