SHOSTAKOVICH AND STALIN: THE EXTRAORDINARY RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE GREAT COMPOSER AND THE BRUTAL DICTATOR

About this book

"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 Shostakovich's controversial 1979 memoir, Testimony - describes how this lethal uncertainty affected the composer's 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 Shostakovich's contemporaries - Mandelstam, Bulgakov, and Pasternak among them - fell victim to Stalin's 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."--BOOK JACKET.