Summer Reading: Total Volshit

By Emily Ghods-Esfahani | Sunday, October 1, 2006

Dmitri Shostakovich, the Soviet composer par excellence, was one of the few cultural stars in the dark artistic firmament of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics to survive his attempts at art: a sad and curious survival. Sadly, it seems the socialists of the USSR were constitutionally disposed to homogenizing the varieties of individual experience, preferring the consolidation of a singular secular identity (a materialist’s brew of atheism, determinism and violence) to the Western artistic tradition of heroic transcendence. In such a Marxist utopia, there are no stars because there can be no heaven to place them in; those that shine are no more than grudgingly more-equal than others in the cosmology of “the perfect state.”

Yet, moving beyond the bullying censors and the paranoia of Comrade Numero Uno, Joe Stalin (the most equal of equals–akin to God in the Old Testament), we are left with the dynamic music of a political na&239;f and musical genius; a man who, through mid-life, remained a committed Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist even while seeing his friends and comrades imprisoned, exiled and ruined. That Shostakovich maintained his composure and faith–producing such standards of modern music as his Fifth symphony, his Thirteenth (Babi Yar) symphony, and his Fourth string quartet–is a marvel explained only outside the dim-witted metaphysics of the Marxism he embraced emphatically.

There has been much ink spilt over the life and music of Dmitri Shostakovich, most recently, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered by Elizabeth Wilson, and Shostakovich: A Life, by Laurel E. Fay–both of which heavily censure the veracity of our Dartmouth administration’s book-of-choice. Either of these would have been superior to the faux apology/sleight-of-hand assigned to our incoming class so that, one would suppose, they would come to understand the truth, time and space of classical music…or perhaps, more to the point, the feckless nexus of high art and dumb politics. Instead of fair edification, they are fed a lie. The lie: Testimony, by the ventriloquist/cipher/liar, Solomon Volkov.

Either to mitigate or compliment the bizarre reading of Testimony, Professor Steven Swayne of the Dartmouth Music Department encourages the freshmen class to spend some time with Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, hoping that they will listen to it “somewhat in awe…listening with a heightened sense of wonder, the students will try to piece for themselves why this work was considered a success…even as it still retains an air of controversy.” Agreed: but one wonders why such a listening should be accompanied by the crib-notes of Volkov and his would-be hand-puppet, Dmitri Shostakovich. Some things must be seen to be believed, some are better seen than heard, still others are better heard than read, most especially when the writing is as poor, disingenuous and manipulative as Volkov’s.

Clearly, Shostakovich’s opuses were the creation of an astute musical mind often capable, it seems, of great harmonic sensitivity and frenzied sonic violence. Strange, therefore, that in Solomon Volkov’s Testimony, Shostakovich is portrayed dumbly and rather thickly as little more than a self-obsessed and hedonistic dissident-wannabe, inclined to sublimate his symphonies and string quartets into cheap political tricks and code-speak; a code that history would have left un-decoded without the Vulcan mind-melding that Volkov claims to have engaged in with the petty and self-obsessed composer.

To wit, Volkov claims that buried in Shostakovich’s Seventh symphony is a message about Hitler destroying Leningrad, only to have Stalin finish it off. But when Volkov interviewed Shostakovich’s favorite student, Galina Ustvolskaya, for his book, she claimed that the Seventh Symphony was written prior to Hitler’s invasion of Leningrad–and in fact, was written to honor Lenin. She tells Volkov, “Once, in 1939-40, Shostakovich...told me that he had almost completed his Seventh Symphony. There remained only the addition of a coda and some corrections; he mentioned that he didn’t know how best to name it: the ‘Lenin’ or the ‘Leninskaya’ [Symphony] - Dmitri Dmitrievich highly respected V. I. Lenin and always wanted to dedicate one of his works to him.” Not specifically ‘truth to power,’ but certainly ‘truth to bovine scatology.’

To be fair to Shostakovich, it should be noted that his own son, Maxim, claimed that the transcripts of Testimony “are not my father’s memoirs.” And the code-speak Volkov is so found of? “I think some musicologists set this idea forth. Others repeated it ... Father never said [his Seventh Symphony] was a [critical] portrait of Stalin.” Yet, when Volkov is questioned about his assertions, he becomes an adamant liar, “Shostakovich himself told me this…and later it was confirmed by Maxim, his son.” Shame, shame: somebody’s fibbin’.

In his laboriously clever introduction, Volkov sets the stage for the lopsided dust-up between art and politics vis-á-vis an obscure definition of a Russian word, yurodivy. The term describes a “holy fool” and mystical eccentric. By remaining outside the conventions and civil structure of society, the yurodivy informs and critiques, through allegory and colloquial metaphor, the culture he has transcended. In Nietzschean terms, he is somehow beyond good and evil. Volkov dresses up Shostakovich as a yurodivy. A divine fool? The composer clearly preferred the comfort and leisure of such a bureaucratic lifestyle as he could afford–that is, the artist as dumb-patriot, not pauper, not fool. Having become a political hit, his days of living in the fashion of the proletariat were over; there would be no yurodivy threads adorning this composer.

The yurodivy, according to Volkov, stitches a moral or political code into the fabric of his art (see the tortured contortions of the “The Da Vinci Code” for a more up-to-date version of same). Shostakovich was, according to Volkov, an “anarchist and individualist.” With Volkov’s yurodivy/apparatchik sleight of hand, the purpose of not only art, but the yurodivy is flipped on its head. Volkov would have it that Shostakovich “breaks commonly held ‘moral laws’ of behavior and flouts conventions…lofty values of the past had been discredited. New ideals, they [the yurodivy] felt could be affirmed only ‘in reverse.’” “He sets strict limitations, rules and taboos for himself.” “Shostakovich relinquished all responsibility for anything he said: nothing meant what it seemed to.” Sounds like a sweet gig: do what you please and call yourself a wise-guy with street cred; is Volkov describing Dmitri Shostakovich or the “Sex Pistols”?

When not wandering aimlessly, the unifying thread that binds the book, giving it a modicum of coherence, is the idea that neophyte artists should jazz-up their shop-worn shtick with politics–in the style of Dmitri Shostakovich, Abbey Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, or Cindy Sheehan–by fusing their political ideologies into the “art” they create (perhaps ‘art’ is too grand a word). No other message has so stampeded culture, leaving the intellectual plains bare and lifeless: said another way, it’s a bum-rush.

Art is neither decorated nor redeemed by its intercourse with political fads and trends, and Shostakovich’s own music, sans Volkov, is testimony to this fact.

Respected music critics, like the late Samuel Lipman, have critiqued Shostakovich’s “protest music” as “thin-sounding orchestration” and “destructive,” while praising his intimate music as his “consistently best music” with “lyricism unforced and affecting.” The union of politics and art is taken to its materialist extreme in socialist-art, a system of thought with such spiffy phrases as “a pair of boots is worth more than Shakespeare.” I suppose, but it depends on the boots.

Yet, Volkov/Shostakovich, or as I prefer, ‘Volshit,’ unwittingly admits that art stretches above the brute fact of politics when he tells us that Lenin, the same man who dared Russia to build toilets out of gold, who got the ball rolling on the death and starvation of untold millions of peasants, “was saddened by music. A telling fact, if you think about it.” It’s not clear why the fact would be “telling,”–though, the remarkable quality of art ensures that all individuals, even those who are responsible for the death of millions, are done in by the eternal symphonic muse.

What is lacking in Volshit’s analysis of art, his own and that of other’s, is something more moving than the standard bohemian-cliché of the tortured artist. Capable of musical majesty, Shostakovich seems too often to spend his time in the intellectual gutter of an alley he has no business being in.

Shostakovich writes, “I’ll be frank: I don’t have much faith in eternity.” This may explain why Volshit’s analysis of art deals only in the immediate, unable to think past the contingency of the here-n-now. It is indeed strange for an artist to dismiss the thread of eternity so cavalierly–it’s as if he’d built his entire musical project on nothing ,for nothing. Politics and ideology, on the other hand, come in gluttonous fits and jerks.

Shostakovich’s sass and volatility may be explained by his hostility to the transcendent and, therein, religion. In his poem, Transcription of Organ Music, Allen Ginsberg once wrote, “I want people to bow when they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the Creator.” Shostakovich, too, suffers from these god-like delusions. One striking feature of Testimony is the composer’s tangential diatribes that run off the tracks into religion and morality; moral only in as much as he was quite capable of moral sanction and condemnation against those who stood in his way.

We’re only left to wonder why our Dartmouth administration felt this book, among all others–even among the actual scholarly work on Shostakovich–would be so indispensable to the incoming class at Dartmouth. Could the administration really be so eager to create little Volshits–all astride in their homogenous dissent? Like Volshit, a man who cracked one eye open on the world and deemed it miserable, in the abstract, our front officers have a keen eye on “social injustice,” commensurate with no more than a certain capacity for dull fury.

The misfortune of Testimony is that it mistakes condescension for compassion. Instead of empathy, the reader is served cold venom: “Some people don’t deserve pity.” Peppering art with the crass and the political leads to such Volshit lines as, “perhaps there is no good or bad music, there is only music that excites you and makes you indifferent.”

The pharmacological equivalent: crystal meth, or Prozac?

To the tortured artist, self-victimization is never out of fashion: “No, I can’t go on describing my life, and I’m not sure that no one can doubt now that it is unhappy. There were no particularly happy moments in my life, no great jobs. It was grey and dull and it makes me sad to think about it, it saddens me to admit it, but it’s the truth, the unhappy truth.” For Volshit, there is no sin in insincerity.

It may do well to remind freshmen, especially those about to suffer from the distemper of the petit revolutionary, that history has judged communism a scam (as it has Volkov’s volshit); that self-consciously creating ‘Socialist-Art’ is as dumb as creating self-consciously ‘Capitalist art’; that everyone invests–or not–in their own happiness (you dead-beat commies), and that folded into the deep comforts of art is a peace that Shostakovich–not Volshit–should have known better to find. Maybe he did.

Summer Reading: Total Volshit

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