October 1999 marks the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Testimony: the memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov. Every devotee of the composer's music will have read this book, and most of them will also be aware of the challenge to its authenticity made by the American scholar Laurel Fay in a paper published in The Russian Review in October 1980. If by no other means, they'll know of Fay's objections from the account of them given in my book, The New Shostakovich, finished ten years after Testimony in September 1989 and published in Spring 1990. Those who've followed the resulting debate will have pursued the Testimony controversy in "Shostakovich's Testimony: Reply to an Unjust Criticism" by Allan Ho and Dmitry Feofanov, a 300-page rebuttal of Fay's charges contained in their book Shostakovich Reconsidered, published in Summer 1998 by Toccata Press. They will also be interested in Laurel Fay's biographical study Shostakovich: A Life, published in November 1999 by Oxford University Press . Such readers will likewise be aware that theTestimony controversy is part of a wider debate over Shostakovich's aims and methods as a composer. [See Centre and pseudo-centre at this site.] For example, the portrait of Shostakovich in Testimony is echoed and often specifically endorsed by over fifty former Soviet colleagues. [See Witnesses for the Defence and Testimony pro Testimony.] Much of this "small 't' testimony" was published by Elizabeth Wilson in September 1994 in Shostakovich: A Life Remembered.

The rationale for Shostakovichiana, and for Music Under Soviet Rule (the web-site of which the former is a part), is outlined in the Introduction and remains the same. However, now -- four and a half years since Music Under Soviet Rule was started -- is an opportune moment for a summary of the aims behind this area of the site and of current developments in the Shostakovich debate. This is partly a question of anniversaries: twenty years since Testimony, ten years since The New Shostakovich, five years since Shostakovich: A Life Remembered. But it's also to do with the obligations of the site editor: myself. I'm contracted to finish writing a book by next summer, one consequence of which is that the promised revision of The New Shostakovich for my current publisher Jonathan Cape will have to be postponed until at least 2001 -- possibly even until 2002.

I'd like to clarify one or two propositions which -- by the palpable design of certain parties who wish such an eventuality to come about -- are in danger of becoming obscured and hence discounted. For example, it's been suggested that there are no substantial points of difference between revisionism and anti-revisionism, and that the debate between these factions should consequently be called off. I wish to submit that this suggestion is no more than a ploy designed to allow anti-revisionism to escape having to justify itself and to let former advocates of anti-revisionism recast themselves as moderate centrists (their revisionist opponents thereby being maintained as "extremists"). This scheme of claiming a moderate middle ground -- which is in fact already occupied by revisionism -- is what I call pseudo-centrism. A treatment of this, together with examples of it in action, can be found in Centre and pseudo-centre. [A prior treatment, of briefer extent, occurs in The Turning Point, written in January 1998.]

Turning to the anti-revisionist notion that revisionism is "extreme", it should be said quite bluntly that this is little more than an artefact of anti-revisionism's lack of in-depth acquaintance with Soviet history. A particular case of this -- Fay's suggestion that Shostakovich's song-cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry, far from written in the full knowledge of official Soviet anti-Semitism, was composed as a sop to Socialist Realist folk-nationalism -- is treated in my essay "Naive Anti-revisionism" in Ho and Feofanov's Shostakovich Reconsidered. Further examples of Fay's uncertain grasp of the historical background will be found in my letter to DSCH Journal 12 (Winter 1999) and in an interview formerly at the DSCH website. Despite anti-revisionist claims that they know as much about Soviet history as revisionists, there is extensive evidence -- at this site and in the pages of DSCH and Shostakovich Reconsidered -- that their historical assumptions are repeatedly false in fact and character, distorting their interpretations of the music. For instance, anti-revisionists are more or less deaf to the satirical strand in Shostakovich's work, a deafness inculcated precisely by lack of contextual awareness. Accordingly, Laurel Fay sees Shostakovich as a not especially intelligent man earnestly struggling to fulfill his Soviet civic musical quota and only later becoming embittered at his treatment by the authorities. That she misses his satire completely is confirmed -- to take one typical example -- by her view of the Ninth Symphony as a "festive, frivolous" piece (in Morgan, Robert P., ed., Modern Times from World War I to the Present, p. 159).

In Fay's case, her judgements are distorted at source by her acceptance of official Soviet statements (for instance, in Pravda) and by her refusal to accept the legitimacy of Testimony or to even consider the "small 't' testimony" of the composer's friends and colleagues. In the case of other anti-revisionists, misjudgements of the tones and aims of Shostakovich's music stem from a contextless focus on the scores alone, treating his work as "pure" music and invoking the solecism of "extra-musicality" in order to downplay background elements. [See Centre and pseudo-centre, Universal Because Specific, and the DSCH interview.] At its simplest, this boils down to the notion that if a piece of music hasn't got words attached to it -- in the way of a title or text -- then its principles of organisation must be purely structural. At a more evolved level, it becomes a question of defending a wholly subjective interpretation of the music, regardless of objective contextual factors. Other anti-revisionists go further, ranging from diehard assertions that Shostakovich was a lifelong earnest communist to claims that he was, at various times during his career, "a collaborator" whose work can, as a result, never be given a stable interpretation. [See The Turning Point, passim; Witnesses for the Defence.] As with Fay's "stupid Shostakovich" hypothesis, the "communist" and "part-time collaborator" theories depend largely on ignoring the historical context in general and the testimonies of those who knew the composer in particular. (It goes without saying that hardline anti-revisionists give no credence to Testimony whatsoever.)

Bearing all this in mind, the reader may well conclude that anti-revisionist charges that revisionism is an "extreme" position are based on simple lack of information. Certainly anyone experienced in the study of Soviet history will be amused, if not mildly amazed, by the way anti-revisionists accuse revisionists of "McCarthyism", "neo-Stalinism", "anti-Stalinist propaganda", and so on. Such rudimentary invective betrays anti-revisionism as a product of academic over-specialisation -- the under-informed misapprehensions of a group of Anglo-American technical analysts with only slim knowledge beyond their own field of study. Certainly the mainstream historians to whom I've showed anti-revisionist attempts at historical redaction have, at their politest, expressed surprise that such excursions are accepted as serious work.

Attached to the anti-revisionist proposition that the debate should be abandoned is the exhortation that we should drop contextual issues and "go back" to the music. As has already been pointed out, this notional segregation of music and context in practice disables the critic, whose analysis, thereby bound solely to structural factors, ceases to be guided by reasonable assumptions concerning the composer's intentions. The results of such analyses are inevitably empty, confused, or indeterminate. It so happens that this segregation of music and context is also philosophically indefensible (see, for example, the DSCH interview); however, it's the paucity of the results of pure structural analysis -- for example, many of the contributions to David Fanning's Shostakovich Studies -- which most damningly indicts such an approach.

Readers will find, at Shostakovichiana and Music Under Soviet Rule, extensive documentation of the debate between revisionism and anti-revisionism. They will also find a great deal of neutral information which they may find useful, as well as other sorts of resource, including chronologies, discographies, reviews, and nearly 100 photographs. I have my own views on Shostakovich and his various composing colleagues -- views, it's worth noting, shared by many informed Russians, albeit that such opinions are not yet common in the West. I invite visitors to this site to read whatever interests them and make up their own minds about it. Discussion of the issues raised by this material may be carried on, for example, in the DSCH-L list, where Dr Allan Ho and Martin Anderson are among the regular contributors.

Ian MacDonald
December 1999