The Noise of Time.epub

A man stands by the lift in his apartment block in the middle of the night, waiting for the men from the 'Big House' to come for him. It is 1936 in the Stalinist USSR, and the man is Shostakovich. The state newspaper Pravda has deemed his latest opera to be “Muddle instead of Music” - a piece designed for the bourgeoisie and therefore not acceptable for a Soviet audience. Now Shostakovich is expecting to be hauled away and grilled about his political beliefs, a dangerous thing for an artist under this brutal regime.

This is a barely fictionalised biography of the composer, focussing on three major episodes in his life each 12 years apart. Shostakovich was eventually brought back into favour and even sent off to represent the regime in the US, but he lived always under the fear that one day he would again be ostracised, or worse. It is clearly well-researched, and is well-written, with Barnes using Shostakovich's life as a vehicle to muse on the position of artists under totalitarian regimes.

Barnes looks at questions of bravery and cowardice, compromise and its debilitating effect on artistic freedom, and the blindness of the regime to the subtleties of irony. He shows clearly how an individual knew that any decision he reached might impact severely on his families and friends, and how this made the question of defying the regime more complex than the simple matter of personal bravery it might at first sight seem. One of the more interesting sections discusses the response of people living safely in the West, expecting Soviet artists to be willing martyrs without an understanding of the realities of living in perpetual fear, not just for themselves but for those around them.