The Borodin Quartet

The idea for a Shostakovich conference began when, after an "absolutely other-worldly" 1991 Ann Arbor performance by the Borodin String Quartet, Michael Kondziolka of the University Musical Society invited the group to perform all 15 of Shostakovich's String Quartets at the University. The Borodin agreed, on the condition that some sort of lecture program accompany the performance.

The concept blossomed into a major five-day multidisciplinary event that drew thousands of people to sold-out concerts, films with scores by the composer, lectures and panel discussions by experts from around the world, exhibitions of paintings from the era of Socialist Realism, sheet music covers from the 1920s, and photographs and other memorabilia furnished by the Shostakovich family and archive in Moscow. Prof. Rosamund Bartlett also organized a one-credit course about Shostakovich to give undergraduates the opportunity to participate.

Artists and architects faced a great deal of scrutiny because of the Communist Party's implacable advocacy of Socialist Realism during the 1930s. Declared the only official Soviet art from in 1934, Socialist Realism was defined by Stalin's cultural watchdog, Andrei Zhdanov, as the depiction of "reality in its revolutionary development."

The definition was circular and deliberately vague so as to give the single-party government philosophical grounds for censorship, noted Erika Wolf, a graduate student in the history of art and Russian and Eastern European studies, who was curator for the conference exhibition of avant-garde sheet music covers.

Courtesy the Helix Art Center, San Diego

THE ECCENTRIC was a popular tune in the Soviet Union of the 1920s. The illustration by Grigorii Bondarenko for the sheet music cover was typical of the modernist style that Stalin forcibly suppressed. Several covers were on display during the U-M's week-long exploration in January of 'Shostakovich, the Man and His Age, 1906-1975'.

The covers were often designed by prominent artists, most of them during Lenin's New Economic Policy before the beginning of tight cultural controls. This period coincided with the arrival of American jazz in the Soviet Union, which accounts for the prominent Jazz Age themes depicted on many of the music covers. These images, and those of a Ford car and actress Mary Pickford indicated the fascination some Soviet artists felt toward aspects of American culture.

"It's very hard for Americans who have lived through the Cold War to have an objective view of this period," Wolf said, but she warned against denigrating Socialist Realist art simply on the basis of its political context. "Until recently," she pointed out, "much of the art of the Thirties was as off-limits in the Soviet Union as avant-garde art was." Furthermore, she added, "a large market has recently developed for Socialist Realist art in the West."