Dmitri Shostakovich

Dmitri Shostakovich composed fifteen symphonies and fifteen string quartets under a regime that could have killed him for any of them. Born in St Petersburg in 1906, he entered the conservatory at thirteen and wrote his First Symphony as a graduation piece at nineteen; it was performed internationally within two years and made him famous. His opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was a success for two years until Stalin attended in January 1936. Two days later Pravda published an unsigned article, Muddle Instead of Music, condemning it. Friends and colleagues were being shot; his patron Marshal Tukhachevsky was executed in 1937. Shostakovich withdrew his Fourth Symphony in rehearsal and kept a packed suitcase by the door so that his family would not see him arrested. The Fifth Symphony of 1937 was received as the required act of contrition and subtitled, apparently by a journalist, a Soviet artist's creative reply to just criticism. Whether its triumphant ending is sincere or forced rejoicing has been argued ever since; he said in the disputed memoir Testimony that the rejoicing is compelled. The Seventh, written partly in besieged Leningrad in 1941, was smuggled out on microfilm and became a symbol of Allied resistance. He was denounced again in 1948 under the Zhdanov decree, dismissed from his teaching posts, and again wrote for the drawer. He joined the party in 1960 under pressure and was ashamed of it. The Thirteenth Symphony of 1962 set Yevtushenko's Babi Yar on Soviet antisemitism and was suppressed. The late quartets and the Fifteenth Symphony are bleak and private. He died in 1975.

• Lived: 1906 CE – 1975 CE
• Nationality: Russian
• Roles: composer