Who was Dmitri Shostakovich?
In Shostakovich Reconsidered the answers are clear and cohesive. He was the man whose cast of mind, private opinions, and personal style are faithfully embodied in Testimony. Allan Ho and Dmitry Feofanov’s case for believing this to be so is too intricate and sustained to be adequately paraphrased; in any case, no one who has any interest in the Shostakovich debate can avoid scrupulously sifting this argument, set forth in the authors’ paper “Shostakovich’s Testimony: Reply To An Unjust Criticism”. Having said this, it is worth pointing out that one of the findings made by Ho and Feofanov during their investigation of the Testimony question is that four separate witnesses (Galina Drubachevskya, Flora Litvinova, Rostislav Dubinsky, and Yury Korev) have independently testified to knowing during 1971-74 that Shostakovich was “talking” to Volkov, i.e., that work on Testimony was then in progress. Indeed, Central Committee documents prove that, despite her subsequent – stout and still conti
