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Шостакович по-английски: мотивы с чужих слов
A complex motivic unit linked with Dmitri Shostakovich’s life and work has recently taken shape in Anglophone fiction. A number of 21st-century novelists use Shostakovich’s name, while some use him as central character. Whether fictionalizations of Shostakovich exclude or include verbal transpositions of his music, the writers heavily rely on Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov (1979). No matter how apocryphal that book is, it has contributed crucially to the construction of the current Shostakovich image in English. All novelistic incarnations of the composer are mediated neither in the first nor in the last degree. Even so, that Shostakovich feels familiar, since the corresponding motif – a thematic brick of narrative – is initially (de)formed and reproduced “from hearsay” of someone’s testimony.