The Noise of Time

Author’s note

Shostakovich died on 9 August 1975, five months before the start of the next leap year.

Nicolas Nabokov, his tormentor at the New York Peace Congress, was indeed funded by the CIA. Stravinsky’s aloofness from the congress was not just ‘ethic and esthetic’, as his telegram maintained, but also political. As his biographer Stephen Walsh puts it, ‘Like all White Russians in postwar America, Stravinsky … was certainly not going to jeopardise his hard-won status as a loyal American by the slightest appearance of supporting a pro-Communist propaganda exercise.’

Tikhon Khrennikov did not, as in Shostakovich’s (fictional) apprehension, prove immortal; but he did the next best thing, running the Union of Soviet Composers from its refounding in 1948 to its eventual collapse, along with the rest of the Soviet Union, in 1991. Forty-eight years on from 1948, he was still giving slickly bland interviews, claiming that Shostakovich was a cheerful man who had nothing to be frightened of. (The composer Vladimir Rubin commented: ‘The wolf cannot speak of the fear of the sheep.’) Khrennikov never disappeared from view, nor lost his love of Power: in 2003, he was decorated by Vladimir Putin. He finally died in 2007, at the age of ninety-four.

Shostakovich was a multiple narrator of his own life. Some stories come in many versions, worked up and ‘improved’ over the years. Others — for instance, what happened at the Big House in Leningrad — exist only in a single version, told many years after the composer’s death, by a single source. More broadly, truth was a hard thing to find, let alone maintain, in Stalin’s Russia. Even the names mutate uncertainly: so, Shostakovich’s interrogator at the Big House is variously given as Zanchevsky, Zakrevsky and Zakovsky. All this is highly frustrating to any biographer, but most welcome to any novelist.

The Shostakovich bibliography is considerable, and musicologists will recognise my two main sources: Elizabeth Wilson’s exemplary, multi-faceted Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (1994; revised edition 2006), and Testimony: The Memoirs of Shostakovich as related to Solomon Volkov (1979). When published, Volkov’s book caused a commotion in both East and West, and the so-called ‘Shostakovich Wars’ rumbled on for decades. I have treated it as I would a private diary: as appearing to give the full truth, yet usually written at the same time of day, in the same prevailing mood, with the same prejudices and forgettings. Other useful sources include Isaak Glikman’s Story of a Friendship (2001) and Michael Ardov’s interviews with the composer’s children, published as Memories of Shostakovich (2004).

Elizabeth Wilson is paramount among those who have helped me with this novel. She supplied me with material I would never otherwise have come across, corrected many misapprehensions, and read the typescript. But this is my book not hers; and if you haven’t liked mine, then read hers.

J. B.

May 2015