A new book by the U.S. Russian-born musicologist Solomon Volkov, "Shostakovich and Stalin: The Extraordinary Relationship between the Great Composer and the Brutal Dictator," has hit the shelves of Moscow's bookstores.
As a young man in Russia, Mr. Volkov knew Dmitri Shostakovich personally. After Shostakovich died in 1975, the former published a book of conversations with the composer. The book, entitled "Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich," created a sensation. In it, Shostakovich reveals quite a few secrets, including ones about his relationship with Joseph Stalin.
The Shostakovich-Stalin relationship is also the focus of Solomon Volkov's latest book. The author maintains that Stalin had a good nose for geniuses, and was able to discern subtle nuances both in Shostakovich's conduct and in his arguably rebellious music. According to Mr. Volkov, it was Stalin himself who penned the unsigned Pravda editorial denouncing Shostakovich's opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" ("Katerina Izmailova"), not the party ideologue Andrei Zhdanov, as is widely believed. "Muddle Instead of Music" was the notorious review's title.
Joseph Stalin regarded all experiments with atonality as an encroachment on music's very foundations, arguing that a true musical piece is one based on melody, not cacophony.
In short, Stalin comes across as a person quite well versed in music to be able to read Shostakovich's symphonies and concertos between the lines.
But how did Dmitri Shostakovich manage to survive under Stalin's paranoiac control?
Solomon Volkov contends that the instinct of self-preservation prompted Shostakovich to feign insanity and that he should be understood as a "yurodivy", or a Russian "holy fool." To quote him, "Shostakovich placed himself as a true successor to Pushkin and Mussorgsky's Russian tradition of artistic dialogue and confrontation with the czar. The yurodivy is the embodiment of the figure of the artist, who on behalf of the downtrodden people speaks dangerous truths to the czar."
There is some truth in this contention. Indeed, "holy fools" often played the role of one-man opposition to rulers in medieval Russia. Arguably the best-known exponent of this tradition was Basil the Blessed. This ascetic, clothed in rags in summer as in winter, revealed many uncomfortable truths about Ivan the Terrible's violent reign that would have cost other people their lives. But the monarch did not touch Basil, as he believed the man to be one of those fools in whom Christ wears the disguise of madness.
Mr. Volkov's claim that Shostakovich pretended to be insane almost unwittingly seems disputable. In the years of Bolshevik repression, a number of artists simulated insanity to survive and to express themselves.
The poet Boris Pasternak, for one, openly criticized the Communist Party's culture policies in his letters to Stalin. A death sentence would have been the dictator's most likely response, had those letters not been written, as they were, in the tone of sublime insanity.
As legend has it, Joseph Stalin dismissed the secret police's repeated suggestion that Pasternak be executed, saying the man was a holy fool and no harm may be done to him. The poet's demonstrable display of his disinterest in the mundane and preoccupation with heavenly matters proved a very wise tactic, earning him a lifetime "indulgence for sins."
Mikhail Bulgakov was even more outspoken than his fellow writer. He openly expressed his monarchist views in the play "The White Guard." And in a letter to Stalin, he pointed out that revolution would never work for Russia and that evolution was the way.
Is this insanity or pragmatism?
In the days of Stalinist terror, dozens of people were killed every day in KGB cells. So, of course, it is pragmatism!
Both Bulgakov and Pasternak simulated insanity, exploiting Stalin's weak points. They knew the man was maniacally afraid of hidden enemies who kept their cards close to their chests. This conspiracy phobia eventually evolved into paranoia. In contrast, the despot was rather tolerant to overt hostility.
Bulgakov and Pasternak both went unpunished. And so, too, did Maria Yudina, a brilliant and eccentric pianist. Stalin once asked Yudina for a Mozart recording and lavishly rewarded her with money. She wrote Stalin a letter in reply, saying that she had donated the money to a church and promised to pray that God would forgive his horrible sins. But Stalin took no action against that woman, because she had put her life in his hands.
Perhaps, Dmitri Shostakovich got the most out of his pretended insanity. His ostensible servility vis-a-vis the regime saved him from repression and earned him all kinds of senior positions, privileges and awards. But his music, paradoxically, provided a sinister commentary to the times. The opera "The Nose," for instance, explored the life of phantoms while at the same time censuring the Communist Party's culture policy. And he responded to the 1948 government decree against formalism in music with his bitingly sarcastic "Anti-Formalistic Heaven," showing off a whole array of formalist devices.
The paradox of the relationship between the composer and the tyrant was that Shostakovich drew his artistic inspiration from dictatorship.
