The Artist as Holy Fool
PALOFF, BENJAMIN
The Artist as Holy Fool Shostakovich and Stalin: The Extraordinary Relationship Between the Great Composer and the Brutal Dictator By Solomon Volkov Translated by Antonia W....
...Of course, as with countless other artists and intellectuals, Stalin kept a close watch on Shostakovich's work...
...Volkov is enchanted by the dynamic...
...To make any of them alone the basis for determining the genesis of art or statecraft is to indulge the very mythmaking cultural histories are supposed to unpack...
...Volkov does not seem to recognize this vis-à-vis Shostakovich...
...Powerful personalities are often more complicated than that, especially in times when everyone is being forced to make sacrifices and compromises...
...These contradictions are reflected in the author's erratic narration and his inclination to jump—sometimes rather far—to conclusions about the dictator's attitudes and motivations...
...As a result, Shostakovich and Stalin stands as a missed opportunity to examine how one great composer produced sharply disparate impressions of his life and work...
...336 pp...
...Insofar as Volkov portrays Shostakovich as a beleaguered saint in this book, the author is practicing a rich Russian hagiographie tradition...
...With an almost shocking lack of selfregard, Volkov blithely remarks that we will never know how large a hand Stalin played in the death of the great poet Osip Mandelstam: "Too much information in the Soviet Union—a society that seemed overbureaucratized to the extreme—was transmitted orally") As an account of how artists and intellectuals experienced the profound pressures of Stalinism, Volkov's book offers little new or noteworthy to long-available biographies or such classic studies as Czeslaw Milosz' The Captive Mind...
...This new image flew in the face of Western perceptions of Shostakovich as a visionary—even brilliant—but corruptible Russian master who willingly collaborated with the oppressive Soviet regime...
...his analyses of Shostakovich's operas and Fifth Symphony are notably lively and insightful...
...contributor, the "New Republic" In 1979 Solomon Volkov, a Russian musicologist and recent émigré from the Soviet Union, published Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich and immediately placed himself at the center of a fierce critical controversy...
...Russian history is peppered with instances of rulers playing an active role, to put it mildly, in the cultural life of the nation...
...At one point, the author interrupts his narrative to tell us he owns some rare children's readers compiled by Shostakovich's godmother...
...Stories abound—some quite credible, some less so— about his dealings with the poet and novelist Boris Pasternak, the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov, the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, and others...
...It is a potent metaphor, and one that certainly has resonance for observers of Russian history, but it is a metaphor nonetheless...
...They did meet at a discussion of the new state anthem in 1943, and there was at least one telephone conversation in 1949, when the dictator wanted an explanation for the composer's refusal to join the Soviet delegation to a cultural conference in New York...
...Although he displays a thorough knowledge of the key players and events in Russian cultural life in Stalin's era, his presentation is often jumbled...
...This undertaking would require not only an elaboration of the relationship between political leaders and artists, but an appreciation of why such associations loom so large in the popular imagination...
...Reviewed by Benjamin Paloff Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard...
...Now, 25 years after he set off the conflict, Volkov adds fuel to it with what he calls "a cultural history" of the relationship between the composer and the Soviet Union's crudest leader...
...Effective critical histories try to unravel popular mythology by examining the interaction between social phenomena, the mass media, and the realities of everyday life...
...We are asked to believe that a kind of secular holiness enveloped Shostakovich, and that just as Christian saints have suffered for their faith, "no one suffered more for his music than the Soviet composer...
...His best writing focuses on the music itself...
...All this plays quite poorly as cultural history: Volkov's research is so haphazard, his management of sources so unreliable, his digressions and offhand references so unwieldy, and his conclusions so often out of left field that the general reader is likely to come away confused, while specialists may simply be annoyed...
...In that respect, the new book revisits the more controversial bent of Testimony...
...Volkov uses the historic association as his point of departure for discussing how Stalin applied pressure on Shostakovich, and he returns to it often, suggesting in some instances that the Soviet ruler deliberately took Nicholas for a model in his dealings with the composer...
...In the absence of compelling new information connecting the musician's pen to the tyrant's iron fist, Volkov pads his account with meandering passages about early Soviet politics and culture that frequently culminate in broad speculations linking the two...
...The book, assembled mostly from the author's private conversations with the composer shortly before his death in 1975, revealed Shostakovich for the first time as staunchly anti-Soviet, a brave and steadfast artist who struggled to remain true to himself and his friends in the face of extraordinary historical pressures...
...Indeed, the relationship he formulates between the young composer and Stalin is precisely the kind of Soviet cultural paradigm we have turned to him to dissect...
...Thus Stalin is a music connoisseur on one page and a philistine on the next, a verbal strategist and a rhetorical fumbler...
...Stalin had a hand in practically every phase of Soviet life...
...A more critical eye would have been intrigued by it...
...Shostakovich, for his part, was painfully aware of Stalin's...
...Toward the end of the book, he has Stalin manipulating state prizes to poison relations between Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev, though there had always been bad blood between them anyway...
...Shostakovich's integrity as an individual and as an artist is already assured before the story begins, and Stalin serves (rather unsubtly) as the hero's foil, the dragon to be vanquished...
...He frequently quotes his principal actors second- or thirdhand (that is, when he provides a traceable reference at all) and draws conclusions that few critical readers would buy...
...But those who come to this book expecting what the subtitle in particular promises will be disappointed: There was very little direct personal contact between Shostakovich and Josef Stalin...
...He maintains, for example, that the anonymous attacks on Shostakovich printed in Pravda in 1936 were authored by the Great Leader himself...
...Lacking vital supporting evidence, Volkov juggles a relatively small set of sources...
...The most famous instance is Nicholas I's appointment of himself as Alexander Pushkin's personal censor in 1826...
...30.00...
...But his depiction of Stalin is more reliable than his picture of Shostakovich as an unbreakable spirit who always opposed Stalin and the Soviet system, "coding" his resistance in his music...
...After all, what is a saint without relics...
...And their charges have kept alive acrimonious battles in what has become a war for the composer's soul...
...As if that were not enough fodder for academic squabbling, several scholars and critics questioned the memoirs' authenticity, claiming that Volkov invented sheaves of Shostakovich's writing according to his own design...
...The Artist as Holy Fool Shostakovich and Stalin: The Extraordinary Relationship Between the Great Composer and the Brutal Dictator By Solomon Volkov Translated by Antonia W. Bouis Knopf...
...This Stalin is sometimes made human, though inconsistently: Volkov cannot quite navigate his need to illustrate an adversarial relationship between dictator and musician on the one hand, and an impulse to vilify Stalin down to his petty oafishness on the other...
...But Volkov never moves beyond his singular vision of Shostakovich as a superlative, otherworldly being, the supreme master of "artistic survival in a cruel age," a man who "digested [all information] instantly and, not only intellectually, but on a directly emotional basis...
...His discussions of literature, in fact, are marked by inaccuracies and weak observation, from his remarkable misreading of Nikolai Leskov— whose story "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" was the basis of Shostakovich's 1932 opera—to his bizarre assertion that the period between the World Wars represented a "crisis" for the European novel...
...His documentation, including some carefully selected declassified materials, is organized around an adulation of Shostakovich's character and buttressed by a great many private conversations he conducted with Russian cultural figures...
...But most unfortunate is Volkov's refusal to engage the critical response to Testimony...
...Shostakovich and Stalin purports to show the genesis of the music within its social and biographical context, ostensibly with minimal recourse to the personal conversations that previously raised doubts about the author's credibility...
...It is a dubious claim— particularly for a book's opening sentence—but it prepares the reader for the author's contortions in what follows, whether he is pasting together a mishmash of evidence to present Shostakovich as a prototypical Russian "holy fool," or is describing the first performances of the Seventh Symphony as "religious rites, giving an escape for the hidden thoughts and suffering accumulated over many years...
Vol. 87 • January 2004 • No. 1
