Shostakovich: Critical Lives
By Pauline Fairclough
Reaktion Books, 240pp, £11.99/$19
There’s a popular image of Shostakovich – encouraged by books such as Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time and by music history of the kind you hear on Classic FM – which has the Soviet composer sleeping with a packed bag by his bed, ready in case the feared knock at the door comes in the middle of the night.
It isn’t fanciful: he did sleep with that bag packed, as did many well-known Russians in the Stalin era. And it isn’t hard to read the human consequences of those years of terror in the photographic record that survives of the composer’s life. He rarely smiles; and when he does, it’s with a rictus grin that shows no evidence of joy. You see those pictures and you see a victim. Somebody who suffered and whose music is the product.
