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Russian
Roulette Martin
Kettle
The writer Allen Ho calls Testimony "probably the most controversial book in the history of music." Few would disagree, even if they would then go on to disagree about almost everything else that the book contains. More than 20 years after its first publication, Testimony - or, to give it its more nuanced full title, Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov - remains an astonishingly divisive book. And the imminent publication of a new study of Shostakovich by one of Volkov's principal critics seems certain to deepen the festering divisions still further. The protagonists for and against Testimony are as intransigent and irreconcilable today as they were way back in 1979. In learned and sometimes not-so-learned articles, in increasingly long and heavy books, and on some of the hottest non-pornographic websites on the internet, the armies continue to fight a sleepless conflict for the soul of the great Russian composer. The venom with which the two sides routinely abuse one another has to be read to be believed. The cold war may be 10 years dead in the political world, but it thrives undiminished in the argument over Shostakovich. Terms such as Stalinist, McCarthyite, revisionist and anti-revisionist fly regularly back and forth between the battle-lines. Charges of bias, incompetence, fraud, and intellectual dishonesty make up the everyday stuff of the unending hostilities. Even a brief exposure to the Shostakovich controversy makes one yearn for the peace, civility and aesthetic refinement of the Wagner-and-the-Jews debate. When he died in August 1975, Shostakovich was recognised, though somewhat grudgingly in some western circles, as a hugely talented composer of uneven output, including 15 symphonies and as many string quartets. But he was still widely seen as the Soviet Union's man. Though he had been out of official favour at various times - notably during Stalin's "anti-formalist" clampdowns in the 1930s and again in the late 1940s - the presence in his 147-strong list of works of such compositions as Glory to Our Soviet Homeland, to say nothing of symphonies commemorating the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, tended to cast him in many eyes as an irreversibly implicated artist. The publication of Volkov's book in the west - to this day it has never
been published in Russia - turned that view on its head. Based on a
series of conversations with the composer, Testimony depicted an altogether
different Shostakovich. This Shostakovich was a troubled, angry, mordant,
deeply ambivalent inner rebel against the Soviet system. The first concerned the authenticity of the document published by Volkov under Shostakovich's name. Was it, in short, genuine? The second focused on the truthfulness of the Volkov/Shostakovich account. Was the book, in other words, a reliable source about the composer's life and music? Two years ago, the musicologists Dmitry Feofanev and Allan Ho mounted the most extended defence yet - their supporters would say the most comprehensive vindication - of Volkov. The centrepiece of their book, Shostakovich Reconsidered, was a 300-page rebuttal of the repeated charges that Volkov's book is not genuine. The critics, says Ho, "have no facts with which to respond to our book". The pianist/conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy, who wrote an introduction to Shostakovich Reconsidered, said last year that Volkov was "an absolutely genuine presentation of Shostakovich's mind". This year it is the turn of Volkov's critics to produce a heavyweight response. The latest episode in music's very own Twenty Years War is the publication of Laurel Fay's book, Shostakovich: A Life, which came out in the United States last year and is published later this month by Oxford University Press (£25). Fay's book has been coolly reviewed in the New York Times, mauled in the Washington Post, and monumentally attacked by the British writer Ian MacDonald, in an online denunciation on his Shostakovichiana website. Try though they may to move on, the two sides remain locked in battle just as they have been for decades. No one has done more to challenge the cases for Volkov than Fay. As early as 1980, when she was a relatively unknown recent graduate student, Fay charged in a review article that Volkov had lifted large parts of his supposedly interview-based volume from already published articles by Shostakovich. Ever since then, Volkov's defenders - though only rarely Volkov himself - have fought to exonerate the book from Fay's charges and, even more significantly, from the implication that Testimony was in some important sense an unbelievable account, perhaps published more for political than musicological reasons. In her book, Fay claims to stand above the argument over whether Testimony is genuine. "Even were its claim to authenticity not in doubt," she writes, "Testimony would still furnish a poor source for the serious biographer." Yet when I met her in New York last month, Fay told me that she is far from done with the issue. "I am going to revisit the authenticity issue again in print next year," she said. "Was it a document with which Shostakovich willingly collaborated and which he wanted published? I don't think it was." Her riposte to Ho and Feofanov will be published in St Petersburg, in Russian, in a volume on Shostakovich edited by Lyudmila Kovnatskaya. "Testimony is identical in every respect, word for word, even down to the punctuation, with those parts which Shostakovich published during his lifetime," Fay continues to assert. "The basic point is the same now as it was in 1980. We haven't been given adequate evidence that this is authentic. I can counter all the arguments in Shostakovich Reconsidered." One of the mysteries in the whole argument is Volkov's continuing reluctance to defend his book against the remaining critics. When he appeared at a New York conference last February, Volkov said it was his "first and very probably last" public statement about Testimony, which he insisted was "an absolutely honest book". Attacking Fay as "out to get me", he claimed that he had not even read her 1980 review. "I don't have a view of Volkov as a person," Fay told me last month. "I am a scholar and I am interested in posterity. I know Volkov had conversations with Shostakovich. I think there are parts of the book that reflect those conversations. But a lot of it is the musical gossip that was current at the time. Testimony does reflect the kinds of stories and anecdotes that were floating around the musical community in Russia. In the end, though, people must check what was correct and what was incorrect." In truth, the argument about Volkov's book was never exclusively about authenticity. Even without reading between the lines of much of the written material on Shostakovich, it has long been clear that the argument is still just as much about the wider reliability of Volkov's account. "Writing about Shostakovich remains laced with political and moral subtexts," says Fay in the introduction to her biography. "At its most extreme, it simply replaces one orthodoxy with another, reversing the polarities of the old, shopworn Soviet cliches; the true-believing communist citizen-composer is inverted into an equally unconvincing caricature of a lifelong closet dissident." Fay was more forthright in her criticisms when we talked. "They want to read his music as encoded dissidence," she charges. "I don't. They start from the position of knowing the answers. I start from the position of asking the questions. I don't automatically assume that his 'Soviet' music is ironic. I allow that he might have been serious. The basic thing is that he was a great composer." Shostakovich's life and work, Fay insists, is "not a black-and-white subject". While many former Soviet musicians, including Ashkenazy, have endorsed the Volkov portrait, she acknowledges, others in a position to know have not done so. The soprano Galina Vizhnevskaya, for example, said that the Shostakovich in the book was not the Shostakovich she knew. Even Maxim Shostakovich, the composer's son, remains equivocal. Equivocation, though, remains a luxury in this intensely charged argument. During our conversation, I asked Fay why on earth she and her fellow sceptics never seem to have met any of their accusers. Her embattled reply epitomises a continuing cold war-era gulf. "I don't have any reason not to," said Fay, "but not while they're defaming me, not while they're throwing mud at me. I'm not going to be told I'm a liar and unethical just because I think they are wrong. These people aren't really interested in Shostakovich at all."
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