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Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad QUOTES

Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad QUOTES

1 " Some love is so powerful after all, that it must always include sadness, because encrypted within it is the knowledge that someday it will come to an end. "

― M.T. Anderson , Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

2 " When we read tales of atrocity, we all want to be the ones who stood firm, who would not bend, who shouted the truth in the face of the dictator ... It is easy for us all to imagine we are heroes when we are sitting in our kitchens, dreaming of distant suffering. "

― M.T. Anderson , Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

3 " Strangely enough, doctors and nurses noted that activity actually prolonged life, when it should have shortened it. Those who lay down and tried to conserve energy often were the ones who trailed off and died first. "

― M.T. Anderson , Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

4 " Gradually, like the emigration of an insidious, phantom population, Leningrad belonged more to the dead than to the living. The dead watched over streets and sat in snow-swamped buses. Whole apartment buildings were tenanted by them, where in broken rooms, dead families sat waiting at tables. Their dominion spread room by room, like lights going out in evening. "

― M.T. Anderson , Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

5 " On the artillery shells produced in Leningrad, workers stenciled messages to the Germans: “For the blood of our workers,” “For our children’s anguish,” and “For our murdered friends. "

― M.T. Anderson , Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

6 " What was the human animal in the midst of the siege? An herbivore that crawled on all fours, browsing on dirty grasses. A predator that hunted alone or in packs. A social animal that spoke of noble art and wound violin strings from the guts of dead sheep and pigs. A creature with canine teeth for tearing, but with a tongue for speaking. A mouth that could devour or sing. "

― M.T. Anderson , Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

7 " Stalin was not merely trying to remove political enemies. He was not merely trying to terrorize the country into submission. He was trying to break down all social structure that did not emanate from him, and to create a new people, no longer Homo sapiens, but Homo sovieticus, the New Man of Communism. "

― M.T. Anderson , Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

8 " Most symphonies, however, are wordless. They are built only of tones, nonlinguistic sounds vibrating in the air, and somehow, we take them to heart and feel that they speak to us more deeply than words ever could. Cultures make up certain rules for music that we learn without even recognizing them; for example, in the West, we have decided that music in minor keys tends to sound sad or anxious, while music in major keys conveys confidence, triumph. Other cultures have made other decisions. "

― M.T. Anderson , Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

9 " History is not simply the great tumults and tragedies but the accumulation of tiny moments and gestures. "

― M.T. Anderson , Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

10 " Even the basic facts of Dmitri Shostakovich’s life are often contested, as a glance through the end notes of this book attests. How do we reconstruct the story of someone who lived in a period in which everyone had an excuse to lie, evade, accuse, or keep silent? "

― M.T. Anderson , Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

11 " its heart, it is a story about the power of music and its meanings — a story of secret messages and doublespeak, and of how music itself is a code; how music coaxes people to endure unthinkable tragedy; how it allows us to whisper between the prison bars when we cannot speak aloud; how it can still comfort the suffering, saying, “Whatever has befallen you — you are not alone. "

― M.T. Anderson , Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

12 " The symphony, a biographer wrote in 1942, tells the man who hears it, not the story of a stranger, but his own story. It makes him the hero of it; it cries out his own sorrows and celebrates his own victories. . . . Shostakovich states that at the beginning of the Seventh he depicts the peaceful life before the war in the quiet homes of Leningrad. But to a listener in Iowa it could mean the meadows and the rolling hills around his home. After the fantastic theme of war, Shostakovich has put into his music a lament for the dead — and the tears of a Russian mother and of an American mother are the same. "

― M.T. Anderson , Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

13 " The frontal attacks puzzled me. Why advance straight into German machine-gun fire? Why not make flank attacks?” These suicidal charges worked occasionally only because Stalin did not care how many of his own soldiers died. "

― M.T. Anderson , Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

14 " As historian Max Hastings wrote, “Both Hitler and Stalin displayed obsessive stubbornness about Leningrad. That of Stalin was finally rewarded, amid a mountain of corpses. A people who could endure such things displayed qualities the Western Allies lacked, which were indispensable to the destruction of Nazism. In the auction of cruelty and sacrifice, the Soviet dictator proved the higher bidder. "

― M.T. Anderson , Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

15 " It is one of the sick ironies of the war that they probably would not have been able to if they had not learned to absorb loss in the nightmare of Stalin’s purges. "

― M.T. Anderson , Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

16 " Now western movies, western novels, and western music were all forbidden again. Russian nationalism was on the rise. French bread was renamed “city bread. "

― M.T. Anderson , Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

17 " There is no way to write a biography of Shostakovich without relying on hearsay and relaying the memories of people who have many private reasons to fabricate, mislead, and revise. "

― M.T. Anderson , Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

18 " By noon on the first day of Operation Barbarossa, the Germans had destroyed more planes than they did in a whole year of their air assault on Britain. The Russian air force had been neutralized almost without firing a shot. The Western Front’s air force commander, staggered at the overwhelming futility of the loss, took out his gun and killed himself. "

― M.T. Anderson , Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

19 " When he was dead, his body was cremated. The remains were thrown in a ditch marked “Common Grave Number One — unclaimed ashes 1930–42 inclusive. "

― M.T. Anderson , Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

20 " He said the stadium was the only place you could express yourself openly. When a player scores, you can cheer, ‘Hurray!’ because you’re happy, not because you’re forced. You can’t lie all the time! "

― M.T. Anderson , Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad