![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
This week’s book is Leningrad: Siege and Symphony by Brian Moynahan.
Leningrad: Siege and Symphony is very well written history, but it is not for the faint of heart. To understand what the book is about, add the horrors of Stalin’s secret police to the nightmare of the starvation of millions of people under daily bombardment by the Germans determined to wipe one of the world’s great cities from the map.
I won’t kid you. It is painful to read books like this, no matter how well written they are. For years I felt it was my duty as a student and teacher of Russian language to learn everything I could about the horrific details of Stalin’s regime and the effects of its clash with the equally murderous Nazi Germany. My fellow Russian students understood what this was about. The average westerner then, even students of German language and German history seemed to think of Hitler and the Nazis as something transcendently exceptional in the history of political murder. Evidence that Mao’s Chinese communists may have been the most prolific political murderers ever and that Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge may have murdered a higher percentage of their own people than Hitler, Stalin or Mao, just didn’t seem to register with the vast majority of people. As students of Russian we felt the duty to be curious about the details of the disappearance of whole generations of Russian artists and writers. It’s one thing to be intellectually aware of what happened and another to have studied it closely and to have met and talked to the survivors when, under soviet rule, they were still deathly afraid to discuss it.
While I do occasionally keep up with current histories of Stalin’s years, it’s been quite awhile since I’ve read anything so personal as Leningrad: Siege and Symphony. I think anyone who has attempted to read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago will understand how ghastly and how numbing it is to read an unrelenting flow of true stories of arrests, torture, slave labor, executions and other deaths caused by human callousness with the full realization you are seeing only a tiny sample of what happened.
One of the most memorable paragraphs of the book describes a moment from a holiday party that the composer of the title symphony put on after being evacuated from Leningrad: It seems no informers were present when Shostakovich greeted the New Year with the toast: ‘Let’s drink to this, that things don’t get any better!’ It had been drummed into Russians for years that life was getting better when manifestly it was getting worse. Hence the unmistakable irony in his toast.
The unifying positive theme of the book is Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony; the composer and his circle of friends, its composition, its performance in Leningrad during the siege, the musicians, even its audience. As much as I appreciate Moynahan’s work, the subject and the interweaving themes of the book seemed more to deserve to be a great epic novel that could be enjoyed (I emphasize that word) by a wider audience. It deserved to be written, if not by a Lev Tolstoy, then certainly by a similar master like Solzhenitsyn, who could make the average westerner feel the events.
Moynahan presents the symphony for what it was, a glorious unifying symbol of a city of people who did their best simply to survive the war and the predations of their own government. Moynahan does not hide the fact that on its musical merits, the symphony met and still meets with mixed reviews. The symphony was the subject of an intense propaganda campaign both in the USSR and in the west, so that audiences during World War II were expected to adore it when they heard it out of sheer patriotism, even in the UK and US. Some people genuinely loved it then, some do now. But there are very different views. The Finnish composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen said harshly in 1987 (quoted here from the article on the symphony in Wikipedia)- When I have said that the Seventh Symphony of Shostakovich is a dull and unpleasant composition, people have responded: “Yes, yes, but think of the background of that symphony.” Such an attitude does no good to anyone.’
The Soviet leadership criticized Shostakovich and banned his music at times both before and after the war for being anti-Soviet, complaining that it was both too western and too inaccessible to the general public. Anti-Soviet was just a catch phrase for anything out of favor. I’m not the greatest student of musicology, but I’d say that Shostakovich’s music is distinctly Russian. But as far as being inaccessible, I’d have to say that concerning the 7th symphony, he was guilty as charged.
I like some of Shostakovich’s later symphonies very much, but it had been a long while since I’d listened to the 7th symphony. So I listened to it during the time I was reading the book. One can either like the symphony or not. Having heard it again, I can’t say I like it or hate it. But I think at least Salonen’s statement above that it’s dull, is fair. The whole symphony is full of dissonance, which means it would be best only to listen to it in a good mood. It’s very loud, and long. As the joke goes, it seems like a symphony written by someone being paid per page of sheet music and written with jobs for classical musicians in mind as its highest priority. A good bit of the first movement has two melodies playing in counterpoint neither of which is very memorable. Shostakovich himself was concerned the Ravel’s-Bolero-like repetitions in the movement would cause criticism. The other three movements sort of fade in my mind into obscurity without any evidence I need to give them another hearing any time soon. There is nothing in it that you will be humming all evening after you hear it. That would certainly not be the case if the impact of its music alone were actually, as some admirers have claimed, like Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture or, say, Sibelius’ Finlandia. It is often said that the meanings of the 7th Symphony’s musical themes, such as the invasion in the first movement and the heroic stand of the Leningraders in the last movement, are easily recognizable. Whatever else you might think of the music, certainly that notion is a flight of pure, esoteric fantasy.
In the end Leningrad: Siege and Symphony is a good book. It does at times take some forms of propaganda of the war period, too seriously, and given the scope of the misery during the siege, it wallows a bit too uncritically in the Russian intelligentsia's penchant for self-promotion. But don't worry too much about those things. They are not going to keep you awake at night. I can highly recommend the book, but only for those willing to endure a very dark journey into ugly depths of human nature.
Leningrad: Siege and Symphony is very well written history, but it is not for the faint of heart. To understand what the book is about, add the horrors of Stalin’s secret police to the nightmare of the starvation of millions of people under daily bombardment by the Germans determined to wipe one of the world’s great cities from the map.
I won’t kid you. It is painful to read books like this, no matter how well written they are. For years I felt it was my duty as a student and teacher of Russian language to learn everything I could about the horrific details of Stalin’s regime and the effects of its clash with the equally murderous Nazi Germany. My fellow Russian students understood what this was about. The average westerner then, even students of German language and German history seemed to think of Hitler and the Nazis as something transcendently exceptional in the history of political murder. Evidence that Mao’s Chinese communists may have been the most prolific political murderers ever and that Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge may have murdered a higher percentage of their own people than Hitler, Stalin or Mao, just didn’t seem to register with the vast majority of people. As students of Russian we felt the duty to be curious about the details of the disappearance of whole generations of Russian artists and writers. It’s one thing to be intellectually aware of what happened and another to have studied it closely and to have met and talked to the survivors when, under soviet rule, they were still deathly afraid to discuss it.
While I do occasionally keep up with current histories of Stalin’s years, it’s been quite awhile since I’ve read anything so personal as Leningrad: Siege and Symphony. I think anyone who has attempted to read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago will understand how ghastly and how numbing it is to read an unrelenting flow of true stories of arrests, torture, slave labor, executions and other deaths caused by human callousness with the full realization you are seeing only a tiny sample of what happened.
One of the most memorable paragraphs of the book describes a moment from a holiday party that the composer of the title symphony put on after being evacuated from Leningrad: It seems no informers were present when Shostakovich greeted the New Year with the toast: ‘Let’s drink to this, that things don’t get any better!’ It had been drummed into Russians for years that life was getting better when manifestly it was getting worse. Hence the unmistakable irony in his toast.
The unifying positive theme of the book is Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony; the composer and his circle of friends, its composition, its performance in Leningrad during the siege, the musicians, even its audience. As much as I appreciate Moynahan’s work, the subject and the interweaving themes of the book seemed more to deserve to be a great epic novel that could be enjoyed (I emphasize that word) by a wider audience. It deserved to be written, if not by a Lev Tolstoy, then certainly by a similar master like Solzhenitsyn, who could make the average westerner feel the events.
Moynahan presents the symphony for what it was, a glorious unifying symbol of a city of people who did their best simply to survive the war and the predations of their own government. Moynahan does not hide the fact that on its musical merits, the symphony met and still meets with mixed reviews. The symphony was the subject of an intense propaganda campaign both in the USSR and in the west, so that audiences during World War II were expected to adore it when they heard it out of sheer patriotism, even in the UK and US. Some people genuinely loved it then, some do now. But there are very different views. The Finnish composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen said harshly in 1987 (quoted here from the article on the symphony in Wikipedia)- When I have said that the Seventh Symphony of Shostakovich is a dull and unpleasant composition, people have responded: “Yes, yes, but think of the background of that symphony.” Such an attitude does no good to anyone.’
The Soviet leadership criticized Shostakovich and banned his music at times both before and after the war for being anti-Soviet, complaining that it was both too western and too inaccessible to the general public. Anti-Soviet was just a catch phrase for anything out of favor. I’m not the greatest student of musicology, but I’d say that Shostakovich’s music is distinctly Russian. But as far as being inaccessible, I’d have to say that concerning the 7th symphony, he was guilty as charged.
I like some of Shostakovich’s later symphonies very much, but it had been a long while since I’d listened to the 7th symphony. So I listened to it during the time I was reading the book. One can either like the symphony or not. Having heard it again, I can’t say I like it or hate it. But I think at least Salonen’s statement above that it’s dull, is fair. The whole symphony is full of dissonance, which means it would be best only to listen to it in a good mood. It’s very loud, and long. As the joke goes, it seems like a symphony written by someone being paid per page of sheet music and written with jobs for classical musicians in mind as its highest priority. A good bit of the first movement has two melodies playing in counterpoint neither of which is very memorable. Shostakovich himself was concerned the Ravel’s-Bolero-like repetitions in the movement would cause criticism. The other three movements sort of fade in my mind into obscurity without any evidence I need to give them another hearing any time soon. There is nothing in it that you will be humming all evening after you hear it. That would certainly not be the case if the impact of its music alone were actually, as some admirers have claimed, like Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture or, say, Sibelius’ Finlandia. It is often said that the meanings of the 7th Symphony’s musical themes, such as the invasion in the first movement and the heroic stand of the Leningraders in the last movement, are easily recognizable. Whatever else you might think of the music, certainly that notion is a flight of pure, esoteric fantasy.
In the end Leningrad: Siege and Symphony is a good book. It does at times take some forms of propaganda of the war period, too seriously, and given the scope of the misery during the siege, it wallows a bit too uncritically in the Russian intelligentsia's penchant for self-promotion. But don't worry too much about those things. They are not going to keep you awake at night. I can highly recommend the book, but only for those willing to endure a very dark journey into ugly depths of human nature.