Dmitry Shostakovich

Dmitry Shostakovich: About Himself and His Times is not a memoir and does not pretend to be one. It is an anthology of everything the composer was able to get into print between 1926 and his death in 1975 - newspaper articles, congress speeches, radio interviews, concert-programme notes, obituary tributes - arranged strictly by year, each item footnoted to its source in Pravda, Izvestia, Sovetskaya Muzyka, Literaturnaya Gazeta or a provincial evening paper. L. Grigoryev and Ya. Platek supply, for each year, a short chronicle of premieres, prizes, tours and illnesses. Shostakovich supplies the rest.

The method is the book's real strength and deserves to be said so. As documentation of what was printed under his name it is careful, complete and checkable: every item sourced, every date given, nothing included that Shostakovich did not put his name to in a Soviet publication. For anyone working on the composer that is a considerable resource - the public voice gathered in one place and traceable to the page it appeared on. The compilers are candid about the principle behind it, quoting Shostakovich on Chekhov: "I am very sorry that Chekhov's correspondence with Olga Knipper has been published, much of it being so intimate that one would rather not see it in printed form."

It appeared in 1981, six years after his death and two years after Solomon Volkov's Testimony was published in New York, presenting itself as memoirs dictated to Volkov in the composer's last years. Volkov is not named anywhere in this volume, and neither is Testimony. There is no preface acknowledging a dispute, no rebuttal, no footnote. The reply is the book's existence and the book's method.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, setting out what the two books are each doing, and why a public record this verifiable still cannot be read as testimony freely given.