Poor Dmitryit seemed about time to give up on him. The great Shostakovich, whose First and Fifth symphonies had alerted the world to the genius of Russia's "20th century Beethoven." had for years been a musical bureaucrat, cranking out empty banalities in the name of "people's music''a pathetic Pshawstakovich.
Even the social realist critics he had tried so hard to please ever since Stalin had scolded him for bourgeois tendencies had shown little patience with the bombastic Leninism of his Eleventh and Twelfth revolutionary symphonies. Mocking rumor had it that in his dacha...
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