Solomon Volkov’s Testimony may have faded from immediate relevance in the present state of Shostakovich reception, but the legacy of its one-dimensional portrayal of the composer whose “memoirs” it purports to be lives on. I was reminded of this earlier this month when I received my copy of the new monograph on Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony by Marina Frolova-Walker and Jonathan Walker. Its cover is illustrated with one of the “Shostakovich Kills Stalin” images created by Andrew Crust; part of a series which first came to my attention a couple of years ago in an issue of the DSCH Journal. Fittingly, for a time and place where cultural discourse and reception has become largely infantilized, Crust reimagines Shostakovich and Stalin as comic book antipodes, superhero and supervillain; with the former on the verge of vanquishing the latter in feats of elaborately maleficent and vindictive violence worthy of Wile E. Coyote.
The belief that Shostakovich and Stalin were embraced in uneasy tidal lock as yurodivy and tsar—the composer playing the part of holy fool occasionally permitted to speak dangerously unflattering truths to the tsar, whose very omnipotence inexplicably leaves him in the thrall of his nominal inferior—has become so deeply ingrained as to be widely accepted as fact. Andris Nelsons’ remarks to the Boston Herald, in an interview about the final volume in his disappointingly limp Shostakovich symphony cycle, is a typical example of this paradigm:
“I remember reading Russian books that said, ‘Fifth Symphony of Shostakovich is a milestone, a wonderful work where the confused artist has lost his orientation and then he finds through the suffering and darkness the light of communistic ideas,” Nelsons told the Herald. Only that’s not what Shostakovich was writing about. Later Nelsons came to understand that this titan of Soviet art did his best to undermine the glory of the regime in his symphonies. “Thanks to the genius of Shostakovich, he managed to fool the authorities,” Nelsons said. “From the Fourth Symphony on, there are these qualities, the grotesque, sarcasm, irony, black humor… He understood that there was only one way, he had to keep writing and fool them.”[1]
A state which possessed the most sophisticated mass surveillance apparatus of its time, and whose bureaucracy contained not a few highly refined and musically perceptive individuals, somehow not only got “fooled” again and again, but also elevated a manifestly ideologically unreliable composer to a status that no other composer in his—or possibly any—country ever before or again experienced. It seems implausible, not to mention narrow. What if both composer and dictator were playing each other? Whatever potential benefits the latter reaped from this relationship have long been discussed, but that gained by the former tends to provoke either awkward justifications or silence. Not unexpectedly, Shostakovich was one of the first composers to issue a public statement in response to Stalin’s death. Although replete with stock phrases of contemporary officialese, the musicologist Alexander Belonnenko discerned one passage which stood apart from the prefabricated jargon that surrounded it:
A severe and onerous grief has befallen us. Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, our best and very closest friend, has departed from our ranks. The dear teacher, whose inspirational teachings have driven and will continue to drive our art onward, has died. Never before has art been delegated such exalted tasks, never before has its importance been so great as in the era of Stalin. [Emphasis Belonnenko’s.][2]
What Shostakovich lamented, according to Belonnenko, was the passing of an era in which music—and, therefore, the concomitant industry of composers, musicians, and musicologists—was accorded respect and importance unmatched anywhere else before or since, however perversely the Soviet government may have demonstrated this. Consider that at even the height of intense official scrutiny and harassment, Shostakovich enjoyed extraordinary privilege, to say nothing of power and influence in Soviet music. Often he used these for the benefit of friends and even strangers whom he felt were mistreated. He also was, however, not above using it as a cudgel against rivals.[3] It was natural, then, that a cult of personality—unintendedly, perhaps, and comparatively modest—formed around such a singularly pivotal figure. As Georgy Sviridov, an erstwhile pupil and friend turned sometime unwilling-adversary, bluntly stated:
No composer had been more propagandized than Shostakovich during his lifetime. The full power of state propaganda was focused on declaring him the greatest musician of all times and peoples. It must be admitted that the [Soviet] musical scene willingly abetted this myth. In every sense of the term, he was a state composer…[4]
Sometimes important truths emerge from outwardly trivial details. A few months ago, while re-reading Sofia Khentova’s Shostakovich: Zhizn i tvorchestvo (Shostakovich: Life and Works), I came across a detail about Shostakovich’s personal habits:
When he got tired, he would smoke his favorite brand of cigarettes, Kazbek. Before his [final] illness he smoked two packs a day; when he went on trips abroad, he stuffed his suitcase with these cigarettes.[5]
Kazbeks were a brand of papirosy—pre-rolled cigarettes which came attached with cardboard tubes that were popular in Russia and surrounding nations until the mid-20th century. Their packaging, which depicted a man on horseback riding against the Caucasus Mountains as backdrop, was based on a painting by Gazi-Magomed Daurbekov, a pioneering Ingush artist, and personally approved by Stalin.[6] They were considered among the highest quality cigarettes in the Soviet Union and for a long time beyond the reach of ordinary citizens. In addition to being only sold at stores accessible to CPSU elites, Kazbeks were priced approximately eight times higher than cigarettes available to the average Soviet worker.[7] (To help put it into perspective, the median price of a pack of Marlboros in California is presently about $12.) That Shostakovich could smoke Kazbeks at all, much less go through at least two packs of them a day, says a lot.
Which is not to say that Shostakovich had an easy life. Following the professional and personal vicissitudes he endured during the Stalin era, he began to manifest symptoms in the late 1950s of an undetermined physio-neurological impairment that progressively worsened over the final eighteen years of his life. Variously conjectured to be polio, MND, and Parkinson’s, one wonders whether or not he may have instead been afflicted by a severe auto-immune disorder such as MS. Recent studies have demonstrated that there may be a link between their diagnoses and traumatic stress.[8] Whatever their mutual misgivings may have been, there is no denying that the state demonstrated to Shostakovich a degree of concern and favor that was unique even among his fellow composers.[9] He received the finest medical care available in the Soviet Union and eventually, in desperation for a more hopeful prognosis, the United States. It was, perhaps, a posthumous and final tribute from the leader who had been a source of both torment and sought-after patronage.
“Although [Shostakovich] inwardly despised [Stalin] and could not forgive him for [...] the humiliating insults that [he] had to endure from the tyrant himself and his cronies, Dmitri Dmitriyevich also understood perfectly that he owed to him his high standing,” observed Belonnenko. “Neither Glinka nor Tchaikovsky could have dreamed of such an exalted position as that which Shostakovich had under Stalin.”[10]
Notes
[1]: Gottlieb, Jeb (October 13, 2023). “BSO spotlights Shostakovich’s rebel journey” Boston Herald. URL: https://www.bostonherald.com/2023/10/13/bso-spotlights-shostakovichs-rebel-journey/
[2]: Belonnenko, Alexander (June 2016). “Шостакович и Свиридов: К истории взаимоотношений” [“Shostakovich and Sviridov: The Story of their Relationship”] (in Russian). Наш современник [Our Contemporary]. Volume 6., p. 209.
[3]: Frolova-Walker, Marina (2016). Stalin’s Music Prize: Soviet Culture and Politics. New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300208849. Pages 132–134. (Frolova-Walker’s concluding statement on Shostakovich’s apparent hounding of the composer of Iron Foundry, Alexander Mosolov (1900–1973), merits being quoted in full: “[Shostakovich’s official mistreatment of Mosolov] prompts us to wonder if there was once some friction between the two composers, great enough to leave Shostakovich with a merciless grudge a quarter of a century later, a grudge which could not be set aside even for such an obvious underdog. There is no evidence to say so, and Mosolov was never in any position of official power over Shostakovich. We may never know, but for all his good deeds, Shostakovich had his darker moments.”
[4]: Sviridov, Georgy (2002). Belonnenko, Alexander (ed.). Музыка как судьба [Music as Destiny] (in Russian). Moscow. Молодая гвардия [Young Guard]. ISBN 5-235-024440-0. Page 397.
[5]: Khentova, Sofia (1985). Шостакович. Жизнь и творчество [Shostakovich: Life and Works] (in Russian). Vol. 2. Moscow: Советский композитор [Soviet Composer]. Page 281.
[6]: Dzarakhova, Zeinep (March 24, 2021). “К 117-летию со дня рождения: Многогранное творчество Гази-Магомеда Даурбекова” [“For the 117th Anniversary of his Birth: The Multifaceted Works of Gazi-Magomed Daurbekov”] (in Russian). Ингушетия [Ingushetiya]. URL: https://gazetaingush.ru/obshchestvo/mnogogrannoe-tvorchestvo-gazi-magomeda-daurbekova.
[7]: Pirogov, Peter (1950). Why I Escaped: The Story of Peter Pirogov. New York City: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce. Page 11.
[8]: Song, Huang; Fang, Fang; Tomasson, Gunnar; et al (June 19, 2018). “Association of Stress-Related Disorders With Subsequent Autoimmune Disease”. Journal of the American Medical Association. 319 (23). URL: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2685155.
[9]: Morrison, Simon (2009). The People's Artist: Prokofiev's Soviet Years. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-518167-8. Page 357. (The medical attention Shostakovich received is in sharp contrast to the initially lackadaisical official response to Sergei Prokofiev’s terminal decline after his stroke on July 7, 1949. In the event, Shostakovich successfully interceded on his behalf to Vyacheslav Molotov for improved treatment.)
[10]: Belonnenko, p. 208
