DSCH 21 Book Reviews - A Shostakovich Casebook and Shostakovich and Stalin

A Shostakovich Casebook
Brown, M. H. (ed.)
Bloomington, Ind., Indiana University Press ISBN: 0-253-34364-X H/B, 408 pages

Shostakovich and Stalin
Volkov, S.
London, Little Brown ISBN: 0-316-86141-3 P/B, 370 pages

Paul Ingram

"We live in a world without mercy," observed Solomon Volkov, famously, in his ever-controversial Introduction to Testimony. After limping along for a further twenty-five years, the world seems in no better shape to mount any sort of serious challenge to Volkov's contention than it did at the end of the 'Me-Decade'. The publication in 1979 of the still-disputed memoirs of Shostakovich helped cure a variety of musicological and cultural navel-gazing habits in the West, just as it launched at the same time the pro- and anti-Volkov industries. Yet the fight for custody of Shostakovich continues, and there seems no end in view for the composer's troubled soul, as it undergoes what D. H. Lawrence called the "long journey after death/To the sweet home of pure oblivion."

Malcolm Hamrick Brown's Shostakovich Casebook is, according to its dust-jacket "The definitive statement on the Shostakovich controversy." By and large, it attempts to consign Solomon Volkov to pure oblivion, while still alive. The more-or-less merciless questioning of his honesty as a presenter of the Shostakovich memoirs began in 1980, with Laurel Fay's Russian Review essay, 'Shostakovich versus Volkov: Whose Testimony?' That piece is reprinted here, helpfully, as the opening shot in Casebook. Its oft-rehearsed but seldom read points about the source of the "signed" pages of Testimony are amplified in Fay's succeeding 'Volkov's Testimony Reconsidered' written in 2002, and in the next chapter of Casebook, which lays out the "source" materials for the Testimony chapter-openings, in parallel with their Testimony equivalents. Various Soviet and post-Soviet commentaries follow, some in welcome first translations, and the book's second half is a more wide-ranging collection of essays and reviews. There is relatively little about Shostakovich' s music here, for a book bearing the composer's name. Any music-loving virgin wandering into this territory for the first time and picking up the Casebook, would surely gain the impression that for some strands of American musicology, a man named Volkov is of far greater significance than the great composer whose work they admire. So much for oblivion.

D. H. Lawrence also exhorted us to "Be kind, oh be kind to your dead/And give them a little encouragement," and here, sadly, the Casebook slams shut. The Editor has chosen to reprint his negative review - first published in Notes in 1993 - of Ian MacDonald's The New Shostakovich. It opens the fourth and final section of the Casebook, whose contributors are all native English-speakers and writers. Brown follows this review with his contrasting, positive assessment of Elizabeth Wilson's Shostakovich - a Life Remembered. The Editor's introduction speaks of the "vehemence with which MacDonald nowadays defends Volkov" while the footnotes to the New Shostakovich review remind us that Brown won an Eva Judd O'Meara award for this piece of work. At no point in the Casebook's 408 pages, though, are we reminded of the fact that Ian MacDonald died, tragically, the year before this volume's publication date. Neither footnotes nor MacDonald's index entry make any reference to the British writer as "late," nor are his dates given. Several authors attack him here: the denial of The New Shostakovich's value seems almost as important to some contributors as the debunking of Volkov's claims for Testimony. Yet I cannot think of another instance of so many academics entering the ring without so much as a passing acknowledgement of the fact that the opponent is no longer of this earth, and hence unlikely to answer the charges made against him, this side of oblivion for us all. Brown, and his publishers Indiana Press, should be hanging their scholarly heads in shame, not crowing about Eva Judd O'Meara awards.

Whatever the level of veracity of Volkov's account of Testimony's genesis, I can pretty much vouch for the authenticity of MacDonald's death, as I attended his funeral, a quiet, dignified affair last summer. He was no friend of mine, but the waste seemed dreadful, and he was most definitely a friend to Shostakovich. At the small reception after the ceremony, world-famous music journalist Charles Shaar Murray mistook me for the wine-waiter, beetle-browing and blaming me for the fact we'd run out of vino. I mention this point, a career-high for me, for two reasons. First, because in context this seemed a fine example of the sort of existential irony that Esti Sheinberg talks about in connection with Shostakovich. Richard Taruskin discusses her book on irony and parody in the Casebook's closing essay, and his compliments end up sounding backhanded. "It will be surpassed, and soon." he predicts, towards the end of a familiar mélange of personal reminiscence, opinion, and multiple book reviews (rather like this). The Professor is far from being at his best here. I'm sure he has a world-beating book on Shostakovich in him, but I've yet to read or hear the evidence that the bulk of Shostakovich's music engages Taruskin enough to make him write it. I hope I'm proved wrong: no-one in musicology matches his knowledge of this field, or his ability to make fresh connections.

Nostalgic memories of student days in Soviet Russia also permeate the preceding essay, Brown's 'Shostakovich: A brief Encounter and a Present Perspective. ' Here the author delineates the peculiarities of the American academic response to Shostakovich over the years, and presents his own ideas on how to respond to the music itself. While discussing the best-known of the Shostakovich quartets with Rostislav Dubinsky of the Borodin Quartet, the Casebook's Editor has this to say: "For my part, aware of the history of the Eighth Quartet as I replayed it in my mind while listening to Dubinsky's story, responding emotionally to its familiar topics and affective codes, I imagined myself sharing the composer's gruelling emotional journey." This seems rather self-conscious, and I do hope we see a more developed response to Shostakovich from America in the near future. Current American music is incomparably rich, varied, and rewarding: no other country has anything like the same range. If Casebook is a barometer, then the American musicologists still have a way to go to catch up with the breadth of sympathies their creative colleagues display. Taruskin quite rightly points to the "polysemy" and universality of a piece like the Eleventh Symphony, but Robert Simpson was saying the same thing in England in the 1950s. This is hardly news, and we need to jump on a long way in our appreciation of Shostakovich's work. For long stretches of Casebook, one could easily forget the subject was a composer.

Better news is the fact that three pieces in Casebook are its saving grace. Levon Hakobian's 1998 essay "A Perspective on Soviet Musical Culture during the Lifetime of Shostakovich" offers a nuanced, Russian view, reminding us in memorable fashion that "virtually any more or less valuable work of art created on the territory of the former USSR belongs to the pen, brush, or chisel of a potential or real victim of stukaches (informers), surrounded by hostile zhlobs (louts, or 'inflated nonentities'), while resisting the humiliating status of vintnik (a cog in the machine)." This is a mouth-watering appetizer for Hakobian's own, forthcoming book on Shostakovich. David Fanning is represented by a conference response to Allan Ho and Dmitri Feofanov, but his questions are pertinent enough to dismiss any charges of British pragmatism, or fence-sitting. Finally Gerard McBurney offers a worthwhile overview of Shostakovich's intellectual heritage, from the 1920s. A whole series of subplots also take place in the extensive footnotes and Lev Lebedinsky, for one, does not come out too well as a reliable witness. For these, and for the ever-compelling, if at times repugnant continuation of the Testimony soap-opera, extending to much astoundingly straight-faced consideration of loaded Soviet responses to the Memoirs, Casebook is required reading for anyone still fascinated by the various musicological personalities involved, or by the "debate." Caryl Emerson, author of a magnificent, definitive scholarly study of the reception of Bakhtin's work, says in her blurb for the Casebook that it is about "music old and new in the twentieth century, about the cultural legacy of one of that century's most extravagant social experiments." I beg to differ here with Professor Emerson. My second point about CSM's taking me for a barman - I was simply wearing a shirt and tie at the time, and standing next to an empty bottle - is that you can't judge a book by its cover. The Shostakovich Casebook is a novel about American academic attitudes, not a study of Shostakovich. I find it genuinely saddening that a group of intelligent, mature musicologists should find it worthwhile to assemble such a collection of attacks on rivals, dead or alive, and fulsome praise for each other. Those interested in Dmitri Shostakovich or his music would do better to study, for example, the Chandos DVD-ROM on the composer and his world (reviewed in DSCH No. 15).

Meanwhile the only man who knows the whole truth about Testimony has produced a book about the composer and the Great Dictator. Volkov's conceit here is to draw a parallel between two uneasy pairings: Tsar Nicolas the First and Pushkin; and Stalin and Shostakovich. The author develops his yurodivy thesis on Shostakovich, familiar from the old Testimony Introduction, and claims his is "..a book of cultural history." Volkov goes on to explain: "Therefore, I do not engage in analysis of Shostakovich's music." He does, however, give the music a good deal more attention than did the Casebook, pointing to a "Christ complex" in the Fifth Symphony, and describing the Piano Quintet as the outcome of "immersion in Mussorgsky and Pushkin." None of the musical discussion is fully developed, though, and this is a shame, as Volkov's ideas can be fascinating. They are translated by Antonina W. Bouis, who also did Testimony and the nagging doubts about the translated accuracy return. The E-minor Piano Trio is described here as "one of Shostakovich's most hopeless compositions" and there are other jarring instances. Also present are a few small swipes at Taruskin and Fay, and a fair a bit of quiet defence of Testimony's factual basis behind the arras, though as Volkov says in his Introduction, he has found it best to avoid much in the way of direct reference. Nonetheless, he asserts unashamedly that: "Beginning with the Fourth Symphony, the great majority of his major opuses are more or less 'autobiographical.'"

There is a wealth of detail on the Stalin era in this book. Much will be familiar to dedicated students of the composer, though the range of varied diary and letter references which Volkov presents is impressive, even if the academic attributions could be tighter. Volkov is equally unashamed of presenting this whole period of historical disinformation as quintessentially anecdotal. If you know little of Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Bukharin, Shklovsky, Zoshchenko and the gang, then you will definitely learn something here, on most pages of Shostakovich and Stalin. The Dictator comes out of it as a more "cultured" man than we might have thought, for example. And Shostakovich emerges as a rounded, credible human being for a change. If you know a lot about him already, however, then the factual inaccuracies - Apostolov dying "romantically" in the foyer at the Fourteenth Symphony dress rehearsal, for example - will seem either irritating or misleading. Shostakovich and Stalin is not a bad read for the enthusiast, but it is not the book we'd hoped for from this source. The twenty-five years of criticism would seem to have given the author a slightly defensive and hurried tone on this territory, which is hardly surprising. I hope he gathers up his courage to give us someday a more rigorous, more extended, and more musical study of Shostakovich, and this time in his own English. Like the very different Hakobian, Volkov knows something of the depths and quiet horrors of Soviet life, from first-hand experience; something Western musicologists, mercifully, need only imagine in an oblivion of comfort.