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	Irina Shostakovich - An Answer to Those Who Still Abuse Shostakovich (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		Volkov had already applied for an exit visa to leave the country and was planning to use that material as soon as he was abroad.
		Volkov at a concert and asked him to come and see me (but without his wife, as he had wanted) and leave me a copy of the material he had, which was unauthorized (since it had never been read by Shostakovich).
		Volkov at first claimed that the American publishers were against the Russian edition, then that the royalties in Russia were not high enough, then that those offering to publish it in Russia were crooks and, finally, that he had sold his manuscript to a private archive and it was not available anymore.
	www.geocities.com /kuala_bear/articles/Irina.html (2186 words)

	Scotsman.com News - Features - Symphonies for the red devil (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		Volkov says "cultural historians have not paid enough attention to this highly noteworthy document", which may be true; but his assertion that the thin-legged spectacle wearer is Shostakovich himself is more questionable.
		Volkov says the subtitle is unfair; it comes from a 1938 newspaper article, and "the true author of that lapidary and memorable formula", he claims, "is none other than Stalin".
		Volkov was a friend and close associate of the composer, and so his book never really gets to grips with the issue of how far Shostakovich - for entirely understandable reasons of self-preservation - sold out to the regime.
	news.scotsman.com /features.cfm?id=408292004 (1218 words)

	How Volkov Faked Testimony
		The book was declared a fraud, invented by Solomon Volkov, that "has nothing in common with the true reminiscences of D. Shostakovich" by a panel of six prominent former Soviet composers- students and friends of Shostakovich- Basner, Karnev, Karen Khachaturian, Levitin, Tishchenko, and Vainberg.
		Volkov forged Shostakovich's signature onto the beginning of seven of the chapters of "Testimony" by attaching a page from one of these old articles to the beginning of one of his chapters.
		Volkov would use the first page only (which often only comes to a few paragraphs in the published book) from a copy of one of these already published, non-controversial Soviet documents which Shostakovich had signed as "read".
	www.geocities.com /rickredrick/Testimony.html (878 words)

	In the shadow of Stalin
		Shostakovich, Volkov argued, was also a sensitive man painfully aware that protesting too vehemently could condemn him and his family to long years, perhaps even death, in the Siberian gulag.
		Volkov compares Shostakovich's difficulties with Stalin to novelist Alexander Pushkin's tormented relationship a century earlier with Czar Nicholas I, a ruler who, like Stalin, alternately wooed and baited his country's pre-eminent artists.
		Volkov is a cultural historian, and Shostakovich shares a vast stage populated with figures reaching from Pushkin and Modest Mussorgsky to Mikhail Bulgakov, Boris Pasternak and Maxim Gorky.
	www.suntimes.com /output/books/sho-sunday-volkov28.html (949 words)

	Financial Review: Great pretender or loyal son of Stalin? (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		The man who stirred up all this odium theologicum was Solomon Volkov, who in the mid-1970s published a book, apparently based on conversations with Shostakovich in the final years of the composer's life, in which he revealed his intimate thoughts on Stalinism.
		Volkov makes a convincing case that Stalin himself was the author of the article, which overnight turned Shostakovich from successful composer to pariah, under constant fear of arrest.
		Volkov so wants to rescue Shostakovich from charges of defeatism or cowardice that he goes to the other extreme, giving the all-too-fallible human being an aura of mythical infallibility.
	afr.com /cgi-bin/newtextversions.pl?pagetype=printer&path=/articles/2004/04/07/1081326788462.html (839 words)

	The Fight for Shostakovich
		Volkov produced several pages of his manuscript which had been signed and validated by the composer.
		Volkov inhabits a one-room Broadway high-rise with his wife Marianna, overlooking the Hudson River which, in early-morning light, resembles his native Neva.
		Volkov shrugged wearily; he has been accused by the Taruskinites of being a liar and a forger, barely acquainted with the composer.
	www.scena.org /columns/lebrecht/040324-NL-shostakovich.html (1108 words)

	Shostakovich's brute of a patron (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		If we are to believe Solomon Volkov, who collaborated with the composer on his posthumously published memoirs a quarter century before writing "Shostakovich and Stalin: The Extraordinary Relationship between the Great Composer and the Brutal Dictator," Shostakovich's music resonated with the tormented citizenry of the Soviet Union in a unique way.
		Volkov's book is a very Russian one; in fact it is suffused with that nation's essence, its worldview, its atmosphere.
		Volkov shows that Shostakovich had to walk a fine line at home in order to be able to swim in the mainstream of 20th century classical music.
	www.sfgate.com /cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/03/28/RVGED5OAQR1.DTL (1044 words)

	The New York Times > Arts > Shelf Life: Where Music May Owe Stalin a Little Credit
		Volkov explores those two realms while also showing their similarities, arguing that the confrontation between Stalin and Shostakovich was no simple matter.
		Volkov's interpretation cannot be separated from another set of confrontations that began in 1979, after he had moved from the Soviet Union and published "Testimony," presenting it as Shostakovich's memoirs.
		Volkov's critics might have once said simply that Shostakovich was a wounded, melancholic, loyal servant who joined the party and did his job, sometimes beyond the call of duty.
	www.nytimes.com /2004/04/10/arts/10SHEL.html?ex=1397016000&en=4ed5d54b11d624c0&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND (661 words)

	Shostakovich and Stalin
		Volkov chats about Stalin's condemnation of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk as “the most infamous episode in Soviet music history.” What he tries to do is explain why Uncle Joe was so very upset – and then why Shostakovich actually escaped execution and exile.
		Volkov goes on to explain that this review has become rather a classic in the history of criticism – that is, music criticism and cultural criticism.
		Volkov notes that for the rest of 1936 Shostakovich, for all his outward calm, was as tense as strung wire and, many claimed, near suicide.
	www.justabovesunset.com /id39.html (1838 words)

	Making music under Stalin - The Washington Times: Non-Fiction Review (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		Volkov writes that Shostakovich read this appraisal of his work on a cold winter's day in Moscow while standing at a newspaper kiosk, and he was devastated.
		Volkov is at pains to show the composer's great struggle in light of "two pivotal events that connected Shostakovich and Stalin" — Stalin's denunciation of the "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" and the Communist Party resolution of 1948 censuring Shostakovich and other leading Soviet composers.
		Volkov has done a superb job of bringing insight and feeling to an epoch in which art was under siege but not obliterated.
	washingtontimes.com /functions/print.php?StoryID=20040320-102249-5936r (1336 words)

	iactextuk2000
		Volkov took them and left, and I asked Dmitry why he had signed each page at the bottom, for that was not the usual way.
		Volkov lets his imagination run away with him: this was out of the question, if only because at the time Dmitry was too ill to be left unattended.
		Volkov found a publisher in the United States, and a publicity campaign was launched at once.
	www.devinci.fr /chostakovitch/BILINGUE/iactextuk2000.htm (1533 words)

	A Shostakovich Casebook
		When it was first published, Volkov claimed he had met with Shostakovich repeatedly in order to capture glimpses into Shostakovich's life, works, and opinions.
		What followed over the next two decades was a flurry of scholarly activity, aimed both at championing and at vilifying Volkov's work, in what has become known as the "Shostakovich wars." The resulting scholarship has, indeed, shed much new and positive light on Shostakovich's work, and provoked fresh and critical listening to his oeuvre.
		For example, her analysis of the chronology of events of research and publication clearly puts Volkov's own recollection of their order into dispute; progressively she attacks countless similar details until Volkov is left with no credibility at all.
	sky.prohosting.com /acbm/en/review/32-3/shostakovich.htm (1201 words)

	classical music - andante - wishful thinking
		But in 1979, Solomon Volkov single-handedly destroyed this popular understanding of Shostakovich by publishing a manuscript that he alleged was the composer's memoirs, dictated to Volkov when he was a young Soviet journalist.
		Volkov describes it as "unprecedented duel," in which Stalin was "obsessive" in his attempt to "micromanage" Shostakovich, and Shostakovich equally obsessive in his resistance, which he expressed in music.
		Volkov tells the stories that artists, writers and musicians whispered to each other when they believed the secret police weren't listening.
	www.andante.com /article/article.cfm?id=24130 (2666 words)

	Shostakovich Festival (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		Volkov, it is now believed, spent no more than three days with Shostakovich, not enough time to glean material for a book of its scope.
		Volkov and Shostakovich spent some moderate amount of time together, and much of what they discussed must have made it into the book.
		But Volkov obviously felt that he had something of value to bring to the table and that whatever he legitimately got from Shostakovich's mouth was worth casting into a book.
	www.angelfire.com /music2/davidbundler/shostakovich.html (2833 words)

	Volkov, Solomon. Conversations with Joseph Brodsky.
		Brodsky's mind, Volkov claims, was "essentially dialogic," a statement proved true in the revelatory conversations that follow.
		All of their energetic discussions are of keen interest, but it is Brodsky's forthright descriptions--the first ever for public consumption--of his detention in a mental asylum, exile in the North, and expulsion from Russia that leap off the page.
		At one point, Volkov challenges Brodsky's matter-of-fact approach to discussing these traumas, and Brodsky retorts, "I refuse to dramatize all this!" That's because all the drama and all the fire of his experiences are found in his majestic poetry.
	archive.ala.org /booklist/v94/adult/ja1/24volkov.html (141 words)

	Amazon.com: Shostakovich and Stalin : The Extraordinary Relationship Between the Great Composer and the Brutal ... (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		Volkov argues that Shostakovich survived the denunciation of his 1934 opera Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, and more minor controversies thereafter, in part by relying on a Russian tradition of playing the "holy fool" when under political pressure.
		Volkov includes material about all the noted writers, artists, and composers of Shostakovich's era to describe the repressive environment and how it shaped Soviet culture, thereby offering invaluable insight into the subversive life of the intelligentsia of the time.
		Volkov, happily, is no discount Freudian, and leaves it to the reader to ponder what delights--outside of the strict demands of "socialist realism"--Stalin derived from the squirming and survival techniques of those he didn't summarily dispatch.
	www.amazon.com /exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0375410821?v=glance (1785 words)

	Commentary Magazine - The Problem of Shostakovich (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		...Solomon Volkov's explanation was straightforward: Shostakovich did everything he was told to do, no matter how contemptible or absurd, both as a means of self-protection and in the certainty that his fellow Russian musicians would assume he was acting at gunpoint...
		...Volkov's Shostakovich seemed entirely credible to performers and listeners familiar with the composer's post-1937 music, and quotations from Testimony soon became a staple item of music critics and program annotators (the present writer included), who thereafter "read" Shostakovich's works as a Solzhenitsyn-like chronicle of life under totalitarianism...
		...Volkov's Shostakovich was no political toady but rather the opposite: a "secret dissident" who spoke bluntly of his loathing of Stalin ("Stalin was a spider and everyone who approached his nets had to die...
	www.commentarymagazine.com /Summaries/V99I2P48-1.htm (2779 words)

	paulmitchinson.com » The Shostakovich Variations
		Solomon Volkov was a sixteen-year-old student at the high school affiliated with the Leningrad Conservatory when he met his idol.
		Later, when Volkov became a senior editor at Sovetskaya muzyka, the official journal of the Union of Composers, Shostakovich invited Volkov to his Moscow apartment, which happened to be in the same building as Volkov’s office.
		Volkov is likable and well read, and he seems to have an extraordinary ability to win the confidence of interviewees.
	paulmitchinson.com /articles/the-shostakovich-variations (4829 words)

	Music, Shostakovich - Johnson's Russia List 2-17-03 (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		The portrait of the composer that emerges from these memoirs is one filled with internal pain and fear, as well as defiance in the form of hidden (and not-so-hidden) messages in his music.
		Volkov's own experience with the uglier side of the Soviet Union gave him an extra affinity for Shostakovich.
		In the 1970s, Volkov wrote the libretto for what is believed to be the first rock opera in Russia.
	www.cdi.org /russia/Johnson/7065-17.cfm (1075 words)

	[No title]
		The other is expressed by Solomon Volkov: ‘Shostakovich was perfectly aware of composing a work whose hidden anti-Stalinist message would one day be heard for what it was.’ It is with Volkov that I agree.
		Volkov begins his Preface: ‘My personal acquaintance with Shostakovich began in 1960, when I was the first to review the premiere of his Eighth Quartet in a Leningrad newspaper.
		Volkov had previously told me of his intention to write a review of the Eighth Quartet, and also that in future he would prefer to write rather than to play the violin.
	www.leeds.ac.uk /music/staff/ek/AShostKadare.doc (6640 words)

	Music to a dictator's ear \| csmonitor.com (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		Solomon Volkov, who helped Shostakovich with his controversial memoir, "Testimony" (1979), claims he never planned to write a biography of the famous composer.
		Volkov believes this attitude colored the dictator's attitude toward those he considered masters of their art, such as the writer Maxim Gorky and the theater directors Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko of the Moscow Art Theater.
		Volkov, who never glosses over Shostakovich's shortcomings, does his best to explain what many consider to be the composer's greatest mistake: joining the Communist Party in 1960.
	csmonitor.com /2004/0427/p17s01-bogn.html (714 words)

	Dmitri Shostakovich
		Within four years of the composer's death, musicologist Solomon Volkov, a Russian émigré, published a bombshell book "Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich." An as-told-to biography "related to and edited by" Volkov, "Testimony" portrayed a bitter and frightened Shostakovich who cooperated with the Communist regime only as far as he felt was necessary to survive.
		Fay suggested Volkov had recycled material from works Shostakovich had published elsewhere and questioned the veracity of the quotes attributed to the composer.
		Volkov, for example, quotes Shostakovich as saying that his Tenth Symphony is a portrait of Stalin.
	www.smsymphony.org /sms9899/shostakovich.html (2255 words)

	His Master's Voice (washingtonpost.com)
		The portrait of Shostakovich that emerged from Testimony was that of a thwarted and embittered genius who had been obliged to cater to -- indeed, to celebrate -- one of the most murderous regimes in history, and who was both well aware and ashamed of his complicity in a long nightmare.
		Volkov, then a young independent scholar, met with Shostakovich on several occasions, took longhand notes on their conversations, then transcribed them and combined them into chapters.
		The first, Shostakovich and Stalin, is Volkov's attempt to write a distanced history of the long, intricate relationship between composer and dictator.
	www.washingtonpost.com /wp-dyn/articles/A33065-2004Jun10.html (817 words)

	Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Free Shostakovich!
		In particular, I’m surprised at the response, or lack of response, to Laurel Fay’s essay in the Casebook, in which Testimony, the dissident memoirs of Shostakovich as allegedly dictated to Volkov, is subjected to a vigorous forensic examination.
		The Volkov camp, who marshaled forces in a 1998 book entitled Shostakovich Reconsidered, suggested in response that the composer had relied on his photographic memory to recite those passages for Volkov’s benefit, somehow conveying punctuation and layout down to the tiniest detail.
		As far as I can tell, there is only one hypothesis for the defenders to fall back on: Shostakovich knew what Volkov was doing, knew that the old material was contained in the new, and signed those pages in order to give himself an out in case the manuscript was discovered prematurely.
	www.therestisnoise.com /2004/07/the_case_of_the.html (1053 words)

	DSCH 21 Book Reviews - A Shostakovich Casebook and Shostakovich and Stalin
		Yet I cannot think of another instance of so many academics entering the ring without so much as a passing acknowledgement of the fact that the opponent is no longer of this earth, and hence unlikely to answer the charges made against him, this side of oblivion for us all.
		Volkov's conceit here is to draw a parallel between two uneasy pairings: Tsar Nicolas the First and Pushkin; and Stalin and Shostakovich.
		Volkov is equally unashamed of presenting this whole period of historical disinformation as quintessentially anecdotal.
	www.dschjournal.com /journal21/volkov21.htm (1633 words)

	Commentary Magazine - Genetic technology; immigration; Shostakovich; etc. (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		...Taruskin says-to Volkov's alleged plagiarism, and I found their analysis of the passages in question to be completely convincing, so much so that I felt obliged to retract in print my own earlier statement of support for Fay...
		...Had Volkov been content to publish a book about Shostakovich based in part on interviews, rather than a book purporting to be actually if indirectly authored by Shostakovich, it would never have become a best-seller, would never have led to two decades' debate, and would never have, in Mr...
		...It is the smokescreen behind which Solomon Volkov has been hiding now for twenty years, with the help of ac- complices like Allan Ho and Dmitry Feofanov, the authors of Shostakovich Reconsidered, and now Mr...
	www.commentarymagazine.com /Summaries/V108I5P7-1.htm (7911 words)

	New Statesman: The holy fool (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		The man who stirred up all this odium theologicum was Solomon Volkov, who in the mid-1970s published a book, apparently based on conversations with Shostakovich during the final years of the composer's life, in which he revealed his intimate thoughts on Stalinism.
		As Pasternak said of the new repression, "It used to be a lottery, now it's a queue." As for Shostakovich, he was permanently under suspicion after his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was denounced in Pravda as "Muddle instead of music".
		Volkov is so keen to rescue Shostakovich from charges of defeatism or cowardice that he goes to the other extreme, giving the all-too-fallible human being an aura of mythical infallibility.
	www.findarticles.com /p/articles/mi_m0FQP/is_4682_133/ai_n6149309 (918 words)

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