Family Portrait

Though he is the most talked about of all contemporary composers, the real Dmitri Shostakovich has long been as mysterious as a Kremlin state secret. Now the secret is out.

It was revealed not in Leningrad but in Philadelphia, where a pleasant, grey-haired old lady named Nadejda Galli-Shohat had been living obscurely, after teaching physics at the University of Michigan, Bryn Mawr and Mount Holyoke. A U.S. resident since 1923, Nadejda Galli-Shohat, though she had never said much about it, is Shostakovich's aunt.

Assiduously pumped by a Russian-born pianist and writer, Victor Ilyich Seroff, Aunt Nadejda tells all. The result, Shostakovich's first full-length biography (Dmitri Shostakovich by Victor Ilyich Seroff; Knopf; $3), shows its subject to be not only a bespectacled firewarden and heroic musical panegyrist of embattled Russia, but an engaging human being who might have stepped out of the pages of a Chekhov family drama.

Mother Sonya. Son of an easygoing, Siberian-born government official, "Mitya" Shostakovich might have spent his days playing the piano in a movie house if it had not been for the iron will of his mother, Sonya.

Sonya, the daughter of a middle-class Siberian gold-mine manager, possessed a bourgeois ambition that even the terrors of the October Revolution could not dampen. Harassed by almost incredible poverty after her husband's death (when Mitya was 16), she brought up her brood of three children with the tenacity of a she-wolf, worked her gnarled fingers to the bone to give them an unusual education despite collectivist hell & high water.

She sold the family furniture to get food. Sister Marusia got a job teaching piano in a ballet school. Sister Zoya was not much help. She kept dissolving into Slavic reveries.

Wrote Zoya to Nadejda when her mother succumbed to a paralyzing attack of sciatica: "With Olympian calm, I put on my coat and go .to drown myself in the Neva.

But nothing ever comes of it. Either the Neva is frozen, or I meet somebody I know on the way and so am forced to put it off." Problem in Selection. Sonya Shostakovich's maternal solicitude for Mitya, who was a frail youth afflicted with tuber ulosis, bordered on mania. "Suppose the ceiling of our house fell in," she would brood. "Whom should one save? Of course Mitya--for this would be the duty of everyone to society--for the sake of art." Sonya even insisted on dragging her friends and relatives into her all-absorbing responsibilities. "If both Mitya and your husband were drowning," she used to ask threateningly of bewildered Aunt Nadejda, "which one would you save?" Aunt Nadejda finally decided it would be easier to drown herself.

When Dmitri Shostakovich finally got married, it was almost over solicitous Sonya's dead body. But Dmitri nevertheless grew to be a mildly self-assertive scholarly-looking young man, who could play the piano as well as anybody in Russia, and whose enormous talents as a symphonic composer were soon to set the world by the ears.

Lady of Mzensk. One mystery Biographer Seroff's book goes a long way toward solving is the maze of Slavic ideological brainwork that lay behind the sensational blacklisting of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of the District of Mzensk in 1936. The close connection in the Soviet mind between musical and political technique will probably never be completely fathomed by non-Russians. But looked at by Russians, the downfall of Lady Macbeth had a certain logic about it.

Lady Macbeth was a satire against the bourgeoisie, but the musical language in which this satire was expressed was the international jargon of dissonance known to postwar Europe from Paris to Moscow as "modern music." That Hitler was, at the same time, castigating modern music as "musical bolshevism" bothered the bolshevik theorists not a whit. To them it was "bourgeois formalism."

Old-Bolshevik Overtone. At any rate, modern music was unquestionably international inherently contrary to the soothing national strains of Russian folk music. In 1936 Joseph Stalin, already preparing for his celebrated purge of the old bolsheviks, was carving Russia a new nationalistic policy. In the eyes of Moscow's word-raddled musical theorists, Lady Macbeth of the District of Mzensk was an old-bolshevik opera.

Stalin's new constitution encouraged a Russian type of music again. Soviet critics found it in Ivan Dzerjinsky's Quiet Flows the Don, a folk-music potpourri (based on M. Sholokhov's novel) that sounded to Russians the way Victor Herbert sounds to Americans.

Fortunately, Dmitri Shostakovich had too much sense to take his ideological thwacking too seriously. He went on composing music in the style of Dmitri Shostakovich. Within two years the Russians decided it fitted the Party line.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.