WAS SHOSTAKOVICH A MARTYR? OR IS THAT JUST FICTION?

By RICHARD TARUSKINAUG.

The composer Dmitri Shostakovich in 1938. Credit Sovfoto/UIG, via Getty Images

Novelists have every right to use historical data to lend their works verisimilitude, and they are free to go beyond the facts, wherever their fancy leads them. Historians, though, are bound by circumstances, condemned to whatever partial, obstructed view their sources grant them. Their only recourse is to keep on looking and pray. Meanwhile, novelists can soar and gain an untrammeled vista.

But what are they actually seeing? Sometimes they deliberately describe what never was. Sometimes they claim more. In a draft for “War and Peace,” Tolstoy wrote that he really wanted to tell the history of Russia’s Napoleonic war but that if he undertook the task without fictional admixture, it would “force me to be governed by historical documents rather than the truth.”

What is that truth, which goes beyond the documents? Whatever it is, Tolstoy’s pursuit of it gave us “War and Peace,” so it can’t be such a bad thing. But more recently, it has given us Julian Barnes’s novel “The Noise of Time,” which pretends to give us the truth, not just the facts, about the composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

This book, I think, is a beautifully written botch, and it has me wondering anew about truth. People have been doing that, of course, for a long time — at least since Pilate confronted Christ. And the wrangling over what the truth might be about Shostakovich and his experiences under Stalin has been going on, it sometimes seems, almost as long.

Contention — between those who believe that Shostakovich was a blameless martyr, opposed to and victimized by the Soviet government, and those of us who believe he made pragmatic compromises to survive and prosper — reached such a pitch that if you search for “Shostakovich wars” on Google, it will fetch thousands of hits. Shostakovich warriors, those who have sought to portray him as disaffected and tacitly hostile to the Soviets, distinguish the literal truth of the letters, journals and memoirs we have, from the essential truth that only inspired speculation can reveal.

 “The Noise of Time” by Julian Barnes. Credit Patricia Wall/The New York Times

The fallacy of such thinking is to regard that essential truth as something revealed rather than created. Tolstoy did not make that mistake. He knew that the difference between real and fictional worlds is that a fictional world is wholly known. Nothing could remain hidden from Tolstoy about his imaginary Napoleonic Russia and its Natashas, Pierres and Andreis. But no matter how diligently he or we may burrow in the archives, there will always be more documents somewhere; some may contradict the ones we know, and there is no end to what was never recorded to begin with.

Mr. Barnes has not fully lived up to the calling he professes. He might have invented his own Shostakovich — his marvelous novel “The Porcupine” fictionalizes Todor Zhivkov, the fallen Communist ruler of Bulgaria, and lets us hear his inner voice as he faces trial. The owner of that voice is given a fictional name in the book, which frees the author from the factual record, and frees us from expectations based upon it.

So why, then, is Shostakovich given his own name in “The Noise of Time” (as are all the other characters)? If Mr. Barnes had called his hero, say, Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov and let the reader divine the resemblance to Shostakovich, I would accept his work without demur. But Mr. Barnes evidently wanted to capitalize on the interest that frenzied debate has drummed up in his subject and to claim implicitly to have settled the issues concerning the composer’s relationship with Soviet power, which scholars continue to dispute. In an author’s note appended to the novel, he advertises his fidelity to his sources and his superior insights. He is trying to have it both ways: He wants the novelist’s freedom and also the historian’s authority. But in trying for both, he achieves neither.

Mr. Barnes’s view of Shostakovich conforms in every detail to the sentimental Cold War fable of a passive, pathetic yet saintly figure buffeted by an obtuse, implacable force. This stereotype goes beyond Shostakovich and beyond his music, all the way to music itself, imagined as pure and spotless, utterly truthful the way mathematics is truthful, unresistant to martyrdom and co-option but ultimately triumphant. These are the naïve assumptions of pop Romanticism.

The sources on which Mr. Barnes most conspicuously relies are the two canonical texts of the Shostakovich wars. One is “Testimony,” a best-seller that appeared in 1979 whose subtitle is “The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov”; the other is the invaluable “Shostakovich: A Life Remembered” (1994) by Elizabeth Wilson, a compendium of third-person accounts by people who knew the composer. Mr. Volkov’s book (despite the seductive, still widely believed stories it promulgates) has been exposed as a mixture of recycled material that Shostakovich had approved for republication and fabrications that were inserted after his death. The other makes no truth claims but presents a great gabble of conflicting viewpoints from which we are invited to draw our own conclusions.

 “Muddle Instead of Music,” the anonymous Pravda editorial of Jan. 28, 1936, which denounced Shostakovich’s wildly successful opera “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.”

Mr. Barnes has done just that. But the remarkable, disappointing fact is that his fictional Shostakovich is not his own invention. He has adopted a ready-made: the sinless version of Shostakovich peddled by “Testimony,” supplemented by the most lurid tales from Ms. Wilson’s argosy and a published letter or two. The resulting narrative predictably recycles three mangy tales from the Shostakovich wars.

The first concerns the anonymous Pravda editorial of Jan. 28, 1936, “Muddle Instead of Music,” which denounced Shostakovich’s wildly successful opera “The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.” It not only led to a ban on the opera but also, according to legend, put the composer under a cloud of suspicion that brought him within a hair’s breadth of being “repressed,” as the saying went, in the Stalinist purges of 1936-38.

The second recycled tale relates to the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, held in March 1949 at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, where Shostakovich, fresh from a second denunciation at the hands of Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s culture czar, was supposedly sent against his will as part of the Soviet delegation, only to be humiliated again in a confrontation with the composer Nicolas Nabokov.

A decade later, as the third saga would have it, Nikita Khrushchev had Shostakovich browbeaten into joining the Soviet Communist Party so that he could serve as titular head of the Russian Federation’s Union of Soviet Composers, after which the composer was supposedly so demoralized and filled with shame that he wrote a string quartet about it: his Eighth, often regarded as his masterpiece. All of its themes are derived from Shostakovich’s initials, bearing witness to his own standing among the 20th century’s “victims of war and fascism,” in the words of the quartet’s dedication.

These three tales — the three books, so to speak, of the Shostakovich Apocrypha — correspond exactly to the three chapters of “The Noise of Time,” and there is nothing in Mr. Barnes’s account that cannot be found in the dubious sources he cites. His open fictionalization achieves nothing beyond what previous covert fictionalizations, like Mr. Volkov’s, did.

 Joseph Stalin. Julian Barnes has his Shostakovich wonder whether Stalin had not only ordered up the editorial that attacked his opera, but also “perhaps even written it himself.” Credit Hulton Archive/Getty Images

These episodes from Shostakovich’s life contain abundant fodder for novelization, were the author more enterprising and inquisitive about his subject. Mr. Barnes has his hackneyed Shostakovich wonder whether Stalin had not only ordered up the editorial that attacked his opera but also had “perhaps even written it himself.” Nobody thought that in Russia in 1936: It was Mr. Volkov who raised the possibility for gullible Westerners in “Testimony.” But now we know who wrote it: a terrified former Yiddish writer named David Zaslavsky, who had become one of Stalin’s most reliable literary hit men. His interior monologue would have made a great novel.

To see Shostakovich as a passive pawn in Stalin’s clutches at the Waldorf does scant justice to a man whose collisions with power had taught him to play a complicated game with exceeding, self-concealing skill. In his one well-documented person-to-person encounter with Stalin, the phone call through which the dictator sought to coerce the composer’s presence in New York, Shostakovich leveraged the world fame that made him indispensable to secure a lifting of the ban on his own and his colleagues’ works that followed the “formalist” denunciations the previous year.

After his return from abroad, Shostakovich paid the powers back with a pair of often derided tribute works, an oratorio called “Song of the Forests” and the soundtrack score for the film “The Fall of Berlin.” As the British musicologist Pauline Fairclough has shown in a patient analysis, they are no worse than the works of Shostakovich we now treat with respect. The Shostakovich of history did not write badly for them and well for himself. No one writes badly on purpose, nor could anyone make a career as successful as the one Shostakovich made in Soviet Russia while maintaining the kind of moral and aesthetic purity his mythologizers attribute to him. No one makes a successful career anywhere without learning and executing an intricate social dance.

As for his official co-option, there is no reason to think that Shostakovich sought either the Party membership or the Union leadership that the government thrust upon him. But once in possession of political power, Shostakovich behaved not like a saint but like a politician. As his recently published official correspondence shows, he was not above settling scores.

In 1948, one of the worst things anyone said about him at the hearings that preceded the Central Committee’s “Resolution on Music” came from Vladimir Zakharov, the director of the Pyatnitsky Choir, the Soviet Union’s leading song-and-dance ensemble. “From the point of view of the People,” Zakharov taunted, Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony “is not a musical work at all; it is a ‘composition’ which has nothing whatever to do with the art of music.”

At the very first Union meeting over which he presided as chair, Shostakovich paid back his tormentor (posthumously) with a scorching attack on the choir’s repertory, which still consisted mainly of Zakharov arrangements. To one of the ensemble’s then-active arrangers he wrote that the hapless fellow’s setting of one particularly famous song “has nothing in common with the art of music,” echoing nearly verbatim Zakharov’s old insult. Yes, his hands, too, were dirty. Everyone’s were.

The author of “The Porcupine” knew that. What lured Mr. Barnes into hagiography when Shostakovich became his subject? Were I a novelist, I would speculate.

Richard Taruskin is professor emeritus of music at the University of California, Berkeley. His “Russian Music at Home and Abroad” will appear this fall.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/arts/music/julian-barnes-the-noise-of-time-shostakovich.html?rref=collection%2Fspotlightcollection%2Fclassical-music-reviews&_r=0