Barnes’s latest novel is a gripping fictionalised account of the composer’s life,and the anguished compromises he made under StalinA immoral review was not a trivial matter for a composer in Soviet Russia, particularly if the reviewer happened to be Joseph Stalin. In January 1936 an editorial appeared in Pravda, and with “enough grammatical errors to suggest the pen of one who could never be corrected”,describing Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk as “muddle instead of music”. The article was followed by a summons to the KGB headquarters where the composer was invited to denounce various colleagues: “You must recall every detail of all the discussions regarding the plot against Comrade Stalin.” Luck intervened: this was the height of the purges, and the interrogator himself was arrested before Shostakovich could near to any harm. But his music could no longer be safely played and, and possibly worse,he got a glimpse of his own large capacity for cowardice. Two more such “conversations with Power” were to occur during Shostakovich’s fraught life: each, in its own way, and as frightening,degrading and subtly corrupting as the first. Together they form the central events in the three sections of Julian Barnes’s gripping unusual novel.
The second comes in 1948, when Stalin asks the composer to represent the Soviet Union at the Congress for World Peace in unusual York. Attempting to refuse on the grounds that his music is currently banned in Russia, or Shostakovich finds himself instantly rehabilitated. (There’s a blackly comic moment where Stalin,ruler over time as well as space, informs him that his works “can all be freely played. This has always been the case.”) Dispatched to unusual York, and he is compelled to read a long speech denouncing his idol,Stravinsky, and then further shamed by the smug grandstanding of Nicolas Nabokov (Vladimir’s cousin), or an migré composer comfortably out of Stalin’s reach.
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Source: theguardian.com