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Taruskin's
Letter to "Commentary" Richard
Taruskin Home
Back to contents TO THE EDITOR: I write in response to "The Composer and the Commissar" [October], Terry Teachout's attempted defense of Solomon Volkov's Testimony, a book falsely purporting to be the transcribed memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, against the criticisms of various scholars including Laurel Fay and myself. If Mr. Teachout has actually read my article, "The Opera and the Dictator," from which he quotes, then he knows how flagrantly he has misrepresented my position when he places me among "some older, Left-leaning academics" who "find it inconceivable that Shostakovich could have been anything other than a supporter of a regime with which they themselves sympathized." Nor is there anything in Laurel Fay's published writings, which now include a full-scale biography that Mr. Teachout has evidently seen, to support such an allegation. The product of an unfounded and unimaginative assumption, Mr. Teachout's assertion is nothing but a political innuendo. To have one's scholarly objections answered in such a way is familiar enough to those of us with first-hand experience of life in the Soviet Union, or with what used to pass there for scholarship. Writers like Mr. Teach out, who ten years after the end of the cold war still seek to establish their credentials on the basis of their "impeccably anti-Communist" attitudes, ought to think twice before they appropriate Stalinist tactics. Let me add that, although in my own case the innuendo was false as well as prejudicial, had it been true it would have been no less a smokescreen. It is the smoke screen behind which Solomon Volkov has been hiding now for twenty years, with the help of accomplices like Allan Ho and Dmitry Feofanov, the authors of Shostakovich Reconsidered, and now Mr. Teachout (who, as he tells us, used to be less gullible). Mr. Teachout's incomprehension of the scholarly issues surrounding the Volkov publication is well exemplified in one of the points of "evidence" he offers in its support. He writes, "while it is true that Shostakovich's surviving friends and colleagues are not unanimous about the veracity of Testimony, most who have spoken out so far--including Maxim and Galina Shostakovich--believe it to be authentic, in part because the composer had already told them many of the same anecdotes recounted by Volkov." Mr. Teachout uses the terms "veracity" and "authenticity" as if they were interchangeable. But they are entirely separate categories. The one refers to truth or falsity of content, the other to truth or falsity of origin. Scholars are trained to make this distinction: it makes a huge difference. Laurel Fay's critique, still unanswered by Volkov and answered only glancingly by his apologists, has indeed demolished the book's claim to authenticity. She has found that, with one exception, all the pages Shostakovich signed in attesting to his having read the work attributed to him contain innocuous material, not all of it even of "memoir" character, which had already been published in the Soviet press, reproduced verbatim even down to punctuation and paragraphing. Fay, it should be noted, never asserted outright on this basis that Testimony "contained spurious first-person revelations concocted by Volkov himself," as Mr. Teachout now paraphrases her. Any trained scholar knows better than that. She merely raised the possibility, in a scholarly publication, as a warning to other trained scholars that the contents of the book were not properly authenticated and should be used with extreme care. Fay may have been incautious in discounting the possibility of total recall on Shostakovich's part. This gave Ho and Feofanov the opportunity to make polemical hay over an irrelevancy. The issue is not whether such material might possibly have been dictated to Volkov by Shostakovich, but rather why it should appear at all in such a book as Testimony purports to be, and why it should always appear precisely where it does--that is, on the signed pages. This issue--the only issue of scholarly relevance--is addressed, sketchily and far from convincingly, in one five-page passage in Ho and Feofanov's book, the remaining 782 pages of which are given over to ad-hominem attacks on their opponents, and to a massive attempt to prove Testimony's veracity through hearsay corroboration of its contents. But even if the veracity of Testimony's every word were established, that still would not constitute evidence that Shostakovich uttered them to Volkov. A moment's reflection will suffice to confirm that a book purporting to contain memoirs might be authentic-and-true or inauthentic-and-false, the only possibilities Mr. Teachout entertains. But it might also be authentic-and-false, as I have shown the memoirs Igor Stravinsky dictated to Robert Craft largely were, or even inauthentic-and-true. As the sentence already quoted from Mr. Teachout shows, many of the stories in Testimony circulated in oral tradition long before Volkov published them. I heard many of them myself as an exchange student in Moscow in 1971-72. I believed many of them at the time, and I still do. Volkov's book might thus be perfectly true even if Shostakovich himself had nothing to do with it. But the reality is more complicated than any of the four simplified scenarios I have sketched. In all likelihood Testimony is an amalgam of the authentic and the inauthentic, the veridical and the inveridical. The trouble is, nobody can tell which is which, and no matter how many innuendos Mr. Teachout heaps up, until Volkov comes clean we never will be able to. Those who wish to believe the book will always be able to believe it (most likely selectively) on the promptings of their gut. That is their inalienable right. But scholars have an obligation not to repeat what they believe unless they have evidence to support it beyond its "ring of truth," which can only exist in the ear of the beholder. As Laurel Fay established almost two decades ago, such evidence Testimony cannot provide. Had Volkov been content to publish a book about Shostakovich based in part on interviews, rather than a book purporting to be actually if indirectly authored by Shostakovich, it would never have become a best-seller, would never have led to two decades' debate, and would never have, in Mr. Teachout's words, "promised to rewrite the history of modern Russian music." Such ambitious claims must be seriously tested. When such tests are flunked, it smacks of fraud. It can only be the fraught political atmosphere that continues to swirl around Shostakovich's legacy, at least in minds like Mr. Teachout's, that would induce an otherwise intelligent critic in this one case to forswear, and then denounce, the process of scholarly testing. RICHARD F. TARUSKIN It is a novel experience for me to stand accused of engaging in "Stalinist tactics." On the other hand, I cannot imagine being surprised by anything Richard F. Taruskin might possibly say about me, however preposterous. Readers of Commentary may not recognize Mr. Taruskin's stock rhetorical strategies--the sky-high dudgeon, the sneering, arrogant bluster, the disingenuous distortions of inconvenient fact--but writers on musical subjects who are familiar with his work will find his letter characteristic. He is, unlikely as it may seem, one of America's outstanding musicologists; I have profited on numerous occasions from his profound insights into Russian music, and will no doubt continue to do so in the future. Alas, those who dare to take issue with his sometimes highly idiosyncratic opinions are likely to find themselves on the receiving end of the sort of ad-hominem abuse he habitually decries (and not infrequently imagines) in others. It is a pity that the peculiarities of his temperament have apparently rendered him incapable of participating in civilized and intellectually honest debate. Unlike Mr. Taruskin, I do not deal in innuendos. So far as I know, I have read everything he has written about Dmitri Shostakovich, and I know very well that Mr. Taruskin is not now and never has been a defender of the Soviet regime. As is self-evident from its context, my remark about "some older, Left-leaning academics" did not refer either to him or Laurel Fay (about whose age and political beliefs I have no information), but to other scholarly participants in the debate over the authenticity of Testimony. Nor, as should also be obvious, was I seeking to "establish my credentials" on the basis of my own "impeccably anti-Communist" attitudes: I used the latter phrase to describe the Russian Review, the journal in which Fay published her original article on Testimony two decades ago. As for Mr. Taruskin's disingenuousness, let me begin with the following statement: "Fay, it should be noted, never asserted outright . . . that Testimony `contained spurious first-person revelations concocted by Volkov himself,' as Mr. Teachout now paraphrases her." Contrary to what Mr. Taruskin implies, my paraphrase was in no way deceptive. Fay wrote "Shostakovich Versus Volkov: Whose `Testimony'?" precisely in order to cast doubt on the authenticity of Solomon Volkov's book, and not merely because of its alleged plagiarism from Shostakovich's published writings but on various other grounds as well, none of which Mr. Taruskin mentions in his letter (and all of which are addressed in exhaustive detail in Allan Ho and Dmitry Feofanov's Shostakovich Reconsidered). Of course, Fay never directly asserted the inauthenticity of Testimony in her article: that is not how one does such things. She merely suggested it, unmistakably and damningly. It is also disingenuous of Mr. Taruskin to dismiss as "sketchy," "glancing," and "far from convincing" the detailed discussion by Ho and Feofanov of what he claims to be "the only issue of scholarly relevance" in the matter of Testimony. Ho and Feofanov devoted 22 pages of Shostakovich Reconsidered--not five, as Mr. Taruskin says--to Volkov's alleged plagiarism, and I found their analysis of the passages in question to be completely convincing, so much so that I felt obliged to retract in print my own earlier statement of support for Fay. To be sure, I am not an academic, nor do I speak or read Russian. My article on Shostakovich Reconsidered was a piece of critical journalism, nothing more. But I know a planted axiom when I see one, and Mr. Taruskin's letter rests on one: he contends that the problem of the authenticity of Testimony cannot be settled until Volkov "comes clean," presumably meaning that any evidence short of a confession by Volkov of plagiarism is "hearsay," and thus irrelevant. (It should come as no surprise that Mr. Taruskin declined to attend the New York press conference held last February at which Volkov, for the first time ever, publicly answered questions about Testimony from the press and other interested parties.) In fact--as Mr. Taruskin knows perfectly well, and as my article makes perfectly clear--the only way to establish the authenticity of Testimony is through the use of hearsay evidence. It is true that the manuscript is not in Shostakovich's handwriting, nor did he sign every page (who would have?), and Volkov's assertion that the book is what he says it is proves nothing in and of itself. But anyone who understands the nature of the Soviet regime should recognize that the "process of scholarly testing" to which Mr. Taruskin pays ritual homage in his letter is simply not applicable to a book written in secret, under conditions of totalitarian repression and surveillance. In cases such as these, one must perforce deal in probabilities, and judging by the evidence amassed by Ho and Feofanov and (very briefly) summarized in my article, it seems to me highly probable that Testimony is authentic--that, in other words, Shostakovich and Volkov did indeed have numerous conversations that formed the basis for a first-person memoir ghostwritten by Volkov and subsequently approved by the composer. Whether it is "authentic-and-false" was not my primary concern; I leave that to the consideration of more qualified persons. But surely it is to the point that Testimony is believed to be both authentic and true by a great many people who, unlike Richard Taruskin or Laurel Fay, knew Shostakovich intimately, including his son and daughter. As it happens, Shostakovich Reconsidered is only partly about Fay's
article. The bulk of the book is devoted to an equally detailed refutation
of what Ho and Feofanov believe to be gross misrepresentations by Western
commentators of key aspects of Shostakovich's life and work. Mr. Taruskin
himself comes in for frequent and severe criticism, not least for his
oft-quoted remark that the composer was "perhaps Soviet Russia's
most loyal son"; in his introduction, for example, Vladimir Ashkenazy
responds to this fantastic claim by suggesting that "this musicologist
. . . simply does not possess enough intelligence" to know better.
One can hardly blame Mr. Taruskin for passing over such criticisms in
silence, but they suggest that what he has to say about Shostakovich
Reconsidered--not to mention my own article--should be viewed with due
skepticism.
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