Product Description

Dmitry Shostakovich wrote regularly to his close friend Isaak Glikman during their forty-year relationship from the early 1930s to the composer's death in 1975. The core of Chronicle of a Friendship is a collection of 288 of these letters starting in 1941, when both correspondents were evacuated from Leningrad. Earlier letters were destroyed during the siege of Leningrad; however, the chronological gap is more than compensated for by Glikman's detailed account, seen very much from the inside, of the main events in the composer's life during the turbulent 1930s, the height of Stalin's terror. The book amounts to a highly personal biography in which Glikman has used the authentic voice of Shostakovich in his letters as a catalyst for comprehensive explications and reminiscences. A portrait emerges of a complex and acutely sensitive personality, endowed with enormous moral integrity, humanity, compassion and a caustic, often self-deprecating sense of humour. The Chronicle is a treasury of facts about milestone events, dates of compositions, first performances and so on. But in its revelations of the deeper, tormented feelings of the composer's soul, especially in letters which reflect on his increasingly debilitating illnesses, his preoccupation with death, and the crippling artistic and moral consequences of living under an ideologically tyrannical regime, it is much more than that Chronicle of a Friendship was first published in Russian as Letters to a Friend in 1993. This is its first appearance in English.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #811687 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-22
• Original language: Russian
• Binding: Hardcover
• 416 pages

Review
'One of the half dozen most important books in Russian on any musical subject; David Fanning

BBC Music Magazine December 2001 issue
'A most moving document...a vivid and also strikingly intimate portrait of Shostakovich during the second half of his life.'

Customer Reviews

An insight into the mind of Shostakovich
This new translation of the letters of Shostakovich to his friend, Isaak Glikman, is an outstanding volume which offers genuine insights into the mind of the great composer. Through letters reflecting everyday occurences and mundane events, as well as dealing with the pivotal events in Shostakovich's life, the reader gets 'into the mind' of Shostakovich.
Readers may be interested to know that the correspondance in the book is one-way only, since Shostakovich never kept any letters he received from Glikman, and only letters from 1941 to 1975 are represented - letters from before this date were lost during the evacuation of Leningrad.
This book works best as a companion volume to a biography, such as E. Wilson of L. Fay's books, or as a comparison to the excellent (if controversial) memoirs, 'Testimony'.