Was Soviet Music Middlebrow? Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony ... · Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony is an obvious example of this conundrum: regularly performed all over the world,

Was Soviet Music

Middlebrow?

Shostakovich’s Fifth

Symphony, Socialist

Realism, and the Mass

Listener in the 1930s

PAULINE FAIRCLOUGH

It is an oddity of Soviet music history that its great-est achievements remain the most difficult to categorize. We can confi-dently point to an example of blandly second-rate symphonic writing anddeclare it socialist realist, but what should we say about a work that weadmire? Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony is an obvious example of thisconundrum: regularly performed all over the world, its quality unques-tioned, it was famously the composer’s ‘‘rehabilitation piece’’ after thehigh-profile attacks on his opera Lady Macbeth on 28 January 1936 andthe arts-wide repression that ensued.1 If the symphony secured thatrehabilitation, in the darkest years of Stalin’s Terror, then surely it be-longs in the category of conformist art, safely socialist realist, definitelySoviet in style and spirit, and therefore a work that audiences outside theSoviet Union would be right to approach with extreme caution. In 1939,

I am grateful to the instigators of this article: Kate Guthrie andChristopher Chowrimootoo, who invited me to take part in theirconference ‘‘Music and the Middlebrow,’’ University of Notre DameGlobal Gateway, London, June 2017. I also wish to thank generousfriends and colleagues for their comments on earlier versions:Philip Bullock, Marina Frolova-Walker, Kate Guthrie, Sarah Hib-berd, John Pickard, Florian Scheding, and Richard Taruskin.

1 Anon., ‘Sumbur vmesto muzıki’, Pravda, 28 January 1936, 3.

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The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 35, Issue 3, pp. 336–367, ISSN 0277-9269, electronic ISSN 1533-8347. © 2018by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permissionto photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permis-sions web page, www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2018.35.3.336

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in the early years of the Cold War, that is precisely how some very influ-ential figures, most notably Igor Stravinsky and Nicolas Nabokov, heardthe symphony. Stravinsky famously lampooned it as the ‘‘symphony ofsocialism,’’ while Nabokov deemed it ‘‘banal’’ and ‘‘trite.’’2

But for the vast majority of listeners worldwide, this is not how theFifth Symphony has been received, neither in its own time nor after thecollapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It is, however, a work whose recep-tion history is richly steeped in the lore of the Terror years and of theCold War. At the Leningrad premiere, its slow movement was reported tohave brought the audience to tears, and at the same concert, the finale—with its famous, protracted D-major apotheosis—won the composer sucha passionate reception that Shostakovich’s friends feared the riotousshow of support might rebound on the vulnerable composer.3 The sym-phony was performed the world over, even if it did not achieve globalpopularity until after Stalin’s death. In Britain, at least, there was a per-ceptible spike in its popularity following the 1979 publication of Solo-mon Volkov’s purported memoir of Shostakovich, Testimony.4 Herereaders found the perfect Cold War description of the symphony’s over-blown coda, designed and guaranteed to give Western audiences a way ofunderstanding this music. Volkov wrote: ‘‘It’s as though someone werebeating you with a stick, saying ‘your business is rejoicing, your business isrejoicing’ and you rise up, shakily and go on your way, muttering ‘ourbusiness is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.’ What kind of apotheosis isthat? You have to be a complete oaf not to hear that.’’5

Unsurprisingly, this way of hearing the ending has become thenorm: pre-concert talks, program notes, and other popular accounts ofthe work frequently quote Volkov or reference his interpretation.6 Yetthis reading defies historical logic. We cannot credibly assert that socialistrealism was required from Soviet composers during this period, declareor imply that this socialist realist music is in some way substandard orcompromised, and then laud the most successful symphonic work of the

2 Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, trans. Arthur Knodel andIngolf Dahl (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 153�55; and Ian Wellens,Music on the Frontline: Nicolas Nabokov’s Struggle against Communist and Middlebrow Culture(Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), 103.

3 Isaak Glikman, Story of a Friendship: the Letters of Dmitry Shostakovich to Isaak Glikman1941–1975, with a Commentary by Isaak Glikman, trans. Anthony Phillips (London: Faber andFaber, 2001), xxiv. See also Manashir Yakubov, ‘‘The Fifth Symphony. The Story of How ItWas Composed and Its First Performances,’’ in Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5(Moscow: DSCH Publishers, 2004), 170�73.

4 For details see Pauline Fairclough, ‘‘The ‘Old Shostakovich’: Reception in theBritish Press,’’ Music and Letters 88 (2007): 266�96.

5 Solomon Volkov, Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as Related to and Edited bySolomon Volkov (London: Faber, 1990; first published: New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 140.

6 I discuss some of these program notes in ‘‘The Old Shostakovich,’’ esp. 290.

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entire Stalin era (with Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony the only com-petition). If only a ‘‘complete oaf’’ could miss the alleged dissidence ofthe finale’s coda, then the symphony’s success in its own time makes nosense. The Volkov reading places a fig leaf over the naked logical flaw,claiming that the work’s success was due to Shostakovich’s cleverness inpleasing both ‘‘the authorities’’ and his more astute listeners. In someway, the reading goes, it could be both socialist realist and anti-socialistrealist, pro-Soviet and anti-Soviet, conformist and non-conformist, andeven dissident.

Yet even if we reject Volkov’s posturing, as all contemporary schol-arship now does, the awkward question remains: whether what MarinaFrolova-Walker has termed the ‘‘glib, the bland, and the corny’’ qualitiesof socialist realism can be applied to Shostakovich’s Fifth. In her seminalarticle on this subject, Frolova-Walker maintains that socialist realism wasa recognizable style, created in conscious opposition to modernism dur-ing the 1930s, but she is careful to apply the designation only to lower-status works, such as Myaskovsky’s Twelfth and Sixteenth Symphonies,Yury Shaporin’s opera The Decembrists, and Shostakovich’s DolmatovskyRomances.7 And this is not surprising at all, given her argument thata defining quality of socialist realism was blandness. Higher-quality worksof the Stalin era remain in limbo, for if we say that they were all socialistrealist, we consign Shostakovich and Prokofiev to the ‘‘bland’’ corner,along with Myaskovsky, Shaporin, and other ‘‘second division’’ Sovietcomposers. If we say only the weaker music was socialist realist, thenwe must explain the far greater success of the best music, not only inthe non-Soviet musical world, but also in its own time among the veryaudiences for whom it was composed.

The aim of this article is to subject our continued use of the termsocialist realism to scrutiny, and to consider how we might more profit-ably regard this extraordinary body of music. These works were com-posed during the Stalin regime by a mixture of composers, some ofwhom, like Shostakovich, were world-class, some of whom we might cat-egorize as respectable second or third division, and some of whom werevery weak, by any measure. In doing so, I begin by asking: was Sovietmusic—specifically that composed within the date-range for Stalinistsocialist realism (1934�53)—middlebrow?

Although this Anglophone term may seem anachronistic, withinSlavic studies ‘‘middlebrow’’ has long been invoked in relation toStalin-era literature and music, specifically that which we would generally

7 Marina Frolova-Walker, ‘‘The Glib, the Bland, and the Corny: An Aesthetic ofSocialist Realism,’’ in Music and Dictatorship in Europe and Latin America, ed. Roberto Illianoand Massimiliano Sala (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 403�23.

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identify as socialist realist. The first scholar to do so was Vera Dunham inher survey of Soviet post-war fiction In Stalin’s Time, first published in1976 and re-issued in a revised form at the end of the Soviet era in 1990.8

Another was Evgeny Dobrenko, whose work on the collating of readerresponses in the 1920s and 1930s was originally published in a 1995article titled ‘‘The Disaster of Middlebrow Taste, or, Who ‘Invented’Socialist Realism?’’9 The ‘‘Middlebrow’’ of his title was changed to ‘‘Medi-ocre’’ for the relevant chapter of his book The Making of the State Reader,published two years later.

The equating of ‘‘middlebrow’’ with ‘‘mediocre’’ resonates with Fro-lova-Walker’s description of musical socialist realism as ‘‘glib, bland, andcorny.’’ Although she does not use the term ‘‘middlebrow,’’ she echoesDobrenko’s literary findings in the musical sphere, arguing that theessential defining quality of socialist realist music was its inoffensive,unremarkable tone. For Dobrenko, ‘‘middlebrow’’ was synonymous withthe socialist realist ‘‘grayness’’ he identifies in Soviet fiction. With twomajor cultural scholars claiming to define socialist realism in the USSR asbland or gray, the point would seem to be settled: socialist realism meansart that is substandard, and so, for Dobrenko, at least, does the term‘‘middlebrow.’’

Nonetheless, this does not get us very far in our assessments ofShostakovich: we still have to account for outstanding artworks withinthis historical paradigm, as well as for those with no manifest connectionwith socialist realist doctrines, such as chamber music and lyric song. Thecultural historian Stephen Lovell provides a different way of defining theSoviet middlebrow:

In early Soviet Russia . . . culture was issued with an imperative to beboth ‘‘legitimate’’ and ‘‘popular,’’ and as a result became ‘‘middle-brow.’’ There was no ‘‘high’’ culture that corresponded to a dominantsocial class, nor can we really speak of a ‘‘popular’’ culture; thereemerged a single ‘‘Culture,’’ which was not allowed to reflect diversesocial interests, but rather provided the model for the Marxist-Leninistproject of social unification.10

8 Vera S. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction, enlarged andupdated edition (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1990).

9 Evgeny Dobrenko, ‘‘The Disaster of Middlebrow Taste, or, Who ‘Invented’ SocialistRealism?,’’ South Atlantic Quarterly 94 (1995): 773�806; reprinted in Socialist Realism WithoutShores, ed. Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko (Durham and London: Duke UniversityPress, 1997), 135�64. A revised version of this article appeared in Dobrenko, The Making ofthe State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature, trans. Jesse M.Savage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 82�145.

10 Lovell, The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras(Basingstoke and London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2000), 17.

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This gives us a less value-laden starting point, since it simply states that,once the avant-garde (‘‘high’’) and popular (‘‘low’’) strands of culturehad been stripped away, what was left was by definition ‘‘middle.’’ Thereare problems with this hypothesis, especially when applied to music. YetLovell’s claim provides a basis for assuming that Soviet culture, whetherwe label it socialist realist or not, was by definition middlebrow because ofits imperative to be widely accessible. This runs counter to Frolova-Walk-er’s more recent contention that Soviet ‘‘middlebrow’’ meant the musicproduced by organizations like the Pyatnitsky Choir and the Red ArmyEnsemble of Song and Dance, with ‘‘low’’ genres being popular andestrada song, and ‘‘high’’ genres being symphonies and other forms of‘‘classical’’ music.11 On one level, I would agree with this hierarchy asseen from within the Soviet Union’s mechanism of recognition andreward. But seen from the problematizing perspective of present-dayevaluations of Stalinist symphonic music, including Frolova-Walker’s, thespectrum of Stalin-era ‘‘absolute’’ art music requires a conceptual over-haul that enables future critical engagement to break free from theeternal question of whether a specific symphony was socialist realist, and,if so, how we should evaluate it.

Middlebrow as Mediation

As a starting-point, this article offers a different insight into what themusical middlebrow might mean for Soviet culture. The insight originatedwith Richard Taruskin, whose keynote address at the 2017 musicologyconference ‘‘Music and the Middlebrow’’ advanced the idea, followingRussell Lynes, that ‘‘middlebrow’’ was not so much a label to be appliedto this or that piece of music, as a term of mediation—an ephemeralidentity placed on an artifact in the process of transactions between onesocio-economic class and another. (Lynes subdivides the ‘‘middle class’’into the socially mobile categories of lower and upper, with cultural medi-ation a crucial link to such mobility.)12 Regarding ‘‘middlebrow’’ as a medi-ating term instantly resonates with the Soviet context, because despiteapparently eliminating the middle class or bourgeoisie—and despite lack-ing low or high culture as fixed, officially acknowledged categories—Soviet

11 Marina Frolova-Walker, Stalin’s Music Prize: Soviet Culture and Politics (New Havenand London: Yale University Press, 2016), 183.

12 Russell Lynes, ‘‘Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow,’’ Wilson Quarterly 1 (1976):146�58; originally published in Life 26, no. 15 (11 April 1949): 99, 102.


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society under Lenin and Stalin up to 1941 took the notion of culturalparticipation very seriously indeed.13

The musicians who remained after the mass exodus of the aristoc-racy and cultural elite following the 1917 revolution were tasked withpreserving Russian musical culture for the benefit of the new mass audi-ence. This audience comprised a mixture of long-standing listeners, stu-dents, and professionals (teachers, doctors, engineers, and so on) but nowalso included the urban proletariat, a huge and ever-growing class ofpeople for whom attending concerts of art music was, by and large, a novelexperience. The Bolshevik regime stripped away all the mechanisms ofcommercialized cultural production: private sponsorship, publishing, pri-vate ownership of institutions, advertising, or any form of marketing notcontrolled by the state. Yet it still needed the old middle class to deliverculture to the proletariat, and right from the start it appointed key figuresin the music world to work with state organizations to re-launch orchestras,opera, and ballet companies. As the historian Michael David-Fox has ex-plained, the middle class (or, as it was more properly called, the Sovietintelligentsia) and the state worked in tandem ‘‘to attain modernitythrough culture and enlightenment.’’14

Crucially for our discussion of the Soviet middlebrow, its joint missionwas now untainted by the market-driven norms that so offended crusadersof elite culture in Western Europe and the United States, such as TheodorAdorno, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Clement Greenberg, and Virginia Woolf.15

The key arguments that underpinned Adorno’s critique of cultural con-sumption in his Philosophy of New Music—essentially, that the working manwas being fed a diet of ‘‘bread and circuses’’ in the guise of a too-easily-accessible high culture in order to keep him supine, complacent, and easyto exploit—fall away in this new structure, as David-Fox explains:

An internally focused civilizing mission became such a central feature ofmodern Russian and Soviet politics and culture because the oppositional

13 The Soviet historian David Hoffmann states: ‘‘According to official ideology, onlythree classes remained in Soviet society: the peasantry, the proletariat, and the intelli-gentsia.’’ David L. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941, (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), 148. For recent scholarship onmusic and the middlebrow, see the colloquium ‘‘Modernism and its Others,’’ especially thecontribution by Christopher Chowrimootoo, ‘‘Reviving the Middlebrow, or: Deconstruct-ing Modernism from the Inside,’’ Journal of the Royal Musical Association 139 (2014): 187�93.

14 Michael David-Fox, Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and theSoviet Union (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), 48.

15 Key texts representing positions taken by all of these authors include TheodorAdorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 2006); Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York and Lon-don: W. W. Norton and Co., 1993); Clement Greenberg, ‘‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch,’’ Parti-san Review 6, no. 5 (1939): 34�49; and Woolf’s essay ‘‘Middlebrow,’’ in The Death of the Mothand Other Essays, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1942), 113�19.

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intelligentsia’s radical embrace of the masses was accompanied by thegreat, seemingly urgent task of transforming them. At the birth of massculture in the nineteenth century, this powerful drive was motivated bya strikingly broad consensus about the pernicious effects of commercial-ism—and, all the while, shaped by the ubiquitous comparison with theWest. The intelligentsia’s antimarket enlightenment crusade may haveattempted to harness the deep-rooted traditions of autocratic statepower, but under the old regime it was unable fully to do so; only withthe Bolshevik Revolution, whose leaders derived from the radical wing ofthe intelligentsia, was the antimarket enlightenment prosecuted with thefull force of the revolutionary dictatorship.16

This assessment gives us a fascinating alternative vision to that pro-pounded by Adorno: its very starting point was strikingly close to his ownMarxist position, yet by forcing revolution on an entire empire, the Bol-sheviks could claim to be sweeping aside the whole capitalist model inwhich culture played such an apparently tainted role. They moved directlyon to what Adorno himself had most urgently desired—the ‘‘enlighten-ment’’ and liberation (in whatever form) of the individual citizen.

Although the task of enlightening, or ‘‘transforming,’’ citizensbecame increasingly coercive and less about individual freedom (in real-ity never a Bolshevik goal), David-Fox’s ‘‘intelligentsia-statist’’ modelholds up exceptionally well in the musical sphere. This is because withmusic, the process of mass enlightenment was less ideological than itcould ever have been in literature, drama, or other texted art forms. Forthe most part (aside from the proletarian militancy of the late 1920s andearly 1930s), the entire transaction between the musical intelligentsiaand the proletariat was predicated on cultural sharing. That is, the intel-ligentsia did not condescend or retreat into obscurity (which would havebeen professional suicide for musicians). Rather, it shared what itbelieved to be valuable. The marketing of past art music and its compo-sers in ways that were supposed to persuade the proletariat of its signif-icance and relevance played a crucial role in this engagement.17 It was anengagement that came with remarkably few strings attached—althoughnot irrelevant, money was not as important a part of the transaction as itwas in capitalist economies, for tickets were heavily subsidized and ‘‘masswork’’ was obligatory for the big institutions like the Leningrad and MoscowPhilharmonias. Nor was political instruction really a part of the package(though workers were certainly instructed in other spheres): a workerattending a club choir or orchestra rehearsal or listening to a Philharmonia

16 David-Fox, Crossing Borders, 49.17 Pauline Fairclough, Classics for the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity Under Lenin

and Stalin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016).


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concert was not required to give anything back, to show knowledge or evenenjoyment. Provided they were lucky enough to work in a well-providedfactory, with good access to instruments and performance space (whichmany were not), workers could take advantage of a multitude of culturalopportunities. These included learning to play an instrument, taking partin an operatic production, hearing—perhaps for the first time—good, well-performed art music, or simply singing in a choir in the factory music club.A vast apparatus of musical experience and opportunity was available to theproletariat at state expense, a result of the sincerely held belief that this wasan essential component of building socialism and fostering good citizen-ship. This aspect of the Soviet experiment provided cultural largesse ona scale that left-wing educationalists and reformers in Europe and NorthAmerica could only imagine.18

This is not to say there was no trade-off implied in this transaction,either before or after 1917. Part of the drive to inculcate good taste in theRussian working population before the revolution was bound to a loftydisdain for ‘‘mass’’ culture, which might distract the peasant or workerfrom worthier cultural pursuits. The literary Slavists Steve Smith and Ca-triona Kelly describe this classically patriarchal instinct in the late nine-teenth century: ‘‘To Russian intellectuals, the emergence of cultural formscreated to make a profit was seen not only to undermine the higheraesthetic and moral purposes of elite culture, but also to threaten pristine,authentic narodnost’ [the quality of being ‘of the people’], folk culture.’’19

And as David-Fox argues, in pre-revolutionary Russia ‘‘well before com-mercial mass culture, itself closely associated with the West, became widelydisseminated toward the end of the nineteenth century . . . a groupdefined by the mission of bringing enlightenment to the masses wasalready in place. . . . The result was a veritable crusade to ‘acculturate thepopular classes into the national, ‘high’ culture, and to extirpate back-wardness, ignorance, and dissoluteness.’’’20

Funders of the old, pre-1917 Russian cultural centers of education—the so-called People’s Houses—were motivated by a dual wish to ensurethe productivity of their workforce and to improve the lives of the Rus-sian working classes. The historian Gleb Tsipursky has noted that

18 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch and Co., 1934); and idem,John Dewey’s Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World: Mexico-China-Turkey 1929,with an introduction by William W. Brickman (New York: Bureau of Publications, TeachersCollege Columbia University, 1964).

19 Catriona Kelly and Steve Smith, ‘‘Commercial Culture and Consumerism,’’ inConstructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution: 1881–1940, ed. Catriona Kelly and DavidShepherd (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 113.

20 David-Fox, Crossing Borders, 55. Here David-Fox quotes David Priestland, Stalinismand the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter-war Russia (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2007), 17–18.

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educationalists in Russia, the United States, and Britain wished to sharetheir ‘‘middle-class cultural values and engage in ‘rational’ and ‘mod-ern,’ not ‘traditional’ or commercial, leisure.’’21 And so what began asclassic projects in the old model of noblesse oblige before 1917 swiftlybecame a major plank in the Bolsheviks’ mass education program.22

After the first major Stalin-era drive for industrialising the Soviet Unionand exponentially increasing productivity, such educational clubsreceived much more state munificence. By the end of the First Five YearPlan (1931), the Bolsheviks had established 912 urban clubs; in just fivemore years, between 1932 and 1937, they founded 2,951 more.23

In creating a cultured workforce, though, the Bolsheviks gained notonly improved productivity, but also control over the self-education processitself. Ideal Soviet citizens had to be more than productive workers; theirvery selves had to be correctly shaped. In other words, as David Hoffmannhas put it: ‘‘The New Soviet Person was to be not only clean, sober, andefficient, but also prepared to sacrifice his or her individual interests for thegood of the collective, in sharp contrast to the ideal of liberal individual-ism.’’24 By fostering this ‘‘illiberal subjectivity,’’ the state turned the notionof individual self-improvement into a civic requirement:

Soviet officials’ efforts to regulate people’s free time stemmed in part fromtheir desire to guarantee or even augment workers’ ability to work well. Bypreventing drunken or decadent leisure activities, they could ensure work-ers’ health and physical capacity. . . . The campaign for cultured leisureonce again reflected Soviet leaders’ aesthetic vision of what socialist soci-ety should look like. Healthy and edifying entertainments fitted theirvision of a progressive and enlightened society, where all aspects of life,including leisure, were rationalized, orderly, and harmonious.25

The term generally used for denoting this vision of personal attain-ment was kul’turnost’: the quality of being an educated, polite, and civi-lized Soviet citizen. It possesses parallels with the aspirations of theWestern middlebrow consumer of culture, as recorded memorably byJanice Radway in her study of the Book of the Month Club in the UnitedStates, but it differs in one crucial aspect.26 The Western notion of the

21 Gleb Tsipursky, Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culturein the Soviet Union, 1945–1970 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), 18.

22 For an excellent account of the People’s Houses and mass education after 1917, seeAdele Lindenmeyr, ‘‘Building Civil Society One Brick at a Time: People’s Houses andWorker Enlightenment in Late Imperial Russia,’’ Journal of Modern History 84 (2012): 1�39.

23 Tsipursky, Socialist Fun, 21.24 Hoffmann, Stalinist Values, 10.25 Ibid., 31.26 Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and

Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).


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middlebrow was tied to consuming art, whether for pleasure, instruction,self-improvement, or to demonstrate that one was cultured. All thesereasons were open to ridicule by those who regarded themselves as‘‘highbrow,’’ as the educated elite, particularly in Britain, struggled tocome to terms with mass literacy and the new media of tabloids andradio.27 The closing of ranks in some Anglo-American ‘‘highbrow’’ cir-cles at the prospect of all this unseemly sharing in the 1930s, 1940s, andbeyond resulted in some remarkable rhetoric—with educationalists andproselytisers of art deemed guilty of besmirching the elite inheritancewith their reprehensible urges to spread the Word of culture.28 Even inpre-Soviet Russian society, such attitudes would have been very rare; post-1917 there was no social and ideological tolerance for such rampantsnobbery. Thus the entire context for the concept of cultural sharingand, indeed, stylistic accessibility, differed radically in Russia from theUnited States and Britain in the same period.

In the Soviet context, art was not ‘‘consumed’’ quite as it was inAnglo-American culture. What was available was selected, marketed, anddelivered within a framework largely beholden to the prevailing ideolog-ical climate, and the social capital citizens might acquire through theirknowledge of art was of dubious worth. No matter how dearly anyoneloved Beethoven and Shakespeare, that knowledge and experience wouldnot improve their status to the same degree as would Party membership,high work productivity, or other approved political action. Nonetheless,Soviet citizens could and did choose how to spend their leisure time. Theyspent their own rubles on what was available to them, whether books,concerts, or otherwise. Thus, despite the infrastructure of state citizenshipand kul’turnost’ dominating cultural experience, the Soviet citizen wasindeed, albeit in a restricted sense, a consumer of culture, and the elementof class-consciousness in that process was by no means as absent in practiceas in theory. As Stephen Lovell notes, ‘‘In the 1960s . . . intelligentnost’ had

27 For a vivid account of the travails of Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and other Britishwriters of the period, see John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudiceamong the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992). For a moreheartening account of the transformative impact of education on Britain’s working classes,see Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 2001).

28 Hannah Arendt expounded on the enemy of culture as the ‘‘special kind of in-tellectuals, often well read and well informed, whose sole function is to organize, dissem-inate, and change cultural objects in order to make them palatable to those who want to beentertained or—and this is worse—to be ‘educated,’ that is, to acquire as cheaply as pos-sible some kind of cultural knowledge to improve their social status.’’ See her ‘‘Society andCulture,’’ in Culture for the Millions? Mass Media in Modern Society, ed. Norman Jacobs(Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 49; quoted in Ian Wellens, Music on the Frontline, 101. I thankRichard Taruskin for this reference. A classic text attacking middlebrow aspiration isDwight MacDonald, Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain (New York: NewYork Review of Books, 2011).

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taken over from gramotnost’ (literacy) and obrazovannost’ (educatedness) asthe culmination of the ‘‘civilizing process’’ for the urban ‘middlestrata.’’’29 There is a perceptible element of social striving in this Sovietexperience, regardless of what we might imagine would be pride in beingworking-class. For the historian Sheila Fitzpatrick, the distinction betweenkul’tura and kul’turnost’ lay precisely in this aspirational quality: ‘‘Kul’turawas something that one naturally possessed; kul’turnost’ was something thatone purposefully acquired. A sense of becoming, striving, and taking pos-session was associated with kul’turnost’ : it was the attribute of one who hadrecognized that kul’tura was a scarce and essential commodity and set outto get some.’’30 The means of access to and distribution of art differed inthe Soviet Union from that in Britain and the United States, but at heartthe acquisition of ‘‘culture’’ was not such a different matter for Sovietcitizens as for their North American or British counterparts. All that dif-fered was that any suspicion of gaining ‘‘culture’’ for social advancementor material benefit that might be invoked by self-appointed ‘‘highbrows’’seeking to justify their disapproval of cultural sharing (e.g., promotionprospects, impressing a future spouse or their family, or gaining accessto elite and wealthy social circles) was entirely wiped off the table asa motivating factor.

Cultivating kul’turnost’

It is easy to understand the importance of basic literacy to the Stalinistregime. Propaganda was, after all, a major tool of the entire Soviet era.But why was it important for workers to appreciate music? To answer thisquestion we need to unpack the notion of what being a cultured, modernSoviet citizen meant in the 1930s. To be kul’turnıy was to be many things,but it was manifestly not to be a typical revolutionary of the 1920s:aggressively flouting norms of ‘‘proper’’ social behavior, showing disdainfor bourgeois values, material possessions, constructions of femininity,domesticity, and so forth. In her survey of ‘‘middlebrow’’ Soviet fiction,Dunham set out this shift as a process of ‘‘embourgeoisement’’ of theSoviet system, starting in the 1930s and continuing in the post-warperiod. She noted that Soviet literature of those years captured thesechanging values, from the ways women dressed and citizens aspired todecorate their living spaces to perceptions of material privilege itself. She

29 Lovell, The Russian Reading Revolution, 18.30 Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia

(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), 218. For this use of kul’turnost’, seealso Philip Ross Bullock, ‘‘The Pushkin Anniversary of 1937 and Russian Art-Song in theSoviet Union,’’ Slavonica 13 (2007): 39�56.


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takes care, however, to label these new Stalinist material values as quin-tessentially meshchanstvo—a word that, in the Soviet context, came todenote vulgarity and pretentiousness. In a distinctly Woolfian vein, Dun-ham states, ‘‘Meshchanstvo’s natural and historical antagonist is theintelligentsia’’—both terms transcend Soviet social class but one hasa negative meaning, while the other is positive. Her own position is,however, a Soviet-era one: Dunham’s idea of meshchanstvo is infused withdistaste for the existing inequality in late-Soviet society. Thus the‘‘middlebrow’’ of her title is a thoroughly derogatory term, derivedwholly from the Anglophone context and aimed squarely at the Sovietnomenklatura—the privileged elite whom less materially fortunate(though possibly far more intelligent and deserving) Soviet citizens werebeing brainwashed into admiring through the literature Dunham wassurveying. Out go the ‘‘real’’ socialist values; in come those of the grasp-ing, aspirational meshchanin.

We need to approach both the concepts of meshchanstvo and kul’tur-nost’—which Dunham also invokes—with caution, because we cannotjustify a sneering attitude toward the modest aspirations of citizens ofthe Stalin era who were often themselves impoverished materially, edu-cationally, or both. Nor, I would argue, should we focus this disapprov-ingly highbrow outlook on the project to bring art music ‘‘to the masses,’’as the slogan of those years was expressed. The 1930s saw a shift fromrevolutionary iconoclasm to an embrace of certain social behaviours andattitudes that could indeed be termed ‘‘bourgeois.’’ This transformationencompassed a spectrum of values ranging from how the institutions offamily life should be understood to how to regard Pushkin and Tchai-kovsky. To quote Hoffmann again, comparing the 1920s to the 1930s:

Cultural radicals, riding a wave of revolutionary iconoclasm, called forthe complete elimination of ‘‘bourgeois’’ behavioral standards, tradi-tional institutions such as the family, and Russian art and literary clas-sics. Yet by the mid-1930s, Soviet leaders endorsed conventional norms,patriarchal families, and respect for authority. They also promoted ele-ments of traditional culture, including folklore, Russian literary classics,and tsarist patriotic heroes.31

This perspective helps us attribute the shift in the 1930s both to theacceptance of certain aspects of ‘‘bourgeois’’ family life (with the atten-dant attitudes toward women’s place in the home, expectations of livingstandards, and material comfort) and to socialist realism when it was firstpromulgated in 1934. Hoffmann adds: ‘‘The family, previously suspectedof perpetuating bourgeois beliefs, could now be trusted to promote

31 Hoffmann, Stalinist Values, 1.

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socialism among children. Monumentalist art and architecture, formerlyinstruments of the old order, now helped to legitimate the new socialistorder and symbolized its accomplishments.’’32

Indeed they did, and so did the best Soviet music of those years,exemplified by Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony of 1937. But there wasanother avenue to becoming kul’turnıy in these years, and that was ina citizen’s demonstrable knowledge of culture—especially culture of thepast. The popular magazine Ogonek ran a monthly questionnaire in 1936titled ‘‘Are You a Cultured Person?’’ to encourage readers to measuretheir own kul’turnost’. One such questionnaire asked its readers whetherthey could recite a Pushkin poem by heart or describe the plots of Shake-speare’s plays, and inquires as to whether they have read key texts byStendhal and Turgenev, while also demanding familiarity with mathemat-ics, geography, and the classics of Marxism-Leninism.33 This encyclopedicappropriation of world culture is entirely of a piece with the ‘‘StalinistEnlightenment’’ project. The gradual replacement of icons of Westernculture from the past (with the exception of Shakespeare and a few othersuccessfully ‘‘appropriated’’ cultural giants) with those of the Russian pastwas also part of the systemic shift toward Russian nationalism at the end ofthe 1930s and during the post-war 1940s.34 Being kul’turnıy in the mid-1930s meant being educated, hardworking, successful, and positive—thatis, ‘‘clean, sober, and efficient.’’ In this ideal world-view, the reward wouldbe recognition within work and perhaps also Party structures, subsequentmaterial improvement, added status, and the personal gratification offeeling oneself improved and successful.35 Therefore, people would con-ceivably feel genuine pride and pleasure when, having received the oppor-tunity to appreciate art music—perhaps the first in their family to havereceived such a privilege—they found they were able truly to enjoy it. And,by extension, we might also consider the notion that a composer of Shos-takovich’s stature sincerely wished for this music-loving constituency toenjoy his music, and that he crafted a style that was both congenial to himand intended to be widely enjoyed and understood by his compatriots.

As every historian of Soviet culture knows, this return to ‘‘bourgeois’’values in the 1930s was seen by some non-Soviet observers as, to adopt

32 Ibid., 4.33 David-Fox, Crossing Borders, 64; and Catriona Kelly and Vadim Volkov, ‘‘Directed

Desires: Kul’turnost’ and Consumption,’’ in Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolu-tion: 1881–1940, ed. Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1998), 291�313, at 301.

34 For a discussion of this ‘‘enlightenment’’ period, see Fairclough, Classics for theMasses; and Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and theEvolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

35 For a discussion of how political elites were rewarded with material wealth, seeFitzpatrick, The Cultural Front, 223�33.


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Nicholas Timasheff’s phrase, a ‘‘Great Retreat.’’36 And this, perhaps, is inpart the source of those still rather vague notions that the culture pro-duced during the period of High Stalinism was also in some wayold-fashioned and anachronistic—a return to realistic portraiture andlandscape painting, classical architecture and easy-to-follow music andliterature. Yet historians of Soviet culture have long contested Timasheff’sview that Stalinism abandoned modernity, arguing that, on the contrary,the mass collectivization and industrialization projects of the 1930s and1940s represent a quintessentially modernizing impulse. As Hoffmannargued in 2003: ‘‘Modernity is often defined as the rise of liberal democ-racy and industrial capitalism, but such a definition excludes the SovietUnion and other illiberal states, such as Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.I define modernist instead in terms of two features common to all modernpolitical systems—social interventionism and mass politics. . . .Stalinist cul-ture was a particular Soviet incarnation of modern mass culture.’’37

If becoming a modern Soviet citizen meant becoming kul’turnıy—leaving behind supposedly antiquated notions of individual freedom andsubjectivity that, under Leninism and Stalinism, were ridiculed asnineteenth-century relics—then there was nothing inherently ‘‘unmo-dern’’ about either facilitating Soviet citizens’ access to high culture ofthe past or expecting composers to write music that was equally accessi-ble. And here we might expand the transactional model of the middle-brow to embrace a very broad stylistic trend. Although the traditionalview of Stalin-era music from the mid-1930s is that it was inherentlyanachronistic, this assumption rests on notions of cultural progress thatare ripe for reconsideration.38 Indeed, might this demand for compre-hensibility not be seen as a radical switch away from what was, far frombeing modern, a nineteenth-century expectation of Romantic subjectiv-ity: the artist as serving only the Muse and not the audience? Or of Art aslofty, searing Experience, not as (shudder) Entertainment? And is it notonly the past Western European and North American preference forAdorno’s neo-Hegelian narrative of progress that has led us to struggleso profoundly with this body of repertoire, composed specifically for

36 Nicholas Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia(New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1946).

37 Hoffmann, Stalinist Values, 7, 10.38 The key source for this assumption is Boris Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet

Russia, 1917–1981, enlarged edition (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1983),where he explains the post-1932 cultural landscape: ‘‘advanced composers turned conven-tional, and conventional composers became commonplace . . . conservatism became a cher-ished virtue’’ (115). Marina Frolova-Walker and Jonathan Walker to some extent echoSchwarz’s position in their book Music and Soviet Power 1917–1932 (Woodbridge, Suffolk:Boydell and Brewer, 2012), where they note that composers after 1932 were in a situationwhose restrictions were not fully understood at the time and that those who espoused thecause of ‘‘progressive new music’’ were defeated after 1932 (xvii–xix).

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contemporary Soviet audiences and intended for their consolation, spir-itual nourishment, and—yes—enjoyment?

I am moving irrevocably now toward arguing that Stalinist musicalculture was middlebrow in both a transactional and a stylistic sense andthat the Soviet middlebrow style was, on its own terms, modern. But I donot claim that this music was modern in the ‘‘expansionist’’ senseespoused by J. P. E. Harper-Scott in his study of Elgar. Nor am I mootingthe idea that we can patronize this repertoire with notions of a modernityobliquely earned, for example, by interacting with and influencing es-tablished modernisms outside the Soviet context.39 That would be toadhere to a single notion of what modern means, and a single notionof its supposed value, both inherently Western European. My point ismore akin to Frolova-Walker’s contention on behalf of socialist realism:it was a style deliberately forged as an alternative to Western Europeanmusical modernism and only residual Cold War prejudice prevents usfrom accepting this idea as unproblematic. Although Frolova-Walker tosome extent has it both ways in making this argument (she selects onlyworks she considers to be relatively weak in her canon of socialist realism,so has already made the most important value judgment), her refusal toengage in special pleading on behalf of the repertoire she labels socialistrealist acknowledges a vital point: this was a process in which all Sovietcomposers participated, fully aware that they were creating a distinctivebody of work that fulfilled a social function quite unlike that outside theSoviet Union.

Neither I nor Frolova-Walker are saying that all Soviet composersjoined forces to be deliberately un-modern; countless stylistic parallelsexist between their music and that of their Western peers that makemany Soviet symphonies at least as up-to-date as any contemporaryorchestral work by Arthur Honegger or Paul Hindemith. Rather, whatSoviet composers did in the 1930s and 1940s was deliberately write musicfor a wide audience, in full knowledge that this aim was considered unfash-ionable in some quarters in the West, and, I would contend, in full accep-tance that this was their duty as Soviet citizens. Pressures on them in bothdecades resulted not from the absence of this fundamental aim—noSoviet composer in the 1930s set out to write music that audiences wouldbe unlikely to enjoy, and even quite modernistic work was intended toplease and entertain—but rather from unpredictable shifts in culturalpolicy and ideas about what was appropriately ‘‘popular.’’ So Frolova-Walker is right: the aim was to forge a new tradition that was not ‘‘modern’’in the European sense of innovation that made alienating the listener

39 J. P. E. Harper-Scott, Edward Elgar, Modernist (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2006).


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a veritable badge of honor. She does not wish to group all this music underthe banner of socialist realism, nor do I (though for different reasons).I do suggest, however, that we understand it as a unique form of Sovietmiddlebrow.

High, Middle, and Low

Historians of Soviet culture have underestimated the extent to whichmusicians were aware of and openly discussed the various cultural stratawithin music. For example, David-Fox argues: ‘‘The very division of cultureinto high and low, elite and popular was anathema to Soviet conceptions.Indeed, the terms mass culture and popular culture were neverused. . . . Such formulations as kul’turno-massovaya rabota (cultural mass-work) simply referred to enlightenment work on a large scale.’’40 Yet thisis disingenuous: he is right that the term populyarnaya muzıka was not thenin common use, but musicians certainly spoke of the lyogkiye zhanrı (lightgenres), of jazz, ‘‘gypsy romances’’ and of imported Western dance crazes,such as the foxtrot and tango, as well as ‘‘everyday music’’ (bıtovayamuzıka), circus music, the music of estrada and ‘‘muzık-kholl’’ [music-hall],and even ‘‘street music’’ (ulichnaya muzıka). All these sub-genres may nothave been grouped under the Anglophone term ‘‘popular music,’’ butthey were universally recognized as such.

Popular songs, both Russian and Western in origin, flooded into theSoviet Union through film, radio, and theater, and were eagerly pickedup and reproduced by workers who were being empowered throughaccess to instruments, choirs, radio, and clubs in which to spend leisuretime.41 The Soviet Union had its own highly popular jazz entertainers inthe 1930s, of whom the best-known were Aleksandr Tsfasman and Leo-nid Utesov. Their songs were widely known and sung (Shostakovichcollaborated with Utesov on his 1931 music-hall spectacle Declared Dead[Uslovno ubitıy]). Light music of all kinds was so popular, in fact, that fromthe late 1920s to 1932, the militant proletarian faction in Soviet musicallife tried to close off every avenue of what it saw as, though did not call,‘‘lowbrow’’ musical entertainment.42 Even after 1932 popular songs

40 David-Fox, Crossing Borders, 66.41 Stephen Lovell points out that most workers would have listened to the radio only

in the clubs, since in the 1920s and 1930s radios were not affordable except to richer ci-tizens. See his Russia in the Microphone Age: A History of Soviet Radio, 1919–1970 (New York:Oxford University Press, 2015), 51, 64. Sheila Fitzpatrick cites a survey carried out in 1938that established twenty-four percent of workers said they owned a radio. Fitzpatrick, TheCultural Front, 223.

42 For details of the 1929 All-Russian Music Conference complaints about ‘‘gypsyconcerts, decadent singing, and dance,’’ see Fairclough, Classics for the Masses, 78. For the

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remained cornerstones of Soviet musical life. The most successful song-writers of the 1930s, such as Isaak Dunaevsky, Matvey Blanter, and VassilySolovev-Sedoy, were fully accepted and rewarded by the state for theirwork, but it was never suggested that their music was on the same level asthat written by major Soviet composers. The distinction between ‘‘high’’and ‘‘low’’ was manifestly present in the minds of musicians in theseyears. Shostakovich himself used the term ‘‘high art’’ in his 1931 articlefor the paper Rabochiy i teatr ‘‘Declaration of a Composer’s Duties,’’ inwhich he dismissed the value of all his incidental and film scores writtenover the last few years. He selected only two of his works (his opera TheNose and his Third Symphony) as deserving ‘‘a place in the developmentof Soviet music’’ and laying full claim to being ‘‘high art’’ (vısokoye iskusst-vo).43 By extension, therefore, the music he was dismissing was not ‘‘highart’’ at all, but a less satisfactory or compromised art—perhaps not ‘‘low,’’exactly, but not ‘‘high’’ either.

As Frolova-Walker has shown, Stalin himself made the same distinc-tion when he rejected the idea of admitting balalaika music for the firstStalin Prize. The composer Tikhon Khrennikov told the story in hismemoirs: ‘‘Stalin dismissed all non-classical art as mere fairground amu-sements . . . [and] said that the balalaika is not a real musical instrumentat all and that the balalaika player shouldn’t be granted any award, sincethat would debase the prize itself.’’44 So at least by 1941, the very outerlimit of my chronological purview, in contrast to what David-Fox claims,the concept of ‘‘high art’’ in musical terms, at least, was alive and well inStalin’s Russia. And by definition so was its lowlier counterpart, which in1931 had been the favorite punching bag of zealous proletarian musi-cians keen to rid the factory clubs of this distractingly enjoyable ideolog-ical menace.45 Thus despite its Anglophone origin, ‘‘middlebrow’’ isneither a tautological nor an anachronistic term when applied to Sovietculture. It signifies art music as opposed to popular or light music, and,because ‘‘art for art’s sake’’ was denounced as elite formalism duringthe period of High Stalinism (becoming an extremely toxic charge afterthe attacks on Shostakovich in 1936), Soviet art music was understood tobe ‘‘high art,’’ lofty in intent—ideally improving, even able to directa listener’s thoughts in ideologically appropriate directions. But it was

-resolution passed at this conference, see Semyon Korev, ed., Nash muzıkal’nıy front: materialıvserossiyskoy muzıkal’noy konferentsii (Moscow: n.p., 1930), 250�52.

43 Dmitry Shostakovich, ‘‘Deklaratsiya obyazanostey kompozitora,’’ Rabochiy i teatr, 20November 1931, 6.

44 Frolova-Walker, Stalin’s Music Prize, 27–28.45 The Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians gained control of music pub-

lishing and managed to almost completely ban the printing of ‘‘light genre’’ music. SeeFitzpatrick, The Cultural Front, 192.


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not avant-garde, not difficult to understand, and therefore not ‘‘high-brow.’’ It was ‘‘high art,’’ but by definition, it was ‘‘middlebrow.’’

Socialist Realism and the Symphony

Perhaps the ultimate middlebrow symphony of the 1930s is Shostakovich’sFifth—a work that may or may not be socialist realist, but that in its globalpopularity amply merits the description ‘‘middlebrow.’’ The more urgentquestion is whether the Fifth Symphony was understood to be socialistrealist at the time it was being canonized in the Soviet repertoire. If it was,then we have a clear indication of what socialist realism in the symphonywas perceived to be, not only by Shostakovich but also by his Soviet con-temporaries. If it was not, then the importance of the concept itself mustbe questioned, for if a work did not need to be socialist realist in order tosucceed, then perhaps we no longer need to use the term at all. To beginwith, we need to remind ourselves of the literal definition of socialistrealism when it was formally announced at the 1934 Writers’ Congress.Both here and in later key writings, socialist realism was described asa literary method with three underpinning criteria: narodnost’ (having thequality of being ‘‘for or of the People’’), ideynost’ (possessing ideologicalcontent), and partiynost’ (possessing party-mindedness).46 Clearly, no un-texted symphony could hope to fulfill anything other than the first cate-gory, but its application under Stalin was not so literal that it could not beattached to works that manifestly lacked such qualities.

Laurel Fay has meticulously traced the process by which the full‘‘subtitle’’ of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony—‘‘A Soviet Artist’s CreativeResponse to Just Criticism’’—and the official interpretation (‘‘the forma-tion of a personality’’) came to accrue around the work, which was orig-inally premiered with nothing more than the blandest of program notes toaccompany it.47 A month after the premiere, Evgeny Mravinsky, the con-ductor who had premiered it, led a Composers’ Union discussion of thework in Leningrad, and the prominent Soviet writer Aleksey Tolstoy pub-lished a review in Izvestiya in which he ventured the opinion that the workwas about the ‘‘formation of a personality’’ (stanovleniye lichnosti). Shosta-kovich himself (who knew Tolstoy well and had recently collaborated withhim on their ill-fated opera project Orango) then went into print to echothese words. By the time of the Moscow premiere on 29 January 1938, thesubtitle ‘‘My creative answer’’—the title of his 25 January Vechernyaya

46 For a comprehensive English-language account of the Congress, see H. G. Scott,ed., Problems of Soviet Literature: Reports and Speeches at the First Soviet Writers’ Congress (Moscow:Co-operative Publishing Society, 1935).

47 Laurel E. Fay, Shostakovich: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 102�3.

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Moskva article a few days earlier—now appeared in the program.48 In thecoming months and years, this interpretation became enshrined in Sovietmusicology: the symphony was at least partly autobiographical and tracedShostakovich’s spiritual (in a Soviet sense) growth toward his final rejectionof individualism and his struggle for joy in collective triumph. In the wordsof the conductor of the Moscow premiere, Aleksandr Gauk, it was the ‘‘firstsymphonic work to show the formation of the Soviet person, the fate of ourintelligentsia.’’49 Speaking to a Literaturnaya gazeta correspondent, Shosta-kovich claimed that he wished ‘‘to show in the symphony how througha series of tragic conflicts and through great internal struggles, ‘optimismas a world-view’ could triumph.’’50 The Fifth’s success and canonization waswon thanks to a combination of its innate qualities and the skills of thosewho knew how to frame and interpret it in such a way that its acclaim couldbe justified in ideological terms. Tolstoy’s reading gave the symphony itstrajectory and its rationale in language that explicitly referenced socialistrealism. And by branding his symphony an ‘‘answer’’ to the criticism hehad received in Pravda and elsewhere, Shostakovich positioned himself asthe grateful recipient of official guidance—and, crucially, he did so bywriting not a trite, inoffensive, or dreary apology of a symphony, but a workwidely considered a masterpiece, both then and now, in the USSR andworldwide.

Tolstoy had stuck his neck out for Shostakovich in his Izvestiya reviewby hailing the Fifth Symphony as socialist realist, but music writers were farmore cautious. Georgiy Khubov’s review of the symphony, published inSovetskaya muzıka in March 1938, circumvents the question of whether ornot it was socialist realist by concluding with the judgment that, whenShostakovich has finally solved the problem of narodnost’ in his music, hismusic will become fully successful and able to resolve all the problems setby the ‘‘tragic’’ questions of the Fifth Symphony. But, says Khubov, Shos-takovich will be able to solve this problem because he is ‘‘a great, genuine,Soviet artist.’’51 Thus despite some fairly major criticisms, Khubov wasconfident enough to anoint Shostakovich, if not quite the symphony,‘‘Soviet,’’ but he felt no obligation to label the symphony ‘‘socialist realist.’’

48 Dmitri Shostakovich, ‘‘Moy tvorcheskiy otvet,’’ Vechernyaya Moskva, 25 January 1938,3. He is also extensively quoted in the unsigned piece (‘‘in conversation with our corre-spondent’’), ‘‘Pyataya simfoniya Shostakovicha,’’ Literaturnaya gazeta, 12 January 1938, 5.

49 L. Gauk, R. Glezer, and Ya. Milshteyn, eds., Aleksandr Vasil’yevich Gauk, Memuarı,Izbrannıye stat’i, Vospominaniya sovremennikov (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1975), 130.

50 Unsigned, ‘‘Pyataya simfoniya Shostakovicha,’’ Literaturnaya gazeta, 12 January 1938, 5.51 Georgiy Khubov, ‘‘Pyataya simfoniya Shostakovicha,’’ Sovetskaya muzıka, no. 3

(March 1938): 14�28, at 14, 27�28. For a helpful discussion of the Fifth Symphony’scontemporary reception, see Richard Taruskin, ‘‘Public Lies and Unspeakable Truth: In-terpreting the Fifth Symphony,’’ in Defining Russia Musically (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1997), 511�44.


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Neither did Shostakovich use this term in his own writings about hissymphony, nor did the term appear in any program note in those years.In fact, in the period immediately after the premiere Tolstoy was the onlyone to link the symphony with socialist realism.

Some (not all) later Soviet-era writers on Shostakovich invoked social-ist realism explicitly in relation to the Fifth Symphony: Genrikh Orlov’s1966 survey of Russian and Soviet symphonism states firmly: ‘‘We may rankShostakovich’s Fifth Symphony in first place as the embodiment of theprinciples of socialist realism in the Soviet symphony.’’52 But a study ofSoviet symphonism published only a year later and edited by the musicol-ogist Andrey Kryukov did not mention socialist realism at all in connectionwith the symphony. The author of the section on Shostakovich, despiterehashing the official narrative, adds a reference to the Largo as expres-sing the troubled atmosphere just before the war—a veiled reference tothe devastating repressions taking place at the time of the symphony’spremiere.53 Already by 1967, then, we see certain writers reluctant toanoint a work they considered a masterpiece with a label they probablyfelt was an embarrassment to the composer. The publication date of bothOrlov’s and Kryukov’s books (1966 and 1967, respectively) places theircomments in the uncertain context of Brezhnev’s ‘‘stagnation,’’ comingvery soon after Khrushchev’s ousting by more hard-line elements in theCommunist Party. By that time the Soviet musical landscape had changedso completely that Shostakovich himself—powerful, wealthy, and a Com-munist Party member—was writing music so far removed from what mighthave been expected of socialist realism that, though the doctrine was notofficially withdrawn, we can consider it effectively defunct.

Even if we acknowledge there was not a unified Soviet claim that theFifth Symphony was socialist realist in the post-Stalin era, the late 1930swas the period when Shostakovich most urgently needed to secure hisposition. If his contemporaries did not claim the symphony for socialistrealism when we might assume it would do the composer the most good,then how sure can we be that in 1937 any musician thought it meritedthat label? Was it rather the case that the symphony was heard as recog-nizably ‘‘Soviet’’ through its finale, acknowledged to be of exceptionallyhigh quality, and that was enough? Did anyone seriously claim that anysymphony was socialist realist in the 1930s, or did successful worksacquire that appellation only much later, once they were safely canon-ized? Or was the overriding consideration not even how ‘‘Soviet’’ itsounded (for instance, whether it had a celebratory ending), but rather

52 Genrikh Orlov, Russkiy Sovetskiy simfonizm (Moscow and Leningrad: Muzıka, 1966),138.

53 T. Todorova, ‘‘Pyataya simfoniya Shostakovicha,’’ in Sovetskaya simfoniya za 50 let, ed.Andrey N. Kryukov (Leningrad: Muzıka, 1967), 443.

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its comprehensibility? In other words, was the all-important factor clarityof language and style—perhaps even how ‘‘middlebrow’’ it was?

Musicians and critics did use the term socialist realism in the 1930s,but they did so remarkably sparingly. To be sure, there was a whole articledevoted to it, in the first issue of the new journal Sovetskaya muzıka inJanuary 1933, one year before the Writers’ Congress at which socialistrealism was advanced as the new ‘‘guiding principle’’ of Soviet culturalendeavors.54 Its author was the musicologist Viktor Gorodinsky, a heavy-weight music editor who had been a Communist Party member since1918 and might have been expected to take a strong line. Gorodinskyurged Soviet composers to apply themselves to this new doctrine, but hispiece was no more than empty exhortation; he never dealt with theactual works themselves and never judged which one might be socialistrealist. Indeed, he fails to mention a single Soviet symphony. Even thearticle in the May issue of that year, ‘‘On the question of the path forSoviet music,’’ by Nikolai Chelyapov, chairman of the Union of Compo-sers in Moscow, neglected to discuss socialist realism in relation to anyexisting music. Chelyapov rather started with the assumption that thereis no identifiably socialist realist music yet composed, so he concentratedinstead on listing potential models from the great ‘‘realists’’ of the past(Schubert, Musorgsky) and concluded by urging Soviet composers toturn away from ‘‘individualism’’ to the collective and forge a new ‘‘mon-umentalist’’ style.55

In the absence of identifiable models, then, did anyone really worrymuch about what a socialist realist symphony should sound like? Let usreturn to the discussions about Soviet symphonism held in Moscow inFebruary 1935 and partially printed from stenographic reports in Sovet-skaya muzıka that year. In this interim ‘‘internationalist’’ period between1932 and the end of 1935, when Schoenberg was still played in the Lenin-grad Philharmonia Great Hall and Shostakovich had not yet suffered thepowerful blow that was to hit him the following January, we find frankopinions about what kind of work might be suitable for the future Sovietsymphonic canon. It is clear from the discussions that no one wished toput forward any existing work as a model; it was much easier to point outgeneral deficiencies than to pick any one symphony and champion itscause. To this end, symphonies of the years immediately preceding theconference that might strike us today as entirely suitable for canonization,such as Myaskovsky’s Twelfth Symphony (‘‘The Collective Farm,’’ 1932)and Lev Knipper’s Fourth (‘‘Poem about the Komsomol Fighter,’’

54 V. M. Gorodinskiy, ‘‘K voprosu o sotsialisticheskom realizme v muzıke,’’ Sovetskayamuzıka, no. 1 (January 1933): 6�18.

55 Nikolai Chelyapov, ‘‘K voprosu o putyakh sovetskoy muzıki,’’ Sovetskaya muzıka,no. 5 (May 1933): 23�30, at 30.


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1933�34) found themselves on the receiving end of sharp criticism. Myas-kovsky’s own former student, Dmitry Kabalevsky, offered the opinion thatMyaskovsky’s Twelfth Symphony was a less successful work than his Sixthand that it ‘‘lacks genuine artistic merit.’’56 Shostakovich roundly con-demned Knipper’s latest symphonies in some of the harshest terms usedby anyone at the conference:

Perhaps Comrade Rızhkin, who rightly pointed out that I used ‘‘crim-inal music’’ [blatnaya muzıka] in my ballet The Bolt, should say the sameabout Knipper’s symphonies, because there the question of purity andclarity of language is especially urgent. I myself find no such purity orclarity in these symphonies. On the contrary, these works exhibita chewed-up language and, I would say, a hard-currency [torgsinovskaya]sound . . . the music is poverty-stricken and primitive.57

The insult ‘‘torgsinovskaya’’ was a particularly low blow: ‘‘Torgsin’’ wasa Soviet acronym for hard-currency stores where higher quality productswere on sale only to foreigners and privileged Soviet citizens in order tobolster the Soviet economy with a reliable source of foreign income. Theshops were frequented by black-marketeers eager to fleece their fellowcitizens by selling goods at even more inflated prices; the shops were alsoassociated with prostitution.58 Thus Shostakovich’s epithet effectivelyconnects Knipper’s music with greed, exploitation, and depravity. Thathe felt able to do so in such a public setting—and that he was notreprimanded by any other delegate—speaks volumes about the compar-ative freedom of the event and Shostakovich’s own views about the highcalling of a symphonic composer. In his opinion, there were no cheapshortcuts to composing symphonies in a populist vein.

But his was not the only voice raised against Knipper: Khubovdeclared that the best thing about the Fourth Symphony was the partisansong (that is, ‘‘Polyushko-pole,’’ or ‘‘Meadowland,’’ a catchy popular songabout the civil war), rather unkindly joking: ‘‘without this song, the sym-phony would lose 90% of its value.’’59 The two most promising candidatesfor representing the Soviet symphony in what we would now consider itsmost socialist realist incarnation were dismissed by some of the most influ-ential people as duds, and no replacements were suggested. It is temptingto conclude from this evidence that composers simply did not take theconcept of socialist realism seriously. But what they unquestionably valued

56 ‘‘Diskussiya o sovetskom simfonizme,’’ Sovetskaya muzıka, no. 5 (May 1935): 23�45,at 39.

57 Ibid., 32.58 For a description of the Torgsin network, see Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front, 228.59 ‘‘Diskussiya o sovetskom simfonizme,’’ Sovetskaya muzıka, no. 6 (June 1935): 28�43,

at 36.

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was the quality and accessibility of symphonic music. The conferencetranscripts show overwhelmingly that music considered poor quality, nomatter how ideologically committed it was, was evaluated negatively. Noone used the term ‘‘middlebrow’’ because it did not exist in Soviet criticalparlance, but its connotations of popularity and ease of comprehensionare constantly in the background of these discussions.

Opportunities for relatively frank and open exchange were shortly tobecome a thing of the past in Soviet musical life. Following Pravda’sattack on Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth in January 1936 and thefollow-up piece on his ballet The Limpid Stream in early February, theComposers’ Union branches in both Leningrad and Moscow held fur-ther discussions, also partially printed in Sovetskaya muzıka. Though thetalks in the two branches ran quite differently, overall they give a con-trasting impression from the freer forum of the previous year. The 1935discussions could be savage in their criticism, and no one was more sothan Shostakovich, but in places they were also humorous. Writers andcomposers felt free to voice admiration for Western figures such asSchoenberg and Krenek, then still being performed without reprisalsin Leningrad concert halls. Now, in 1936, no one would have dared tovoice any support for a contemporary Western composer. Chelyapov(soon to be purged and shot) wrote the opening piece, in which he, likeeveryone else, genuflected before the Pravda editorial and declared,‘‘The fundamental slogan of Soviet art is that of socialist realism.’’60

Underlining the future direction of classical adaptation, he listed Vivaldi,Bach, Handel, and Haydn as composers for whom ‘‘folk creativity’’ (narod-noye tvorchestvo) was a founding principle; he further listed Glinka, Rimsky-Korsakov, Musorgsky, Borodin, and Tchaikovsky as the best representa-tives of Russian culture who drew on their folk heritage. The bogeymennow were the ‘‘formalists,’’ the purveyors of atonal and futurist music, andaccordingly all Western contemporary music was instantly wiped from thePhilharmonia schedules. All the delegates at the conference—except forthe composer Vladimir Shcherbachev—agreed with the judgment of Prav-da on Shostakovich, and all present clearly understood that the role inSoviet musical life played by their Western contemporaries was, at least forthe time being, over.

It may be idle to harp on the circumstance that hardly anyone at theconference, even at this critical moment, had anything to say aboutsocialist realism. One reason for this neglect is obvious: this was a discus-sion focused mostly on what not to do and what not to approve of.‘‘Formalism’’ was the ultimate cultural crime, and worshipping the West

60 Nikolai Chelyapov, ‘‘K itogam diskussii na muzıkal’nom fronte,’’ Sovetskaya muzıka,no. 3 (March 1936): 3�9, at 5.


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was judged a major cause. This was not the place to identify paragons ofvirtue. Shostakovich’s fall was a very clear signal that the saints of todaycould be the sinners of tomorrow, though it is worth noting the voicesraised in defense of Myaskovsky in particular, protecting him from Sol-lertinsky’s alleged disdain for ‘‘Myaskovshchina’’—a term apparentlyused as a watchword for all that was dull and provincial in Soviet musicallife.61 The conference’s lack of conclusions left Soviet composers stillcasting around for the new type of Soviet symphonism that just theprevious year had been the topic of vague discussion. Now finding theright formula had become extremely urgent; as is now well known,the next offering from Shostakovich would be rejected even before itspremiere. Shostakovich had almost completed his Fourth Symphony atthe time of these discussions and was confident enough in its powers tosubmit it for rehearsal, fully expecting the premiere to take place inDecember 1936. The fate of the symphony is familiar—Shostakovich waspressured into withdrawing it, and it was not played again until 1961.These circumstances show that those in official positions around Shos-takovich and the Leningrad Philharmonia (Platon Kerzhentsev, theChair of the Committee on Arts Affairs, Vladimir Iokhel’son from theComposers’ Union Leningrad branch, and Iosif Rızhkin, Director ofthe Philharmonia) felt the ‘‘formula’’ had evaded him.62

Role Models and Canons

If Shostakovich got the formula wrong with his Fourth Symphony, didanyone else get it right? Apparently so: Myaskovsky’s Sixteenth Sym-phony was premiered on 24 October 1936 by the Moscow Philharmo-nia, conducted by Eugen Szenkar. As with Shostakovich’s FifthSymphony, the premiere of this new work was accompanied by articlesin the arts press explaining the ‘‘meaning’’ of the symphony andproviding an ideologically sound platform for its reception. In June1936 Myaskovsky had published his ‘‘Autobiographical Notes’’ in So-vetskaya muzıka, in which he claimed that in his Sixteenth Symphonyhe had not managed to fully solve the problem of either form orlanguage but had addressed a contemporary theme within it, namelySoviet aviation; the finale was based on his own popular song ‘‘Planesare Flying’’ (Letyat samolyotı), and the slow movement was a memorial

61 See the speeches of Lev Knipper (24�25, with ‘‘Myaskovshchina’’ on 24), Viktor Belıy(29�35, at 32, 34) and Tikhon Khrennikov (45) in Sovetskaya muzıka, no. 3 (March 1936).

62 For a detailed history of the Fourth Symphony, see Pauline Fairclough, A SovietCredo: Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006).

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to the 1935 tragedy of the Maxim Gorky crash, which killed thirty-fiveairmen and passengers.63

Frolova-Walker notes that this symphony was the ‘‘first work to beconsidered a masterpiece of Socialist Realist music.’’ Indeed critical re-sponses were generous, to say the least.64 In January 1937 Khubov pub-lished a glowing review of the work, which he praised for the ‘‘depth andcomplexity of [its] great philosophical significance, combined with suchwise simplicity and clarity of expression,’’ though he stopped short ofanointing it as socialist realist.65 In the same issue of Sovetskaya muzıka,Viktor Vinogradov published a short piece on Myaskovsky’s recent song‘‘With all my heart’’ (Ot vsey dushi), which uses words by the Kazakh bardDzhambul Dzhabayev, in which he goes so far as to claim that the work metthe requirement to be ‘‘national in form, socialist in content.’’ But sincethis was a song rather than a symphony, setting a text by one of the mostrenowned Stalinist poets of the period, this was an eminently feasibleachievement.66 The symphony, by contrast, had neither text nor evena program, though its stylistic references to folk song and actual Sovietsong gave it a clearly implied program of sorts, one that was appropriatelyheroic in character. It was no surprise, then, that the symphony was wellreceived in the press. The ground had been thoroughly prepared by thecomposer himself, and with his clear, semi-programmatic intentions andhis setting of Dzambul’s slavish ode to Stalin, he had firmly positionedhimself as eager to fulfil his ideological obligations. Moreover, Shostako-vich’s fall from grace had left a gaping hole in the record of Soviet musicalachievements that the combined bureaucratic edifice of the Composers’Unions and the Committee on Arts Affairs now rushed to fill. Myaskovsky’sSixteenth Symphony provided what had been lacking—a high-quality sym-phonic work that embodied socialist realist precepts: a folk-like and pop-ular mass quality (the slow movement and the song used for the finale);a public statement aligning the music with a contemporary event in Sovietlife (the plane crash); and a popular song used as the basis for an uplifting,optimistic finale. Yet even as they united to praise it, Soviet critics hesitatedto anoint the work as socialist realist—perhaps because the term was notyet properly established in Soviet music criticism or because critics wereconscious that the concept was not easily transferable to symphonic music.

63 Nikolai Myaskovsky, ‘‘Avtobiograficheskiye zametki o tvorcheskom puti,’’ Sovetskayamuzıka, no. 6 (June 1936): 3�11, at 11.

64 Frolova-Walker, ‘‘The Glib, the Bland, and the Corny,’’ 412.65 Georgiy Khubov, ‘‘16-aya simfoniya Myaskovskogo,’’ Sovetskaya muzıka, no. 1 (Jan-

uary 1937): 2�30, at 30.66 Viktor Vinogradov, ‘‘O pesne ‘Ot vsey dushi’ Myaskovskogo,’’ Sovetskaya muzıka,

no. 1 (January 1937): 31–34, at 34.


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In designating Myaskovsky’s Sixteenth Symphony as the embodimentof socialist realism in a post-Soviet critical context, Frolova-Walker hascreated a dual narrative around the work: first, reminding us that it wassuccessful and uncontroversial; but, second, taking its very ordinarinessand harnessing this quality to socialist realism as an explicit and definingquality. In short, Myaskovsky’s Sixteenth Symphony and its success havebeen used as hard evidence for what we should consider symphonic social-ist realism to be. Yet if, to take the title of Frolova-Walker’s chapter, social-ist realism was indeed glib, bland, and corny, this still leaves us witha problem when considering Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, which, onthe current evidence, should not have enjoyed anything like the success ofMyaskovsky’s more obliging Sixteenth Symphony. So, then, let us seewhich of the two works was embraced most warmly by orchestras—notforgetting that both the Moscow and Leningrad Philharmonias were suf-fering eviscerating purges in late 1937 and presumably were at their mostrisk-averse.67

For an orchestra like the Moscow or Leningrad Philharmonia to givemultiple performances of a symphony, it was essential for them to havesubstantial confidence in it. If we consider that Shostakovich’s Fifth Sym-phony had already received three Leningrad performances before hisarticle in Vechernyaya Moskva appeared (25 January 1938), with the fourthscheduled the following week, and that Khubov’s half-hearted endorse-ment of the symphony would not appear in Sovetskaya muzıka until Marchthat year (following the Composers’ Union discussions on 8 February1938), then we can conclude that the Fifth Symphony was well on its wayto canonization before the press began to weave in socialist realist narra-tives. Table 1 lists performances of the Fifth Symphony between itsNovember 1937 premiere and January 1941 in the Leningrad and Mos-cow Philharmonia seasons, showing the combined performance tally ofboth orchestras as twenty-one or twenty-two.

How did Myaskovsky’s Sixteenth Symphony fare by comparison? Thesame orchestras performed it, but in Moscow, where it received fourPhilharmonia performances, these occurred almost exclusively withinthe 1936–37 premiere season. (The performance dates were 24 October,29 November, 8 December, and 21 January, with one further perfor-mance on 15 January 1938.) In Leningrad it was played only once by thePhilharmonia, on 26 November 1939, resulting in a total of six perfor-mances in the same period. This was already exceptional for any Sovietsymphony; most received only one or two performances. Khubov’saccount of the Myaskovsky symphony was vastly more complimentary

67 For details of the Moscow Philharmonia purge, see Fairclough, Classics for theMasses, 141–53.

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TABLE 1Performances of Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5, 1937�41,

Leningrad and Moscow Philharmonias

Leningrad21/11/37 Premiere, with Khachaturyan, Piano Concerto; Asaf’yev,

extract from Flames of Paris1/1/38 With Red Army dances in second half20/1/38 With Haydn, Symphony No. 6 (Hob. 1/6)28/1/38 Concert for art workers of Leningrad, with Wagner,

Meistersinger Overture; Chopin, Piano Concerto in F Minor11/3/38 With Haydn, Symphony No. 1 (Hob. 1/1)5/4/38 Repeat of 11/3/382/1/41 With Shostakovich, Piano Quintet

Moscow29/1/38 Moscow premiere; with Haydn, Symphony in G Major

(number unknown); Beethoven, Adelaide2/2/38 Repeat of 29/1/381/3/38 With Brahms, Violin Concerto; Mozart, overture to

Marriage of Figaro4/3/38 With Haydn, Symphony No. 100 (Hob. 1/100)11/4/38 With Glinka, Capriccio on Russian Theme; arias from Ivan

Susanin; Glazunov, Violin Concerto23/4/38 Myaskovsky, Symphony No. 18; Khachaturyan, Piano

Concerto*1/10/38 With Tchaikovsky, Francesca da Rimini; Mozart, Overture

to Der Schauspieldirektor; Shebalin, Symphony No. 3;Khachaturyan, Piano Concerto

14/11/38 With Golubev, Symphony No. 2; Khachaturyan, PianoConcerto

27, 28/12/38 With Bach, Orchestral Suite in B Minor; Rimsky-Korsakov,excerpts from The Invisible City of Kitezh

23/4/39 With Riazov, Flute Concerto; Kreitner, Andante andScherzo for piano and orchestra; Tikotsky, excerptsfrom Mikhas Podgorniy

26/11/39 In dekada, with Vlasov, Second Suite from Ay-churek;Fel’dman, Violin Concerto

6/1/40 With Rachmaninov, Piano Concerto No. 2; andTchaikovsky, Overture to Hamlet

20/3/40 With Beethoven, Piano Concerto No. 4; Coriolanus Overture1/4/40 With Shostakovich, Piano Concerto No. 1; Symphony No. 1

*Myaskovsky’s Symphony No. 18 may have been a replacement for Shostako-vich’s Fifth Symphony, since the Fifth Symphony is crossed out in the program.


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than his piece on Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, and Myaskovsky hadwon further praise for his Dzambul setting. Yet none of this verbalapproval translated into the coveted multiple performances Shostako-vich’s composition enjoyed.

Therefore, it is clear that canonization was not, in fact, dependent ona work’s socialist realist credentials. Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony wasa staple of the repertoire before those credentials could be established;the process of its acceptance in Soviet criticism began only after it hadbeen played four times: in a dekada (the premiere), in a special concertfor Leningrad party activists that included Red Army dances in the sec-ond half, in an Art Workers’ Union concert, and in a late-January pairingwith a Haydn symphony. For the second concert (the one including theRed Army Ensemble), the Leningrad Philharmonia devised a question-naire to be distributed inside programs. Sadly, for our purposes, theresults were not preserved, but the questionnaire ran as follows: ‘‘1. Whatsymphonic works do you already know? 2. Did you already know any ofShostakovich’s music? (List works you have heard and your impressionsof them.) 3. What is your opinion of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony?’’Clearly, the orchestra was amassing popular opinion about the symphonyin a way that was uncharacteristic, strongly suggesting it was seeking toprotect itself in the event of an official rebuke. All that is left of this mass-questionnaire technique is a set of responses to a Philharmonia summerconcert in Kislovodsk in 1938, and these show—albeit to a very modestdegree—that Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony was popular with audi-ences. A sixteen-year-old student from Leningrad, Ye. Vıgodskaya, wrotethat of all the concerts she attended during the summer tour of thePhilharmonia in Kislovodsk that year, the Fifth Symphony made ‘‘themost powerful impression’’ on her, and a fifty-five-year-old literatureteacher from Moscow, Moisei Heifetz, recorded that for him, too, theFifth Symphony made the strongest impression of all the concerts heattended, because of its ‘‘power and richness of unusual instrumenta-tion, as well as its freshness and novelty.’’ A forty-six-year-old teacher, F.Murav’yev, also liked the Fifth Symphony best because of the ‘‘novelty,depth, and sincerity of the experiences transmitted within it.’’68 And thiswas exactly what the Philharmonia players wanted to hear—they hadtaken the risk of championing the work when Shostakovich’s reputationstill hung by a thread. Popularity with real people was all that truly mat-tered; no audience member was supposed to remark on how ‘‘realistic’’ oreven ‘‘socialist’’ it was. They were just supposed to enjoy it. And it seemsthey did—not only the members of the Leningrad premiere audience who

68 Central State Archive of Literature and Art, St Petersburg (TsGALI), fond 279(Leningrad Philharmonia), op. 1, delo 101 ‘‘Anketi 1938,’’ ll. 65�67, 32, 113.

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famously wept during the Largo, but also an audience of citizens relaxingon their summer vacation at the Black Sea, many of whom doubtless knewlittle or nothing about Shostakovich’s career before attending the concert,and for whom his personal rehabilitation probably also meant very little.

Socialist Realist or Soviet Middlebrow?

It would appear that no symphonic work during these formative years waswholeheartedly embraced as socialist realist. What we see instead is thatthe process of creating narratives around symphonies was of specialimportance at this time; it is in this context that we see socialist realism’ssecondary definitions coming into play. As the Russian musicologist IgorVorob’yev explains, socialist realism as a creative method lay behinda range of ingenious strategies in the musical press to construct socialistrealist ‘‘pragmatic narratives’’ around musical works that extrapolatedideological meaning in a process parallel to their actual performance.In doing so, writers developed a wide range of verbal tropes, includingsuch standard terms as realist, classical, heroic, simple, and national, alongwith others that are not easily translatable, such as narodnıy (the quality ofbeing ‘for or of the people’’), pesennıy (having a song-like character), andmassovıy (similar to narodnıy, only signifying the ‘‘masses’’ rather than the‘‘folk’’). Using one or more of these terms convincingly in a verbal accountof a musical work, a writer could signify socialist realism without having touse the phrase explicitly.69 Writers used all these terms with considerableskill, knowing exactly what they were doing: creating a socialist realistnarrative around an abstract work that could not itself fulfill the aestheticcriteria. That the symphonies themselves were not socialist realist was clearto contemporary writers of the late 1930s, even if, following successfulcanonization, some musicologists later in the Soviet era felt comfortableusing the designation.

How should we therefore respond to Frolova-Walker’s contentionthat socialist realism was and is a definable style that was formulated asan alternative to modernism, and that what needs to change is not thelabel but our phobic reaction to it?70 I agree that it is not credible tomaintain that Soviet composers wrote in an enforced, and thus compro-mised, language. Moreover, that the advent of socialist realism coincidedhistorically with an international retreat from radical avant-gardism isincontrovertible. Where we differ is in maintaining the integrity of thelabel itself. For Frolova-Walker, Myaskovsky’s Sixteenth Symphony is

69 Igor Vorob’yev, Sotsrealisticheskiy ‘‘Bolshoy stil’’’ v sovetskoy muzıke (1930–1950-ye godı)(St Petersburg: Kompozitor, 2013).

70 Frolova-Walker, ‘‘The Glib, the Bland, and the Corny,’’ 421�23.


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socialist realist; Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony—we can only assume,since her article is concerned only with defining works composed in theclassic ‘‘bland style’’—is not. Myaskovsky’s work was greeted with moreenthusiasm in Sovetskaya muzıka (and we must not forget the role of hisDzambul setting in smoothing his critical path), yet Shostakovich’s sym-phony was canonized much more swiftly and comprehensively. It is notpossible on this basis to say Myaskovsky’s work was socialist realist withoutdoing the same with Shostakovich’s—or we are reduced to relying onnothing but the most subjective personal criteria. Either Myaskovsky’sSixteenth Symphony and Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony were socialistrealist, or neither was.

I contend that the second position is more accurate: neither met thecriteria because that was impossible for a symphonic work. Criticsreceived them using a battery of secondary descriptors that suggestedsocialist realism in order to support their entry into the performancecanon, and to show higher administrative and political bodies that theComposers’ Union had recognized Pravda’s criticism of Shostakovichfrom early 1936 and turned its wise words to constructive purpose. It wasin everyone’s interest to canonize both symphonies and to show thatSoviet musicians were being both diligent and successful in followingthe new Party lines. A symphony could not be socialist realist, but it couldgain critical acceptance when accompanied by these secondary descrip-tors, and so become socialist realist by default, or at least gain the samecredibility as if critics had proclaimed it a socialist realist paragon.

As Frolova-Walker herself has more recently shown, the awarding ofStalin Prizes to works that did not seem to adhere to any of those fea-tures, barring only ‘‘classicism’’ (yet another secondary definition),merely underlines the extent to which socialist realism was melded withother semi-official musical descriptors, such as ‘‘Soviet,’’ by virtue of yetanother tier of adjectives loosely associated with socialist realism, such as‘‘clarity,’’ ‘‘mastery,’’ even ‘‘genius’’—all terms associated with Shostako-vich’s Stalin-prizewinning Piano Quintet.71 A bad work, even one hypedas socialist realist, could not be sure of gaining canonic status—as wasproven by Ivan Dzerzhinsky’s opera Tikhiy Don (The Quiet Don), pre-miered in 1935. Praised by Stalin, it nonetheless fell swiftly into obscu-rity.72 My point is that we need not repeat the same claims, rehearsing allthose secondary descriptors as justification for retaining the label itself.To jettison the term socialist realism is not a decision made phobically—

71 Frolova-Walker, Stalin’s Music Prize, 37�62.72 Frolova-Walker, ‘‘Soviet Music in Post-Soviet Musicology: The First Twenty Years

and Beyond,’’ in Russian Music Since 1917: Reappraisal and Rediscovery, ed. Marina Frolova-Walker and Patrick Zuk (Proceedings of the British Academy, New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2017), 101–2.

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founded on a Cold War prejudice or the conviction that it was a coercedstyle. It is simply logical. Rendering works socialist realist through musiccriticism was a convoluted, high-pressure process that Soviet music criticswere forced to participate in. Today we are in a much more fortunateposition.

By admitting that the term socialist realism cannot be crediblyapplied to symphonic music, we also remove the temptation to divideStalin-era repertoire into the categories of works that ‘‘conformed’’ andworks that did not. And this can only benefit Soviet music historiography:we can stop thinking in terms of who capitulated and who resisted; whowas brave and who was weak; who betrayed their creative impulses andwho remained true to their calling. All these binary oppositions do isprevent us from understanding deeper currents in human behavior. TheStalin regime poured vast sums into maintaining an extraordinarilyactive musical culture on many levels, in which contemporary composi-tion featured prominently. Composers understood they had a civic dutyto their listeners. Some, for multiple and complex reasons, never man-aged to find a style that accommodated both their own taste and theiridea of what audiences might enjoy. Others successfully made thataccommodation, which gave them a framework and a set of expectationsthat enabled them to realize their talent as fully as possible.

Responding to that civic duty produced what I have called the‘‘Soviet middlebrow’’ style. It was a distinctive and historically limitedphenomenon that required a unique set of cultural circumstances: aneconomic model that weakened the need for commercial success; anideological model that insisted on equality of opportunity, experience,and education; and a deep-seated tradition, existing long before 1917, ofregarding the function of art as social transformation for the collectivegood. This is why the Soviet middlebrow cannot be analogized to theconcept of middlebrow in Britain or the United States; these prerequisiteswere not dominant in either culture, so attempts to transfer Soviet prac-tices of cultural sharing to more class-riven societies inevitably provokeddeep antagonism. Even if we overlook the allergic responses of Greenbergor Arendt to mass cultural education and consider only Adorno’s perspec-tive, rooted in Marxist theory and ostensibly concerned with social trans-formation, the objections he raises both to ‘‘compromised’’ (that is,stylistically accessible) new music and to the all-too-easy availability of theclassics fall away when transferred to the Soviet context. There, Adorno’sarguments are anticipated and he is beaten at his own game: for him the‘‘enlightening’’ purpose of art was conceived as a feature of a capitalisteconomy, as was the notion of revolution as the inevitable and desirableconsequence of that enlightenment. Hence, in Adorno’s world view, anycultural practice that distracted citizens from becoming enlightened could


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only be regarded negatively, whether it was a Beethoven quartet playing inthe background on the radio or Stravinsky titillating his audiences at theballet.

In Stalin’s Soviet Union culture could have no such enlightening pur-pose—because the ‘‘goal’’ of such enlightenment, as Marx and Engels firstconceived it, had in theory already been fulfilled. Nor was access to culturea means to cynical exercises in social display, as Adorno had believed; formillions of Soviet citizens it truly was a chance to experience something thatbrought genuine pleasure, even if a functional by-product was to fostersobriety and expectations of kul’turnıy behavior. The philosophically mud-dled and self-serving conceit underpinning Western narratives of the loftyeffect of ‘‘high art’’ on the human spirit was, in the Soviet Union, replacedby very different notions: ‘‘high art’’ had a clear duty to entertain, uplift, andinform; composers were paid servants of the people, expected to performcivic duties in return for state support; and artists had a moral obligation tocommunicate, not to turn away from their audiences. For all these reasons,the ‘‘Soviet middlebrow’’ was a style all of its own. It sought to be a form of‘‘high art’’ for the masses—a form, above all, of musical communication.Much of it, miraculously and wonderfully, succeeded.

ABSTRACT

Symphonic music composed under Stalin presents both ethical andaesthetic problems. Often assumed to have been composed in a compro-mised style by composers who were either coerced into abandoning their‘‘real’’ modernist inclinations or who were in any case second-rate, theseworks have been labelled variously socialist realist, conformist, conserva-tive, or even dissident, depending on the taste and opinion of those passingjudgement. This article argues that picking and choosing which symphonyis socialist realist and which is not cannot be justified either logically orhistorically, and that we should no longer attempt to define any non-textedor non-programmatic music in this way. The Anglophone term ‘‘middle-brow’’ holds out the possibility of describing this repertoire without imply-ing ethical or artistic compromise on the composers’ part, acknowledgingthat, in the absence of any elite or ‘‘highbrow’’ musical culture, composersshared the aim of reaching a mass audience.

Keywords: middlebrow, Shostakovich, socialist realism, Symphony no. 5,Myaskovsky

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Documents

Was Soviet Music Middlebrow? Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony ... · Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony is an obvious example of this conundrum: regularly performed all over the world,