Alexander Mosolov, who continued composing even after being sent to a concentration camp.
The late Richard Taruskin has been getting dinged a bit for being hard on Prokofiev (for Prokofiev's supposed excessive deference to the Soviet regime.)
And in fact it's become kind of a cliche to beat up on Prokofiev and Shostakovich for not publicly standing up to Stalin, or whatever they were supposed to do to show their independence. Many of these criticisms come from folks who are safety inside the United States, or some other place where freedom of speech exists.
I can't help but point out that many American academics are discovering that it's easier to be brave in theory than in actual fact. Here is a comment posted recently on Bari Weiss' Substack on an article about the "Woke" atmosphere at American college campuses:
"I am one of the 99% who doesn't speak up publicly or professionally. I talk about it with friends and family, specifically the 'woke' ones, but I won't, for example, share an article like this on Facebook or speak up when a colleague casually mentions the prevalence of white supremacy in America. I work in an entirely different field but one only marginally less woke than higher education. I'm 34 and my career is just starting to have something resembling momentum. I think the ongoing revolution at American universities is the single most important threat to our country, including China, but I'm not going to be another white male easily dismissed for wrong think. I just can't do it." (Source). Others in the comments report similar situations.
Of course, being worried about being dismissed (if that's really a possibility, it's difficult to judge without more facts) is pretty serious.
Still, it's not the same thing as being tortured and shot, the fate of Vsevolod Meyerhold. (At the time, Meyerhold was working on Prokofiev's opera Semyon Kotko.) It's not the same as being shipped off to the Gulag, the fate of Alexander Mosolov. It's not the same as expecting to be arrested during the times of Stalinist repression, something Shostakovich had to endure. Prokofiev's wife was sent to a concentration camp. Of course, lots and lots of other examples can be cited, such as Shostakovich reading a Pravda editorial that threatened him.
Maybe it's not so easy being a target, particularly when you face a fate more serious than being criticized on Twitter. And maybe it's time to be a bit more sympathetic to Shostakovich and Prokofiev.
Interesting piece. I know fear of losing my job has encouraged me to keep my mouth shut, but I do feel lucky that I have not had to deal with the sort of things Shostakovich and Prokofiev had to deal with.
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