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

Volkov, Solomon

ISBN 10: 0375410821 / ISBN 13: 9780375410826

Published by Alfred A Knopf, New York

About this Item

[0-375-41082-1] 2004, 1st edition. (Hardcover) Very good plus in very good dust jacket. 313pp. Illustrated paper-covered boards. Notes, photographs, index. There is a remainder mark on the bottom edge, and the dust jacket has minor edgewear and some rubbing on the back panel. Book about Dmitry Shostakovich & Josef Stalin. (Music, Composers, Music). Seller Inventory # 142222

Bibliographic Details

Title: Shostakovich and Stalin; The Extraordinary ...

Publisher: Alfred A Knopf, New York

Binding: Hardcover

Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

Edition: 1st Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

“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.

This is a revelatory account of the relationship between one of the twentieth century’s greatest composers and one of its most infamous tyrants.

About the Author:

Solomon Volkov is a musicologist and the author, most recently, of St. Petersburg: A Cultural History.

Antonina W. Bouis is an award-winning translator.