About the book: 1979 / "Testimony" - A book by Solomon Volkov, which he published in 1979 as his recorded memoirs of Shostakovich. In this book, Shostakovich speaks quite harshly about some of his colleagues and expresses a very negative attitude towards the Soviet regime. Preface by Vladimir Ashkenazy: “The truth is that Shostakovich trusted only a small circle of close friends. To say too much in another place - for example, at rehearsals - would have been suicide in a creative sense, and perhaps something worse. It is no coincidence that the son Shostakovich, Maxim, at the rehearsal of the Eleventh Symphony (“1905”) whispered in his ear: “Dad, won’t they hang you for this?” When, during a press conference at the Edinburgh Festival in 1962, one Western journalist asked Shostakovich whether it was true that the party criticism helped him, the composer nervously replied: “Yes, yes, yes, the party always helped me! It was always right, it was always right.” When the journalist left, Shostakovich said to Mstislav Rostropovich, who was present: “Son of a bitch!” It’s as if he doesn’t know that there’s no point in asking me such questions - what else could I answer?” The need to protect ourselves was clear to all of us who had to survive in the Soviet Union. As Rodion Shchedrin said, “nobody wanted to go to the Gulag.” Nevertheless, we had no shadow of a doubt that Shostakovich could not stand the system in which We lived. knew how much he suffered from it and what helplessness he felt due to the inability to do anything other than express himself directly through music."Solomon Volkov was born in Central Asia, in Leninabad, in 1944. In 1967 he graduated with honors from the Leningrad State Conservatory named after. Rimsky-Korsakov and studied in graduate school there until 1971. The main topics of his research were the history and aesthetics of Russian and Soviet music, as well as the psychology of musical perception and performance. He published a large number of articles in academic and popular magazines, in 1971 he wrote the popular book “Young Composers of Leningrad”, worked as the chief editor of the journal of the Union of Composers and the Ministry of Culture of the USSR “Soviet Music”, and was the artistic director of the Experimental Studio of Chamber Opera. In 1972 he became a member of the Union of Composers. In June 1976 Volkov came to the USA. Since then he has been a researcher at the Russian Institute of Columbia University in New York. In addition to preparing for the publication of Testimony, he has contributed articles on various musical topics to The New York Times, The New Republic, Musical America, The Musical Quartety, and other periodicals in the United States and Europe. He has presented at La Biennale in Venice and the XII Congress of the International Musicological Society in Berkeley, California. He lives in New York with his wife, Marianna Volkova, a pianist and photographer..