Yakovich, E. (2025). The two. Reminiscences of Shostakovich’s wife. Moscow: AST: Corpus. (In Russ.)

Abstract

The review discusses reminiscences of Irina Shostakovich, recorded by Elena Yakovich. The reviewer considers the book’s structure and analyzes the parallel biographic descriptions (belonging to two distinct periods, before meeting Shostakovich and the years spent together). The love story of the composer and his last wife is shown as a series of “uncanny coincidences” — common experiences, both the ghastly everyday with its repressions, arrests, the Siege of Leningrad, etc. and metaphysical, that inevitably defined a spiritual affinity of two people caught between the millstones of the 20th century. A philologist by training, I. Shostakovich lists her husband’s musical and literary acquaintances and preferences with ease. She names A. Akhmatova, A. Solzhenitsyn, Y. Yevtushenko, M. Yudina, B. Britten, M. Rostropovich, and many others. In her testimony, life and death walk hand in hand, partly because the couple, reluctant witnesses of a tragic period in the country’s history, lived a “truly torturous life.”