Shostakovich and Stalin: The Extraordinary Relationship

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

â€œMusic illuminates a person and provides him with his last hope; even Stalin, a butcher, knew that.â€ 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 Volkovâ€”who cowrote Shostakovichâ€™s controversial 1979 memoir, Testimonyâ€”describes how this lethal uncertainty affected the composerâ€™s life and work.

Volkov, an authority on Soviet Russian culture, shows us the â€œholy foolâ€ 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 Shostakovichâ€™s contemporariesâ€”Mandelstam, Bulgakov, and Pasternak among themâ€”fell victim to Stalinâ€™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 centuryâ€™s greatest composers and one of its most infamous tyrants.
Country USA
Brand Knopf
Manufacturer Alfred A. Knopf
Binding Hardcover
ReleaseDate 2004-03-23
EANs 9780375410826

Country	USA
Brand	Knopf
Manufacturer	Alfred A. Knopf
Binding	Hardcover
ReleaseDate	2004-03-23
EANs	9780375410826

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

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