SW(Final8/31) Written by Allan B. Ho and Dmitry Feofanov
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- IX. A Question of Methodology
- 2. ‘Don’t Seek, Don’t Find’
is ‘an allusion to Homer’s Thersites (the mocker from the sidelines in The Iliad)’; ‘Dr. Johnson’ is, of course, Samuel Johnson (1709–84), who dismissed opera, which he himself didn’t like, as ‘an exotic and irrational entertainment’ (Dictionary of the English Language), and mocked a female Quaker preacher, saying, ‘Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all’ (James Boswell, Life of Johnson). 206 IX. A Question of Methodology ‘… there are far worse things one can be than wrong: one can be lazy; one can be incompetent; one can be dishonest. If one is diligent, competent, and honest, one need not fear being wrong’. (Richard Taruskin, On Russian Music, p. 23) 1. ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ In other areas of research, scholars spare no effort to look under every rock and to collect every shred of evidence. However, in the rather bizarre world of Shostakovich studies, a different methodology often prevails. Some scholars claim to seek nothing but the truth: for example, Brown asserted, in a letter of 27 September 1997, that he, Fay, and Taruskin ‘are now and always have been interested first of all in establishing the truth [. . .] about how Testimony was put together’. Their actions, however, speak otherwise. Consider two statements made by Laurel Fay on 3 November 1995 at the national meeting of the American Musicological Society: What I wish for right now is an approach to Soviet music scholarship no more revisionist than a healthy dose of the old musicology; painstaking basic research and fact finding guided by open minds and common sense, rather than by polemical agendas, shopworn clichés, and double standards. 683 Yet, when asked if she had contacted Shostakovich’s friends and family while researching her biography of the composer, Fay responded ‘no’, because she considers this information, as a whole, less reliable; she also stated: ‘I didn’t want to become compromised by having them tell me their stories and then being obliged somehow to retell them’. 684 This is a most peculiar methodology for someone longing, at the same time, for ‘painstaking basic research and fact finding guided by open minds and common sense’. In contrast to Fay, Brown in A Shostakovich Casebook acknowledges the value and urgency of collecting exactly these types of reminiscences from Shostakovich’s friends and family. Reviewing Wilson’s Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, he writes: This is a remarkable book, filled with remarkable revelations, unforgettable stories, and poignant images. [. . .] Wilson was motivated to take on this project by the conviction that ‘now is the time, while some key witnesses are still alive, to try and tap living memory’ (p. xi). She set about to interview everyone who she 683 Shostakovich Reconsidered, p. 287, note 3. 684 Ibid., p. 246 note 17. For other specific examples of Fay’s dubious methodology, cf. Ian MacDonald’s review of Shostakovich: A Life on the Internet at 207 could identify who might have had some significant association with Shostakovich [. . .]. 685 Clearly, a proper scholar does not dismiss sources out of hand before learning what, if anything, they have to contribute. Yet, as has been demonstrated repeatedly, Fay’s selective scholarship is evident both in her book Shostakovich: A Life and in her contributions to A Shostakovich Casebook. Fay has declined speaking to people who knew Shostakovich well and who might shed valuable light on Testimony, because memory is fickle and these reminiscences might be skewed by personal or ‘polemical agendas’: 686 685 Brown, A Shostakovich Casebook, pp. 265–66; emphasis added. 686 Three personal observations of Fay over the past twenty years are worth quoting. Michael Kerpan reported in DSCH Journal, 7, Summer 1997, p. 18: [In early 1987] I had the opportunity of participating in a small group discussion with Ms. Fay. I was interested in her critique of Volkov’s ‘methodology’ but disconcerted by her basic attitude. It was clear that she did not feel worthy of academic investigation the official Soviet line that Shostakovich was always a devoted party man. These are the ‘facts’ as I see them — she had special privileged access to Soviet archives and she was contemptuous of anyone who questioned the official Soviet interpretation of Shostakovich. Alice Nakhimovsky added, in an email of June 2001 to Ian MacDonald: I should tell you that I went to graduate school with Laurel Fay. I was in literature, and she, of course, in music, but we were friends and attended at least one seminar together. I haven’t seen her in many years, and her pronouncements on Shostakovich caused me great distress. The motivation could not be ignorance of the context. I remember her as a real iconoclast, and I think that after her discovery about Volkov’s book she seized on the opportunity to stake out a contrarian position and just stuck with it. Finally, Maya Pritsker, head of the Art Department for the American Russian daily newspaper Novoye Russkoye Slovo, stated publicly during the Shostakovich session at the Mannes College of Music, 15 February 1999: You should know that Laurel Fay was working for the Schirmer publishing house for a long time, and I think she’s still there. And in this capacity she came to Russia quite frequently. She became probably the only person who frequently visited the Soviet Union for a long time. So a whole lot of information came to her through VAAP, the agency of the authorship — which was headed by a KGB agent, as you know — and also through the Union of Composers. I knew that because I was living then in Moscow. I was a member of the Union of Composers as a musicologist, and I talked to Laurel. So I know her views. If she’d spoken against the situation, she probably wouldn’t have been allowed back into Russia. She would have lost her position as a leading specialist in Soviet music at that time. [. . .] Malcolm Brown also visited frequently and had very close connections with the head of the Union of Soviet Composers [Tikhon Khrennikov]. So this is probably part of the explanation. Pritsker here is referring to Fay’s longtime employment at G. Schirmer, which began in the 1980s and is now defined as ‘Consultant, Russian and CIS Music/Copyright Restoration Project’. She suggests that Fay, as a representative of Schirmer, would have been in a difficult position to oppose VAAP’s official stand on Testimony and Volkov without jeopardizing the ‘fruitful political and monetary relationship’ between VAAP and Schirmer (mentioned by A. Lebedev in Sovetskaya Muzyka, 6, 1975, pp. 99–101). 208 Reminiscences can be self-serving, vengeful, and distorted by faulty memory, selective amnesia, wishful thinking, and exaggeration. They can be rife with gossip and rumor. The temptation to recast the past to suit the present — especially now, when the victims and survivors of the Soviet ‘experiment’ are grappling with discomforting issues of complicity and culpability with a shameful past — can be hard to resist. In any case, factual accuracy is not generally one of their most salient features. 687 While acknowledging the need for caution with all materials dealing with Shostakovich, Fay prefers to focus instead on official documents of the Soviet era, seemingly unaware of their provenance in the dungeons of the ‘Ministry of Truth’, and on Shostakovich’s letters, in the belief that these are more accurate and reliable. 688 Others have already questioned her reasoning and methodology. Diane Wilson notes that heavy reliance on written documents is not necessarily a safe thing to do in a society with a free and open press, and becomes very problematic for a prominent Soviet citizen. Were articles published in Soviet books, journals, and newspapers true and accurate? Were they free of political influence? Can anyone verify the authorship of any of these? 689 687 Fay, pp. 2–3. 688 A prime example of the dangers of relying on written Soviet documents concerns Shostakovich’s joining the Party in 1960. As noted in the reminiscences of Isaak Glikman, Maxim, Galina, and Irina Shostakovich, Lev Lebedinsky, and others close to the composer, this event caused the composer much emotional turmoil (cf. pp. 36–37 above). Yet, as Khentova reports, none of this is evident in the official record: I was allowed to look through all the material concerning this event [Shostakovich joining the Party]: who spoke to him, what about, details of his application (written in his own hand), minutes of the meetings and so on. In this way the documents proved to me that no one had forced him to join the Party. There is no proof for this, as the documents showed (‘St. Petersburg Special: Part 1’, DSCH Journal, 13, July 2000, p. 29). 689 Diane Wilson, DSCH-list, 18 May 2002. In addition, C. H. Loh, writes: In her new book, she [Fay] proudly claims Soviet-era printed material (newspaper and magazine articles, Soviet biographies and letters written under severe censorship) to be the most objective source. Here she gingerly qualifies their reliability with disproportionate mildness compared to the manner in which she slams the door shut on accounts of friends [. . .]. What is laughable is the amount of skepticism one is asked to apply to documents such as Wilson’s personal accounts and Testimony, while Pravda is held to be the word of the truth (oh, but Pravda means ‘truth’ in Russian does it not?). [. . .] Her idea that Shostakovich was neither dissident nor a Soviet communist- loyalist but something in-between, a complex character and an enigma, begins to sound like an easy way to worm out of an embarrassing situation of having pitched for the wrong team. [. . .] In the end A Life is not so much a book about Shostakovich as it is a book about who Fay needs Shostakovich to be, which is a terrible waste of an excellent opportunity for the author (DSCH Journal, 12, January 2000, pp. 16–17). 209 Louis Blois adds: [. . .] however filtered, distorted and unreliable that resource may seem, Testimony presents at least a reflection of possible interpretation, a set of potential leads and signals to which the scholar’s antenna should be keenly attuned. In some instances, Fay has chosen to ignore such possibilities, and even goes so far as to completely shun the corroborating evidence presented by Feofanov and Ho’s Shostakovich Reconsidered and elsewhere. It is a decision that at times leads to awkward moments, such as in her already infamous discussion of the cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry in which her own trail of footnotes touches upon evidence that would contradict her view of the work’s conception. Another instance occurs in her discussion of the Eleventh Symphony (1956–7) where she dismisses the contemporaneous Hungarian uprising as a possible source of the composer’s inspiration, citing a lack of ‘available evidence’. In fact, Shostakovich Reconsidered does present interesting documentation to the contrary (corroborating that found in Testimony). 690 Fay’s selective reporting of evidence not only about From Jewish Folk Poetry and the Eleventh Symphony, but about Testimony and other issues, and her ignoring of ‘potential leads and signals to which the scholar’s antenna should be keenly attuned’ is particularly disturbing because most readers have to rely on the few Western experts fluent in Russian to translate and disseminate pertinent information. If these experts withhold information and then claim a lack of ‘available evidence’, how can others draw valid conclusions? Malcolm Brown and Richard Taruskin’s silence regarding Fay’s selective scholarship is equally peculiar. Since neither have publicly questioned Fay’s justification for not speaking with the friends and family of Shostakovich — so as ‘not to be compromised’ or ‘obliged’ to repeat all their stories (some of which might even support Testimony and its portrait of the composer) — let us consider their own statements. In A Shostakovich Casebook, Brown differentiates between a ‘responsible scholar’ and a ‘music journalist’: ‘a responsible scholar eschews on principle data known to be skewed, no matter how attractive it may appear in support of one or another pet hypothesis. Ian MacDonald, however, is a music journalist’. 691 Yet, as demonstrated repeatedly in this book, Brown himself has not eschewed ‘data known to be skewed’, but embraced it. He reproduces, without comment or qualification, denunciations of the memoirs that appeared in the Soviet press in 1979, Irina Shostakovich’s hearsay allegations, Orlov’s spurious examples of errors in Testimony, Mitchinson’s interpretation of Litvinova’s words that is at odds with her own statements, and the like. Indeed, one wonders why Brown did not ask his contributors simply to check their facts. Brown likely will claim, again, ‘I didn’t know’. 692 But a responsible scholar makes it his business to know. 690 Louis Blois, review of Shostakovich: A Life, DSCH Journal, 13, July 2000, p. 44. 691 Brown, A Shostakovich Casebook, p. 263. 692 Cf. ‘Arena’, DSCH Journal, 9, Summer 1998, pp. 37–40, in which Brown earlier acknowledges being unfamiliar with evidence pertinent to the Testimony debate. 210 2. ‘Don’t Seek, Don’t Find’ Taruskin, too, has voiced some revealing thoughts on research, at least as it pertains to the ‘Shostakovich Wars’. In his Cramb Lecture (2000), he recalls that ‘a wise old professor of mine used to say, you’ll always find what you’re looking for’. 693 While it is true that looking for something may increase your chance of finding it, more important is the corollary, which apparently has escaped Taruskin these many long years: you are less likely to find something if you don’t look for it. For thirty years, Fay, Taruskin, and Brown have looked for information that casts doubt on the memoirs, but not for information that would corroborate it, and then they claim a lack of ‘available evidence’: • They have refused to ask Flora Litvinova about when Shostakovich told her about his collaboration with a young Leningrad musicologist or to investigate how many of the six signatories to ‘Pitiful Forgery’ actually had read Testimony before they denounced it; • They have refused to ask Irina Shostakovich to identify the ‘everybody’ who she said in 1978 knew about the memoirs or to verify her more recent claims; • They have refused to contact people who were aware of Testimony while it was in progress or who worked with the Russian typescript early on, such as Galina Drubachevskaya, Yury Korev, Seppo Heikinheimo, and Heddy Pross-Weerth. At the same time, isn’t it curious how evidence casting a shadow on Testimony emerges only after key people have died? For example, if Leo Arnshtam (1905–80) or Lev Lebedinsky (1904–92) were genuinely suspected of being ‘deep throats’ collaborating with Volkov, why were they not asked about this before their deaths, one and thirteen years, respectively, after Testimony was published? If Isaak Glikman (1911– 2003) had any reservations about Volkov and Testimony, as stated in his note of 20 November 1979 recently put forward by Fay via Irina Shostakovich, why was he not asked about this before his own death, twenty-four years after Testimony was published? 694 As usual, Fay does not want to investigate why Glikman’s note was written (1) immediately after VAAP had decided, after losing the copyright battle, to brand the memoirs a forgery and to distribute disinformation about it; and (2) at the same time that signatories were being assembled to denounce a text that they had not read for 693 Taruskin, ‘Cramb Lecture’, p. 34. 694 Glikman told Alexander Izbitser, a former student and later a close friend (cf. ‘Glikman on Shostakovich: Beyond Pisma’, DSCH Journal, 30, January 2009, pp. 7–16), that Irina Shostakovich forbade him to speak publicly about Volkov. However, after Irina published ‘Myortvye bezzashchitny?’ (‘Are the Dead Defenseless?’) in August 2000 (cf. pp. 39–55 above), Izbitser persuaded Glikman to document his own longheld criticisms of Volkov (quoted on pp. 212–13 below). 211 themselves. In fact, she criticizes those who would question the timing of Glikman’s note, dated less than a week after ‘Pitiful Forgery’ was published: ‘Why did Glikman write this? Maybe he was asked to . . . I wouldn’t be surprised if Volkov were to impugn Glikman’s motives’. 695 Fay even uses Glikman’s note to suggest that Shostakovich opposed writing his memoirs: Glikman says Shostakovich was very irritable about writing any memoirs — he was very negative about being asked for his reminiscences and reacted with scorn when asked if he would like to write about Mikhail Zoshchenko — (Glikman states) ‘I asked him to write about his piano teacher — I would sketch out the memoirs — he answered in a fit of temper — “I know how to write music, not memoirs” . . . this was five months before his death — I remembered this in terms of Volkov’s memoirs — I can’t believe Shostakovich suddenly turned into one (a memoirist) — why would he relate them to the unknown Volkov? It’s incomprehensible to me that Shostakovich could embark on these topics with someone unknown to him — otherwise he would have inquired about him, especially with his family name’ (Volkov = wolf). 696 In citing Glikman, Fay completely ignores the testimonies of Maxim and Irina Shostakovich that the composer was, indeed, interested in writing his memoirs and not only had asked for a notebook to jot down his ideas, but had selected a motto for his reminiscences. 697 To her credit, Elizabeth Wilson, immediately aware of Fay’s selective 695 Pleak, p. 52. Regarding the objectivity and balance of the 2004 Shostakovich Festival at Bard College at which Fay, Brown, Mitchinson, and other contributors of A Shostakovich Casebook were participants, Richard Pleak asked: ‘A pro-Volkov view on the panel is absent, will there be one?’ Leon Botstein, the organizer, replied, ‘there are through the two weekends — [explaining, after all, that] this is not a Volkov festival’. Pleak reports that, contrary to Botstein’s claim, ‘there were not’ any pro-Volkov views at the Bard Festival. 696 Ibid., p. 52. Glikman’s private comments from November 1979 contrast significantly with his public statement in Story of a Friendship, p. xi, which is much tamer and does not even mention Volkov: In the last years of his life, Shostakovich was often asked to write his reminiscences of departed artistic colleagues, but he did not generally take kindly to these requests. He used to say: ‘Why ask me? After all, I’m not a writer. Anyhow, who needs these so- called reminiscences? I certainly hope that when I’m dead, Irina [Antonovna, Shostakovich’s third wife] isn’t going to go round knocking on people’s door asking them to write their “reminiscences” of me!’ 697 Shostakovich Reconsidered, pp. 82, 85, and 88–89. In addition, Oksana Dvornichenko begins her Dmitry Shostakovich, Puteshestviye (Dmitry Shostakovich, The Voyage), Tekst, Moscow, 2006, with the following epigraph by Shostakovich: During the years of my life, I saw many interesting things, met many interesting people, and I regret terribly that I did not keep a diary, reminiscences, because this all, I think, would be very interesting not only for me but for many readers (also cf. the statement in Sovetskaya kultura, 26 June 1973, included in Dvornichenko’s DSCH DVD-ROM under the year ‘1973’). On p. 8, she goes on to mention that, while sailing to the USA on the Mikhail Lermontov (3–11 June 1973), Shostakovich remarked: ‘Too bad that I did not write reminiscences. There was so much interesting in my life. But I do not lose hope to return to this’. 212 reporting of the evidence, added: ‘Irina says he had thought about writing his memoirs and had [selected] an epigra[m] from Balzac (presumably ‘All is true’)’: 698 In every profession there are true artists who possess invincible pride, aesthetic sensibility, and indestructive stalwartness. Their conscience can never be bought or sold. These writers and artists will be faithful to their art even on the steps of their scaffold. 699 Irina also told Mitchinson that ‘Dmitrich wanted to write his memoirs himself’, though she continues to deny Volkov’s role in writing them. 700 Alex Ross, in ‘Unauthorized: The Final Betrayal of Dmitri Shostakovich’, summarizes Fay’s ‘new evidence’ and proclaims her source, Isaak Glikman, an ‘unimpeachable witness’. 701 However, neither he nor Fay discloses the latter’s obvious bias against Volkov, which makes Glikman, in fact, a highly impeachable witness. Again, ‘don’t ask, don’t tell; don’t seek, don’t find’. In the interest of full disclosure of the facts and to allow readers to make their own assessment of Glikman’s veracity and motives, we provide below his complete statement ‘About S. Volkov’, followed by our analysis. These reminiscences, documented by Alexander Izbitser (cf. note 694) from his personal conversations with Glikman and material provided by the latter’s widow, Luisa Dmitrievna, reveal that Glikman had been highly critical of Volkov from as early as 1968, eleven years before his note of 20 November 1979: I am not sure whether I should advertise Solomon Volkov. Because about this book on St. Petersburg’s culture [A Cultural History of St. Petersburg, 1995 — Eds.] there are very positive reviews by Andrey Bitov and Yakov Gordin. They are delighted that — think about it! — this [. . .] [ellipse in the original — Eds.] Volkov dabbled about 698 Pleak, p. 53; emphasis added. When Pleak asked Wilson privately at the 2006 Shostakovich Festival at Rutgers University about her attribution of the motto to Balzac’s ‘All is true’, she responded that that information came second-hand and that she could not recall the source (email from Pleak to the authors, 10 April 2006). The exact passage has not yet been found. Even Dr. Michael J. Tilby, a leading Balzac scholar, was not familiar with the motto and could not locate it in the Balzac concordances. 699 Irina Shostakovich, Shostakovich Conference, transl. Sofiya Krapkova, California State University, Long Beach, 18 February 1996. Cf. Shostakovich Reconsidered, p. 82, and David Bündler’s ‘The Real Shostakovich Comes to Long Beach’, Twentieth-Century Music, 3/4, April 1996, p. 16; on the Internet at Download Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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