Testimony : the memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich / as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov ; translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis.

This item contains a list of Dmitri Shostakovich's musical compositions, along with years of release.

This book contains a list of awards granted to Dmitri Shostakovich, along with years of granting.

This resource contains black and white photographs of Dmitri Shostakovich from throughout his life. This includes photographs of Shostakovich with members of his family, working in the orchestra, receiving awards, and helping in the war effort during the Second World War.

This item contains black and white photographs of the Soviet congress meeting in order to condemn formalist musical composition.

This item contains black and white photographs of an edition of Times Magazine that features Dmitri Shostakovich, and the cover pages of several of Shostakovich's musical works.

The photographs throughout this resource are from the personal collection of Solomon Volkov.

Includes index.

Preface -- Introduction -- Testimony -- Major compositions, titles, and awards -- Index.

"The story of the creation and emergence of Testimony is one of high drama. In these memoirs Dmitry Shostakovich, the musical titan whom the Russians presented to the world as the personification of their ideal in the arts, reveals himself as a profoundly tormented man - deeply ambivalent in his feelings about himself and his role. For some four years before Shostakovich's death, working first in Leningrad then in Moscow, the brilliant young Soviet musicologist Solomon Volkov drew for from Shostakovich's memories whose publication the composer came to see as mandatory. "I must do this, I must," he said to Volkov, who took down these recollections and then shaped and edited them, retaining always Shostakovich's idiosyncratic patterns of recall and abrupt personal voice. The composer read, approved, and signed each section when Volkov completed his work. He consented to the manuscript's being published in the West and imposed only one condition: that it not appear until after his death. Shostakovich calls these recollections "the testimony of an eyewitness," and brings an eyewitness's immediacy to this series of associative reminiscences which range over the full length of his life, from before the Revolution through the ill-fated thaw which followed Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin. Scenes spring to life as if the reader were present at them: astonishing and courageous conversations with Stalin; the uproarious competition to create a new national anthem (in which Shostakovich joined forces with Khachaturian); the fabrication of false geniuses; the ubiquity of plagiarism. He recalls musicians, artists and writers whom he knew: Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Glazunov, Meyerhold, Akhmatova, and many others at the center of Russian culture. He speaks out passionately against the anti-Semitism rife in all levels of society. He writes with mordant wit about individuals, prominent and obscure, who danced to the changing tunes of those in power. He had never let any of this be known publicly before, and the picture that emerges of what it was like to be a creative artists in the Soviet Union is moving and often harrowing. This was a life and an art Dostoevskian in its emotions, and these memoirs are plain-spoken and outspoken, sardonic and powerful - a Shostakovich the world has never seen before and a life that was at once triumphant and tragic." --From the dust jacket.

Translated from Russian into English.