War. Revolution. Death. Oppression. Moral ambiguity. The story of Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad doesn't really sound like kid stuff, but author M.T. Anderson has turned it into a gripping new book for young adult readers.
Symphony for the City of the Dead is the nonfiction debut of Anderson, a National Book Award winner whose fiction for young readers has often drawn on his interest in classical music. Anderson is known for the prescient science fiction story Feed and the two-volume historical epic The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing.
Anderson's new Shostakovich book tells the turbulent, often tragic story of Russia and the Soviet Union in the first half of the 20th century by using the lens of the great composer, who was born in St. Petersburg in 1906 and witnessed the sweep of the Russian Revolution—then became one of the U.S.S.R.'s most scrutinized citizens.
Even in simplified form, there's a staggering amount of ground to cover in a book that aims to elucidate both the historical and aesthetic background of the Leningrad Symphony. We meet the Futurists, influential in Shostakovich's early career; and we learn about the authorities' suspicion of anti-populist formalism.
The book follows the composer and his city through the grueling two-and-a-half-year siege, and the intense process of writing the Seventh Symphony. The book opens, as a teaser, with the story of the score being smuggled to the West on microfilm (!) and climaxes with the work's poignant Leningrad premiere in 1942.
"The whole of Leningrad heard the music that evening," writes Anderson. "A soldier in the Red Army wrote in his journal, 'On the night of 9 August 1942, my artillery squadron and the people of the great frontline city were listening to the Shostakovich symphony with closed eyes. It seemed that the cloudless sky had suddenly become a storm bursting with music as the city listened to the symphony of heroes and forgot about the war, but not the meaning of war."
Given the emotional subject matter, it's forgivable that Anderson sometimes gets a little cheesy. (Regarding Shostakovich's Fifth: "Listen to it. It is your symphony to write with him.") Anderson's impressive achievement in Symphony for the City of the Dead is to make this book more than just a historical study: it's an investigation of the relationship between artists and their times.
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