Dmitri and Philip

 

It puts it all in perspective is what we are often told when something enormous happens and our everyday concerns are belittled. It was hardly Philip Larkin's fault, just taking him as an example, that all he had to worry about was his library, three girlfriends and timorous mother. He made fine poems out of his relatively humdrum life, compared to that of Shostakovich and the rest of his story as told in Testimony.

It's a stunning book and whether or not Solomon Volkov adjusted or augmented it in places, it does more than enough to convince that the impression we are left with is not a false one. Shostakovich had strongly held views about his compatriots, fellow composers and his country, as did Larkin, but he had infinitely more justification, one might think, for holding them.

There's 'big' art and art that is perceived as being of less stature even if it is equally well made. In recent years, the general consensus has raised Larkin from 'good, minor' poet to that of one of the finest of the C20th in England but however much one can admire his craftsmanship, memorability and the ironic nuance that diminished over the years, he didn't do what he did in such hellish circumstances. One can only do what one can do and perhaps Shostakovich would have traded his life under Stalin, Beria and Zhdanov for that of a fogey English librarian bicycling round countryside churches on Sunday afternoons. I know I would have, in his position, but he didn't have the option and wouldn't have been the monumental composer he became as a result if he had.

There is an idea that great art is forged in the crucible of difficult periods. Shakespeare lived in volatile times, we are offered the English poets of World War 1 or Wordsworth and the poets associated with him as Romantic taking their inspiration from the revolution in France but Bach poured out his cantatas as a professional musician relatively undisturbed in safe employment and Handel was an impresario, concerned mainly to outdo his rivals in the London opera houses with as much favour from the king as Bach enjoyed from the church. Their lives were a walk in the park compared to what Shostakovich lived through but he still found the time to emulate the Preludes and Fugues as well as reading literature, performing, having an acute appreciation of his contemporaries in music and, as yurodivy (as below in Whose Testimony Is It Anyway) composer. 

It's hardly surprising he takes a dim view of some of his less talented, or more compliant, contemporaries. It's remarkable how he maintained such clear-sighted detachment, which might be one thing he suspects Solzhenitsyn didn't, but it makes some of Larkin's off-hand dismissal of the likes of Edmund Spenser's poetry, The Bible and Ted Hughes look shrivelled in comparison.

 

Testimony is gripping throughout but one passage that I paid particular attention to said that,

The quality of Jewish folk music is close to my idea of what music should be. There should always be two layers in music. Jews were tormented for so long that they learned to hide their despair. They express despair in dance music.

He knows what he's doing. Without wanting to find myself in Pseud's Corner, yes, of course, worthwhile art needs more than one layer. They work off each other to produce the effects that can be appreciated on more than one reading and, possibly, inexhaustibly.

She Loves You by The Beatles sounds celebratory but uses Em and Bm chords that hint at the sadness that the singer wishes she loved him instead. I also understand that the Human League traded on downbeat words weitten over upbeat chords. There's not many new tricks left to reveal, surely, by now and so we just keep on finding new ways to use those that there are. And that's what 'art' is whether it is achieved under impossible conditions, 'for the glory of God' (as well as making a living), while administerating in a senior way at a university library or just waiting for an idea to present itself, knocking off a few lines and then having a lie down.

I don't know if Testimony would make the Top 6 Books I've ever read but in the red hot frenzy of having not long put it down, I'd like to think so.

It made me finally get around to ordering Apricot Jam, the posthumously published short stories of my other 1970's Soviet dissident hero, Solzhenitsyn, but Ian McEwan's Lessons, telling us as much as he could be expected to know, might arrive first. 

There's only so much grim, grey Stalinism one can take at once if one doesn't have to. It's the fact that we don't have to and only have to resent how 'quarterly', money 'reproaches' us, that should make us only pretend to be curmudgeonly for a joke.