An Artist With Courage!

If we have been talking about the power of artists to meet out violence in the form of painting, here we have a portrait of artist, in this case a composer, that stood up to violent tyranny through his art.

Dimitri Shostakovich was born in 1906 in St. Petersburg 11 years before the Russian Revolution.  His life as an artist is largely characterized by his extreme difficulty under the regime of Josef Stalin.  He fell out of Stalin’s “favor” several times during the great tyrant’s reign; narrowly escaping being sent to one of Stalin’s infamous gulags, or worse, being killed.  All because the dictator didn’t hear enough “populism” in some of Shostakovich’s music.  There was even on symphony, that had Stalin heard it even once, the composer would certainly be sent to his death.  But in Shostakovich, we had an artist who would not yield to threat.  His meddle was such that every time his music disappointed Stalin and crowd, he would write ever more sophisticated pieces, with subversive elements woven in, only in a kind of musical disguise.  

The first time this happened was in 1936, when Stalin and Co. took exception to his Lady Macbeth.  Pravda ran a critical piece entitle “Muddle Instead of Music”—in which the piece was condemned as “coarse, primitive and vulgar,” which it is not.  

A second denunciation came in 1948, and Shostakovich, along with whole host of other composers, were forced to publically repent.  We he did, but not without adding a few of his own words to the party prepared remarks that he was forced to read.  It was around this time that he was quite sure that he would be arrested.

There only a few times, later in Stalin’s life that the brave little composer gave into the hulking “leader.”  He must have feared for his children, to whom he was very attached.

This little documentary as by no means ambitious; and that is what makes it so powerful.  It is what it is—the story of small, very talented Russian composer, fighting the invasive and brutal Georgian the only way he knows how.  One could almost say that, by staying in Russia, not fleeing to western Europe as so many older Russian artists of all sorts had done, he was attempting to be steward of the Russian heart, soul, and mind; while crazy men raged in power and all of society was compromised with mind-numbing totalitarian violence.  

Listening to most of Shostakovich’s music, it power lies in the very almost brooding nature of it.  It is not brooding in a sense that it is feeling sorry for itself, rather it’s emphatic moments are there to feel sorry for the populace.  They are dirge like, funeral in nature.  Yet they are not there by themselves.  They woven in with bright, higher notes which can only be taken as hopeful.  Or perhaps, they are reminder to society or pleads for the people not to loose all of their selfhood.  The horrible thing in the Kremlin, the music sometimes seem to say, is just a man---it will die sometime.  Just wait, hang on—don’t loose hope of mind.

These images included here are of Stalin's victims.