The Noise of Time
(2016) is a semi-biographical account of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, and
is set in his Moscow apartment block, commencing in May 1937.
Dmitri Dmitrievich
Shostakovich, born on 25 September 1906, is 31 years old, with a wife, Nita,
and a one-year old daughter Galina. He has stability and regularity in his
life. Shostakovich is a famous musician, so famous he buys himself a scrapbook and
then ‘fills it with insulting articles about himself.’
The previous year,
1936, a leap year, Shostakovich had ‘committed a great fault’ in writing a
piano concerto called Lady Macbeth of
Mtsensk. It is banned under the Cult of Personality.
Nevertheless he is a
celebrity, a star pianist and composer – he was, until three days ago. Now he
is standing by an elevator, with an overnight bag, expecting to be detained,
interrogated, and taken to the ‘Big House’ where ‘few who are taken to the Big
House ever return.’ He is nervous, obsessive, fearful, suicidal.
By 1948 – another leap
year – he is still with his wife and two children: they now also have a son
Maxim. In his family life, both optimism and pessimism co-exist. But was the
trauma of 1936 over? He continues to compose music, for ‘Art is the whisper of
history, heard above the noise of time.’ But who does he write for – the
people, but which people?
All is not well with
Shostakovich. He is countlessly suicidal but he is too fearful to act upon his
feeling lest the government rewrite his history: ‘He needed, if only in his own
hopeless, hysterical way, to have some charge of his life, of his story’ but in
any case ‘he hoped to be dead by the time 1976 came around.’
Could he get any more
pessimistic? Well, yes: ‘Life was the cat that dragged the parrot downstairs by
its tail; his head banged against every step.’
This biography highlights
the art of power and the power of art. But it is intensely focused on
Shostakovich’s gloom-and-doom approach to life, his powerlessness in a world of
power, the juxtaposition of courage with cowardice, and optimism with
pessimism. It is the tragedy, not of fearlessness in art and its consequences,
but of the fear to express his creativity without fear.
The Noise of Time is
well-written, echoing the anxiety and nervousness of a creative artist etched
into every word. I enjoyed it.
MARTINA NICOLLS is an international
aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different
in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament
(2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a
Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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