Saturday, January 30, 2016

My hero / Dmitri Shostakovich by Julian Barnes


Dmitri Shostakovich


My hero:

Dmitri Shostakovich by Julian Barnes


Under lifelong pressure from the Stalinist state, being a coward was the only sensible choice




Julian Barnes / The Noise of Time / Review by John Self

Julian Barnes
Saturday 30 January 2016


M
y hero was a coward. Or rather, often considered himself a coward. Or rather, was placed in a position in which it was impossible not to be a coward. You or I would have been cowards in his position, and had we decided to be the opposite of a coward – a hero – we would have been extremely foolish. Those who stood up to power in those days were killed and members of their family, friends and associates were disgraced, sent to camps, or executed. So being a coward was the only sensible choice.

He was Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich who, more than any other composer in the entire history of music, felt the daily, yearly, lifelong pressure of power. He wrote his First Symphony in 1926 at the age of 19; it was a worldwide success; three years later its dedicatee was arrested and shot. They executed the dedicatees of symphonies? Yes, and musicologists. And anyone who looked remotely suspicious to Stalin’s paranoid eye.
Dmitri Shostakovich

Shostakovich’s music has been with me for half a century; his “case” since the publication of Testimony, his contentious memoirs. Tikhon Khrennikov, the long-serving, power-worshipping head of the Composers’ Union, claimed – absurdly – that the composer was “a cheerful man who had nothing to be frightened of”. But as the Russian saying goes, the wolf cannot speak of the fear of the sheep. Shostakovich was often frightened (and narrowly escaped death in the 30s), wary and suspicious. Yet while he rightly feared Stalin’s power, he wasn’t afraid of Stalin personally (whereas Khrennikov famously shat his pants in the dictator’s presence).
Shostakovich stood his ground, paid Caesar his due (and Caesar was very greedy in those days), wrote his private as well as his public music, protected his family and hoped for better days. There are more forms of heroism than the obvious ones.



2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016


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