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Why? Shostakovich answers: "Just like that, so that they wouldn't get un derfoot." The blind men's songs had not been passed by the censor. "Mighty deeds were being done there," he adds with fu rious sarcasm. "Complete collectivization was under way, they had destroyed ku laks as a class, and here were these blind men, walking around singing songs of dubious content." Shostakovich vows that some day, the people who were respon sible for this and similar "evil deeds" will be brought to account, if only before their descendants. "If I didn't believe in that completely, life wouldn't be worth living."
Shostakovich wrote the score for the superb Soviet film of Hamlet. It was one of his favorite plays, and there was a line of Hamlet's he particularly liked: "Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me."
Now we know that that could have been Shostakovich's epitaph.
Excerpt
"I had to go to the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace in New York. But I refused, it was humiliating for me to take part in a spectacle Like that. I was a formalist, a representative of an antinational direction in music. My music was banned, and now I was supposed to go and say that everything was fine. Finally I agreed. People sometimes say that it must have been an interesting trip, look at the way I'm smiling in the photographs. That was the smile of a condemned man. I felt Like a dead man. I answered all the idiotic questions in a daze, and thought, When I get back it's over for me. Stalin liked leading Americans by the nose that way. Well, why say lead by the nose? That's too strong¬ ly put. He only fooled those who wanted to be fooled. The Americans don't give a damn about us, and in order to live and sleep soundly, they'll believe anything."