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  WHOSE SIDE WAS SHOSTAKOVICH ON? by Alex Ross, The New Yorker, March 20, 2000 RUINED CHOIRS How did Shostakovich's music survive Stalin's Russia? BY ALEX ROSS On a January evening in 1936, Joseph Stalin entered a box at the Bolshoi Theatre, in Moscow. His custom was to take a seat in the back, just before the curtain rose. He had become interested that month in new operas by Soviet composers: a week earlier, he had seen Ivan Dzerzhinsky's "The Quiet Don," and liked it enough to summon the composer for a conversation. On this night, the Bolshoi was presenting "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk," a dark, violent, sexually explicit opera by Dmitri Shostakovich. Stalin enjoyed himself less. After the third act-in which tsarist policemen are depicted as buffoons who arrest people on hastily fabricated pretexts-the Leader conspicuously walked out. Shostakovich, who had been expecting the same reception that Stalin gave to Dzerzhinsky, went away feeling, he said, "...

  The Paris Review Subscribe Joseph Brodsky , The Art of Poetry No. 28 Interviewed by  Sven Birkerts Issue 83, Spring 1982 Joseph Brodsky, ca. 1988. Photograph by Anefo/Croes, R.C. Joseph Brodsky was interviewed in his Greenwich Village apartment in December, 1979. He was unshaven and looked harried. He was in the midst of correcting the galley proofs for his book— A Part of Speech —and he said that he had already missed every conceivable deadline. The floor of his living room was cluttered with papers. It was offered to do the interview at a more convenient time, but Brodsky would not hear of it. The walls and free surfaces of his apartment were almost entirely obscured by books, postcards, and photographs. There were a number of pictures of a younger Brodsky, with Auden and Spender, with Octavio Paz, with various friends. Over the fireplace were two framed photographs, one of Anna Akhmatova, another of Brodsky with his son, who remains in Russia. Brodsky made two cups of str...