Catriona Kelly Julian Barnes Antony Beevor Mary Beard Richard J Evans Sameer Rahim Andrew Marr Simon Schama 2 PROSPECT
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The past in perspective Catriona Kelly Julian Barnes Antony Beevor Mary Beard Richard J Evans Sameer Rahim Andrew Marr Simon Schama 2 PROSPECT Foreword by Sameer Rahim t Prospect we believe that reflecting on the past glossed over in traditional works. Reviewing Beard’s new book, can provide key insights into the present—and the SPQR, Edith Hall, Professor of Classics at King’s College, Lon- future. In the following pages, you can read a selec- don, hails her “exceptional ability” to keep up with modern tion of some our favourite historical and contem- scholarship as well as her talent for plunging the reader into the porary essays we have published in the last year. thick of the action right from the start. AJulian Barnes’s new novel, The Noise of Time, is based on Nazi propaganda presented Hitler’s Germany as the inher- the life of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. In her itor of the Roman Empire. The man who shaped that image lively and expert review, Catriona Kelly, Professor of Russian at was Josef Goebbels. Richard J Evans, a leading historian of the Oxford University, argues that Barnes has captured the spirit of Nazis, reviews a biography of Goebbels that draws extensively the “technician of survival,” who was in continual fear of having for the first time on his private diaries. What Evans finds is a his music—and his life—being eradicated by Stalin. man, for all his fanatical bombast, who had “a soul devoid of Staying on Russia, Antony Beevor’s column “If I ruled the content.” Also included is my interview with Nikolaus Wachs- world” describes how after the publication of his bestselling Ber- mann, whose acclaimed book KL is the first comprehensive his- lin: the Downfall, which criticised the Red Army’s conduct dur- tory of the Nazi concentration camps. ing the Second World War, the Russian ambassador accused Finally, we have Andrew Marr’s review of Simon Schama’s him of “lies, slander and blasphemy.” Beevor says that histor- history of Britain through its portraits—“a terrific, fat book, ical disputes should not be the subject of national laws—even classic Simon Schama.” Marr, the BBC presenter who last year if that means allowing Holocaust deniers to put forward their wrote a history of the nation through its poetry, praises the book case. Scholarship should be robust enough to challenge lies for its “zest and intelligence.” These are also qualities we believe about the past. mark out Prospect’s writing, whether it is about the distant past Mary Beard made her name with revisionist accounts of or the present day. the Roman Empire, highlighting the women and slaves often Sameer Rahim is Prospect’s Arts & Books editor Contents 03 Technician of survival 07 What the Romans really did 12 Anatomy of a genocide catriona kelly edith hall sameer rahim 06 If I ruled the world 09 Hitler’s shadow 14 An eye for a story antony beevor richard j evans andrew marr PROSPECT 3 Technician of survival Julian Barnes brings to life the troubled inner world of Dmitri Shostakovich catriona kelly he life of Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich is at once and others have illuminated the circumstances in which the Soviet well-documented and elusive. Famous from an early Union’s foremost composer lived and worked. Yet the surround- age, the Russian composer was surrounded for his ings only make the man at the centre seem less substantial. Lau- whole life by family, musicians, pupils, enemies and rel Fay’s scholarly biography, recording what is known for certain, admirers; he attracted the attention of the formida- is at once scrupulous and dry. Tble Soviet surveillance machine at every level. Material traces, Myth-making annoys historians, but perhaps annoyed Shosta- including an apartment museum in Moscow, abound. Yet he also kovich less. His Soviet biographer, Sofya Khentova, claimed that skids away from definition. The latest Shostakovich had recalled raptly listen- to re-interpret his life is Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time ing to Lenin’s speech at the Finland Sta- whose new novel The Noise of Time is by Julian Barnes (Vintage, £14.99) tion on 3rd April 1917; Volkov recollects structured round three crucial episodes Shostakovich saying he’d ended up in the in Shostakovich’s struggle with state power. crowd by mistake and hadn’t known what the fuss was about; Fay, In private photographs and in the recollections of those closest following Lossky, states that Shostakovich was never there at all— to him in his later years, Shostakovich has the reserved intensity of by the time Lenin arrived, a nicely brought up 10-year-old would his late chamber music. But in some moods, according to the dis- have been safely tucked up in bed. The third version is much the puted but likely in some respects accurate memoirs of the musi- most convincing. But that doesn’t disprove that Shostakovich cologist Solomon Volkov, he could be both hilarious and pungent. told the other stories, or even, to some extent, believed them. Like Winding his way through a dangerous patronage culture, he has many who witnessed the Revolution (particularly the February often been understood as a martyr to the totalitarian state. But he Revolution) as a child, he had a genuine enthusiasm for popular is also psychologically comparable with figures such as Alexander upheaval and mass action all his life, if not necessarily for what Pushkin and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Interpreting such art- resulted from that great political turmoil. Sticking to the facts can ists exclusively in terms of encoded self-revelation and concealed mean, at some level, missing the point. irony—as Shostakovich often is—would certainly not do justice to Where historians subside into embarrassed silence, nov- their intentions or intelligence. elists speak. In The Noise of Time, the different variants of the Current academic study tends to avoid the hunt for “the real Lenin story are among many pointers to the fluidity of Shosta- Shostakovich” (a kind of perpetuation of state surveillance) in kovich’s relations with his past: “These days, he no longer knew favour of a historical understanding. The archives have not pre- what version to trust. He lies like an eyewitness, as the story goes.” served the young boy’s school reports, but they confirm his near- In an anecdote that frames the novel and is also repeated within contemporary Boris Lossky’s account. Shostakovich attended it, three men drink a vodka toast on a wartime station platform: what was known officially as a commercial school, but the title was “one to hear, one to remember, and one to drink.” The Shos- a flag of convenience: the syllabus was shaped by the strong con- takovich of Barnes’s imagining includes all three: the barely temporary interest among educated Russians in “free education,” surviving crippled alcoholic, limbless on his trolley, practis- and it even had its own Montessori kindergarten. The emphasis on ing “a technique for survival”; the bespectacled listener who self-directed study, personal development and community spirit offers him vodka with egregious courtesy; and the anonymous had its echoes later in his life. witness, who disappears even from recollection after the desul- Shostakovich was certainly not purely a victim—he managed, tory encounter. after all, to outlive no fewer than three Soviet leaders, while many Not that Barnes’s purpose is anything to do with allegory. But of his artistic contemporaries preceded even Vladimir Lenin into The Noise of Time, largely based on memoirs (those collected by the grave. As well as being moulded by his era, he helped to con- Elizabeth Wilson as well as Solomon Volkov’s) is a book about struct it. Marina Frolova-Walker, Jonathan Walker, Kiril Tomoff Shostakovich’s memories, rather than a straightforward fic- tional account of his life. Complaining that the Leningrad sym- phony doesn’t figure, or that Barnes omits Shostakovich’s work as a teacher of composition, or as a deputy of the Supreme Soviet (and a conscientious one) would be obtuse. It would be equally Catriona Kelly is a professor of Russian at Oxford University. otiose to point out that as well as agonising over his new version of Her latest book is “St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past” (Yale) Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Shostakovich negotiated hard over 4 PROSPECT © FRANCES BROOMFIELD / PORTAL GALLERY, LONDON / BRIDGEMANIMAGES LONDON GALLERY, © FRANCES BROOMFIELD/ PORTAL Reserved intensity: a portrait of Shostakovich by Frances Broomfield (2003) PROSPECT 5 in the dining room, with the clock’s door open, holding back the pendulum with one finger.” In turn, the book is structured less round onward time than time repeated: particularly, the three leap-year moments, 1936, 1948, and 1960, when Shostakovich came closest to destruction and despair. In Russia, despair is sometimes diffi- cult to separate from black humour: as the joke goes, “If you’re over 40 and you wake up, and nothing hurts, that means you’ve died.” Unlike some English chron- iclers of Russian life, Barnes has an ear for this mood: “Music is not like Chinese eggs; it does not improve by being kept under- ground.” When Shostakovich reflects on what he sees as the passivity of Ameri- cans, he notes that “even the cows stand- ing motionless in the fields looked like advertisements for condensed milk.” One of Shostakovich’s wry comments even has a parallel life as an in-joke for people who know Barnes’s previous work on Gustave Flaubert: “Life was the cat that dragged © RUSSIAN PHOTOGRAPHER (20TH CENTURY) / PRIVATE COLLECTION/ BRIDGEMAN IMAGES © RUSSIAN PHOTOGRAPHER(20TH CENTURY)/ PRIVATE the parrot downstairs by the tail; his head Shostakovich with fellow composers Sergei Prokofiev (left) and Aram Khachaturian (right) banged against every step.” But it is above all the “hard, irreducible the 1966 film version and insisted only the Kiev production was purity” of music that drives the narration, expressed not just in used.