Shostakovich Reconsidered

by Allan B. Ho, Dmitry Feofanov

Dmitry Shostakovich's memoirs, Testimony, 'related to and edited by Solomon Volkov', have been the subject of fierce debate since their publication in 1979. Was Testimony a forgery, made up by an impudent impostor, or was it the deathbed confession of a bent, but unbroken, man? Even now, years after the fall of the communist regime, a coterie of well-placed Western musicologists have regularly raised objections to Testimony, hoping with each attack to undermine the picture of Shostakovich presented in his memoirs that of a man of enormous moral stature, bitterly disillusioned with the Soviet system. Here, Allan Ho and Dmitry Feofanov systematically address all of the accusations levelled at Testimony and Solomon Volkov, Shostakovich's amanuensis, amassing an enormous amount of material about Shostakovich and his position in Soviet society and burying forever the picture of Shostakovich as a willing participant in the communist charade.

792 pages, Hardcover

First published June 19, 1998

Reviews

[Blaine Snow · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are reading about the (now three decades old, largely Anglo-only) controversy over the interpretation of the life and music of Dmitri Shostakovich and have not read this book, you are missing the coup final. For very interesting reasons, the controversy either doesn't exist or is very unimportant in most non-English speaking countries (see website "Music Under Soviet Rule/Shostakovich/Shostakovich Debate/Manual For Beginners/The Broader Perspective).

In this massive page-turner, Ho and Feofanov demolish any doubt over the authenticity of Volkov's 1979 presentation of Shostakovich in Testimony: The Memoirs. Their exhaustive research makes Western academic musicologists such as Fay, Taruskin, Brown, Norris and others into conniving Soviet sympathizers bent on presenting selective and misleading information to create a false narrative of Shostakovich's character and intentions. It's not that their story of who he was is completely wrong; rather it's that their narrative is so insensitive to the pain, fear, horrors, persecution, and immense suffering endured by Soviet citizens across the spectrum. Their soft treatment of Soviet Jewish anti-Semitism for example, which Shostakovich clearly had immense sympathy for, is disgusting and borders on their own clandestine anti-Semitism.

Shostakovich Reconsidered appeared at the height (or maybe the nadir?) of the so-called "Shostakovich Wars" in 1998. Subsequent developments in the 2000s were addressed in Ho and Feofanov's online publication entitled "The Shostakovich Wars" (search "SW.pdf" from "sieu.edu"). The latter publication goes further to answer questions brought up in their original publication (this book) and to expose the personal lengths to which Taruskin in particular has gone to attack and discredit the work of one of his colleagues. It's nasty stuff of pompous academic egos and politics.

I've now read more than a dozen books on Shostakovich's life and have to agree with most musicians, conductors, family, and friends who knew him that the views expressed in Testimony are unequivocally his own. To me, the decisive factor as to which narrative you choose to believe (the Fay-Taruskin-Brown anti-revisionist or the Volkov-MacDonald-Ho-Feafanov revisionist narrative) rests on how well you know Soviet history, but particularly how sensitive you are to the suffering of others. If you are truly able to inhabit the life experience of those who lived through the horrors of Soviet Russia, the revisionist view of Shostakovich as a tortured yet supremely gifted, dignified human being who despised the Soviet system, its leadership, and it choke-hold on artistic expression, is the only narrative worth considering. Whose narrative do you want to believe - Soviet stooge academics or seekers of truth outside of politics?

Other books in the Shostakovich wars are:
Revisionist = Shostakovich-Volkov memoirs valid, accurate
- Testimony: The Memoirs
- The New Shostakovich
- How Shostakovich Changed My Mind
- The Noise of Time
- Ho and Feofanov's The Shostakovich Wars, avail. online at siue.edu, search "SW.pdf"

Neutral = not taking either side
- Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (although Wilson's revised edition sides with the anti-revisionist view despite the fact that testimony in her book mostly corroborates the revisionist view... go figure)
- Story of a Friendship: The Letters of Dmitry Shostakovich to Isaak Glikman, 1941-1970
- Stormy Applause: Making Music in a Worker's State

Anti-Revisionist = Shostakovich-Volkov memoirs fraudulent, inaccurate
- A Shostakovich Casebook
- Shostakovich: A Life
- Shostakovich and His World
- Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets
- Shostakovich Studies
- Dmitry Shostakovich