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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 November 2020
Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.
1 From the composer’s obituary in Pravda, 12 August 1975, p. 3.
2 Shostakovich, Dmitri, Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 183 Google Scholar.
3 See, for example, Laurel E. Fay, ‘Shostakovich Versus Volkov: Whose Testimony?’ (review of Shostakovich, Testimony), Russian Review, 39 (1980), 484–93. Fay’s subsequent biography of the composer takes this further: see Fay, Laurel E., Shostakovich: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.
4 Frolova-Walker, Marina, ‘Stalin and the Art of Boredom’, Twentieth-Century Music, 1 (2004), 101–24 (p. 102)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 This phrase is borrowed from Whitman, Walt, ‘Song of Myself ’, Leaves of Grass, ed. McKay, David (Philadelphia, PA: David McKay, 1928), 29–79 Google Scholar (p. 78).
6 Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore (Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1888 Google Scholar; repr. London: Penguin Random House, 2015), 1.
7 Edward Harper-Scott, John Paul, The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism: Revolution, Reaction, and William Walton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 178 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 For a consideration of this in relation to Soviet music, see Fairclough, Pauline, ‘The Russian Revolution and Music’, Twentieth-Century Music, 16 (2019), 157−64 (p. 159)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Fairclough, ‘Was Soviet Music Middlebrow? Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, Socialist Realism, and the Mass Listener in the 1930s’, Journal of Musicology, 35 (2018), 336−67.
9 Mathew, Nicholas, Political Beethoven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 15 Google Scholar.
10 Taruskin, Richard, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 488 Google Scholar.
11 Dimock, Wai Chee, ‘A Theory of Resonance’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 112 (1997), 1060–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 1061).
12 See, for example, Darian-Smith, Eve and McCarty, Philip C., The Global Turn: Theories, Research Designs, and Methods for Global Studies (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2017), 44 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Ulf Hedetoft, The Global Turn: National Encounters with the World (Aalborg: Aalborg University Press, 2003).
13 Treitler, Leo, ‘What Kind of Story Is History?’, 19th-Century Music, 7 (1983−4), 363–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 373).
14 James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley, CA, and London: University of California Press, 1996), 2.
15 Lewis, Jonathan, Reification and the Aesthetics of Music (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 122 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quoting from Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, 488.
16 See, for example, Žižek, Slavoj, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion (London: Verso, 2002)Google Scholar; Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Totalitarian Art and Modernity, ed. Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jacob Wamberg (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2010).
17 Frolova-Walker, Marina, ‘An Inclusive History for a Divided World?’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 143 (2018), 1–20 CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 7).
18 Ibid., 1.
19 Ibid., 2–3.
20 ‘Dmitri Shostakovich: A Life’, <https://www.classicfm.com/composers/shostakovich/guides/dmitri-shostakovich-life/> (accessed 4 October 2019).
21 Treitler, Leo, ‘The Historiography of Music: Issues of Past and Present’, Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 356−78Google Scholar (p. 358).
22 Frolova-Walker, ‘An Inclusive History for a Divided World?’, 3.
23 For an introduction to the field of music and the cold war, see Schmelz, Peter J., ‘Introduction: Music in the Cold War’, Journal of Musicology, 26 (2009), 1–16 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 Richard, Taruskin, ‘Introduction: Taking It Personally’, On Russian Music (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 1–27 Google Scholar.
25 Bullivant, Joanna, Alan Bush, Modern Music, and the Cold War: The Cultural Left in Britain and the Communist Bloc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 Ibid., 14. To nuance our understanding of Communist selfhood, Bullivant puts forward Jochen Hellbeck’s examination of diaries from the Stalinist period: Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). See also Ivan Chistyakov, The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard (London: Granta Books, 2016), and the online database prozhito.org, which collates thousands of digitized diary entries, most of which were composed in Russia during the Soviet era. Regarding the ethics and reliability of utilizing diary entries as a research resource for musicology, see Eirini Diamantouli, ‘History in Other Words: The Diaries on Prozhito.org as a Research Resource for Musicology’, Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 50 (2019), 184−7.
27 Taruskin, Richard, Russian Music at Home and Abroad: New Essays (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016), 327 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28 This resilience is perhaps demonstrated most prominently in the composition of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, after Shostakovich’s first denunciation in 1936. For an in-depth discussion of Shostakovich’s reconciling of official expectation with personal inspiration and integrity, centring on the ‘boundary-collapsing’ Sixth Symphony, see Simon Morrison, ‘What Next? Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony as Sequel and Prequel’, Twentieth-Century Music, 16 (2019), 231−57.
29 This is in line with the chronological model proposed by Katerina Clark, according to which there was in the first half of the 1930s a kind of Stalinist ‘Enlightenment’ characterized by the ‘Great Appropriation’ of Western culture. This ended in late 1935, around the time of Shostakovich’s denunciation in January 1936, when a push began towards ‘Great Russian chauvinism’ and cultural and political isolationism. The period that followed, up to the Soviet Union’s entry into the Second World War, is referred to as the ‘Imperial sublime’ − ‘a sublime that celebrated Soviet dominion over the lands and peoples the Russians had conquered earlier in forming their empire’. See Clark, Katerina, Moscow, the Fourth Rome (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 289 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30 Regarding this shift, see Frolova-Walker, Marina, ‘From Modernism to Socialist Realism in Four Years: Myaskovsky and Asafyev’, Muzikologija, 3 (2003), 199−217 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
31 On the cultural evolution of the Soviet Union and the internationalism of the 1930s, see Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome.
32 This transition was precipitated by the 1932 Bolshevik decree on the ‘Reconstruction of Literary and Artistic Organisations’ which dissolved all independent cultural organizations, forcing cultural life into mammoth creative unions. The decree, in English translation, features in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902−1934, ed. John E. Bowlt (New York: Viking Press, 1976), 288–90.
33 Richard Taruskin, ‘Shostakovich and the Inhuman’, Defining Russia Musically, 468–98 (p. 488).
34 See, for example, Norman Lebrecht, ‘Shostakovich’s Secret Love Goes Under the Hammer’, Slipped Disc, 14 August 2019, <slippedisc.com/2019/08/shostakovichs-secret-love-goes-under-the-hammer/> (accessed 13 January 2020).
35 Pauline Fairclough, ‘Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time’, Music and Literature, <http://www.musicandliterature.org/reviews/2016/7/6/julian-barness-the-noise-of-time> (accessed 4 October 2019).
36 For the cultural internationalism of the Soviet Union, see, for example, Stern, Ludmila, Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union, 1920–40: From Red Square to the Left Bank (New York: Routledge, 2007)Google Scholar.
37 While the provenance of Stalin’s slogan ‘National in Form, Socialist in Content’ is pre-war (1930), developing alongside the reconfiguration of the Soviet nationalities policy in light of the failure of global revolution, here I emphasize how it was adapted to meet the requirements of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ in which the political priorities shifted from building to protecting Communism. This took the form of inspiring vigorous support for the nation through Russo-centric cultural and political policies and a reassertion of nationalist paradigms. For the phrase ‘National in Form, Socialist in Content’, see Joseph Stalin, ‘Political Report of the Central Committee to the Sixteenth Congress of the C.P.S.U.(B.), 27 June 1930’, Stalin, Works, compiled by the Marx–Lenin Institute of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 13 vols. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952–5), xii: April 1929–June 1930 (1955), 242–385 (p. 378). On the Soviet nationalities policy, see, for example, Astrid S. Tuminez, Russian Nationalism since 1856: Ideology and the Making of Foreign Policy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000); Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923−1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); and Prizel, Ilya, National Identity and Foreign Policy Nationalism and Leadership in Poland, Russia and Ukraine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.
38 This concept is borrowed from Bullivant’s pertinent study on Alan Bush: Alan Bush, Modern Music, and the Cold War.
39 Ibid. For an indication of the apparently ideologically motivated and reductive narratives that memorialize Skalkottas, who wrote politically engaged music, as a ‘politically naïve’ and enigmatic figure with a ‘remarkable creative ability to detach himself from his surroundings’, see John Thornley, ‘Skalkottas in Haidari’, Nikos Skalkottas: A Greek European, ed. Haris Vrondos (Athens: Benaki Museum, 2008), 370−95 (p. 370). The work of Assaf Shelleg, and particularly his paper ‘On the Notion of Peripherality (or, Comments from an Adjacent Ecosystem)’, presented at the Skalkottas Today conference in Athens on 1 December 2019, inspired me to consider the application of these binary musicological frameworks in this context.