...Shostakovich was a caustic man. His table talk was full of sarcasm. He
liked his drink and, when in his cups, revealed his wit and irony . . .
Later on his nervousness assumed the character of panic, a kind of
conditioned reflex. He used to say: ‘I’d sign anything even if they hand it
to me upside down. All I want is to be left alone.' ...

LRB | Vol. 29 No. 12 dated 21 June 2007 | Stephen Walsh

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n12/wals01_.html

Mikoyan Shuddered
Stephen Walsh

Shostakovich: A Life Remembered by Elizabeth Wilson · Faber, 631 pp, £20.00

In the introduction to her authoritative biography of Shostakovich,
published in 2000, Laurel Fay sounds a sharp warning about the historical
value of personal reminiscences:

    Fascinating and useful as these can be, memoirs furnish a treacherous
resource to the historian. Reminiscences can be self-serving, vengeful, and
distorted by faulty memory, selective amnesia, wishful thinking and
exaggeration. They can be rife with gossip and rumour. The temptation to
recast the past to suit the present . . . can be hard to resist. In any
case, factual accuracy is not generally one of their most salient features.

Researching a Life of Stravinsky in the 1990s, I talked to many people who
had known him more or less intimately. I read, of course, Stravinsky’s own
published reminiscences, and the memoirs of those who had, in effect, helped
him write them. I looked at filmed interviews, including I forget how many
hours of out-takes from Tony Palmer’s film Aspects of Stravinsky. I soon
realised that, in order to weigh up what I was hearing, I needed to know
something about the speakers’ relationships with the composer and those
around him, which was precisely what I was trying to find out by talking to
them or watching them being talked to. In other words, the process was
circular. Leaving aside the candid liars (there were one or two), and those
who had palpably refreshed their memories from books that I too had read (in
one case even from a book that I had written), the only way of usefully
sizing up these reminiscences was to identify such common ground as there
might be, and thereafter trust one’s own judgment as to who could or
couldn’t be relied on to have remembered things fairly or lucidly or
accurately.

The people I met or listened to were and always had been free to say what
they liked. Stravinsky lived his entire life in what, by Shostakovich’s
standards, were liberal, or at least not efficiently illiberal societies.
But in a society governed by censorship and fear, by the informer and the
cat’s-paw, a society which offered instant and vicious redress to the
envious and the vindictive, what remains of trust rapidly vanishes in a fog
of self-exculpation and score-settling. Even those contemporary resources
which, in a free world, one feels entitled to depend on for information at
the very least unclouded by defective or recovered memory – letters,
diaries, newspaper reports, interviews – have to be litmus-tested for
self-censorship under circumstances where letters might have been opened or
diaries rifled from locked drawers. Not every nuance or irony is as
transparent as the following, in a letter of December 1943 from Shostakovich
to Isaak Glikman: ‘The freedom-loving peoples will at last throw off the
yoke of Hitlerism, peace will reign over the whole world, and we shall live
once more under the sun of Stalin’s constitution.’ The question is, with
someone as cautious and vulnerable as Shostakovich: which of the remarks
that might conceivably strike the casual, or even careful, reader as in any
way unexpected are to be understood as nuanced or ironic? Without some
measure of certainty on this score, a letter or interview is practically
valueless as a psychological document, and not much less so as a factual
one.

Elizabeth Wilson knows all this as well as anyone. In her own preface to the
original 1994 edition of her documentary biography Shostakovich: A Life
Remembered she noted that at the end of the 1980s, when she was conducting
her researches, glasnost was enabling Russians ‘to speak openly and without
fear about their past’. But there were, she admitted, ‘instances when
reminiscences were coloured by the personal issues at stake’, to which she
now adds in the new preface: ‘not least by the wish for self-justification’.
These are perilous sands for the general reader. After all, the first
apparently authentic challenge to the Soviet image of Shostakovich as a
loyal, if sometimes erring, Communist had come long before glasnost, in the
form of his posthumous ‘memoirs’, edited in 1979 under the title Testimony
by a thirtysomething Russian musicologist called Solomon Volkov, who by that
time had left Moscow for a post at Columbia University. Volkov claimed to
have compiled the book out of many meetings and conversations with the
composer, and the text is couched in the form of a first-person monologue,
swift, precise and detailed. There seemed no obvious reason to doubt the
authenticity of its portrait of a composer who, behind a necessary façade of
compliance, had pursued through his music a continuous campaign of sniping
and satire against a despised regime, while storing up sharp, sometimes
wickedly penetrating impressions of friends and colleagues. Nevertheless
subsequent exchanges in, for the most part, academic publications have
demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that Volkov’s book is substantially a
fabrication. Laurel Fay herself delivered the coup de grâce in a meticulous
piece of scholarship published in a collection of largely sceptical essays,
A Shostakovich Casebook, edited by Malcolm Hamrick Brown, in 2004. Elizabeth
Wilson sides with Fay, while observing with regret that ‘the so-called
“Shostakovich Wars” have given rise to debate, ranging from tendentious
quarrels to mud-slinging, all copiously described in acres of print and
cyberspace,’ and that ‘ultimately this has held up rather than promoted the
advance of Shostakovich scholarship.’ It is this disorientating state of
affairs that lends particular value to the reminiscences and reflections
which form the bulk of Shostakovich: A Life Remembered and which fully
justify their reissue in this expanded form.

Elizabeth Wilson is a cellist (a pupil of Rostropovich) who lived and
studied in Moscow for seven years in the late 1960s and early 1970s (her
father, Duncan Wilson, was British ambassador for some of that period). By
the time she went back to Russia at the end of the 1980s to conduct her
research, the old Soviet Union had effectively ceased to exist and glasnost
was in full swing. Even so, most Russians would not have spoken so freely to
just any microphone-wielding Westerner: it was Wilson’s detailed sense of
the subject and familiarity with its environment and language that drew them
out. The book as it evolved would in any case certainly have been
inconceivable in the Brezhnev years. In this sense it was opportunistic and
cleverly timed. But in another sense it might have been thought premature.
The kind of scholarly research that glasnost also made possible had not yet
borne significant fruit, so that Wilson was almost entirely dependent on
published Soviet material and on the memories, recovered or otherwise, of
her interlocutors. One of the most obvious differences between the old
volume and the new is the addition of translated material from recent,
mainly Russian, collections of letters, documents and reminiscences.
Wilson’s own commentaries are a great deal more substantial than before, and
include sizeable chunks of programme-note description which seem designed to
amplify the volume in the character of a ‘life and works’. The original text
is appreciably revised; some material has been expanded from the original
sources, some substituted, footnotes added, and so forth. The result is a
fatter and to some extent more up-to-date, if not crucially different
volume. But does it still punch its old weight in its new guise, or is the
revision merely an attempt to remarket a book which, indispensable in its
day, has largely been overtaken by the progress of Shostakovich scholarship?

One distressing answer is that the progress of Shostakovich scholarship has
been such that Shostakovich: A Life Remembered is not less but more
indispensable in its new edition, because it remains practically the only
general book in this much trampled field that serves the general reader in
the complex, intelligent, emotionally engaged and above all incautious way
required. These epithets are not meant frivolously. At present the
biographical field is substantially occupied by two books, Ian MacDonald’s
The New Shostakovich (1990), which is so candidly biased in favour of Volkov
and so relentlessly hermeneutical in its reading of the music as to defy
serious consideration; and Fay’s Shostakovich: A Life, which is scholarly,
balanced and painstaking to the point of dullness. Some idea of the
minefield that Shostakovich scholarship had become at the turn of the
century can be gleaned from the fact that MacDonald, whose biography had
been excoriated by the anti-Volkov front, posted a book-length denunciation
of Fay’s biography on his website, then, after a long period of clinical
depression, took his own life. Fay’s is clearly the essential book, but it
confines itself, on the whole, to what a scholar can assert with reasonable
certainty, and there is a whiff of unstated disapproval in her remarks about
oral histories of Wilson’s variety, though she has the grace to acknowledge
her debt to them. Much of Wilson finds no place in Fay because, presumably,
it can’t be relied on. Yet, reading Wilson, one forms a picture which, with
all its vagaries and quirks, strikes one as more revealing. It seems to tell
us as much as we can hope to know, at least, about those aspects of its
subject that remain, and will presumably always remain, in any more official
or material sense undocumented.

Wilson manages with considerable skill to stitch together a coherent and
more or less continuous narrative of Shostakovich’s entire life out of the
threads of memoir and documentation that she compiled during her time in
Moscow. The story is compulsively readable, not least because of the
close-up images and snapshots that typify the reminiscence form. The
penetrating yet affectionate portrait by Shostakovich’s close friend, the
pianist Mikhail Druskin, hits off the complexities of his nature as
convincingly as anything one has read, and more persuasively than anything
in Testimony. ‘He was disciplined and restrained,’ Druskin claims:

    Although this restraint cost him great moral effort, it became the
mainstay of his stoic spirit. He was sociable and absolutely lacking in
arrogance; he was well disposed towards people and at the same time aloof
(only in his own music could he be completely open and sincere); he had
natural good manners, but simultaneously kept his distance from the vast
majority of people whom he met (he was secretive because he was vulnerable).
At the same time . . . he never refused any requests for help of a personal
or professional kind.

More in keeping with the portrayal of Shostakovich in Testimony is an
observation by the theatre director Yuri Lubimov, which sheds an oblique
light on Druskin’s image. ‘For all his nervousness and defencelessness,’
Lubimov remarks (as if Wilson had played him the Druskin interview),

    Shostakovich was a caustic man. His table talk was full of sarcasm. He
liked his drink and, when in his cups, revealed his wit and irony . . .
Later on his nervousness assumed the character of panic, a kind of
conditioned reflex. He used to say: ‘I’d sign anything even if they hand it
to me upside down. All I want is to be left alone.’

Both of these accounts were in the original edition of the book. New memoirs
include reminiscences by Levon Atovmyan, the one-time administrator of
Muzfond (the funding arm of the Composers’ Union), a rare example of an
apparatchik Shostakovich felt he could trust. Atovmyan claims to have
witnessed more than a hundred performances of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth
before the fateful Bolshoi performance attended by Stalin in January 1936
which led to the work’s denunciation in Pravda. Shostakovich was himself in
Moscow that day on his way to a concert in Archangel. Shortly before leaving
to catch his train, he received a phone call instructing him to attend the
Bolshoi performance. Nervous both about the train and about the odd
character of the invitation, he asked Atovmyan to go to the theatre and let
him know how matters stood. The performance was already in progress when
Atovmyan arrived, and he soon saw that Stalin and other members of the
Politburo were in the audience. ‘The show was going well,’ he writes,

    but then in the orchestral entr’acte before the scene of Katerina’s
marriage, the players . . . got carried away and played very loudly . . . I
glanced over to the director’s box, and saw Shostakovich walk in. [At the
end] he went out on stage to take applause. He was as white as a sheet,
bowed quickly and walked off into the wings . . . Shostakovich simply
couldn’t calm down and kept asking irritably: ‘Why was it necessary to
reinforce the band, to exaggerate the noise level? . . . I should think
those in the government box must have been deafened by the volume of the
brass. I have a bad premonition about this. And to boot it’s a leap year
which will bring me the usual bad luck.’

Perhaps Atovmyan’s reminiscence, which was first published in Russian only
in 1997, fits a little too well with the Pravda description of the opera’s
‘deliberately dissonant, muddled stream of sounds’ and its ‘snatches of
melody [which] struggle free and disappear again in the din, the grinding,
the squealing’ (I quote from Fay’s translation). Yet the singer Sergei
Radamsky, who was in Shostakovich’s box, had painted a similar picture in a
comparatively obscure memoir published in German in 1971, which Wilson
excerpts here for the first time. The government box was opposite theirs,
and though Stalin himself was hidden by a curtain, his companions were
visible, and ‘every time the percussion and brass played fortissimo we saw
Zhdanov and Mikoyan shudder, then laughingly turn round to Stalin . . . When
Shostakovich saw how this “troitsa” laughed and made merry, he . . . covered
his face with his hands.’

Radamsky also claims to have been present at the subsequent meetings of the
Moscow Composers’ Union in which the rump of Shostakovich’s colleagues
queued up to associate themselves with the Pravda denunciations. The
composer Lev Knipper attacked Shostakovich for ‘“anti-people” sentiments’,
and followed this up with an anecdote about Shostakovich’s having arrived
late and drunk for a meeting of the Leningrad Composers’ Union at which
Knipper was to address a party of sailors. ‘But,’ he concluded poisonously,
‘we are not here to hammer the last nail into Shostakovich’s coffin.’ At
this point Radamsky has himself yelling, ‘You bastard!’, which might be one
of those self-exculpatory inventions to which memoirs are prone, or might
just be true. In either case it gives the lie to MacDonald’s reading of
Knipper’s remark as ‘generous’; who, after all, had said anything about
coffins?

The difficulties presented by this kind of reminiscence are thrown into
relief by Lev Lebedinsky’s account of the rewriting of the Twelfth Symphony,
which Wilson included in her original edition and which survives, with a
mildly defensive editorial gloss, in the new one. According to Lebedinsky,
Shostakovich had written the symphony as a satire on Lenin, but lost his
nerve shortly before the Leningrad premiere in October 1961 and rewrote the
entire 40-minute work in three or four days in time for the rehearsals,
confiding this information exclusively to Lebedinsky. As Fay points out, the
problem with this story is that the work had already been played through in
a piano duo reduction at the Leningrad Composers’ Union more than a
fortnight before it went into orchestral rehearsal, and Sovetskaya kultura
had published a critical study of the score a week later. Wilson now defends
the story by means of a slightly earlier dating. But this undermines it
altogether, since a panic rewrite for a piano run-through makes no sense,
and a critical study could easily have been withdrawn.

Why should Lebedinsky invent such a far-fetched tale if not to lay claim to
a special intimacy with the tormented genius? The same wish seems also to
underlie his account of Shostakovich’s becoming a Party member in 1960.
Lebedinsky portrays himself as the composer’s confidant and conscience,
warning him that ‘invitations issued by certain friends brought him into the
society of licensed officials, and were nothing short of a trap.’ On the
night after the meeting at which Shostakovich was supposed to have been
admitted to membership but which he had failed to attend, he broke down in
Lebedinsky’s presence and sobbed hysterically: ‘I’m scared to death of them
. . . you don’t know the whole truth . . . From childhood I’ve been doing
things that I wanted not to do . . . I’m a wretched alcoholic . . . I’ve
been a whore, I am and always will be a whore.’ Once a member, he duly
attended Party rallies of the most stultifying tedium, sitting apparently
comatose and even once applauding a speech which had contained personal
insults against him. ‘Why did you clap when you were being criticised?’
Lebedinsky asked. But Shostakovich had noticed nothing.

Not all Wilson’s material, of course, is of this questionable character, and
sometimes it’s unclear why material that she now includes was excluded from
the original edition. For instance, there is a great deal more here on
Shostakovich’s final illness, which was diagnosed as a rare form of polio by
a Soviet doctor in 1969, but later identified by American doctors as motor
neurone disease. New information on Shostakovich’s emotional entanglement
with his pupil Galina Ustvolskaya (who has died since this edition of the
book was published) is genuinely new in the sense that it comes mainly from
an interview published in Moscow in 1996, though conducted in 1977. Wilson
is censorious of Ustvolskaya’s attitude to her former teacher, which was
itself increasingly critical of what Wilson calls ‘his musical and personal
principles’. Ustvolskaya came to resent any suggestion that Shostakovich
influenced her own work, and – tellingly – destroyed his letters to her and
sold the manuscripts he gave her to the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basle.

Wilson finds all this hard to understand and harder to forgive – a rare
example of lack of detachment on her part. It’s more in her nature to give
her dramatis personae space and it seems to me precisely because of her
light editorial touch that a picture gradually takes shape of a far more
socially complex and psychologically intricate world than normally emerges
from books about Shostakovich. As with any large-scale portrait, the truth
of the image is independent of the smudging or misrepresentation of small
details, which the mind, like the eye, corrects instinctively; such surface
features are no hindrance to the perception of deeper and perhaps richer
truths. Of all books on Shostakovich, this is the one that best depicts the
horrors and triumphs of his life and work, and it does so without bias or
special pleading but with unfailing sympathy.

Stephen Walsh holds a personal chair in music at Cardiff University. The
final volume of his Stravinsky biography, Stravinsky: The Second Exile, was
published last year.