SEER, 98, 2, APRIL 2020 366 istinnaia pravda. The word dolzhen can also be problematic. I sometimes felt (e.g., on p. 213) that it would have been better to translate it as ‘should’ or ‘ought to’, rather than ‘must’. For those who will not have the time to read the whole text, I should mention that the Subject Index is particularly well done. Some readers will find it comforting and reassuring that the author concludes Part 3 with the assertion that ‘[o]ne cannot transcend Westernism, since Westernism itself means the continuity of self-transcendence’ (p. 173). University of Glasgow Martin Dewhirst Fairclough, Pauline. Dmitry Shostakovich. Critical Lives. Reaktion Books, London, 2019. 191 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. £11.99 (paperback). This is a sensible and insightful book. Much of Shostakovich’s reception has been distracted by political agendas wielded both for and against the man and his works, and interpretation of the music has often been a fraught affair played for high stakes. Pauline Fairclough deals with these ‘Shostakovich Wars’ (p. 9) calmly and judiciously, without attempting to resolve ‘his divided existence’ (p. 177) in favour of either his public or private side. She also, to the relief to the general reader doggedly interested in the composer and his music, deals with them quickly, passing over the musicological intricacies of, for example, the Volkov case in order to open up spaces in which the music can be heard for what it was, is, and might be worth. There is much to be gained from this slim volume, and hardly any theoretical weight to slow down the general reader (the occasional mention of ostranenie (p. 152) and other culturally appropriate terms). Aside from the programme notes on individual works, which consist of the sorts of explications that the general reader might desire (the string quartets are treated to some wonderful interpretative prose), the book also includes genuinely new archival material, in the form of a complete letter written by the composer in 1949 about a potential trip to New York (pp. 96–97). Shostakovich’s film music is given space alongside his concert music, all the better for the book’s portrait of the composer as a Soviet artist. There is ample attention devoted to Shostakovich’s personal life, and especially his important friendship with Sollertinskii, not as a vulgar interpretative cipher, but simply as another register in which our understanding of the composer needs to dwell. There is also a fair amount of discussion, mostly at the ends of the book, but also scattered throughout, of what we might make of the composer’s music in our currently political, financial and cultural contexts; one question concerns the music’s understandable popularity and whether that itself poses an obstacle REVIEWS 367 to our fuller understanding. Fairclough’s own desire is ‘to challenge the idea, still commonly held, that Shostakovich’s music is depressing, and that he himself was a broken man at the end of his life’ (p. 11). In this respect, Dmitry Shostakovich is a success, for by the end the general reader emerges with a clear picture about the composer’s status within Soviet society in the 1960s and early 1970s: for example, his marriage in 1962, his slow rise within the Communist Party, the studied ambiguity — ‘so oblique as to be invisible’ (p. 136) — of his public position under Brezhnev, the profoundly brave decision to set certain texts, the diagnosis of lung cancer in 1972 (p. 156), and so on. In the final couple of chapters, some of the works are interpreted in terms of a return home full circle (p. 168), a kind of symbolic closure that perhaps seduces biographers more than listeners. There are some interesting and tantalizing references over the course of the booktowritersandcomposerswithoutwhomShostakovichwouldhavebecome a wholly different artist. Of the musicians, one encounters time and again the interventions that Mahler made in his life (e.g. pp. 30, 54, 170). With additional space, it would have been useful to dwell on this epic figure, considering the ways in which Shostakovich’s heteroglossia (including allusions both to specific music and to generic gestures and archetypes) is found ‘not just in an opera’s message...