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Still, for most people Shostakovich was exactly who he said he was: a loyal son of the Soviet state and the Communist Party. For others, he presented a poignant spectacle of servility that his utterances in the years to come did little to dispel. With the appearance of this book, these two images that constituted his persona have been irredeemably shattered. Shostakovich's memoirs were dictated to the musicologist Solomon Volkov during the four years that preceded the composer's death in 1975, at the age of 68. The manuscript was smuggled abroad with each chapter signed by Shostakovich.
Volkov then immigrated to the U.S., where he edited and annotated it. Now that the memoirs have been published, not one episode of the composer's career can be viewed in the same light as before, not one work of music heard in the same way.
Take the Waldorf conference.
As Shostakovich describes it, it was a grisly charade in which the chief performer's face was actually a mask of rage, his smile a rictus of fear. Stalin had been disappointed that his campaign against "putrid formalist perversions" (i.e., experimentalism) in the arts had not been received enthusiastically enough by Westerners. "Don't worry, they'll swallow it," said the dictator. Sending Shostakovich to New York was his way of ramming it down their throats. "Stalin Liked to put a man face to face with death and then make him dance to his own tune," Shostakovich says. "That was his style completely." The composer has nothing but scorn for the Americans' willingness to be deceived.
The new image of Shostakovich that emerges from his memoirs is that of a proud, exceptionally intelligent and cultivated man whom fear rendered foolish. "You feel like screaming, but you control yourself and just babble some nonsense" became a way of life.
He signed any statement and made any speech that was put before him. But behind the babble was another Shostakovich, whose governing passion was anger. He seethed at the mindlessness and the menace behind the Soviet regime's response to his music. His greatest fury was reserved for Stalin, his greatest grief for the dictator's victims.
These attitudes stunningly reverse the view that is almost universally held of Shostakovich, so much so that there will be some people who will wonder if he did not undergo a conversion late in life and revise his recollections with an eye to posterity. There is no certain answer to that question, but the book's sincerity is so apparent that it can scarcely fail to persuade most readers.
Unable to vent his anger in words, the composer expended it in his music.
"The majority of my symphonies are tombstones," he says. "Too many of our people died and were buried in places unknown to anyone ... I'm willing to write a composition for each of the victims, but that's impossible, and that's why I dedicate my music to them all."