SW(Final8/31) Written by Allan B. Ho and Dmitry Feofanov
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also took place between Volkov and Louis Blois: Volkov: [. . .] about these interpolations. I was not aware of them before Fay’s article. Blois: Did Shostakovich, in the course of your interviews with him, did he hold a paper in front of him and read certain articles? Perhaps he read his articles to you in the process? Volkov: No, no, no, no. That would have alerted me immediately to the fact that he’s giving a prepared [text]. Absolutely not. 78 Neither has anyone among them [individuals privileged to read the Russian text] acknowledged recognition that some passages in Testimony duplicated material already published in the Soviet Union during Shostakovich’s lifetime nor an awareness that this duplicated material was located on the very pages of the Testimony typescript ‘authenticated’ by the composer’s signatures. 289 Second, Brown notes that Volkov was not known as a Shostakovich scholar while in the USSR. Instead, he was a journalist at various periodicals who, again according to Brown, had no significant articles on Shostakovich other than a brief introduction to the composer’s reminiscences of Meyerhold and an early review of the Eighth Quartet. 290 Clearly, Shostakovich was not the focus of his research or writing. Third, even Henry Orlov, a bonafide Shostakovich scholar who is hailed multiple times in A Shostakovich Casebook, 291 did not recognize a single one of the eight recycled passages when he examined the Russian text in 1979. Although he does note that portions of Testimony are ‘rephrase[d] in the vernacular’ from ‘some of the published autobiographical material’, 292 the specific passage (typescript pages 6–7) to which he refers in his reader’s report to Harper and Row is, in fact, only loosely related to the earlier article (‘Dumy o proydennom puti’, Sovetskaya Muzyka, 1956) and is not one of the eight verbatim or near-verbatim recyclings. Finally, even though Fay herself had actively searched for recycled passages, she had found only five and Simon Karlinsky two more at the time her article first appeared in October 1980. 293 Indeed, one has to wonder why Fay, the leading Shostakovich scholar in the West, never mentioned the recycling on page 003 from Shostakovich’s ‘Autobiography’ of 1927, printed in the September 1966 issue of Sovetskaya Muzyka, 294 289 Fay, A Shostakovich Casebook, p. 28. 290 Brown, A Shostakovich Casebook, p. 343: ‘I have looked through every issue of the journal [Sovetskaya Muzyka] starting in 1965 and continuing through 1976, the year of Volkov’s emigration, and found his name only as a byline to nine items. The first appeared in 1970, the remaining eight in 1973 and 1974’. Volkov, however, estimates that from 1959–75 he wrote some 300 articles for various publications, though, again, not focusing on Shostakovich. The only piece on the composer he deemed worthy of mention in his entry in The New Grove is his review of the Eighth Quartet, ‘Novy kvartet D. Shostakovicha’ (‘New Quartet of D. Shostakovich’), Smena, 7 October 1960, p. 4 (cf. Allan B. Ho, ‘Volkov, Solomon [Moiseyevich]’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Macmillan Ltd., London, 2001, Vol. 26, p. 885). 291 From A Shostakovich Casebook: ‘Orlov had worked closely with Shostakovich, knew his idiosyncrasies well, and was widely recognized as an authority on the composer’s music’ (p. 3); ‘Orlov, someone who himself had collected memoirs of Shostakovich, [. . .] is an outstanding figure among Russian scholars, musicologists, and historians of culture. His monograph, Simfonii Shostakovicha [The symphonies of Shostakovich] (Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1961), remains, to the present day, more than three decades after its publication, one of the best books in any language about Shostakovich’s symphonies’ (p. 99); and ‘Orlov is well known to have been personally and closely associated with Shostakovich for many years, in contrast to Solomon Volkov [. . .].’ (p. 178). 292 Kovnatskaya, A Shostakovich Casebook, p. 115. 293 Fay, ‘Shostakovich versus Volkov: Whose Testimony?, Russian Review, 30/4, October 1980, 484–93; reprinted in A Shostakovich Casebook, pp. 11–21. 294 Fay, A Shostakovich Casebook, p. 39. 79 until an altered copy of the typescript emerged that included Shostakovich’s signature on this page. Are we to believe that Fay worked on a biography of the composer for fifteen years, but did not notice for twenty-plus years this obvious recycling in Testimony’s first chapter? An excerpt of this material is quoted on page 10 of Wilson’s Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (1994; as mentioned in Shostakovich Reconsidered; p. 190) as well as on page 16 of Natal’ya Lukyanova’s easily obtained Shostakovich: His Life and Times (1982; English translation, 1984), both of which are cited in the bibliography of Fay’s Shostakovich: A Life. Did Fay remain quiet about this recycling earlier because it did not fit her theory that recycled passages appear only on signed pages? What else has Fay not reported? a. Shostakovich’s Memory In Shostakovich Reconsidered we provided numerous examples of Shostakovich’s feats of memory as well as testimony from leading psychologists specializing in this area that the composer might well have repeated his earlier words in telling his life story. 295 Although Shostakovich’s astounding memory is mentioned still more in recent publications, 296 Fay continues to doubt that he would repeat himself verbatim on eight pages of Testimony since he often embellished his stories in conversation: Ho and Feofanov produce no evidence that Shostakovich ever repeated such large chunks of his own statements word-for-word in conversation. [. . .] No evidence has been produced to demonstrate that Shostakovich ever repeated one of his stories exactly the same way twice. 297 In contrast to Fay, we believe that if Shostakovich could repeat others’ texts verbatim, it only stands to reason that he could have repeated his own. Remember, too, that these were not casual conversations or ‘stories’ the composer might have shared, 295 Cf. Shostakovich Reconsidered, pp. 188–209, summarized on pp. 266–68 below. These include having all of Wagner’s Ring Cycle in his head and being able to play, without prior preparation, just the second violin and cello parts of Beethoven’s Die grosse fuge on two pianos with Krzysztof Meyer, something that most musicians would consider ‘utterly inconceivable’. Although Shostakovich’s repetition of eight pages of his own words (over multiple sessions) may seem difficult to believe, it is actually a modest accomplishment compared to other feats of memory that have been documented. For example, in 1917 George M. Stratton studied the Shass Pollak, students of the Talmud, who could recall the location of every word on every page of the twelve volumes of that text, and on 4 October 2006 Akira Haraguchi recited from memory the mathematical pi to 100,000 decimal places in 16 hours. Researchers such as neurobiologist James McGaugh of the University of California, Irvine, are currently studying others with a phenomenal memory, such as a woman identified as ‘AJ’ (later revealed to be Jill Price) and Brad Williams, both of whom can recall, instantaneously and without use of mnemonic devices, the details and events of most of the days in their lives (cf. ‘Amazing Memory Man Never Forgets’, 22 February 2008, Download Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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