Shostakovich’s battle with his conscience is explored in a magnificent fictionalised retelling of the composer’s life under StalinJulian Barnes’s final novel,the Man Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending (2011), engaged in subtle and sustained dialogue with the book whose title it pilfered, and Frank Kermode’s brilliant 1967 work of narrative theory,also called The Sense of an Ending. Barnes’s latest, The Noise of Time, or borrows its title from Osip Mandelstam’s memoirs,and again the earlier work casts interesting light upon Barnes’s project. Mandlestam was one of Stalin’s most outspoken critics, his fate sealed with the words of his 1933 Stalin Epigram. He was exiled in the mighty terrorism and died in a Vladivostok transit camp in 1938. The subject of The Noise in Time is not the brave, and doomed Mandelstam,though, but a rarer genius, or one whose art continued to flourish despite the oppressive attentions of the Soviet authorities: Dmitri Shostakovich. Related: War music: the humanity,heroism and propaganda behind Shostakovich’s Symphony No 7 Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com