The Composer and the Commissars

Terry Teachout
October 1999

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TWENTY YEARS ago, a book appeared that promised to re write the history of modern Russian music. Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich purported to be a first-person account of the life and thoughts of the Soviet Union's most famous composer, "as related to and edited by" Solomon Volkov, a Russian music journalist who had emigrated to the U.S. in 1976.¹

Shostakovich had long been regarded by Western observers as an abjectly loyal subject of the Kremlin. But in Testimony, he not only declared his hatred of Soviet totalitarianism--"Stalin and Hitler were spiritual relatives," he wrote--but also revealed that many of his best-known works were pieces of program music in which he had secretly sought to depict the horrors of life under Stalin:

[World War II] brought much new sorrow and much new destruction, but I haven't forgotten the terrible prewar years. That is what all my symphonies, beginning with the Fourth, are about. . . . The majority of my symphonies are tombstones. Too many of our people died and were buried in places unknown to anyone, not even their relatives. It happened to many of my friends. . . . I'm willing to write a composition for each of the victims, but that's impossible, and that's why I dedicate my music to them all.

Testimony immediately attracted worldwide attention, and its authenticity was just as immediately challenged by Soviet cultural commissars and their foreign mouthpieces. But Volkov's explanation of how the book came to be written seemed credible. It was, he said, based on an extended series of face-to-face interviews conducted with Shostakovich in the early 70's in the hope of producing a memoir that would ultimately be published in the West. The composer had affixed an inscription--"Read. D. Shosta ko vich"--to the first page of each chapter of the 404-page manuscript, thus attesting to his approval of the finished product; and the manu script was then smuggled out of the Soviet Union prior to his death in 1975.

There the matter stood--until the publication in 1980 of a scholarly paper seeking to show that Testimony was a fraud. In "Shostakovich Versus Volkov: Whose `Testimony'?," which appeared in the Russian Review, a journal published by the impeccably anti-Communist Hoover Institution, Laurel E. Fay asserted that large parts of Testimony had been lifted from earlier articles by Shosta kovich, and that seven of the book's eight chapters opened with sections based on this material. This latter fact led Fay to suggest that Solomon Volkov had somehow hoodwinked Shostakovich into authenticating a manuscript that looked like a compilation of his official writings but also contained spurious first-person revelations concocted by Volkov himself.

Fay's charges were eventually taken up by the eminent American musicologist Richard Taruskin, who, in "The Opera and the Dictator," a much-discussed essay published in the New Republic in 1989, stated flatly that "any proper scholar could see" Testimony was a "fraud." As for Volkov, he refused to respond either to Fay or to Taruskin--or to later attacks--and so critics and commentators unfamiliar with the original Russian-language documents were left with little choice but to assume that his book was not what it claimed to be.²

But the debate was still not over. Last year, Allan B. Ho, a professor of music at Southern Illinois University, and Dmitry Feofanov, an émigré pian ist and attorney, jointly edited a collection of essays, Sho s takovich Reconsidered,³ the bulk of which was given over to their own detailed refutation of the case against Volkov and Testimony, prepared with Volkov's approval and cooperation. The result has been a violent dispute among American musicologists and Russian émigrés, the former largely siding with Fay and Taruskin and the latter with Ho and Feofanov.

Not surprisingly, many observers have now concluded that it is simply not possible to say with certainty who wrote Testimony; hence the general lack of interest in Shosta kovich Reconsidered, which was largely overlooked by the nonspecialist American press. But in fact, the debate over the book's credibility is of high cultural significance, for it will necessarily have a major impact on the long-term reputation of one of the greatest composers of the 20th century--as well as on what future historians will have to say about the nature of musical life in the Soviet Union.

ONE MAJOR difficulty in assessing this case is that Laurel Fay's 1980 paper against Testimony has been more talked about than read. It was published in a scholarly journal of small circulation, and has never appeared in book form. For this reason, a summary of its contents is in order.

In brief, Fay's case against Volkov rested on her discovery that Testimony contains seven "extensive passages" that are "verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions of memoirs previously published by Shosta kovich." She presented one of these passages alongside its apparent source, an article by Shostakovich published in the Soviet magazine Literaturnaia gazeta in 1965 and reprinted two years later in a collection of the composer's writings. According to Fay, it was "utterlyinconceivable" that Shostakovich could have "memorized his previously published statements and then reproduced them exactly in his conversations with Volkov." Given the additional fact that all seven disputed passages were located "at the beginnings of chapters," where the inscription, "Read. D. Shostakovich," is "alleged to appear," she made this damning inference: "Is it possible that Volkov misrepresented the nature and contents of the book to Shostakovich [emphasis added] just as he may be misrepresenting them to the reader?"

Volkov's claim to have interviewed Shostakovich, Fay pointed out, "rests exclusively on his own `testimony,'" there having been no witnesses to their meetings. In addition, Volkov did not tape these interviews, but instead took down the composer's responses in shorthand notes that he later worked up into a first-person narrative. Since Volkov was unable to produce the notes (he said he had been forced to leave them behind in the Soviet Union), and Harper & Row refused to allow Fay to inspect the Russian-language manuscript of Testimony, she felt obliged to conclude that the book's authenticity was "very much in doubt."

NO WONDER that, at first glance, it appeared that Fay had indeed, in Taruskin's phrase, "absolutely demolished" the credibility of Testimony. But even before Ho and Feo fanov came along to rebut her, things were not so simple. In the years following the book's initial publication, many émigrés who had known Shostakovich told stories about him that closely resembled the "conversations" reported by Volkov. In particular, they consistently claimed that he intended his music to be understood as a coded criticism of the Soviet regime, and that it was so understood by Russian audiences.

With the collapse of Communism, such claims began to be heard with increasing frequency from inside the former Soviet Union. Elizabeth Wilson's Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, published in 1994, contains dozens of detailed and specific first-person reminiscences of Shostakovich that are consistent with Testimony. Typical of these is the statement of Fyodor Druzhinin, the violist of the Beethoven Quartet, the ensemble that premiered most of Shostakovich's string quartets:

People who lived in Shosta kovich's epoch have no need to dig in the archives or to marvel at the evidence of repressions and executions and murders. It is all there in his music.

• The existence of Testimony was reported as early as 1976 in the samizdat publication, A Chronicle of Current Events, as was the fact that the KGB had already interrogated Irina Shostakovich, the composer's second wife, about the contents of the book.

• In order to keep the manuscript out of the hands of KGB agents who were attempting to steal it, Volkov subsequently deposited it in a Swiss bank vault. Though Laurel Fay was not allowed to inspect the actual document, it has since been examined by various Russian émigrés who knew Shostakovich, none of whom believes it to be a forgery.

• Unable to purloin the man uscript, the KGB instead launched a disinformation campaign intended to persuade Western journalists that Volkov and Shostakovich were not close acquaintances but had met only four times (Testimony contains four photographs of the two men together). But several people have since confirmed that Volkov's interviews with Shostakovich were common knowledge in Russian musical circles at the time they were taking place. In addition, Flora Litvinova, a friend of Shostakovich, recalled that late in life the composer had said to her, "You know, Flora, I met a wonderful young man--a Leningrad musicologist. . . . We now meet constantly, and I tell him everything I remember about my works and myself. He writes it down, and at a subsequent meeting I look it over."

• The eight signatures Shos ta kovich affixed to the manuscript of Testimony were all reproduced in the German and Finnish editions of the book, and Maxim and Galina Shos ta kovich, the composer's son and daughter, have confirmed that they are in fact in his handwriting.

• Fay's claim that Volkov deceived Shostakovich as to the content of the chapters he signed rests on her contention that seven of them open with material derived from previously published sources, none of which could be considered "controversial or inflammatory." But this is not true of the book's first chapter, whose seventh and eighth sentences read as follows: "Looking back, I see nothing but ruins, only mountains of corpses. And I do not wish to build new Potemkin villages on these ruins."

• Numerous friends of Shosta kovich have attested to his photographic memory for both words and music--he could quote "whole chunks of Chekhov or Gogol" verbatim--as well as his tendency to repeat favorite anecdotes word for word. Ho and Feofanov suggest that this may account for the "self-plagiarized" passages included in Testimony. Moreover, not all of the parallel passages resemble each other nearly so closely as the lone example quoted by Fay.

• Finally, while it is true that Sho stakovich'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.

THE CONTINUING debate over Testimony has come to resemble the longstanding argument over whe ther Whittaker Chambers was telling the truth when he testified in 1948 that Alger Hiss had been a Soviet agent. As yet, Laurel Fay has had nothing of substance to say about Shostakovich Reconsidered, while Richard Taruskin has stated publicly that he still believes Testimony to be fraudulent (though he points out that he has never said the entire book is a fraud); other musicologists who initially aligned themselves with Fay and Taruskin have similarly refused to change their minds, in spite of the compelling evidence amassed by Ho and Feofanov.

How can this refusal be explained? No doubt some older, Left-leaning academics find it inconceivable that Shostakovich could have been anything other than a supporter of a regime with which they themselves sympathized. As for Fay, "Shostakovich Versus Volkov: Whose 'Testimony'?" is the rock on which she has built her subsequent career as an academic expert on Shostakovich; it is hard to imagine her ever admitting to second thoughts. Certainly she does no such thing in her forthcoming biography of the composer, which will be published next month.⁴ In the introduction, she summarily asserts that the authenticity of Testimony "was never properly vetted" and "remains doubtful"; the contents of Shostakovich Reconsidered are similarly dismissed in a five-line footnote as nothing more than "third-party endorsements and circumstantial evidence."

Taruskin's view of Testimony, by contrast, is more nuanced, if less coherent. For while he continues to claim that Volkov lied about the book's authenticity, he simultaneously appears to believe that Sho stakovich saw the book as an opportunity to whitewash his past, and especially his record of cooperation with the Soviet authorities:

It is natural that latter-day dissidents would like him for an ancestor. It is also understandable, should it ever turn out that Shostakovich was the author of Testimony, that he, who though mercilessly threatened never suffered a dissident's trials, should have wished, late in life, to portray himself in another light. . . . A great deal of evidence suggests that in his later years Sho sta kovich became desperately obsessed with his historical image, and with the theme of self-justification. For he did have a history of collaboration to live down.

Now, it is perfectly true that Shostakovich never spoke out against the Soviet regime; to the contrary, he publicly conducted himself at all times as a Soviet loyalist, and by all accounts loathed himself for doing so. ("I've been a whore, I am and always will be a whore," he told a friend.) But what Taruskin refuses to credit--ignoring the near-universal testimony of countless Russians in a position to know better--is the possibility that Shostakovich was also a "secret dissident" who not only incorporated harsh depictions of Soviet life into his ostensibly abstract scores, but fully expected Russian musicians and audiences to understand what he was "saying" in those scores.

Taruskin rejects this possibility in part because he believes that any attempt to "explain" music by such crudely metaphorical means constitutes the grossest kind of anti-aesthetic reductionism--and here, he has a point. Prior to the publication of Testimony, it was widely taken for granted that Shostakovich's music reflected in some meaningful sense his status as a loyal Communist; afterward, it came to be no less widely assumed that it reflected in an equally meaningful sense his status as a secret dissident. The most extreme formulation of this latter view is that of Ian MacDonald, a contributor to Shostakovich Reconsidered, who argues that "a factual and imaginative grasp of the [political] context of Shostakovich's music is not merely advisable but essential to understanding it."

Can this really be true? Music is a nonverbal art form, whose "meaning" is radically ambiguous and not easily subdued to the demands of politics of any kind. Moreover, the argument that it is impossible to understand Shostakovich's music without understanding its political context and implications is refuted by the many powerful and compelling recorded performances of that music prior to the publication of Testimony.⁵ Whether written by an (agonized) Soviet loyalist or a secret dissident, the music is the same, and, irrespective of what it "meant," it continues to impress listeners the world over as among the greatest composed in this century.

So great is Shostakovich's music, indeed, that Russian musicians persecuted by the Soviets for overt acts of dissidence believe that it would have fully justified acts of collaboration on the composer's part. As the cellist-conductor Mstislav Rostropovich recently told a reporter for the Wall Street Journal:

I'm a performer. If I don't play the Mendelssohn Sonata in my life, what does it matter? Nothing. If Goskonsert [the Soviet concert agency] cancels my tours after I write a letter for Solzhenitsyn in October 1969, that's nothing, because I'm coming here. But if Shostakovich could not compose his symphonies, that's a loss to our world. And he understood this perfectly.

What Shostakovich himself thought his symphonies "meant" is, of course, a different matter--which brings us back to the problem of the authenticity of his published memoirs. No doubt there will always be those who persist in questioning the role played by Solomon Volkov in the writing of Testimony, just as there are still a handful of diehards who believe Whittaker Chambers was lying about Alger Hiss. But the evidence presented by Allan Ho and Dmitry Feofanov in Shostakovich Reconsidered, if not absolutely dispositive, still appears sufficiently convincing to ensure that Testimony will henceforth be generally acknowledged as what Volkov has always said it was: the autobiography of Dmitri Shostakovich.

¹ Originally published by Harper & Row, Testimony is currently available in a paperback reprint (Limelight, 289 pp., $18.95).

² Four years ago I myself wrote in the pages of COMMENTARY that Fay had "demonstrated conclusively" that Testimony could not be accepted as reliable ("The Problem of Shostakovich," February 1995).

³ Toccata Press, 787 pp., $74.95.

⁴ Shostakovich: A Life. Oxford, 464 pp. $35.00.

⁵ Two of particular note by Western artists are Leonard Bernstein's 1959 recording with the New York Philharmonic of the Fifth Symphony in D Minor, Op. 47 (Sony SMK 47615) and Herbert von Karajan's 1967 recording with the Berlin Philharmonic of the Tenth Symphony in E Minor, Op. 93 (DGG 429 716-2GGA).

TERRY TEACHOUT, COMMENTARY'S music critic, is a contributor to Time magazine.

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