Shostakovich: A Life (review)

Shostakovich: A Life. By Laurel E. Fay. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. [xii, 458 p. ISBN 0-19-513438-9. $35.]

Biography, like any other historical undertaking, is normally carried out within the framework of a narrative. Even the autobiographer must begin to invent a life story upon attempting to mold some memory-prodding jottings into a coherent and engaging paragraph. Readers of historical writing will normally allow the narrative to operate quietly in the background, but in the case of Shostakovich studies, the issue of the narrative has come to the foreground during the past decade. Debate has raged over Dmitry Shostakovich's character, as his commentators have sought to interpret his music and his public actions: was his private life characterized by dogged resistance, which manifested itself in perpetual irony and covert subversion within his public statements as an artist, or was there a much closer match between his public and private lives, ranging from regretful pragmatism through craven acquiescence to eager participation? The supporters of these different positions will have very different criteria for judging whether a given biographical narrative of Shostakovich's life is appropriate. It is in the context of this biographer's quandary that we should receive Laurel Fay's new Shostakovich biography, for she has largely eschewed narrative and presented her source information with all its apparent conflicts and contradictions intact; her biography also belongs firmly in the "life" rather than the "life-and-works" subgenre, thereby avoiding the ultimate locus of contention in the nineties. This may well render the book much too dry to appeal to the wider public, whose curiosity (and willingness to read newspaper articles and purchase books) has no doubt kept the engines of confrontation and recrimination well stoked for so long. But Fay's dryness and her reluctance to exercise personal judgment has resulted, I believe, in a far more valuable contribution to Shostakovich studies at the present time. Certainly, a coherent narrative holds the attention and offers the reader greater pleasures, but little would have been achieved by publishing another book designed to attract the automatic applause of one camp and hoots of derision from the other. The present volume is an oasis of relative calm, in which Shostakovich scholars who are not already too deeply entrenched can reconsider or nuance their positions. This is not to say that a coherent narrative that embraces the apparent contradictions of Shostakovich's life cannot one day be written: we are, after all, talking about the actions of a single man, and no one has suggested a split personality; but in our present state of knowledge and understanding, and in the midst of so many frayed tempers, Fay's mostly narrative-free biography is precisely what we need.

If observers of the debate have been able to draw any conclusion, it is that anything said by Shostakovich, or anything said about him by his contemporaries, should be treated with the utmost skepticism. (Participants in the debate have generally been more selective in their incredulity.) His official speeches were often ghostwritten (do we always know which?), his letters contain many quirky passages that may fairly be judged ironic (but can we always tell when?), and we have memoirs and recollections by Shostakovich's family, friends, and colleagues, any of whom might, understandably, have been engaged in erasing or revising episodes in their own past (can we know whom or when to trust?). Fay enables her readers to keep track of the possible deceptions that may lie behind the words, but she never appoints herself custodian of their true meaning, in the way Isaak Glikman did to some extent in his recently published correspondence with Shostakovich (Shostakovich, Chaos statt Musik?: Briefe an einem Freund, ed. Isaak Dawydowitsch Glikman, trans. Thomas Klein and Reimar Westendorf [Berlin: Argon, 1995]). She often brings together conflicting accounts of a single event without comment, content to leave the puzzle in the hands of her readers. Where commentators in the past have tended to present a coherent, but partial...