Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Establishes beyond any doubt the enormous courage of one of the giants of the ageDmitry Shostakovich's memoirs, Testimony, `related to and edited by Solomon Volkov', have been the subject of fierce debate since their publication in 1979. Was Testimony a forgery, made up by an impudent impostor, or was it the deathbed confession of a bent, but unbroken, man? Even now, years after the fall of the communist regime, a coterie of well-placed Western musicologists have regularly raised objections to Testimony, hoping with each attack to undermine the picture of Shostakovich presented in his memoirs that of a man of enormous moral stature, bitterly disillusioned with the Soviet system. Here, Allan Ho and Dmitry Feofanov systematically address all of the accusations levelled at Testimony and Solomon Volkov, Shostakovich's amanuensis, amassing an enormous amount of material about Shostakovich and his position in Soviet society and burying forever the pictureof Shostakovich as a willing participant in the communist charade. ALLAN B. HO is a musicologist, DMITRY FEOFANOV a lawyer and pianist.arade. ALLAN B. HO is a musicologist, DMITRY FEOFANOV a lawyer and pianist.arade. ALLAN B. HO is a musicologist, DMITRY FEOFANOV a lawyer and pianist.arade. ALLAN B. HO is a musicologist, DMITRY FEOFANOV a lawyer and pianist.

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CHOICE Review

To the list of controversies destined to continue for eternity one can add that concerning whether Dmitry Shostakovich was a communist or closet democrat. Ho and Feofanov fire the latest salvo by attempting to refute claims of Shostakovich's communist orthodoxy, claims leveled by Soviet functionaries and by such US scholars as Russian specialist Richard Taruskin, the book's principal target. Taruskin (among others) challenged the authenticity of Testimony, Shostakovich's memoirs (CH, Jun'80). The authors attempt to demolish Taruskin's--and others'--charges against Testimony, and thus rebuke all who believe Shostakovich was a Stalinist. This reviewer believes the question will never be decided. Possibly more significant is the authors' point about judging musical value. Contrary to orthodox Western musicology, they insist that to confine musical evaluations to matters of form and structure is to miss the point of art. Using Shostakovich's works, they argue for a contextualism in which the cultural milieu determines both the stimulus for musical creation and its results. Thus, Shostakovich's works "testify" to the horrors of the communism in Russia and cannot be understood otherwise. This contention should prolong the battle between purist and contextualist into the indefinite future. Graduate and research collections. F. Goossen; emeritus, University of Alabama