Шостакович и власть

[Дима]

Просто не нужно принимать так близко к сердцу как всегда очень эмоциональные рассказы Ростроповича - с голоду Прокофьев не умирал.

Не понял? Значит для тех, кто знает положение вещей, рассказ Ростроповича лишний повод улыбнуться, а других он, мягко говоря, вводит в заблуждение, то есть обманывает? .

Прокофьев говорит - "У меня нет денег на завтрак".
Один например прокомментирует - вот буржуй, деньги у него на повара кончились.
Другой как Ростропович помог - кончились деньги, значит нужно снова их заработать.

Ростропович лучше знал, что ему рассказывать в своём интервью.

[Михаил Лидский]

Некий благодетель прислал мне нижеследующее.
Если кому нужен перевод, сделаю завтра вечером.
-----------------------
UNAUTHORIZED

by ALEX ROSS

The final betrayal of Dmitri Shostakovich.

"New Yorker"
Issue of 2004-09-06
Posted 2004-08-30

There are few documented examples of the fake or forged autobiography,
although the genre probably has a long, secret history. Its most famous
practitioner was Clifford Irving, who, in 1971, tried to publish the
tell-all memoirs of Howard Hughes without telling Hughes. Irving's
manuscript began with a brazen announcement that "more lies have been
printed and told about me than about any living man" and that it was time
for the "elusive, often painful truth." Irving made the mistake of releasing
his manuscript while Hughes was still alive. Nothing kills an autobiography
like a flat-out denial by the author.

In 1979, the Russian-emigre musicologist Solomon Volkov published
"Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as Related to and Edited by
Solomon Volkov." It was a grippingly embittered monologue by the greatest of
Soviet composers, denouncing Communism and chronicling a life lived in fear.
In retrospect, something about the first page should have set off alarms.
Like Irving's Hughes, Volkov's Shostakovich seems to protest too much.
"Others will write about us," he says. "And naturally they'll lie through
their teeth." This book would "speak the truth about the past"; "reminisce .
. . only in the name of truth"; "try to tell only the truth."

The book arrived with impressive credentials. According to Volkov, each
chapter had been read and signed by Shostakovich, who had died in 1975.
Irving never met Hughes, but Volkov was acquainted with Shostakovich, and
was known to have interviewed him. A year after publication, though,
"Testimony" hit a snag. The American scholar Laurel Fay pointed out that
seven of the eight chapters began with word-for-word quotations from older
Shostakovich essays. Given that these pages bore Shostakovich's signature,
it looked as if Volkov might have obtained the composer's approval under
false pretenses-perhaps by showing him an innocuous collection of previously
published material, then weaving the signed pages into a monologue of his
own invention. Volkov never answered these charges, but other writers
stepped in to defend him. The most persuasive argument, which I repeated in
this magazine in 2000, was that Fay had found no borrowings on the first
page of Chapter 1, which proclaimed the truth of the very book that was in
the reader's hands.

A couple of years ago, Fay got hold of a copy of the Russian typescript of
"Testimony." She has now reported her findings in Malcolm Hamrick Brown's
new anthology, "A Shostakovich Casebook" (Indiana). There is no signature on
the first page, it turns out; that claim was something other than the truth.
Instead, there is a signature on the third page, which perfectly overlaps
with a bland essay that Shostakovich published in 1966. Fay subjects the
entire document to Sherlockian scrutiny, noting that a couple of the
recycled pages had been doctored to remove datable references. A mention of
the Chekhov centenary-"I am sincerely happy that the hundredth anniversary
of his birth is attracting anew to him the attention of all progressive
humanity"-disappears under correction tape. The American publishers could
not easily check back issues of Literaturnaia Gazeta, where this statement
originally appeared, but they might have noticed that a man allegedly
interviewed in the seventies was suddenly speaking from the year 1960.

Recently, at a Shostakovich festival at Bard College, Fay spoke once more
about "Testimony," which Limelight Editions has ill-advisedly reissued in a
twenty-fifth-anniversary edition. She added new evidence to her suggestion
that "Testimony" is a hoax: a memo, drafted by Shostakovich's friend Isaak
Glikman shortly after "Testimony" was published, records Shostakovich, in
the last months of his life, railing against the business of writing
memoirs. Shostakovich is also quoted as saying, "What sort of a person is
this Solomon Volkov?" The words hung in the air as Fay repeated them. You
could almost hear the fear germinating in Shostakovich's harried mind: this
Volkov character is hatching something. Glikman, by the way, is an
unimpeachable witness, whose writings have been cited by Volkov's defenders
and detractors alike.

Fay leaves little doubt that Shostakovich saw nothing of "Testimony" beyond
the eight pages he signed. (I can imagine another, less likely scenario: the
composer read the manuscript and refused to grant his approval, whereupon
Volkov obtained the signatures by subterfuge.) Whether the composer made any
of the statements attributed to him in Volkov's book is a trickier question.
As Fay readily admits, many of the anecdotes and opinions have been
corroborated by other sources; Volkov may have heard some from the composer,
others from his friends. The musicologist Lev Lebedinsky, who liked to say
that Shostakovich's symphonies were secret diatribes against the Soviet
system, has been suggested as a secondary ghostwriter. It could well be that
the bulk of the manuscript consists of things that Shostakovich did say at
one time or another, in so many words. Some have shrugged their shoulders
over the entire affair, saying that, yes, some hanky-panky went on, but that
it doesn't matter in the end, because Volkov told little lies in order to
convey a larger truth about Soviet music.

I don't buy that argument. It isn't enough for the memoirs of a major artist
to have an ambience of authenticity. A book that subjected Picasso or Joyce
to such manipulations would never have made it to publication. For some
reason, though, music is treated as a childish realm in which fables serve
as well as facts. Russian composers seem especially vulnerable to urban
legends, as if facts mattered even less behind the old Iron Curtain. To
dismiss Fay's evidence is to disregard a great artist's right to speak in
his own voice. If Shostakovich had known what was going to be printed under
his name, he might have hated Volkov with a passion that not even Joseph
Stalin inspired in him.

For years, Volkov's book provoked nonsensically polarized arguments over
whether Shostakovich was a Party ideologue or an anti-Communist dissident.
The composer had long served as a caricature of Soviet nationalism; Volkov
and his acolytes had now made him a puppet for the other side. The most
effective "Volkovian" interpreter was Ian MacDonald, the author of a book
entitled "The New Shostakovich," who, sadly, committed suicide last year.
Perhaps the so-called "Shostakovich Wars" are ready to end, and a more
evenhanded assessment can begin. The Bard festival, two weekends of concerts
in which Shostakovich was heard along with twenty other Soviet composers,
offered a sometimes confusing picture, but there was no doubt of the
composer's vital appeal. Every performance at the splendid new Fisher Center
was packed, and even 10 a.m. panels drew crowds.

In conjunction with the festival, Fay edited another new collection,
entitled "Shostakovich and His World" (Princeton), which contains an
illuminating essay by Leonid Maximenkov on the composer's relationship with
Stalin. Stalin knew Shostakovich primarily as a film composer, and admired
him on that count. He famously disliked Shostakovich's opera "Lady Macbeth
of Mtsensk," which was denounced in Pravda in January of 1936. But there was
no personal animus, as Volkov claims. The Pravda editorial spearheaded an
attack on modernist tendencies which had been in preparation for months. As
one Pravda editor remarked, the government targeted Shostakovich not because
he was the worst offender but because he was deemed "worth saving."
Transcripts of a meeting at the Kremlin show that Stalin simply wanted
Shostakovich to stop writing "rebuses and riddles" and create a "clear mass
art." Stalin was probably more interested in intelligence reports on what
other cultural figures were saying. Those reports have been published in
Russia, and they are deeply chilling. Two check marks were placed next to
the name Abram Lezhnev, who denounced Pravda's Nazi-style tactics. He was
shot in 1938.

When the Pravda editorial appeared, Shostakovich was starting work on the
final movement of his Fourth Symphony. On the opening weekend of the Bard
festival, Leon Botstein, a co-director of the event and the president of the
college, conducted the American Symphony Orchestra in a performance of the
Fourth; the tempos were rigid, but the effect was tremendous. The first two
movements evoke a surreal landscape in which the late-Romantic symphony
seems to have collapsed on itself, its grand themes supplanted by trivial
material. The clobbered, staggering tone persists through much of the
finale. Then, several minutes before the end, cellos and basses take up a
low, chattering figure borrowed from Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony, and
an epiphany seems at hand. Soviet listeners would have expected a pageant of
triumph after the struggle.

But when the bombastic major chords arrive they make a ghastly sound. The
phalanx of brass seems to split apart and collide violently. As the
musicologist Richard Taruskin has pointed out, there is a strong resemblance
to the Gloria of Stravinsky's "Oedipus Rex," in which Jocasta is hailed as
the queen of a "disease-ridden Thebes." After the aborted resurrection, a
long recessional ensues, taking up two hundred and thirty-five dismal,
monotonous bars. Nothing in music is quite as scary as this ending, for its
aesthetic of catastrophe was tantamount to suicide. If the premiere of the
Fourth had gone ahead as scheduled, in the fall of 1936, the composer might
have met the same fate as Abram Lezhnev. At the last minute, however, he
withdrew the symphony. In its place, he produced the angrily affirmative
Fifth, and bought another forty years of life. Shostakovich's urge to defy
authority was always tempered by an instinct for survival.

The Fourth Symphony was the only giant slab of Shostakovichian oratory on
the festival's opening weekend. What we got, for the most part, was a
refreshing emphasis on the sly, comic Shostakovich-the fidgety, neurotic,
soccer-loving genius who had somehow retained his deadpan sense of humor
even as Stalin's terrors unfolded around him. Zuill Bailey and Simone
Dinnerstein gave a deeply felt, freely flowing performance of the 1934 Cello
Sonata, in which Shostakovich simplified his language without help from
Pravda. Melvin Chen gave a raw, roaring account of the First Piano Sonata.
The Bard Festival Quartet avoided the usual doom-and-gloom in the Eleventh
Quartet, finding an elusive balance of sweetness and sadness.

Best of all were two Shostakovich theatre events, presented as part of Bard'
s SummerScape series. One was Francesca Zambello's production of
Shostakovich's 1959 operetta-musical "Moskva: Cheryomushki," or "Cherry Tree
Towers," which has long had a dull reputation but came to life here as a
witty, goofy, even touching affair. The plot, mildly subversive in its
mention of Communist Party corruption, follows the love lives of young
Soviets who are scrambling for apartments in a horrible new high-rise. The
score is infested with satires and self-quotations, including a reprise of
Shostakovich's greatest hit, the "Song of the Counterplan," which Stalin had
mentioned approvingly in 1936. Lauren Skuce and Jonathan Hays were graceful
and vivid in the romantic leads, but the show belonged to two Russian
speakers-Andrei Antonov, as the gleefully corrupt superintendent, and
Makvala Kasrashvili, wielding her luxurious soprano to comic effect in the
role of the gold-digger Vava. They tore up the stage with the joy of
performers liberated from convention.

The other Shostakovich show of the summer was "The Nose," based on Gogol's
absurdist tale. Zambello again directed, creating a simulacrum of early
radical Soviet theatre, with its abstract designs and madcap movement. A
large cast, Antonov and Kasrashvili among them, performed with zany high
spirits. Instead of pondering the music, these singers relished its
pleasures and its dangers, its precarious balance between profundity and
kitsch, its love of life and its yen for death. An epigram of Karl Kraus's
flashed through my mind: "You don't even live once."

**********

[Илья Блинов]

New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/13/ar...13SHOS.html?th

Shostakovich: New Questions, New Clues
By JAMES R. OESTREICH

Published: August 13, 2004


It almost feels like a centennial or something. Not that Shostakovich has ever been neglected in recent memory, but for whatever reason, 2004 has turned into a major Shostakovich year.
Two books appeared almost simultaneously in the spring: "Shostakovich and Stalin," by Solomon Volkov, and "A Shostakovich Casebook," a collection of essays edited by Malcolm Hamrick Brown. And even in a straitened record market, CD's continue to appear, notably Valery Gergiev's searing new version of the Fifth Symphony, alongside a jaunty Ninth, with the Kirov Orchestra from Philips.
Bard Summerscape — a seven-week festival in its second year at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. — has presented two Shostakovich stage works rarely performed in the West, "The Nose," an early satirical opera, and "Moscow: Cherry Tree Towers," a musical.
Now, with "Moscow: Cherry Tree Towers" still playing this weekend, the real jawing begins, as the 15-year-old Bard Music Festival, the heart, or at least the mouth, of Bard Summerscape, examines Shostakovich in a larger compositional, social and political context. That festival continues next weekend and ends with a third weekend in November. In the process, it yields another book, "Shostakovich and His World," edited by Laurel E. Fay, a Shostakovich scholar and biographer.
"Shostakovich is having a Mahler moment," Ms. Fay said recently, referring to the Mahler boom of the 1960's, spearheaded by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. But that boom grew out of an anniversary, Mahler's 100th birthday in 1960. The current ferment around Shostakovich is leading up to his centennial in two years. Will interest continue to rise? Or is it possible that by 2006 — especially after this chattiest of all festivals, at Bard — there will be nothing left to say, or do, or play?
Fear not. To hear some of the current participants at Bard tell it, there will still be plenty to do, if only to sort through everything that has happened in recent decades.
A significant factor in the Shostakovich boom, at least in the West, was the 1979 publication of the book "Testimony," billed as "The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov." It portrayed Shostakovich as a tortured dissident, forced to comply at least outwardly with the dictates of Stalin's regime and its successors but maintaining an inner distance and imparting secret truths in his music. In the lingering cold-war atmosphere, Shostakovich emerged from "Testimony" as a deeply sympathetic if not exactly warm and cuddly figure.
The problem, as Ms. Fay suggested in an early review of the book and as she has established beyond a reasonable doubt in a new essay in "A Shostakovich Casebook," is that "Testimony" was not entirely what it purported to be: a direct first-person recounting of his life by Shostakovich in the years just before his death in 1975, however heavily edited.
Whole pages of the book — conveniently, the first pages of chapters, which bore Shostakovich's signature in Mr. Volkov's Russian typescript — are virtually identical to the opening pages of writings by Shostakovich published much earlier, right down to their punctuation. After those opening pages the texts diverge wildly. English translations of the matching pages are printed side by side in the casebook, and the effect is stunning, though some reviewers, evidently not impressed, have treated Ms. Fay's work as just so much repeated niggling.

Questions, Questions . . .

Was Shostakovich, seeing those pages of his earlier prose, merely signing off on publication of what he took to be an anthology of his writings? Is there another plausible explanation? The controversy has been long and loud, and another book entered the fray in 1998: "Shostakovich Reconsidered," written and edited by Allan B. Ho and Dmitry Feofanov, which adopted the conceit of a courtroom trial (thus opening the way to rebuttal in the new casebook).
Ms. Fay's coup de grвce was to show, once she finally obtained photocopies of Mr. Volkov's Russian typescript, that even Chapter 1, held up by Mr. Volkov's defenders as the exception that proved the rule, had Shostakovich's signature on a page of previously published material. In this case, it was the third page of the chapter, because two new pages had been added before.
Mr. Volkov, over the decades, has resolutely refused to discuss issues related to "Testimony" publicly. He brushed off my question about it in a panel on culture in St. Petersburg that I moderated last year in Baltimore. ("Testimony" was on sale there, as it will be at Bard.) An attempt to reach him this week through his publisher Alfred A. Knopf (since repeated calls to a number provided by a mutual friend went unanswered by man or machine) proved unsuccessful.
No one disputes that much of "Testimony" rings true on one level or another. Because it conveys much of what was in the air in Russia before Mr. Volkov's emigration in 1976, it has received support from prominent Russian musicians and others. As a book about Shostakovich, the music historian Richard Taruskin has suggested, it can stand as simply one commentary among others. But given its uncertain origins, it can hardly be considered reliable in representing Shostakovich's own thoughts.
"For years I was using it with caution in program notes, usually adding a disclaimer," Christopher H. Gibbs, a co-director of the Bard Music Festival and a contributor to "Shostakovich and His World," said ruefully last week. Mr. Gibbs is not alone; I did the same.

Hunting Hidden Messages

Others used it less tentatively, finding often fanciful personal or political messages and other signs of dissidence hidden in the music. So there is indeed much to sort out.
"The irony is that Volkov didn't have to fabricate," said Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College and the founder and conductor of the Bard Music Festival. "He didn't have to simplify or glorify the problem. Shostakovich suffered in the political controversies of his time. It was inevitable.
"A moral critique would be inappropriate. By the same token, there is no need to elevate Shostakovich. Why should he be a saint? Was Wagner a saint? No."
Still, Mr. Botstein added, we need to know more about his personal life.
"It's like writing about a living person," he said. "There are too many people with too much interest around. Despite post-Volkov attempts to portray him as a dissident, for example, Shostakovich was a patriot."

Social vs. Individual

Mr. Gibbs agrees that the person is an important avenue to the music. "We'll keep coming back to the public and private man," he said. "Shostakovich is a case study in the meaning of music."
Mr. Taruskin, a specialist in Russian music who will address the topic of Shostakovich and politics on Aug. 21 at Bard, is skeptical. How much, he wonders, can we know about Shostakovich's personal life, and how much does it matter?
"What we will never know," Mr. Taruskin said, "is what everyone says they do know, Shostakovich's true feelings and beliefs. But ultimately, are they that relevant? If we reduce him to a few political messages, we do him no favor. If every piece says the same thing, who cares what any of them have to say? The danger is that we become deaf to his music."
What matters most for Mr. Taruskin is Shostakovich's central place in 20th-century music. "He embodied the idea of the artist in society," Mr. Taruskin said, setting Shostakovich against the Western model of aloof individualism, exemplified by the composers associated with the Darmstadt new-music courses in Germany at midcentury, especially Pierre Boulez.
"The two views built on each other," Mr. Taruskin added. "There was a ridiculous polarization, with an extreme asocial view pitted against a socially dominated view, and it lasted for decades. In this context, Shostakovich became emblematic of the socially committed artist."
And for his efforts, he always had an audience. He made a deep connection at a time when, to quote the title of Mr. Taruskin's essay in the "Shostakovich Casebook," "serious music mattered."

Reacting Against the Reaction

In fact, Ms. Fay suggests, Shostakovich was overexposed in Russia toward the end of his life, crowding out the younger composers in his wake. And a reaction set in.
"With glasnost, musicians could play what they wanted," Ms. Fay said, "and Shostakovich wasn't it. They turned to Sofia Gubaidulina and Alfred Schnittke."
Much the same was true in the area of scholarship. When Ms. Fay visited Russia in 1991, she says, no one was working in the Shostakovich archives. As she describes it, the attitude was: "We've done Shostakovich. Now we're doing Roslavets."
Ms. Fay argues to the contrary: "Scholarship on Shostakovich is still in its infancy. There's still a lot that we don't know. The good news is that things in Russia have changed back. Now Russian scholars are going into the archives."
With so much focus on social and political issues, Ms. Fay points out that there is also much to learn about the music itself. An emerging 150-volume edition of Shostakovich's works, including facsimiles and sketches, though less than 10 percent complete, has already disproved one old saw, she said: that Shostakovich didn't sketch.
"It's exciting to scholars to be able to study the process," she added.
And ultimately, the big issue is the music. Even for those of us who have never had much use for secret messages in music (how do you distinguish in performance between genuine triumphalism and sarcastic triumphalism, anyway?), Shostakovich's music is compelling on many levels — much the way, yes, Mahler's is.
If Shostakovich is indeed having his Mahler moment, it is worth pointing out that Mahler has lasted. So, undoubtedly, will Shostakovich. "Once the boom is over," Ms. Fay said, "he will be repertory."
In 2006 he will stand proudly beside Mozart, who turns 250 that year. And as with Mozart, Shostakovich and his music seem sure to become only more intriguing with time.

[Дима]

Соломон Волков недавно издал книгу - "Шостакович и Сталин" на русском: http://www.ozon.ru/?context=detail&id=1910440

Обратил внимание, что в версии для запада этой же книги на всю обложку крупно изображён портрет Сталина и в глубине небольшая фигура Шостаковича. А в российском издании наоборот - Шостакович на обложке побольше, а Сталин поменьше. Исходя из такой коньюктуры понимаешь, что на западе безотносительно фигуры Сталина Шостакович интересует меньшее число людей.

[Читатель]

Некий благодетель прислал мне нижеследующее.
Если кому нужен перевод, сделаю завтра вечером.
-----------------------
UNAUTHORIZED

by ALEX ROSS

The final betrayal of Dmitri Shostakovich.

"New Yorker"
Issue of 2004-09-06

Вот здесь можно найти перевод этой статьи.

[Roman]

Всё, или почти всё, взято из Музыкальной энциклопедии (Москва 1982)
Вот она могучая сила энциклопедических знаний в застольных (тьфу) интернетовских спорах
Вот токо Государственной премии в 1952 году не было Как счас помню Сталинская была и при этом трёх степеней, а Шостакович, если память не изменяет, только один раз получил второй степени, а так всё больше первую. Да и комитеты перечислили, а то, что он был единственным музыкантом в комитете по подготовке70-тия Сталина, забыли А ещё его работу в 1942-46гг (?) художественным руководителем Ансамбля песни и пляски НКВД (или как оно там называлось) ни гу-гу

Eto nichego ne znachit. Moj ded byl zav.xoz.chasti Kievskogo NKVD pered vojnoj. Vybora u nego ne bylo, dvoe detej kushat' prosili. Vybor byl pozzhe v 41om: ujti dobrovol'cem na front i pogibnut'. On sdelal ego.
RT

[Vic]

По моему мнению, ответ иной: С. Волков не публикует русский текст своего изделия, потому что боится разоблачения.
Появись книга по-русски, ее компилятивный характер станет слишком очевиден. Собственно, он очевиден и в переводе, но все же перевод позволяет несколько прикрыть срам.

Некоторый срам, увы, не прикрыть ничем. В немецком издании книги С.Волкова есть такое примечание: "Schostakowitsch komponierte für Rostropowitsch mehrere Violoncellosonaten" ("Шостакович сочинил для Ростроповича несколько виолончельных сонат"). Так-то вот! Даже та единственная соната создана, когда Ростроповичу было лет девять!

[До ля]

Б.Тищенко о Шостаковиче:

http://www.frinet.org/classica/6/Page6.html
В 1961 году студенты консерватории представляли свои опусы в Доме композиторов. На концерт пришел Шостакович. Кажется исполнение моей Второй фортепианной сонаты и цикла " Белый аист", спетого Сергеем Николаевичем Шапошниковым, решило мою судьбу. Очень оживленный, Дмитрий Дмитриевич зашел за кулисы и сказал мне и Владику Успенскому, чей цикл тоже прозвучал в тот вечер:
- Эти произведения надо загнать, надо загнать...
Ему хотелось, чтобы мы поскорее денежки получили. Действительно из Москвы приехала закупочная комиссия, и нем выписали первые в жизни гонорары.
Вскоре он взял меня в свой класс... Я расскажу о двух эпизодах, в которых по-разному проявилась натура Шостаковича. Одна история связана с поэтом Бродским. Когда Иосифа схватили, я навестил его в кутузке перед ссылкой, пытался приободрить, уверить, что мы расстаемся ненадолго. Охранник, услышав это, ухмыльнулся:
- Да, да, вы тоже там скоро будете.
Бывал я и у родителей Иосифа. Мария Моисеевна сказала мне как-то, что училась с Шостаковичем в одной гимназии. Она попросила меня поговорить с Дмитрием Дмитриевичем не сможет ли он что-нибудь предпринять в защиту сына. Шостакович тут же согласился и обивал пороги высоких кабинетов, что стоило ему больших переживаний. Однажды я был у Бродских, когда зазвонил телефон. Мама Иосифа взяла трубку, и до меня донесся знакомый голос:
- Это Мария Моисеевна? Здравствуйте. С вами говорит Дмитрий Дмитриевич Шостакович, друг Бориса Ивановича Тищенко...
Так отрекомендовался Шостакович, словно Мария Моисеевна могла не понять, кто он такой или отнестись к нему с недоверием...
Другой эпизод связан с балетом "Двенадцать". В Кировском его ставил Леонид Вениаминович Якобсон. Я ходил на репетиции через директорский подъезд. Холеный швейцар сдувал пылинки с моего плаща, вешал его на плечики. Прихожу в очередной раз - он меня не пускает:
- Нельзя.
- Моя фамилия Тищенко.
- Это-то я знаю...
Швейцар знал больше меня: судьба спектакля была решена. Все мои переживания по этому поводу я описал Шостаковичу и получил ответ, где он разбирает мои ошибки, в том числе и слишком чувствительное отношение к беседе с холуем из театра.
"Холуй - это маленький человек, - писал Дмитрий Дмитриевич. - Он стоит при вешалке и собирает себе на пропитание двугривенные. Именем своим дорожите. "Я Тищенко" сказали вы гардеробщику.
Помню в дни моей молодости я, вняв убеждениям предмета моей страсти, пошел с ней в театр. В кассе билетов не оказалось... Мне было сказано: "Подойдите к администратору и скажите, что Вы Шостакович...". Я подошел к окошку администратора и сказал ему:
"Моя фамилия Шостакович. Дайте пожалуйста два билета".
Умный администратор мне ответил: "Моя фамилия Рабинович. Почему я должен Вам дать два билета?" Я оценил мое недомыслие и мудрость администратора. С тех пор никогда не произношу имя свое всуе".
Этот урок Шостаковича я усвоил навсегда.

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А реально в нете достать The Testimony? (на англ.)