Shostakovitch's Memoirs

Dimitri Shostakovich's memoirs, Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, are one of the most intimate and insightful depictions of Stalinism ever recorded.  In the interviews Shostakovitch apparently conducted with Solomon Volkov, the brilliant musicologist and cultural historian, the great composer reveals himself to be one of the most caustic satirists the Soviet Union ever produced.  With dark humor, and tremendous antipathy for every aspect of authoritarian rule, Shostakovitch carefully explains how a dictator in a totalitarian setting can degrade himself, his immediate circle, and almost everyone else in his realm.

The composer's verbal style, as Volkov points out in his introduction, owes a lot to that genius of everyday Soviet reality, Mikhail Zoshchenko (and, in my opinion, to the indirect influence of longstanding Jewish comedic traditions).  The composer's subject matter, of course, is primarily music, and Russian music in particular.  To be sure, Shostakovitch spends a great deal of time on his mentors and musical influences.  However, the subtext in almost any of these discussion is the corrupting influence of despotic power.  The state determined which composers were funded, and which were not.  More significantly, Stalin saw himself as the arbiter of good taste in music, just as he saw himself as the ultimate arbiter of theater, literature, military strategy, and every other field of human endeavor.

The politicization of music affected every stage of Shostakovitch's Soviet career in music.  His music became the symbol of Russian resistance to Nazi aggression in World War II.  He was both lauded by the Soviets as a symbol of Soviet artistic excellence, and pilloried for his so-called "formalism" and allegiance to "bourgeois" forms of creativity.

To be sure, there is no historical record of Shostakovitch "speaking truth to power" against Stalin.  Shostakovitch sometimes asserts that he often did more than his contemporaries to avoid the kind of flattery than many of his colleagues embraced.  However. Shostakovitch's critique of dictatorial power is predicated on the fact that heroes did not, and could not, have existed in Stalin's reign.  His belief is that any public display of integrity would have been  met by unshakable and bloody force.

In many ways, Shostakovitch's Testimony can be profitably paired with Brian Boeck's new biography of Mikhail Sholokhov, entitled Stalin's Scribe:  Literature, Ambition, and Survival:  The Life of Mikhail Sholokhov.  For both the famous composer and the Nobel Prize winner seemed to have existed at the intersection between loyalty and disloyalty. And both men criticized aspects of Soviet power even as they became its very incarnation to internal and external audiences.  Sholokhov often spoke out much more vigorously on behalf of Soviet leaders thank Shostakovitch.  On the other hand, he also took greater risks, pointing out collectivization problems or advocating for political allies (who he genuinely believed were helping people).  Combined, the memoirs and the literary biography point out just how important culture was to Stalin and his successors. They also remind that of the moral complexity of continuing to make art in the midst of terror.

One should also note that there is some controversy about the accuracy of these memoirs.  A quick look on the Internet reveals that some have accused the editor, Volkov, of making up material that suited him.  Even if this is so, which is perhaps unlikely, the "Memoirs" would remain a valuable artifact on Stalinism.  For someone--whether Shostakovitch or Volkov hardly matters--produced a beautifully expressed exposition of the relationship between high culture and Soviet power.

Everyday St. Petersburg

I’m scheduled to go to return to return to St. Petersburg in about a month.  If all goes accordingly to plan, my two-week administrative Fulbright will take me to Kaliningrad, Archangelsk, Moscow, and St. Petersburg.  As some of my readers may know, I am not conversant in Russian and have only been to Russia once in my life.  On my single visit to Russia I stayed in St. Petersburg, which quickly became my favorite place in the world.  To a large extent, my love of the city is predicated on my fascination with what Solomon Volkov called “the myth of St. Petersburg,” which focuses on a long series of interconnecting legends of monarchical power, aesthetic and political inventiveness, and resistance to Nazi (and even Stalinist) totalitarianism.  The power of the St. Petersburg myth rests on the firm foundations of dozens of brilliant historical and quintessentially modern actors, including Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, George Balanchine, Igor Stravinsky, and Anna Ahkmatova, as well as on Leningrad’s 900 day siege.  As I walked up and down the Nevsky Prospect, or took a boat tour of the city’s famed canals, I hardly needed to interact with the “real” St. Petersburg at all.   At first, I thought that the St. Petersburg I visited two years ago was oddly historical.  Only interacting with people when I needed to order a sandwich or ask for the way to a hidden museum entrance, I was the archetypal tourist, staring at the city’s bridges, cathedrals, and palaces—many of which were utterly impervious to time.  But perhaps my second visit to St. Petersburg will allow me, or force me, to catch at least a glimpse of life beyond the myth.    This is of course easier said than done.  I have encountered St. Petersburg many times, but always through the lens of literature.  These encounters, and even those which are mediated by the work of literary theorists, are in a sense of a form of concentrated mythology.  The house museums in St. Petersburg are a case in point.  My first visit to St. Petersburg put me in one writer’s flat after another.  Genius (the genius of Blok, Ahkmatova, Pushkin, Nabokov, and Dostoyevsky—I never could locate Leskov’s pad) permeated the city. 

If there’s any academic anecdote to the myth of St. Petersburg, it is certainly Catriona Kelly’s recent book, St. Petersburg:  Shadows of the Past.  In this book, Kelly does her best to circumvent the city’s legacy of aesthetic and political brilliance.  Instead, she takes an almost anthropological tour of the city, explaining how ordinary Russian and Soviet citizens lived everyday life.  Kelly’s tour de horizon of Leningrad/St. Petersburg takes us into the most quotidian aspects of the city’s existence.  Relying on insights from scholars in the field of cultural studies and related fields, Kelly breaks city life down into its simplest parts.  Where did people live?  How did they make use of their shared and private space?  What did they eat?  How did they get to work or move around the city?  What entertainment did they seek out?  The value of Kelly’s work is immense, especially in light of the fact that the city has been subjected to so many one-sided treatments in the past.  St. Petersburg’s denizens did not (and do not) spend their lives at the ballet; nor do they always fret about politics.  More often than not, men and women are navigating complex rituals related to their kitchens, television sets, and recreational activities.  Kelly’s treatment of everyday life in St. Petersburg is encyclopedic, although it deliberately deemphasizes those aspects of city life that have already been documented, including work as well as politics and art.  While Kelly, a scholar of language, is intimately familiar with St. Petersburg’s poetry scene, she only quotes specific poems to illustrate some detail of the people’s most banal experiences.  One downside of Kelly’s approach to her subject matter, is that St. Petersburg often seems to be the mirror image of every major, modern city.  Although Kelly explores many of the city’s peculiarities, one is left with the overall impression of urban sameness.  If you take away the political and artistic myths, and spend no time admiring the city’s famed Bronzed Horseman, you might be anywhere.  Her argument might be summed up this way:  if you live in Chicago, how much time do you really spend dwelling on the significance of the lion sculptures that adorn the Art Institute?  As somebody who recently left the city to take up residence in a distant suburb, located in what one scholar labeled “the geography of nowhere,” I can’t fully embrace her line of thinking.  Cities are more than the sum of their parts.  While it’s interesting to note that the citizens of St. Petersburg rarely actually use its famed canals in the service of business interests, the canals have been, and remain, vitally if ineffably linked to what it means to inhabit (as well as visit) this special place. 

Politics, War, and Faberge Eggs

Solomon Volkov's Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under The Tsars delineates the complicated and evolving relationship between Russian autocracy and Russian cultural genius between 1613 and 1917.
This is a self-described prequel to another work, the Magical Chorus, which treats the same topic during the Twentieth Century. See my earlier blog post on this wonderful book.

Romanov Riches is a short book, and Volkov cannot claim to have analyzed any of the tsar's aesthetic predilections or cultural policies in any detail. Even so, Volkov manages to say something interesting and original about Catherine the Great, Alexander I, Nicholas I, Alexander II, Alexander III, Nicholas II, and even Lenin. In just slightly more than 200 pages, we tract the collapse of imperial authority in the arts. Where the emperors once dominated almost every aspect of the art market, Nicholas II's patronage was often spurned by liberal or radical artists for ideological reasons. Moreover, by the turn of the century, wealthy bourgeois patrons competed with the tsar for role of taste-maker and patron of the arts. Volkov is well established as once of the most balanced and knowledgeable experts on Russian culture, and feels equally at home analyzing trends in ballet, music, theater, fine art, poetry, and prose.

This book, like his treatise on the influence of Stalin on Shastokovich, is filled with insights into the influence of high culture on state policy. How did Pushkin and Nicholas I use one another and who got the better end of the bargain? Why was Pushkin's death, as well as that of Lermontov, a political problem for the tsars? How did the government use Dostoevsky and Gogol, and were the risks of relying on these Slavophiles to make their case to the literate classes? And who couldn't be fascinated by the way autocrats read and understood Tolstoy? Tolstoy, of course, interpreted the Franco-Russian War of 1812 for the Russian public, but he also shaped public perception of the Crimean War with his Sevastopol Sketches, and of course had a lot to say about how Alexander III dealt with his father's murderers.

All in all, the Romanovs come off rather well in Volkov's history. Although military and political matters necessarily dominated their worldviews, most of these conservative autocrats were sensitive, well-read, polyglots with serious personal interest in participating in the arts. Some were even educated by Russia's greatest authors, including the historian Karamzin. Volkov's point is that political leadership of the Russian nation necessarily entailed cultural fluency if not cultural mastery.

Russian Frost

A Jewish violinist from St. Petersburg with a profound understanding of Russian literary history, Solomon Volkov seems to have earned the respect of Russia's greatest exiles, including the Nobel prize winning poet, Joseph Brodsky. This book, Conversations with Joseph Brodsky, documents a long series of informal interviews he conducted with Brodsky over the course of several decades. Clearly, Brodsky did not suffer fools gladly. The fact that the supremely self-confident Brodsky earnestly and respectfully debates Volkov throughout these encounters, says a great deal about Volkov's own stature, intellectual judgement, and mastery of the Russian cultural cannon. In fact, this book would not be half what it turned out to be without Volkov's own commentary on art, music, dance, and poetry.

Volkov's book showcases Brodsky's opinions on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from poetic influences, the impact of a number of early biographical episodes from a famous life, the nature of Soviet despotism, important friendships, translation work, the creative process, the history of Russian and western poetry, music, dance, and life in exile from his native St. Petersburg. In each instance, Brodsky is articulate, erudite (notwithstanding his very limited formal education), and opinionated. For example, Brodsky adores Venice, Auden, Frost, Akhmatova, Tsevaeva, Walcott, Zoshchenko's prose, Platonov's prose, Mandelstam's anti-Stalin poem, Barynikov as dancer and intellectual, Cavafy, Tvardovsky, Zamyatin's essays, Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago poetry, Isaiah Berlin, Naipaul, Herzen as stylist (if not thinker), and Joyce, but Brodsky either actively dislikes or believes the following to be overrated: Yevtushenko, Mayakovsky, Blok, Nabokov's poetry, Gumilyov, Nabokov's Speak, Memory (and Russian equivalent), etc. Perhaps the only thing about which Brodsky maintains an ambivalent or indifferent attitude is ballet.

The poet is never more opinionated than when discussing poetry. Brodsky doesn't apologize for his unwavering belief that poetry remains the most difficult and important form of expression available to the human species. As a teacher as well as master craftsman, it's no surprise that Brodsky has a relatively fully formed aesthetic philosophy. He's a partisan of Frost and Auden as well as Mandelstam, Tsevateva, Pasternak, and his friend and mentor, Akhmatova. And he sees his poetic legacy and opinions as infinitely more interesting than any of the famous events of his life, although this life included work at a morgue, geological expeditions in search of uranium, a famous trial in the Soviet Union for "social parasitism", exile to Siberia, arbitrary imprisonment in a mental institution, friendship with the internationally acclaimed Anna Akhmatova and other Russian luminaries, exile to America, friendship with Baryshnikov and dozens of other famous artists, and a Nobel Prize.

Ultimately, this book can only lead one to the obvious conclusion that one needs to read Brodsky's poetry to see what the man is all about. Brodsky's appreciation for Akhmatova says volumes about his bias against confessional poetry. When, for example, Volkov brings up Akhmatova's son's famous critique of his mother, that her poetry would have benefitted from his death more than from his prolonged imprisonment in the gulag, Brodsky is unsympathetic. He thinks Akhmatova's role as a poet supercedes her role as a mother. Her job is to privilege the universal over the purely personal. As Brodsky knew, Akhmatova suffered profoundly from the destruction of two husbands and a son at the hands of runaway Stalinism. Even so, her voice was never associated with a wounded heart. She was a great poet, and nothing less. As Brodsky says elsewhere, he agrees with another poet's sentiment that a great poet (such as Ezra Pound) should be awarded a medal and only then be hanged for his crimes. And that just about captures my feelings with respect to Woody Allen, who remains a great artist more than a bad or even criminal father.

St. Petersburg Seminar

From time to time I've touched upon the idea of teaching a course about the Russian Revolution and its legacy. I've been unsure about whether this course would delve deeply into the revolutionary tradition in nineteenth century Russia, or spend much time tracing the revolutionary aftershocks that continue to this day in Russia and its "near abroad." Probably, the Revolution proper deserves its own course.

Reading Volkov makes me dream of a topics course or upper division seminar on St. Petersburg. Following Volkov's text, and perhaps Bruce Lincoln's treatise on the same subject, I'd like to explore the history of Russian modernity as that history has been revealed in St. Petersburg. I taught a course called the British Novel at Arizona State (West) that explored modernity (British modernity anyhow) through an exploration of British literature. We read Defoe, Shelley, Dickens, Woolf, Burgess, and various post-colonial authors such as Jamaica Kincaid. We ended spectacularly with Bridgette Jones' Diary and an episode of Absolutely Fabulous.

This class was one of the favorite ones I've ever taught. Aside from appreciating the high percentage of literature majors in the class, I liked looking at history through the lens of history, free of the heavy emphasis on dates and indeed the general question of causation. This class didn't focus on when things happened, or who made them happen. It didn't even stress why they happened. Instead, it looked at what happened, which is a difficult enough question to answer without any other complicating factor. And by using great literature, we looked at each age's most articulate, intelligent, and subtle spokespeople. What a relief to be free of safe, monotonous, and committee-written textbooks!

It would nice to look at Russian history by relying on the writers and artists rather than the historians. Following Volkov, I'd use Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Blok, Bely, Bunin, Mayakovsky, Trotsky, Akhmatova, Lunchacharsky, and of course Stalin--the sinister aesthete, not the sinister politician.

The point about St. Petersburg is that its intelligentia and artistic community experienced and articulated the severe dichotomy of modernity more accutely than any other European city--the glittering hopes as well as the awful suffering. Once the capital of one of the most powerful autocracies in Europe, and the scene of the country's most advanced forms of industrialization, St. Petersburg enjoyed many of the rewards of imperial patronage, including a sophisticated culture of prose, poetry, art, music, and theatre. But in a very short timeframe by European standards, St. Petersburg's privileged position as vanguard of Russian history was overthrown.

Lenin and Stalin de-graded the capital, fearful of its relationship to the West. The Nazi dictatorship starved the re-named city for 900 days. Following that, Stalin attacked the city again, as he had done before the wary in response to the Kirov murder he apparently authored, sending many of its leading writers to death or exile.

Modern Capital

This blog has already summarized Solomon’s Volkov’s majestic survey of Russian high culture in the twentieth century, The Majestic Chorus. That work was a supremely sophisticated and beautiful explanation of Russia’s cultural achievements prior to the First World War as well as the aesthetic continuity that somehow survived a frontal attack from the forces of Soviet totalitarianism. Volkov’s earlier book, St. Petersburg: A Cultural history, despite its longer chronology and geographical constraints, is a very similar book.


St. Petersburg is urbane, humane, well-written, and well-informed; and Volkov, expatriate musician and historian, is equally at home discussing St. Petersburg’s centrality to European art, music, dance, theater, poetry, architecture, literature, and politics. Even as an exile, Volkov somehow remained the ultimate Russian insider. And now he may be the doyen of the expatriate Russian intellectual community.

In addition to his career as a musician, Volkov has produced a series of books that are predicated on oral interviews with some of St. Petersburg most famous sons, including Shostakovich (See Nick’s previous post on Testimony), Brodsky, Balanchine, and Akhmatova.

Volkov’s purpose in this book is twofold: to assert St. Petersburg’s importance to the history of European and global modernity, even apart from the Revolution; and to explain how the St. Petersburg “mythos” operated in Russian cultural history.

Volkov necessarily begins with the city’s highly unusual founding by the highly unusual emperor, Peter the Great (for whom the city was not actually named). The city was nothing if not experimental: at great human cost, Peter built a new “window to the West” which bore little resemblance to Moscow or the rest of Russia. Its architecture was well-organized, spacious, and elegant, if also cold and sterile. The city immediately found both aesthetic champions and detractors.



Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, celebrating the imposing statue of the same name, launched the powerful but ambivalent poetic response to the physical city. Dostoyevsky and Gogol built on what Pushkin had written, although each had severely critical reactions to the city, for despite its grandeur St. Petersburg had its drawbacks. Built at the cost of tens of thousands of serf laborers, St. Petersburg was cold, landlocked during the long Russian winter months, subject to floods, strangely inorganic, and home to brilliant but often superficial court life.

Ultimately, it’s hard to dismiss Volkov’s claims about St. Petersburg. Smaller and newer than cities such as London, Paris, and Vienna, St. Petersburg’s cultural elites eventually became the most articulate artistic exponents of what it meant to live in the modern world. ). Marshall Berman has written very succinctly on the subject, exploring Dostoyevsky’s feverish explanation of modernity: on the one hand, you get freedom born of the anonymity of city life; on the other hand, you get uprooted from the traditional moral and social networks.

Eventually, St. Petersburg’s claim to historical importance would be solidified for all time by the October Revolution, though ironically Lenin hated the city and hasted to move the Russian capital to Moscow (though not entirely for the reasons Volkov suggests). It’s true that many of Russia’s aesthetic innovations predate the Revolution. However, although this may be impossible to prove, it seems likely that revolutionary aesthetics led to revolutionary politics, and of course the reverse is certainly true: once the political revolution occurred, the new political elite alienated traditional artistic elites and therefore coincidentally opened doors for radical artists and poets such as Blok and Mayakovsky.



St. Petersburg suffered tremendously for its radical pretensions. In some ways, its gloomy artists had expected as much: poets such as Blok has foretold the city’s collapse before it became inevitable. The Revolution, Civil War, Stalinism, and World War II, led to the murder, suicide, death by starvation, exile, flight, or imprisonment of countless artists, writers, and poets. Somehow, the city survived.

The survival was embodied by the great poet, Akhmatova, who refused to leave Russia, although Stalin executed a former husband and imprisoned another husband as well as her son. Volkov’s St. Petersburg is a wonderful reminder that even had the city of St. Petersburg perished, its “mythos” would live on. For better or worse, the city helped to define what it means to be a modern person. The legacy is complex and ambivalent, so perhaps Volkov’s hagiographic tone isn’t quite right. What is certain is that we need to think seriously about St. Petersburg’s legacy to the modern world if we want to understand our place in that world. It was the home of the Bronze Horseman, Mir iskusskva (World of Art), Suprematism, Acmeism, Russian Futurism, Constructivism, the Decembrist Revolt, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Krondstadt Revolt, the Marysky Theater, the Stray Dog, etc. This city meant something important (if not always positive) to people such as Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Belinsky, Herzen, Pasternak, Punin, Mirsky, Tchaikovsky, Balanchine, Lenin, Benois, Chukovsky, Ginzburg, Gumilyov, Mussorgsky, Blok, Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Shostokovich, etc. And if meant much to them, it should to us as well.

100 Years of Genius

Sololomon Volkov’s The Magical Chorus is a brilliant introduction to Russian high culture in the 20th century. It’s original, accessible, and relatively objective in terms of its treatment of revolutionary traditions in literature. The book covers Russian poetry, prose, theatre, dance, music, art, and film, with some forays into popular culture. It links Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn, and Block to Brodsky.



Volkov’s own position as a Russian émigré, expert musicologist, and Voice of America cultural critic lends him special credibility on many of the topics he covers, especially the art and life of Russian and Soviet composers. The Magical Chorus stresses the close relationship between politics and culture throughout the twentieth century. Although some might fault Volkov for spending too much time on elite culture, and too little time on popular art forms, Volkov makes a very convincing case that elite art was incredibly influential on Soviet politics and Russian political culture. Strangely, but convincingly, Volkov’s study of high culture places Stalin squarely at the center of many if not most artistic trends of the twentieth century.

Volkov’s Stalin retains his place as one of the century’s most brutal dictators. However, Volkov’s Stalin is intelligent, well-read, sophisticated, and personally invested in the arts. Stalin’s impact on the humanities is manifested on many levels. Stalin took a direct interest in the leading authors of his day, patronized many leading figures in culture, selected Lenin and Stalin prize winners, met with literary leaders, and often intervened directly in their fates, for better or worse.

Stalin also maintained active correspondences with many authors—Gorky and Pasternak, most famously—and used culture as a political tool in terms of the propaganda war he was waging against the West during the 1930s. However, Volkov demonstrates that Stalin had a serious aesthetic philosophy (related to the general line of bringing high culture to the masses) and serious appreciation for some of the work itself, particularly opera, film, and literature. (In this context one should also recall that Stalin wrote good poetry as a young man).



In comparison with both Lenin, who preceded him, and Khrushchev, who succeeded him, Stalin was a connoisseur of the arts. Born into the intelligentsia, Lenin had almost no sense of wonder at even the most extreme forms of musical or literary talent. And Khrushchev, notwithstanding his early support for A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, let his belligerence, poor education, and insecurity get the best of him whenever he had the opportunity to engage with the arts.

To sum up, Volkov’s tour de horizon of modern Russian and Soviet culture leaves one breathless. What other country can boast so many first-rate authors and poets and muscicians? In fewer than 300 pages, Volkov discussed Tolstoy, Checkhov, Blok, Gumilev, Kandindsnky, Chagal, Diaghilev, Babel, Akhmatova, Berdyaev, Benois, Esenin, Ginzburg, Simonov, Horowitz, Mirsky, Ninjsnky, Stavinsky, Rachmaninoff, Shlovsky, Yevtushenko, Ehrenburg, Eistenstein, Mayakovsky, Nekrasov, Nureyev, Meyerhold,Sholokov,Bunin, Nabakov,Mandelstam, Bulgakov, Chukovsky, et cetera and so on. Despite the suffering and oppression, Russian genius asserted itself at every stage of modern history, but this genius was always produced as a result of a complex dialogue with the powerful and often terrifying Russian state.