Whose Testimony Is it Anyway

One is never left feeling short-changed by anything to do with Shostakovich. Portsmouth Libraries, for once, had to admit they couldn't find their copy of Testimony. I'll forgive them anything, though. They would even get it in for me from elsewhere for a small charge but I'd already found a copy for less than that.

Testimony is 'the memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov', his friend. But the 'unreliable narrator' has been around for a lot longer than when the idea became high fashion for that generation of novelists who did Creative Writing at East Anglia University with Malcolm Bradbury. 

Even the blurb on the back of this 1987 edition accepts that some suggested 'that Volkov invented part of it'. It begins with a story about a law lecturer who arranged for one of his lectures to be disrupted by a 'hooligan' and then asked the students to say what had happened and they all reported it differently and,

some even maintained that there had been several hooligans.

So much for eye witness evidence. So much, we might think, for the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, by the way. So much for any idea of history. I'm almost tempted - but not quite - to dig out my terrible second year university essay on Kierkegaard and subjectivity. We might be well advised not to believe what we read but it isn't necessarily the author's fault.

What we do get from Shostakovich's Testimony, enough of which must be faithfully enough reported to bring with it a sense of him, is at least as much of the clear-sighted, uncompromising artist he surely had to be in the extreme circumstances he worked in. Not for him was the decadent luxury of producing a few short poems each year, thinking he'd done enough, and having a long lie down after each one. As per Julian Barnes's The Noise of Time he spent his whole life in expectation of Stalin's goon squad coming to take him away and here he shows that he knew stories about plenty of those who did disappear. It remains quite a mystery why he wasn't one of them but perhaps by being as good as he was and signing whatever Soviet-line statement was put in front of him without even reading it, Stalin was fooled into keeping him on even though he was more dissident, and had more reason to be than those major Russians who did well for themselves in exile. He's very kind about Stravinsky's music, he's less so about Prokofiev but Rachmanninov doesn't even appear in the index. I don't think it's fair to call him 'ambivalent'. That surely undersells the subterfuge he so heroically brought off. 

The first-hand insights into Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk are valuable and not likely to be the bits suspected of being added by Volkov. For example,

I wanted to show a woman who was on a much higher level than those around her. She is surrounded by monsters. The last five years were like a prison for her.

It's hard to imagine that the artist can't help but bring some elements of autobiography into their work. And,

it turns out that a crime is worth committing for the sake of that passion, since life has no meaning otherwise anyway.

Yes, that crime is murder but murder was an everyday thing under Stalin and so perhaps not as unthinkable in Russia then, and in others places at other times, like England under the first Queen Elizabeth, as it seems to us cosy, middle-brow types who benefitted from living so much of our lives in the reign of the second Queen Elizabeth.

If the memoirs don't lead the reader back to the music they won't have been a complete success, however much of a vicarious thrill one gets from them, or how grateful they make one for having lived so far in such benign times. The Piano Sonatas won't be added to the CD collection, I'm well aware that the symphonies ought to be taken on at some point even if I'm happy enough to nominate Shostakovich as the Greatest C20th Composer without knowing much about them. But I returned to the Trio Sonatas and the Seven Romances on Poems of Alexander Blok which proved to be a fine soundtrack to chapter 5.

I'm glad to know the Russian word, yurodivy, someone who 'tells the world about his insights in an intentionally paradoxical way',

he plays the fool , while actually being a persistent exposer of evil and injustice.

There might have been something of the yurodivy in Shostakovich but you couldn't have called Alexander Solzhenitsyn that. I've never read what Solzhenitsyn thought of Shostakovich but Shostakovich has his reservations about Solzhenitsyn. He wasn't easy to impress. These two giants of C20th Russian art and Soviet dissidence each had their own ways of doing it and it's hardly for me to say who was the braver. But it's not easy to come away from their eloquent testimony liking Russians, or anything about Russia beyond the magnificent art it produced and it continues to be a failing, rogue state.

 

I'm only halfway through this immensely compelling book. It's entirely possible that the second half will generate as much to say again. In a way it's almost a good thing the library couldn't find me a copy, it's a book one wants in one's own library.