Volume 26, Number 21 & 22 · January 24, 1980
Notes from the Composer
By Robert Craft
Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich
as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov, translated by Antonina W. Bouis
Harper & Row, 289 pp., $15.00
Prokofiev by Prokofiev: A Composer's Memoir
edited by David H. Appel, translated by Guy Daniels
Doubleday, 370 pp., $14.00
O I.F. Stravinskom y ego Blizkikh
by Kseniya Iur'evna Stravinskaya
Leningrad: Muzyka, 232, illustrated pp.
The following comments on Testimony, Solomon Volkov's presentation of some of Dmitri Shostakovich's opinions, confessions, and recollections, were provoked by three events occurring within a week: the refusal of the Soviet Embassy in Berne to allow a microfilm of the 1917 manuscript of Les Noces to be sent from a Swiss library to a musician in the USSR for a concert that was to have taken place in Moscow on December 6; the publication in the November 14 issue of the Moscow weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta of a letter signed by six friends and pupils of Shostakovich denouncing Volkov's text as a forgery; and the appearance, at last, of an informed criticism of the book, Simon Karlinsky's, in The Nation, November 24. Professor Karlinsky has pinpointed the main shortcoming of Testimony, that first-person 'memoirs' written by a second person must inevitably result in confusing obliquity.
Review, 3906 words
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