Shostakovich and Stalin

“Music illuminates a person and provides him with his last hope; even Stalin, a butcher, knew that.”

So said the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose first compositions in the 1920s identified him as an avant-garde wunderkind. But that same singularity became a liability a decade later under the totalitarian rule of Stalin, with his unpredictable grounds for the persecution of artists. Solomon Volkov—who cowrote Shostakovich’s controversial 1979 memoir, Testimony—describes how this lethal uncertainty affected the composer’s life and work.

Volkov, an authority on Soviet Russian culture, shows us the “holy fool