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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2016
Shostakovich harboured a special esteem for Chekhov's literary genius, and knew by heart many of the short stories. At the same time, the composer felt an extraordinary tangible identification with the Jewish spirit, as well as a recognition of the role and importance of the Jewish contribution in history. (When it comes to the references in the disputed biography, Testimony, to Shostakovich's fierce personal stance whenever he came across the slightest expression of anti-semitism, there is sufficient independent evidence to indicate that Solomon Volkov's reporting cannot seriously be challenged.)
1 Chekhov's fondness for Jews, chronicled in Rayfield's, Donald Anton Chekhov: A Life (Harper Collins 1997)Google Scholar, though often equivocally expressed, was, at the time, uncomfortably conspicuous. (As well as the programs, police were in 1892 expelling Jews from Moscow itself.) Rayfield, however, ignores Rothschild's Fiddle. By 1893, Ignati Potapenko – singer, violinist, comedian and playwright, the ‘star’ of the Odessa stage – had become Chekhov's alter ego (at once agreeable and unnerving). Potapenko is a key to the creation of the character of Bronza, no less than Rayfield recognizes him to be the link Chekhov required in order to be able to give birth to The Black Monk. How odd that Shostakovich (who planned an opera on the latter) was captivated by two tales written at the same time, the one to this day kept at arm's length by commentators, the other dismissed as a ‘certainly a failure’ by all its early critics (see Mirsky, D. on The Black Monk, as late as 1926). Rayfield indicates that musicians and painters comprehended the form and nature of Chekhov's work better than did the literary community of the time. (And in 1889 Tchaikovsky and Chekhov had decided to collaborate on an opera, Béla, based on Lermontov's A Hero of our Time, though nothing would come of this.)Google Scholar
2 alt. spellings, Fleishman, or even Fleyshman (New Grove's at present fixed housestyle transliteration from the Cyrillic of what is a German–Jewish name).
3 According to A. Livshitz, in the preface to the score published in Moscow, 1965, Fleischmann was born on 20 July 1914 in Bezhetsk, Kalinin Region. After studies with Mikhail Yudin at the Mussorgsky Music College in Leningrad, he entered Shostakovich's composition class at the Leningrad Conservatoire. His main preoccupation was with vocal music, but Livshitz refers also to a cycle of romances to texts by Lermontov, to songs, as well as to a group of piano preludes. All these works may have been lost. 14 September 1941, in the district of Luga, Krasnoye Village, is cited as the date on which, and place where, Fleischmann was killed.
4 Right at the start of Rothschild's Fiddle, Chekhov tells us that Bronza's real name is Jacob Ivanov. While the name Jacob is, of course, that of the third of the original Hebrew patriarchs, Ivanov is a name as common in Russia as Smith is in English speaking countries. Rayfield notes that Chekhov's first play about an intellectual in a perpetual state of manic depression was entitled Ivanov (1888), a cunning stratagem by which the author ‘could bring one per cent of the population to see their namesake’ (p. 159). Six years later – and with crafty innocence – Chekhov was able to touch a very raw nerve in our psyche by his apparently incongruous juxtaposition of archetypal Hebraic and Russian names.
5 SBMG/RCA 09026 68434 2. The CD also includes, appropriately, Shostakovich's From Jewish Folk Poetry. The recording was made to accompany Edgardo Cozarinsky's film, Rothschild's Violin (referred to in the above article) which had its British premiere in February 1998 at the Barbican Film Theatre.