Our Horror: A Psychohistorical Meditation

For the last several months—spring and summer 2005—I have been able to listen to virtually nothing else except Dmitri Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony (“Stalingrad”): in my office, at home, while driving in my car to work and to teach in rural Oklahoma. I have felt that it is as much music for our time as it was the child of Shostakovich’s torment in 1943. Josef Stalin and his regime had expected from him a triumph symphony, since the tides of World War II had finally turned in favor of the Allies. Instead, Shostakovich gave them a bleak portrait of war’s brutality and horror. Implicitly, without “saying” so at the time, he also depicted the endless terror that Stalinism inflicted on its own people in the name of Soviet Socialism.