The Terror novel

None could be more authentic than Victor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev; he lived through the earlier waves of eliminations and was imprisoned/exiled himself before French connections got him released in 1936, of all years. But a great chronicler of his times - chiefly in Memoirs of a Revolutionary, through which I introduced my first acquaintance with this literary giant and attempted to provide a potted biography - might not be guaranteed to be a great imaginative novelist. Serge undoubedly is, and in her introduction to this New York Review of Books edition (thanks to the imprint for so many discoveries), Susan Sontag explains why, in a series of questions followed by eloquently argued sentences, Serge has missed the 'master' status he deserves. Born in Belgium of Russian anti-Tsarists in exile, 'no country can fully claim him', and no 'national literature' either; he was hyperproductive, and people are suspicious of that; 'most of what he wrote does not belong to literature', and what does has been 'politicised' as a 'moral achievement'; his life was full of dualities; an embattled revolutionary to the last, he 'refused to take on the expected cargo of melancholy'.

Indeed - necessarily dark, even black as hell, as The Case of Comrade Tulayev undoubtedly is, it's constantly lit up by a cosmic perspective. The very first chapter echoes War and Peace with the title 'comets are born at night'; three members of the old guard meet in a snowy wood outside Moscow, knowing that they won't see each other again and so alive to the strange beauty around them; and in the most amazing chapter, for me, of all, 'the brink of nothing', the only one of the fall-guys to meet a triumphant fate of sorts (it is not survival) is seen at one with his overseer among a small population of Ostiaks and Old Believers at what is constantly depicted as the end of the world. He transcends fear and sees that one of his persecutors will become one of the next victims. This is prose of the highest, most poetic order, in Willard R Trask's translation from the French.

The structure of the novel is an original polyphony of voices. It both is and isn't about the fallout from the random assassination of Kirov in 1934; the height of the Terror, which fell three years later, is past and we start in 1939, end on the brink of the German invasion. Scapegoats from the not-yet-wiped-out first and second wave of revolutionaries must be wiped out. their individual fates are taken in turn. Stalin appears throught as 'the Chief'.

All the major figures are political ones, so the sweep of the Terror isn't the subject of the book. I thought it coincided well enough, though, with the near-misses that Shostakovich and Prokofiev had in the second half of the 1930s, so I urged the students on the third of my Russian music Zoom terms to read both the autobiography and the novel. We were so privileged that Elizabeth Wilson, author of the best book on Shostakovich, joined us for the class dealing with the formation of the Association of Soviet Musicians in 1932 and the Pravda attack on Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in 1936, with the opera and the Fourth Symphony as the main musical focuses. I like to think that Liza and I are good friends now, so the exchanges were relaxed, but she is rigorous with the facts and shed some new light on the interrogation of Shostakovich which is the main subject of Julian Barnes's The Music of Time, on which she advised. That's Liza top far right in the screenshot below. I've lopped off the bottom of the screen because it had the time bar over the five folk there, and there are more on two other screens who only feature when they pop up to ask a question or make an observation.

Term is coming to an end with the music of the war years this coming Thursday, and the bleak time between 1948 and 1953 in the last class. For the Opera in Depth classes, we've gone from the heights of Fidelio/Leonore - and a marvellous finale which featured Linda Esther Gray, Mark Wigglesworth and Ian Page - to the depraved depths of Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel (three more classes left). Then I want to offer a double one-off, as it were, with two classes on Prokofiev's War and Peace on Thursdays 18 and 25 March, 2.30pm-4.30pm UK time: anyone interested, just leave a message here with your email and I won't publish it, but I'll reply.

Around the Shostakovich quartets

The Dante Quartet (violinists Krysia Osostowicz and Oscar Perks, viola-player Yuko Inoue and cellist Richard Jenkinson) plus Jim Page (left) and Jenny McGregor-Smith (second from right), the two inspiring organisers of the Bromsgrove weekend devoted to all 15 quartets in chronological order - a first for me - salute DDS at the end of the adventure. I was called in at a late stage to replace my good friend Stephen Johnson - now returned to reasonable health - in talks before each of the concerts. Toasting him with a 'present absence', including a two-stringed instrument set up by Yuko to save damage to her own instrument in the Thirteenth Quartet, where Shostakovich requires each of the players to 'play on the belly with the stick of the bow' during the boogie-woogie centrepiece.

As it turned out Elizabeth Wilson, doyenne of the best single book on the composer, Shostakovich Remembered, was also coming for two events and was quite happy to share my burden, so I kicked off with the introductory talk and then we alternated. Jim's and Jenny's magnificent series of events also included David Rudkin talking on the screenplay of Tony Palmer's Testimony film, Alan George of the Fitzwilliam Quartet on meeting Shostakovich. Robin Ireland - another Fitzwilliamite - giving a masterclass with the Dunev Quartet of the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (the part I heard dealt with the second movement of the Eighth Quartet, and he really got them to bite into it)

and David Fanning and Michelle Assay linking the quartets with the two Kozintsev Shakespeare films which Shostakovich scored so hauntingly. Later that Sunday afternoon I chaired a forum with those of us talkers left by then, and it was such fun. Here we are at the end of the marathon.

Two more here: one of Liza with Yuko, who know each other well as players,

the other of David and Michelle with Richard.

Liza I liked tremendously when I met her at Bard College's Shostakovich symposium 14 years ago, and though I'd not seen her since, we had a lively e-correspondence. Now, I hope, we're proper friends. It was such a bonus that she was giving a lecture at Pushkin House the following Tuesday on the extraordinary pianist Maria Yudina, whose biography she's preparing, and that turned me on to a great artist of whom I'd previously heard too little. Just listen to this performance of Bach's Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue.

Yudina led a fascinating life, a human being of total integrity who somehow escaped prison, though not punishment, under Stalin; a holy person always short of funds because she gave all her money away; an interpreter who, though superlative in Bach, had the curiosity to seek out the contemporary, not least Hindemith and Stravinsky (her Serenade and Sonata are also among the best performances I've heard). Can't wait for the book.

But back to Shostakovich. Although I can't say the cycle as a whole was quite up to the mark of the Jerusalem Quartet's Wigmore series (of which I missed one), and though Krysia swapping roles with Oscar didn't always yield the best results, these were sensitive and perceptive musicians attempting the Everest parallel to the Beethoven series for the first time, and I found so many revelations. Chiefly, I'd say, in the Ninth and Tenth, the Passacaglia of which was the highlight of the cycle for me (it's the quartet I knew least well). Plus Richard's sounds in several dying falls were so unearthly. Remember too that most quartets break up their series over a season, so it was hardly surprising if there were points of tiredness: it was as much a test to themselves as a gift to us that the Dantes undertook the odyssey.

Liza spoke before Quartets 2 and 3, then 7-13, with such lucidity in journeying through each work (she knows most of them from the inside as a fine cellist). My approach was to link to other works contemporary to each of the quartets in question, so the recorded excerpts avoided what we were about to hear. I handled 1, 4-6, 14 and 15 - with gratitude to EW for highlighting the quote from the slow movement of Prokofiev's Second Quartet in the Lento of the Sixth Quartet, a 1956 homage to the colleague who had died three years earlier on the same day as Stalin.

I had to hand the reference to Shostakovich pupil and love-object Galina Ustvolskaya's Trio for clarinet, violin and piano of 1949, but I'd never thought of its first careful placing -fff, espressivo - at the height of the first-movement development - as opening a space in the high wall of the last Stalin years. Though it's a severe theme, could this be Ustvolskaya keeping DDS sane in extremis?

In conversation with David Curtis of the Coull Quartet and the Orchestra of the Swan, Liza gave us so much chapter and verse about her meetings with Shostakovich during her years as a young cellist under Rostropovich's guidance at the Moscow Conservatoire from 1964 to 1971. Two memories in particular struck me. One she mentioned in Shostakovich Remembered, but not in quite such poignant detail as this - namely, that DDS had arranged a private hearing for Britten and Pears in his apartment of the Thirteenth String Quartet. She was present, mostly as interpreter (and her family already had connections with Aldeburgh, so she knew Shostakovich's English counterpart). At the end of the short but harrowing performance, Britten went down on his knees in front of Shostakovich, kissed his hand and asked to hear the whole thing again.

The other memory which brought tears to my eyes was that the students all knew DDS - he always had time for them - but when they saw him in his later illness attending public performances, where he would always insist on getting up with much difficulty to greet people he knew, they tactfully took a longer way round so as not to pass him and put him to that trouble. Anyway, here's Liza with Rostropovich in a photo from that time.

If anyone doesn't own Liza's book - or, indeed, her scrupulously researched and honourable biographies of Slava and Jacqueline du Pré - I urge you to rectify the situation. At the Pushkin House event, I was talking to Rosamund Bartlett and we were talking about how we both bought the book when it came out, but were equally thrilled to own the second edition, where EW, clearly urged to expand her considerable musicological knowledge, writes more about the works themselves. Anyway, there is no end to what we can learn about these great masterpieces.

Accompanied by a moon still visible on the Saturday morning of the weekend, when it briefly snowed as I dashed across from hotel to arts centre, I love to quote, as EW does in Shostakovich Remembered, those Michelangelo lines which Shostakovich set at the end of one of his own last monuments.

Here fate has sent me eternal sleep;

But I am not dead: though buried in the earth,

I live in you, whose lamentation I hear,

Since friend is reflected in friend.

I am as though dead, but as a comfort to the world,

With its thousands, I live on in the hearts

Of all loving people, and that means I am not dust;

Mortal decay cannot touch me.