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Art in Wartime: A Review of Symphony for the City of the
Dead
By lynmiller-lachmann on 2016-03-07 10:00:03
In 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, an American diplomat nearly loses the microfilmed score of a symphony,
SYMPHONY
FORTHECITY 2
= OFTHEDEAD
and millions of lives hang in the balance. Why? This fascinating vignette begins M.T.
Anderson’s stunning nonfiction work for teen and adult readers, Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich
and the Siege of Leningrad. Anderson creates a symphony of his own, interweaving music, biography, and history to explore
the origins, composition and repercussions of this work of art, produced under the most challenging of conditions. Readers
come to see that the survival of both Shostakovich and his Seventh Symphony was no less than a miracle. Before the war,
before the rise of Joseph Stalin, before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Shostakovich was a musically gifted middle class
youngster growing up in a city once called St. Petersburg, then renamed Petrograd, and after the revolution renamed
Leningrad (and today, St. Petersburg once again). In the heady early years of the revolution, he and other artists—musicians,
visual artists, and writers—were able to experiment freely, a privilege for which they paid dearly once Stalin came to power
and imposed Socialist Realism as the only approved style. Most of Shostakovich’s colleagues perished in the purges, as did
his friends in the military who complained that Stalin’s retrograde views of warfare left the country unprepared against a
rapidly militarizing Germany under Hitler. Once Hitler betrayed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union, Shostakovich and his
family were trapped in their besieged city, where the composer began to write his Seventh Symphony. The tale of how he
and his immediate family were smuggled out of the starving to finish the symphony, worried about their friends and
extended family still trapped there, is alone worth the price of the book. [caption id="attachment_8194" align="alignright"
width="200"] M.T. Anderson[/caption] Vivid language brings the music to life on the page.
Readers will probably want to listen to the symphony in the background, as I did when I read this book. Well-chosen
historical photos show the ebullience of pre-Stalinist art and the grimness of life both under Stalin and during the almost
three-year siege. The book reminds readers of how many Soviet citizens made the ultimate sacrifice to defeat Hitler,
challenging our ethnocentric view of the war. For those who cannot imagine a work of art changing anything, Anderson
convincingly shows why Shostakovich’s symphony meant so much to Russians—including musicians in Leningrad who
performed it in public only hours before they died of starvation—and to Americans during the war who had little reason to
contribute to relief efforts for people far away and “different” culturally and ideologically. But a brilliant work of music
closed the gap and reminded people of our common suffering and our common humanity. In a recent interview, M.T.
Anderson talked about Symphony of the City of the Dead in the context of his other works, including the dystopian novels
Thirsty and Feed and the Octavian Nothing series of historical novels that portray enslaved and free blacks at the time of the
American Revolution. He described his fascination with the portrayals of utopias that turn out to be dystopias when
revolutionaries come to power and are corrupted by power, disillusioned by the imperfections of their world, and/or dragged
down by original sins such as slavery and racism. While futuristic dystopian fiction has become all the rage in both YA and
adult fiction, M.T. Anderson’s wide-ranging works, that now include this outstanding nonfiction book, remind us that there
are very real dystopias in our past and present, as well as very real heroes who put their lives on the line for the cause of
humanity.
