The life of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich features in several contemporary anglophone bio-fictions, both novels and film, raising the question of the larger implications of Shostakovich’s life in art today. In my paper, I aim to address how such...
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Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Universitätsbibliothek, Jacob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm-Zentrum
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The life of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich features in several contemporary anglophone bio-fictions, both novels and film, raising the question of the larger implications of Shostakovich’s life in art today. In my paper, I aim to address how such Shostakovich bio-fictions reinvent the composer’s creative labour in the context of World War II, Stalinist and post-Stalinist politics. Shostakovich’s life as artist and man appears torn between fear of persecution, social commitment, and the claim of individual, aesthetic autonomy tied to a controversial degree of political dissent. In Western eyes, the Soviet composer thus epitomizes the transnational figure of the twentieth-century artist – compromised, yet achieving an expression of his personal voice, creating an emphatically modern art that is bound to its times and yet ultimately eludes both the dictates of politics and mimesis. Peer Reviewed
