Composing for dear life

Ever since the posthumous publication in 1979 of Testimony, his volume of memoirs, ‘as related to and edited by Solmon Volkov’, Dmitri Shostakovich has ranked not only as a great Russian composer but also as a great figure of Russian literature — sullenly truculent, cynically embittered and permanently disappointed. Some scholars, indeed, have gone so far as to claim that the Shostakovich of Testimony was in effect a fictional creation, based on Volkov’s fraudulent claim to be the composer’s close friend and largely designed to please a Cold War audience who needed to think of him and his music as fervently anti-communist.

The controversy seems to have died down now, with books by Ian MacDonald, Elizabeth Wilson and Allan Ho and Dmitri Feofanov confirming the basic veracity of Volkov’s record. Shostakovich, they conclude, may not have been a hero of the resistance. At times he was forced into painful compromises to protect himself and his family. He did not want to be shot in his bed or sent to the Gulag, and did everything possible to avoid such fates: who can blame him for that? But he was never a Stalinist stooge, never profited immorally from the regime and — at least from the mid-1930s — never regarded the official ideology as anything other than contemptible and ludicrous claptrap.

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Now, almost as a postscript to the debate, comes this brief but evocative volume of conversations between the composer’s surviving children Maxim and Galina, and Michael Ardov, a Greek Orthodox priest who was their childhood friend. Ardov weaves their random but intimate recollections into a delicate tapestry, interspersed with footnotes, asides, letters, photographs and the voices of others. Elegantly translated by Rosanna Kelly and Michael Meylac, it makes a subtle and haunting book in which a domesticated Shostakovich appears more touchingly and vulnerably human than ever before.