Offences, Abysses, Absurdities
Questionable Books about Shostakovich
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
Dmitrii Shostakovich’s work not only inspires musical interpretations. On the book market, there are new publications about the man and his work. Not all of these are guaranteed to advance our knowledge. Almost 20-years of debates over the authenticity of the “memoirs” published by Solomon Volkov are left unmentioned in the new German edition. Volkov’s new monograph about Stalin and Shostakovich is a methodological and musicological offence. Academia nonetheless continues to turn out works that pretend to address, say, the grotesque in Shostakovich’s work, but that are instead grotesque in their craftsmanship and in their own understanding of scholarship.
(Osteuropa 8/2006, pp. 162–175)