The noise of time

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Der Lärm der Zeit (Original title: The Noise of Time ) is a biographical novel by Julian Barnes from 2016. The German translation by Gertraude Krueger was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 2017 .

Content and structure

The novel tells the life story of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich . It deals with the living and working conditions of an artist in a dictatorship , especially during the Stalinist era .

The novel is divided into three parts. In each part, a concrete situation is described as a framework that provides the starting point for Shostakovich's memories and reflections:

In the first part, On the Stairs , a situation from 1936 is described: After Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth von Mtsensk met with the displeasure of Stalin and he was declared an enemy of the people , he is also accused of being an accomplice in a conspiracy against Stalin. Every night he expects to be arrested by the secret police (officers of the NKVD ). In order to spare his wife and young daughter from witnessing this, he waits every night in front of the door of his apartment for his arrest, which, however, does not take place.

In the second part In the plane , Shostakovich is on the return flight from New York, where he took part in a Soviet-American peace congress. In the eyes of the Soviet leadership, he has been rehabilitated, but he did not want to take part in the congress in order not to be caught up in their state propaganda. He had no choice, however, and he even had to officially distance himself from his earlier works and from composers whom he actually admired, but who ran counter to socialist-realistic art doctrine.

The third part in the car tells of Shostakovich's late years in the era of Stalin's successor Nikita Khrushchev . Shostakovich, now the most famous composer in his country, is driven through Moscow by his chauffeur. He accepts his many medals and honors from the state rather indifferently. He reads speeches and signs newspaper articles that others have written for him. His friends know how he really thinks, but to everyone else he must appear like a lackey in the Soviet government. He thinks he has adapted too much to the system and has lost his self-respect as a result. However, he no longer has frequent suicidal thoughts, as in earlier years.

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