Protest and Discipline: Shostakovich and the Revolutionary Self

There is, then, abundant objective correlation of the mixture of euphoria and dread as characteristic constituents of the memories of youngsters around Shostakovich's age when they looked back to the days when revolution raged. Participation in meetings on the one hand, and the witnessing of brutal killings on the other, are commonplaces of the Zemgor essays. By extension, the assumption that the presence of these motifs in Shostakovich's recollections is purely explained by an expedient desire to lay claim to the «right» sort of memories is certainly unwarranted. Even Boris Lossky (whose attitude to the revolutionary period is made clear by his allusion to it in the title of his memoirs as «years of savagery») recalls hearing Shostakovich play his «Funeral March for the Victims of Revolution», and recollects that the staff of the Shidlovskaya College «surely included quite a few socialists», and that there were plenty of boys who were eager to sing revolutionary songs and who were thoroughly excited by the atmosphere of upheaval Lossky Â. Nasha sem'ya ... P. 169. - a mood which another early piece by Shostakovich, «A Hymn to Freedom», also evoked.

Yet one should emphasise again that this was not «consciousness» in the Bolshevik sense. The supporters of the new regime sought not so much to encourage children and young people's enthusiasm, as to channel this in useful ways. The statements by Lenin and Trotsky that saw youth as the nation's future also implied coercion: the young were to be turned into fiery activists who could lead their elders in appropriate ways. The «elemental» social participation that came from young people when not directed was the subject of suspicion, rather than admiration. An amusing demonstration of this occurred in October 1924, when a group of Pioneers decided that they wanted to engage in an act of revolutionary refashioning, discarding their «religious» first names and adopting politicised new ones, such as RKP (Workers' and Peasants' Party) and Kim (Communist Youth International). The response to this from Pioneer and Komsomol leaders was anything but rapturous: the children, instead of being congratulated, were expelled from the Pioneer organisation Zapis' razgovorov detei v detskoi chital'ne Moskvy v 1924 // Rossiiskaia Akademiia obrazovaniia. Nauchnyi arkhiv (RAO NA). F. 5. Op. 1. D. 59. L. 280. My thanks to Steve A. Smith for passing on this reference.. Discipline of a militarised kind was a more characteristic, and enduring, part of Bolshevik culture than colourful protest. The whole of Soviet youth, like the population more generally, was supposed to engage in a mission of vospitanie (moral education) and of rabota nad soboi (work on the self): protest was regarded less positively than purposive discussion (for example, participation in reading groups that studied Bukharin's The ABC of Communism, carefully repeating and assimilating the ideas set out there). Efforts to integrate oneself into the rational collective were essential, and those who displayed the lack of capacity for due «self-criticism» would have the weapon of criticism turned on them from the outside These processes are discussed in detail in: Kharkhordin O. The Collective and the Individual in Soviet Culture. Berkeley (CA), 1999..

The revolutionary aspirations of the «first Soviet generation» were vulnerable from other points of view too. It was customary in the revolutionary arts to represent political upheaval as a carnival: Eisenstein's The Battleship Potyomkin ends with the rebel ships greeting each other joyously as they sail out into the open sea. In the case of children, the carnival could be literalised, as youngsters poured from their classrooms into the street. Yet carnival celebration, as Mikhail Bakhtin was to argue in his famous study of Rabelais, on which he began work in 1936, during the aftermath of revolution, was ambiguous and unstable. It left unassailed the tenets of the system that it inverted. The interior sense that protest was shortlived and extraordinary, that it would be followed by a return to «normality», could help to explain the rupture between Shostakovich in the years before 1936 and thereafter.

«Freedom» and «Discipline»:

The Contradictions of an Early Twentieth-Century Education

Another aspect of Shostakovich's early experience that was critical to his later development was his exposure to contradictory forms of socialisation. His early schooling, and indeed upbringing, was shaped by the ideals of what is known in Russian as «free education» (svobodnoe vospitanie) (this translates into German, as «freie Erziehung», more easily than it does into English). In the 1900s and 1910s, large numbers of well-educated, middle-class Russian parents were inspired by the theories of Froebel and Montessori. Modern methods of upbringing and education were even satirised in a cartoon published in the St. Petersburg satirical magazine The New Satiricon, a clear indication of their popularity I have discussed all this in detail in: Kelly C. Children's World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991. New Haven, 2007. Ch. 1.. Shostakovich's relationship with his parents, as indicated by his highly informal and affectionate letters to his mother, not to speak of her extraordinary concern to support a son whose exceptional talents she constantly asserted, was very much in the spirit of «free education» See e.g. S. V. Shostakovich's letter to B. L. Yavorsky, 1 May 1925: “I'm very sad that with every step, dear Mitya is moving further away from me and my role in his life is becoming totally insignificant, and I'm even afraid that he finds me wearing at time, and I even put up with this, and without any real trouble, because I am so convinced of his intelligence and his talent. But when it comes to his health, I must make every effort to make sure he does not perish. Please accept what I say: the only person who is able to think about that side of things is his useless old mother. And so I am condemned to wage war on all Mitya's friends, on whom, as you can well imagine, the question of his health and life makes no impact at all” (DSPD. P. 15).. In turn, her encouragement of his early musical efforts was in the spirit of an era that encouraged children's creativity, with Aleksei Kruchenykh's Children's Own Stories and Drawings (1914) an example of how leading modernists of the day took a direct interest in juvenile artistic production as an inspiration for their own Kruchenykh A. Sobstvennye rasskazy i risunki detei. St. Petersburg, 1914.. (Just so, the painter Mikhail Larionov was an enthusiast for children's compositions, as shown in his collection of drawings by the young as well as in the style of his own compositions).

Shostakovich's parents took care to send him to a school that suited these patterns of development. In biographies of Shostakovich, the Shidlovskaya College is usually presented as an institution that appealed because of its programme of technical subjects, and it is claimed that Shostakovich's parents sent him there because they hoped he would follow in his father's footsteps and become an engineer. This may well have been true, but the Shidlovskaya College was in fact an educational establishment whose most characteristic features were of rather a different kind.

In sending their daughter Mariya, and later her younger sister Zoya, to the Mariya Nikolaevna Stoyunina Classical High School, Dmitry and Sof'ya Shostakovich were making clear their ambitions to be progressive parents. Founded in 1880 by a leading member of the Petersburg intelligentsia (married to the prominent teacher Vladimir Yakovlevich Stoyunin, its initiator was also a friend of Dostoevsky), the school was renowned for its espousal of modern methods, including a heavy reliance on visual aids; formal marks were rejected in favour of continuous assessment, and an «individual approach» that sought to focus on pupils' own particular abilities. The school pioneered the teaching, in Russia, of physical education (under the famous teacher of the subject Petr Lesgaft), and in the 1890s, acquired a model primary school for poor children, and also its own kindergarten Dvadtsatiletie Zhenskoi gimnazii M. N. Stoyuninoi 1881-1906 gg. No place or date given. [St. Petersburg, 1906]. Spravochnaya knizhka Zhenskoi gimnazii M. N. Stoyuninoi. St. Petersburg, 1908. For the general context, see: Maidanova S. Yu. Obrazovatel'nye sistemy chastnykh zhenskikh gimnazii Rossii vtoroi poloviny XIX -- nachala XX v. // Vestnik of Tomsk State University. 2007. N 303. P 99-101..

The Shostakoviches were, evidently, keen to place their son also in a school that combined intellectual and progressive credentials, rather than sending him to an ordinary classical high school, which were sustaining increased criticism in the early twentieth century, as places that both overburdened pupils with dry academic work and operated a repressive regime During the 1905 “year of revolutions”, there were widespread protests on these fronts by pupils, including groups in St. Petersburg. Leaflets stigmatising the school regime as oppressive were signed by several hundred pupils at most major classical high schools in the city and its outskirts. For example, classical high schools had their own lock-ups (kartsery), and the behaviour of pupils was policed outside school hours -- they could be subject to disciplinary action not just for smoking in the streets, but also for visiting cafés, music-halls, etc. For some documents relating to surveillance in the classical high schools, see: Gorodok v tabakerke. Vol. 1.. Conceivably, they might have chosen the Tenishev College, on Mok - hovaya ulitsa, founded in 1900, and the most prominent St. Petersburg school offering a liberal education of the English public school type. However, the fees charged by the Tenishev were exceptionally high - Mnearly ten times as much as those exacted by the state-run Classical High Schools - which may have been a factor. Distance was certainly not the issue: the school's location made it about ten minutes' walk nearer than the establishment that they eventually chose For the fees, see: Spravochnaia knizhka Tenishevskogo Uchilishcha. Izdanie Tenishevskogo Uchilishcha. Petrograd, 1915. P 16: the amount charged was 200 roubles per semester in the preparatory classes, 325 roubles per semester in the junior classes, and 360 roubles a semester in the senior classes -- as opposed to the 40 roubles per semester charged in the state institutions.. Whichever way, their eventual selection was different - a much less well-known school, but one whose approach to educating the pupils in its care was equally experimental.

On 19 January 1910, Mariya Aleksandrovna Shidlovskaya petitioned the Minister of Trade and Industry for permission to open an «eight-class commercial college for boys, with the right to accept girls by special permission of Your Excellency» Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv, St. Petersburg (RGIA). F 25. Op. 2. D. 855. L. 1.. After supplying a draft budget for equipment and a timetable of lessons for the different year groups, and after the obligatory check with the city governor's office that she had no record of political subversion, Shidlovskaya obtained the necessary permission in early May, and later that month, forwarded to the Ministry the statutes (Ustav) of the fledgling college, which stated that its purpose was to offer pupils «a general and commercial education». As well as a library, teaching aids, and laboratories for physics and chemistry, Shidlovskaya's school had a «museum of model goods»; alongside the classes that offered teaching to senior pupils, it also had a «preparatory» section for younger children RGIA. F. 25. Op. 2. D. 855. L. 2-12.. In its first years, the school was extremely small: in 1912, the total number of children on the books was 32, clustered in the younger year groups (the two preparatory classes included nearly half the total numbers of pupils) Svedeniia o kolichestve uchashchikhsia v Chastnom Kommercheskom Uchilishche M. Shidlovskoi // RGIA. F. 25. Op. 2. D. 855. L. 69.. Given that it was common at the time for classes in state secondary schools to have as many as 40 pupils, these figures were highly unusual, and in crude commercial terms, made little sense: in fact, in the first two years that the school was in operation, Shidlovskaya was subsidising the costs quite heavily out of her own money Dokladnaia zapiska i. o. direktora S. Sozonova // RGIA. F. 25. Op. 2. D. 855. L. 24 ob..

This painful situation was partly the result of the fact that the Ministry of Trade and Industry did not accord Shidlovskaya's Commercial College the same rights as its own commercial colleges (and in particular, the right to matriculate its pupils into institutions of higher education) until 19 1 2 RGIA. F. 25. Op. 2. D. 855. L 9; l. 46.. But it was also the result of the extremely ambitious character of the equipment and education. Both the school's first premises, on Manezhnyi pereulok, and at no. 7 ulitsa Shpalernaya, to which it moved in September 1913, were «clean and light», and the latter also «spacious» (a sign that by this stage, the school had managed to expand its intake of pupils). They were also located in the most prestigious area of the city: in the first case, a stone's throw from the elegant end of Nevsky Prospect, and in the second, close to the Summer Garden and the aptly named Millionnaya ulitsa, the local «Millionaire's Row», as well as the palaces and mansions of the French Embankment (now Kutuzov Embankment) and the Winter Palace Embankment For the premises on Manezhnyi, see: RGIA. F. 25. Op. 2. D. 855. L 24 (consisting of 5 rooms, the place is described as “fairly spacious”); for those on Shpalernaya: RGIA. F. 25. Op. 2. D. 855. D. 360. L. 2. The school occupied an entire two floors of the building at no. 7 Shpalernaya.. Among the teaching aids, as well as a globe, maps, wall-charts, an abacus and other relatively standard items, were a magic lantern operated by electricity, stereoscopes with special slides, a microscope, and a special room for handcrafts fitted with seven benches and lathes, and a full set of carpentry equipment. Care was taken to provide the pupils with nutritious meals, to organise regular medical inspections and to take them on excursions, such as skiing trips to Jukka in the outskirts of St. Petersburg; «in autumn and spring they play foot-ball [sic!] under the supervision of the gymnastics teacher» RGIA. F. 25. Op. 2. D. 855. L. 24-24 ob. (sports), l. 29 (equipment)..

This emphasis on health and gymnastics was pervasive. In fact, while the school's statutes might dutifully list the subjects required by the Ministry of Trade and Industry's model programmes (including «commercial arithmetic, book-keeping, political economy, jurisprudence, technology»), the timetables told a rather different story. While some subjects on the official list were also listed on the records kept by the school (for instance, German, French, mathematics in its various forms, science, and Russian language), the in-house records also included «nature study» and «modelling» as well as handicrafts and drawing Compare RGIA. F. 25. Op. 2. D. 855. L. 12 ob. -- 13 (for the list of subjects in the statutes, which resembles those offered in other commercial colleges: see, for instance, Spravochnaya knizhka Tenishevsko- go Uchilishcha.. Music was not listed in the school's statutes, but figured in the timetables as submitted to the Ministry of Trade and Industry, and on 29 September 1911, Leonid Leonidovich Lisovsky, then teaching singing in the St. Petersburg Commercial College, was engaged to teach the subject to pupils in Shidlovskaya's school RGIA. F. 25. Op. 2. D. 857. L. 4 (appointment of Lisovsky). For the non-mention in the statutes, see RGIA. F. 25. Op. 2. D. 855. L. 12 ob. -- 13; for the timetables, see ibid., ll. 6-7 and ll. 26-7. In the draft timetables (ll. 6-7) it was proposed that singing was taught to pupils at all levels, while in the completed timetables (ll. 26-7) it figured only for the preparatory classes, which may mean either that it proved in practice difficult to secure enough hours of teaching to cover the entire span of ages, or that ministerial regulations assumed singing would be taught only to younger age groups. It appears from Lossky's memoirs. Conversely, in 1915, the Ministry of Trade and Industry felt compelled to investigate whether the school was bothering to teach Religious Knowledge, a subject then compulsory in all schools in the Russian Empire, which may perhaps have been an indication of slackness about observing the rules(Nasha sem'ya) that music actually played a significant part in the activities of the Shidlovskaia College at all levels. RGIA. F. 25. Op. 2. D. 855. L. 51. Lossky recalls that there was a priest who taught at the school in his day, a roaring snob who did not tolerate the boys who were not of noble birth (Nasha sem'ia. P. 155)..

In fact, there was overall a whiff of «free education» about the Shidlovskaya school, well before it was actually taken over by the Society for Free Education, on 30 April 1918 For the transfer to this Society, whose statutes ordained that its purpose was to “foster the all-round dissemination and enactment in life of the rational principles of free education, and above all the principles of labour education and social education on the basis of freedom, and of correct application of pupils' physical development”, see RGIA. F. 25. Op. 2. D. 858. L. 3-4. Khentova, mentions the transfer, but with characteristic lack of meticulousness refers to it as “after 1917”. Khentova S. M. Shostakovich: zhizn. Vol. 1. P. 75,.

The emphasis on games, learning through labour, and creativity were all characteristic of reformist pedagogy of the time See the journal Svobodnoe vospitanie, founded in 1907.. Among members of staff recruited to teach at the Shidlovskaya College in its early stages were, alongside more conventional specialists in Russian language and literature, history, and mathematics, Yuliya Ivanovna Fausek, a graduate in biology of the Women's Higher Courses of Education (offering the equivalent of a university-level training to those excluded from actual universities by sex), and Ivan Ivanovich Sidorov, also a scientist (in his case, a product of St. Petersburg's famous Faculty of Physics and Mathematics) RGIA. F. 25. Op. 2. D. 856. L. 3 (Sidorov); RGIA. F. 25. Op. 2. D. 857. L. 1 (Fausek).. Fausek, a pioneer of Maria Montessori's methods of nursery education in Russia, recalled in 1924 that L.O. Pettsel', the director of the Froebel Kindergarten at the First Pedagogical Institute in St. Petersburg, had demonstrated Mon - tessori's methods at the Shidlovskaya College in September 1913; in October, she herself had, «with the warmest support from the school's owner M.A. Shidlovskaya», initiated a kindergarten attached to the school Fausek Yu. I. Metod Montessori v Rossii. Peterburg [sic!] 1924. P. 5.. The school was given official permission to open by the Education Ministry on 15 August 1914 RGIA. F. 25. Op. 2. D. 855. L. 49.. The spirit of Montessori teaching, with its emphasis on individual development, the value of practical skills and education for labour, and simple, down-to-earth occupations and tasks, evidently fitted well with the ethos of the Shidlovskaya College's teaching of older children For a description of Montessori teaching as interpreted in the Shidlovskaya School's kindergarten (known, following Montessori, as the “House of Children”), see: Fausek Yu. I. Metod Montessori.... In the late 1910s, Ivan Sidorov himself spent time making wooden toys for the Montessori kindergarten, a most unusual activity for the holder of the position of school inspector, whose official duties ran more to supervision of the social order and good behaviour in his home institution On toys, see: Fausek Yu.I. Metod Montessori.; on duties, see: Ustav Chastnogo vos'miklassovogo kommercheskogo uchilishcha M. A. Shidlovskoi (1910) // RGIA. F. 25. Op. 2. D. 855. L 15..

The School's position was helped by the general attitude to commercial colleges, which had developed rapidly after a decree of 1896 from the Ministry of Trade and Industry resolving to expand this type of educational establishment. The Ministry's attitude to the schools under its care seems to have been decidedly liberal, compared with the Education Ministry, and the level of regulation was light, which encouraged experimentation.

Unfortunately, early twentieth-century Russian progressive pedagogy's gain is the historian's loss. The classical high schools generated mountains of paperwork, since the Education Ministry demanded detailed reports on the progress and character of the pupils. The hundreds of bulging files relating to these schools in the archives are in sharp contrast to the bare half-dozen folders containing a total of perhaps 100 sheets on the Shidlovskaya school's years of operation Far better documented is the childhood of Igor Stravinsky, on which see: Kelly C. Memory and Truth: Stravinsky's Childhood (1882-1901) // Stravinsky in Context / ed. by G. Griffiths. Cambridge, 2019 (forthcoming).. Certainly, the documentation makes it possible to say that the school had once more run into financial trouble by the spring of 1918 (despite being nationalised in February that year; these money worries were one factor behind the takeover by the Society for Free Education) On the nationalisation, see: RGIA. F. 25. Op. 2. D. 860. L. 1; on the Society's takeover, RGIA. F. 25. Op. 2. D. 858. L. 2.. The amalgamation of different schools in order to produce «United Schools of Labour» (the required type after the reform of the education system by government decree on 16 October 1918) generated other problems also. By January 1919, Sidorov (returned from a period as a POW after serving at the Front in the First World War) was appealing to the People's Commissariat of Education for the transfer of more pupils, particularly girls, to the top classes RGIA. F. 25. Op. 2. D. 858. L. 18.. By May, there were severe problems with staff numbers, and Sidorov was pleading with the Military Commissariat not to force any more teachers into conscription RGIA. F. 25. Op. 2. D. 860. L. 8.. Judging by the absence of any more documentation, these efforts were unsuccessful, and the existence of what was then called «the United School of Labour of Free Socialisation and Education» came to an end in early summer 1919 It is sometimes claimed (e.g. Khentova S. M. Shostakovich...; Wilson E. Shostakovich: A Life...) that the Shidlovskaia College was renamed the “United School of Labour no. 108”, but the school files make no reference to that title.. Thus, the documentary record supports Shostakovich's own claim in his autobiography that he left the school when it closed down in 1919.

The limited amount of information available makes the issue of what was actually taught at the Shidlovskaya College partly a question of surmise. But Lossky's detailed memoir confirms the «free school in sheep's clothing» analysis. For instance, in the statutes, it was specified that the pupils wore the standard uniform of Ministry of Trade and Industry schools; Lossky records that they actually wore cloth overalls and sailor suits Lossky B. Nasha sem'ya... P. 150.. (In the beautiful drawing of Shostakovich by the artist Boris Kustodiev, Shostakovich is shown wearing a sailor top, likely part of the uniform, since, as Lossky records, the young Mitya had got to know Kustodiev through his son, who was a pupil at the Shidlovskaya College.) Creative education was definitely a feature: for example, in 1917, as Lossky remembered, the pupils gave a performance of Blok's The Pussy Willow, with choral and solo sections, and then «we second-formers acted out, to the narration of Volodya Bogdanovich, Nekrasov's lyric-dramatic poem A Clear Morning, with me as the harshly rational fishermen, and the two rude little boys, for some reason, played by two little girls» Ibid. P. 169..

The Lossky connection may well also explain why Shostakovich was sent to the Shidlovskaya College. According to Khentova's biography, Shidlovskaya's husband was a me - trologist, and hence a professional colleague of Shostakovich's father Khentova S. M. Shostakovich: zhizn'. Vol. 1. P 75.. This appears to be only partly accurate. Ivan Sidorov, the science teacher and later director of the Shid - lovskaya College, to whom Shidlovskaya was married in 1912 or 1913, was, in his pre-ped - agogical professional life, a specialist in the measurement of atmospheric pressure (pribo - ry davleniya), but he had switched to teaching several years before Dmitry Shostakovich went to the College. It seems much more likely that the Shostakoviches were recommended to Shidlovskaya by the Losskys, whose son Boris was two years older than Dmitry, and had therefore begun attending her school in 1913 or 1914.

There was likely reason for Khentova to equivocate. By the time that she was writing, «free education» was an inflammatory term in Soviet culture (it had fallen out of favour with the return to traditional educational skills in 1932, and Shostakovich was, in later autobiographical statements, to refer to his schooling only in the sparsest detail). The eschewal of Shidlovskaya's married name was also no doubt deliberate. In 1925, Shid - lovskaya, under the name Sidorova, was arrested and sent to the Solovki labour camp, along with the other members of the St Sergius Cathedral parish council (literally, «group of twenty», dvadtsatka). There was also the opposite of an incentive to refer to the Shostakoviches' friendship with the Losskys, since the family, having been forced into emigration during the Philosophy Steamer incident of 1922, was contaminated by the stain of «desertion of the motherland» as well as repression See the annotations by Sof'ya Nuridzhanova to her publication of a diary written by her twin sister Yuliya Krivulina (née Khordikainen, 1928) in 1940-1945. The Khordikainen sisters were taught French and Catholic religious knowledge by Mariya Shidlovskaya-Sidorova, and the publication of the diary contains valuable biographical material about her: Dnevnik Lyusi [Yulii] Khordikainen / ed. by S. Nuridzhanova // A. I . Zalessky. Zhizn' v okkupatsii i v pervye poslevoennye gody: Pushkin -- Gatchina -- Estonii. St. Petersburg, 2011. URL: http://www.molodguard.ru/heroes1609.htm (accessed 20.04. 2013). I would like to thank Aleksandr Liarsky for this reference.. Even if Khentova had been the kind of careful positivist who was in principle committed to retrieving facts from archives (in fact, her standard source for her many and repetitive works on the composer's life was what could politely be called «oral history», or less diplomatically, hearsay and gossip), she would hardly have been encouraged to dig deep in the story of Shostakovich's education.

That said, when it comes to the effects of Shostakovich's education on him personally, any writer is forced to speculate. The written record could not, even if it were more substantial, finally settle the issue of how his schooling affected his personality, attitudes, and aesthetic principles. But he certainly spent longer at the Shidlovskaya College than any other educational establishment, with the possible exception of the conservatoire. He began attending it no later than 1915, when he would have been the right age for the junior preparatory class. But one might also wonder whether he attended the Montessori kindergarten in earlier years as well. At nearly 7 in September 1913, he would have been just the right age. Whichever way, he attended the school at a point when Montessori methods, with their emphasis on respect for children's individual abilities, and development of their artistic potential, but also on the need for self-discipline - imposed by the assignation of regular work-tasks and by the instigation of sessions of silence - already enthused Shidlovskaya and her husband. He may have taken part in the movement to music activities that were another regular part of the programme. It is entertaining to note that a little book published by Fausek and Shidlovskaya (as Sidorova) in 1923, What We Do at Our School, which portrayed in coloured illustrations the activities at a Montessori nursery school, includes a plate bearing the legend, «And then we moved to music. Mitya beat the drum» Fausek Yu., Sidorova (=Shidlovskaya) M. Kak my zanimaemsia (Petrograd, 1923). See also fig..

shostakovich political conservatory

«Then we moved to music. Mitya beat the drum» (ill. to the book of Yuliya Fausek and Mariya Sidorova (Shid - lovskaya) «What We Do», 1923)

Were Fausek and Shidlovskaya paying tribute to the pupil who had most strikingly borne out the value of arts education at a young age? Certainly, Shostakovich himself seems to have felt grateful to Shidlovskaya. Anna Sidorova, the latter's daughter (b. 1913), recalled that Shostakovich visited her mother in 1940, «and stayed there for quite a while; they had lunch. He wrote regularly to Mama right up until her death» in 1949 Reported by Nuridzhanova in the annotations to Dnevnik Lyusi Khordikainen..

There was a dramatic difference between the teaching that Shostakovich received at the Shidlovskaya College and the pedagogical style preferred by Glyasser, who, as Loss - ky put it, was exceptionally dictatorial and rigid: study with him «was far from always enjoyable, given the teacher's cross and impatient attitudes to his pupils» Lossky B. Nasha sem'ya. P. 185.. Equally, the Petrograd conservatoire was in many respects a traditional institution, which saw fewer changes than most institutions of Russian higher education at the period. It is clear from the biographies in the recent collection edited by Marina Frolova-Walker and Jonathan Walker, Music and Soviet Power, that many teachers both at the Moscow and at the Leningrad conservatoires remained in their posts for decades, with 1917 making little, if any, difference.

The contrast between the relatively free-and-easy learning of his early years and the pressures at the conservatoire emerges in one of Shostakovich's answers to Gruber's questionnaire in 1927:

«While I was doing the course in Theory of Composition at the Conservatoire, I saw it as a `necessary evil', and submitted more or less passively. Once I had finished it, though, I began to sense the impossibility of composing freely and unmediatedly. I ended up having to `squeeze out' a whole series of compositions (in summer 1925, a symphony, two movements of a string octet..from autumn 1925 to December 1926, I kept trying to compose, but it kept not working out (at first, after I left the conservatoire, Id become a `professional' in too narrow a sense, placing technical proficiency above anything else; I involuntarily strove to make everything turn out sounding `correct' and smooth); my creative consciousness could not escape from the framework that the canons of my education had imposed on me» Anketa po psikhologii. P. 472..

The tension between «academic canons» and the view that it was important to «compose freely, spontaneously» makes clear the very different educational perspectives that had shaped Shostakovich's experience. Attention to the impact of politics in a narrow sense on the composer's development should not lead us to ignore the other significant, and highly contradictory, cultural influences that shaped his life.

Some Conclusions

As I have argued here, the term «Marxism-Leninism» is largely irrelevant to the interpretation of Shostakovich's work. The term is of late origin (end of the 1930s), and does not well reflect the unformalised «leftism» to which he appears to have gravitated in the 1920s. Arguments that Shostakovich had an «unpolitical» attitude at this period beg the question of whether it was possible not to be «political» at this era, when no position was seen as «beyond politics» by the participants. Even the flood that devastated Leningrad in the autumn of 1924, as the art critic Nikolai Punin recorded in his diaries, was seen by some as a political event. Shostakovich's 1933 comment «When someone writes that the oboe and clarinet in some symphony represent Soviet civil servants, and the brass stands for Red Army soldiers, you want to shout, `Not true!' is characteristic of the times in its reductio ad absurdum: the protest against the simple-minded decoding of artistic signals was not necessarily a plea for the total depoliticisation of art» See Shostakovich's comments on: Gorodinsky V. M. K voprosu o sotsialisticheskom realizme v muzyke // Sovietskaia muzyka. 1933. N 1. P. 120-121.. Typical of the times, too, was the «modern» tenor of the composer's life in the 1920s, with the experiments in free love that characterised the time of his first marriage.

At the same time, Shostakovich's early enthusiasm for «left arts» was, the indications are, more the product of gut feeling than of intellectual reflection. There was every reason for someone of his age to be caught up in the initial excitement and fervour of political revolution, as the composition of the early piano works Hymn to Freedom, and a Funeral

March for Victims of the Revolution confirms. At the same time, the pairing of the «Hymn to Freedom» and «Funeral March» already indicated ambivalence with regard to the heritage of revolution. The double-vision was no doubt enhanced by the fact that the composer saw his share of privation: if, according to Shteinberg's diaries, the Shostakovich household was well-off enough even in 1922 to allow his mother to make gifts of patisseries at holiday time (i.e. significantly above the breadline), that same year witnessed the premature death of Shostakovich's father. Shostakovich himself was to emphasise, in his autobiography of 1926, the privation that he had experienced, and the hack-work (khaltura) as a pianist for silent movie showings to which he had been consigned by this Zhiznopisanie Dmitriya Dmitrievicha Shostakovicha (16 June 1926, Leningrad) // DSPD. P. 469.. Certainly, the hardship in which this plunged his family did not impede the creative energy and basic optimism that characterised his outlook at the time, but the after-effects may have been felt in the long term. The widespread pattern recorded in the 1924 Zemgor essays, whereby child witnesses of the historical cataclysm of revolution simply did not understand what was going on could be followed, as some of the witnesses also recorded, by a demoralizing and energy-sapping reaction, what would now be understood as «post-traumatic syndrome».

The revolution no doubt seemed to Shostakovich, as to many of his contemporaries, at once invigorating and threatening. The uncertainty of the times fostered both ambition and a sense of vulnerability. If the supremely energetic creative period that took hold in the early 1920s was certainly one of the effects of Shostakovich's divided and disrupted childhood, the persistent anxieties about his own fragility in both a physical and a creative sense that afflicted the composer in his later years must surely have been another.

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