MY personal acquaintance with Shostakovich began in 1960, when I was the first to review the premiere of his Eighth Quartet in a Leningrad newspaper. Shostakovich was then fifty-four. I was sixteen. I was his fanatic admirer.
It is impossible to study music in Russia and not come across the name Shostakovich in childhood. I remember when, in 1955, my parents returned in great excitement from a chamber concert: Shostakovich and several singers had performed his “Jewish Cycle” for the first time. In a country that had just been lashed by a vicious wave of anti-Semitism, a prominent composer had dared publicly to present a work that spoke of the Jews with pity and compassion. This was both a musical and a public event.
That was how I came to know the name. My acquaintance with the music came several years later. In September 1958, Yevgeny Mravinsky conducted Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony at the Leningrad Philharmonic. The symphony (written after the 1956 Hungarian uprising) is about the people, and rulers, and their juxtaposition; the second movement harshly depicts the execution of defenseless people with naturalistic authenticity. The poetics of shock. For the first time in my life, I left a concert thinking about others instead of myself. To this day, this is the main strength of Shostakovich’s music for me.
I threw myself into studying all scores of Shostakovich that I could get. In the library, furtively, the piano reduction of the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District was taken out from under stacks of books. Special permission was required before I could get the music of the First Piano Sonata. The early, “left” Shostakovich was still officially banned. He was still defamed in music history classes and in textbooks. Young musicians met secretly, in small groups, to study his music.
Every premiere precipitated a struggle—hidden or overt—in the press, in musical circles, in the corridors of power. Shostakovich would rise and make his awkward way to the stage to respond to the loud calls from the audience. My idol would walk past me, his small head with its cowlick held carefully in balance. He looked very helpless, a misleading impression, as I later learned. I burned to help him in any way I could.
The opportunity to speak out came after the first performance of the Eighth Quartet, an extraordinary work and in a sense his musical autobiography. In October 1960, the newspaper printed my ecstatic review. Shostakovich read it—he always read the articles about his premieres closely. I was introduced to him. He said a few polite phrases and I was in heaven. Over the next few years I wrote several other articles about his music. They were all published and they all played their part, great or small, in the contemporary musical process.
I came to know Shostakovich during the years when he was perhaps most dissatisfied with himself. One could get the impression that he was trying to distance himself from his own music. The inner—not the external—tragedy of his situation became clear to me when, in the spring of 1965, I helped to organize a festival of Shostakovich’s music. It was the first festival of its kind in Leningrad, the composer’s native city; symphonies, choruses, and many chamber works were performed. I spoke with Shostakovich about festival-related activities in his rather elaborate hotel room. He was obviously nervous and avoided questions about his latest works. With a wry grin, he said he was writing the film score for a biography of Karl Marx. Then he stopped talking, and drummed his fingers feverishly on a table.
The only concert of the festival that Shostakovich was willing to approve was the evening devoted to his students’ works. He strongly implied that I should agree with him about its importance. It was impossible not to obey. I began studying the music of his students, burrowing deeply into the manuscripts. One of them in particular caught my eye: Veniamin Fleishman’s opera, Rothschild’s Violin.
Fleishman had entered Shostakovich’s class before the Second World War. When the front moved up to Leningrad itself, he joined the Volunteer Brigade. These were condemned men and almost none returned. Fleishman left behind no grave and no compositions except for Rothschild’s Violin.
The story of this opera, based on a Chekhov story, is full of tantalizing loose ends. It is known that Fleishman, at Shostakovich’s suggestion, had begun composing an opera of that name. Before he left for the front, he allegedly finished the reduction. But the only thing available to researchers is the score, written from beginning to end in Shostakovich’s characteristic nervous handwriting. Shostakovich maintained that he had merely orchestrated the work of his late student. The opera is a marvel, pure and subtle. Chekhov’s bittersweet lyricism is presented in a style that could be described thus: mature Shostakovich. I decided that Rothschild’s Violin had to be staged.
I could not have done it without Shostakovich, of course; he helped in every possible way. He could not come to Leningrad in April 1968 for the premiere; his son, Maxim, the conductor, came in his stead. It was a stormy and rousing success with glorious reviews. A marvelous opera was born onstage, and with it a new opera theater—the Experimental Studio of Chamber Opera. I was the artistic director of the Studio, the first such group in the Soviet Union. A week before the premiere I had turned twenty-four.
Then the official administrators of culture accused all of us of Zionism: poor Chekhov, poor Fleishman. Their resolution read: “The staging of the opera pours water on the enemy’s mill”—and it meant an irreversible closing of the production. This was a defeat for Shostakovich as well as for me. He wrote me in despair: “Let’s hope that Fleishman’s Violin will eventually get its due recognition.” But the opera was never staged again.
For Shostakovich Rothschild’s Violin represented unhealed guilt, pity, pride, and anger: neither Fleishman nor his work was to be resurrected. The defeat brought us closer together. When I began work on a book on young Leningrad composers, I wrote to Shostakovich with a request for a preface. He replied at once, “I’ll be happy to meet with you,” and suggested a time and place. A leading music publisher agreed to do the book.
According to my plan, Shostakovich would write about the ties between the young Leningraders and the Petersburg school of composition. At our meeting I began talking to him about his own youth, and at first met with some resistance. He preferred to talk about his students. I had to resort to trickery: at every convenient point I drew parallels, awakening associations, reminding him of people and events.
Shostakovich met me more than halfway. What he finally told me about the old conservatory days was extraordinary. Everything that I had read and heard previously was like a watercolor faded beyond recognition. Shostakovich’s stories were quick, incisive pencil sketches—sharp, clear, and pointed.
Figures familiar to me from textbooks lost their sentimental halos in his tales. I grew very enthusiastic and so, without realizing it, did Shostakovich. I had not expected to hear anything like this. After all, in the Soviet Union the rarest and most valuable thing is memory. It had been trampled down for decades; people knew better than to keep diaries or hold on to letters. When the “great terror” began in the 1930s, frightened citizens destroyed their personal archives, and with them their memory. What was henceforth to be thought of as memory was defined by each day’s newspaper. History was being rewritten with dizzying speed.
A man without a memory is a corpse. So many had passed before me, these living corpses, who remembered only officially sanctioned events—and only in the officially sanctioned way.
I used to think that Shostakovich expressed himself frankly only in his music. We had all come across articles in the official press with his name at the bottom.* No musician took these high-flown, empty declarations seriously. People from a more intimate circle could even tell which “literary adviser” of the Composers’ Union had stitched together which article. An enormous paper mountain had been erected which almost buried Shostakovich the man. The official mask sat tight on his face.
That’s why I was so stunned when his face peered out from behind the mask. Cautiously. Suspiciously. Shostakovich had a characteristic way of speaking—in short sentences, very simply, often repetitiously. But these were living words, living scenes. It was clear that the composer no longer consoled himself with the thought that music could express everything and did not require verbal commentary. His works now spoke with mounting power of only one thing: impending death. In the late 1960s, Shostakovich’s articles in the official press were preventing the audience he most cared about from truly listening to his music when it was played. When that final door was to close behind him, would anybody even hear it?
My book on the young Leningrad composers was published in 1971 and was sold out immediately. (Until I left the Soviet Union in 1976, it was used throughout the country in the teaching of contemporary Soviet music.) Shostakovich’s preface had been cut severely, and it dealt only with the present—there were no reminiscences.
This was the final powerful impetus for him to give the world his version of the events that had unfolded around him in the course of half a century. We decided to work on his recollections of these events. “I must do this, I must,” he would say. He wrote me, in one letter: “You must continue what has been begun.” We met and talked more and more frequently.
Why did he choose me? First, I was young, and it was before youth, more than anyone else, that Shostakovich wanted to justify himself. I was devoted to his music and to him, I didn’t tell tales, I didn’t boast about his kindness to me. Shostakovich liked my work and he liked my book on the young Leningraders; he wrote me about it several times.
His desire to remember, which would arise impulsively, had to be nurtured constantly. When I spoke with him about his dead friends, he was amazed to hear me talk about people and events he had forgotten. “This is the most intelligent man of the new generation” was his final evaluation of me. I repeat these words here not out of vanity, but because I want to explain how this complex man came to a difficult decision. For many years it had seemed to him that the past had disappeared forever. He had to grow accustomed to the idea that an unofficial record of events did still exist. “Do you not think that history is really a whore?” he once asked me. The question reeked of a hopelessness that I could not comprehend; I was convinced of the opposite. And this, too, was important to Shostakovich.
This is how we worked. We sat down at a table in his study, and he offered me a drink (which I always refused). Then I began asking questions, which he answered briefly and, at first, reluctantly. Sometimes I had to keep repeating the same question in different forms. Shostakovich needed time to warm up.
Gradually his pale face would turn pink and he would grow excited. I would go on with the questioning, taking notes in the shorthand that I had developed during my years as a journalist. (We discarded the idea of taping for a variety of reasons, chief among them the fact that Shostakovich would stiffen before a microphone like a rabbit caught in a snake’s gaze. It was a reflex reaction to his obligatory official radio speeches.)
I found a successful formula to help Shostakovich speak more freely than he was accustomed to, even with close friends: “Don’t reminisce about yourself; talk about others.” Of course, Shostakovich reminisced about himself, but he reached himself by talking about others, finding the reflection of himself in them. This “mirrored style” is typical of Petersburg, a city on water, shimmering, spectral. It was also a favorite device of Anna Akhmatova. Shostakovich revered Akhmatova. Her portrait, a gift from me, hung in his apartment.
At first we met in Shostakovich’s cottage near Leningrad, where the Composers’ Union had a resort. Shostakovich went there to rest. It was not very convenient and dragged out our work, making each resumption difficult emotionally. The work went smoothly once I moved to Moscow in 1972, taking a position with Sovetskaya muzyka, the country’s leading musical journal.
I became a senior editor of Sovetskaya muzyka. The main objective of my move had been to be closer to Shostakovich, who lived in the building that housed the journal’s offices. And even though Shostakovich was frequently out of town, we could meet more often.* Work would begin with a phone call from him—usually early in the morning, when the office was still empty—his jangling, hoarse tenor voice asking, “Are you free now? Could you come up here?” And the exhausting hours of cautious exploration would begin.
Shostakovich’s manner of responding to questions was highly stylized. Some phrases had apparently been polished over many years. He was obviously imitating his literary idol and friend, the writer Mikhail Zoshchenko, a master of precisely refined ironic narrative (translations cannot transmit the fine, beadwork subtlety of his writing). Phrases from Gogol, Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, and Ilf and Petrov found their way into his conversation. Ironic sentences were spoken without a trace of a smile. Conversely, when an agitated Shostakovich began a deeply felt discussion, a nervous smile twitched across his face.
He often contradicted himself. Then the true meaning of his words had to be guessed, extracted from a box with three false bottoms. My persistence waged battle with his crankiness. I would leave, wrung out. The mound of shorthand notes was growing. I read them over and over, trying to construct from the penciled scribbles the multifigured composition that I knew was there.
I divided up the collected material into sustained sections, combined as seemed appropriate; then I showed these sections to Shostakovich, who approved my work. What had been created in these pages clearly had a profound effect on him. Gradually, I shaped this great array of reminiscence into arbitrary parts and had them typed. Shostakovich read and signed each part.
It was clear to both of us that this final text could not be published in the U.S.S.R.; several attempts I made in that direction ended in failure. I took measures to get the manuscript to the West. Shostakovich consented. His only insistent desire was that the book be published posthumously. “After my death, after my death,” he said often. Shostakovich was not prepared to undergo new ordeals; he was too weak too worn out by his illness.
In November 1974, Shostakovich invited me to his home. We talked for a while and then he asked me where the manuscript was. “In the West,” I replied. “Our agreement is in force.” Shostakovich said, “Good.” I told him I would prepare a statement to the effect that his memoirs would appear in print only after his death (and subsequently I sent him this letter of agreement). At the end of our conversation, he said he wanted to inscribe a photograph for me. He wrote: “To dear Solomon Moiseyevich Volkov, in fond remembrance. D. Shostakovich. 13 XI 1974.” Then, just as I was about to leave, he said, “Wait. Give me the photo.” And he added: “A reminder of our conversations about Glazunov, Zoshchenko, Meyerhold. D.S.” And he said, “This will help you.”
Soon thereafter, I applied to the Soviet authorities for permission to leave for the West. In August 1975 Shostakovich died. In June 1976 I came to New York, determined to have this book published. My thanks go to the courageous people (some of whose names I do not even know) who helped bring the manuscript here safely and intact. I have been supported since my arrival by the Russian Institute at Columbia University, where I became a Research Associate in 1976; contact with my colleagues there has been both beneficial and rewarding. Ann Harris and Erwin Glikes of Harper & Row were immediately responsive to the manuscript, and I am grateful to them for their advice and attentiveness. Harry Torczyner, my attorney, gave me invaluable help.
And finally, I thank you, my distant friend who must remain nameless—without your constant involvement and encouragement, this book would not exist.
Solomon Volkov
New York, June 1979