After considerable hesitation and soul-searching I have decided to publish the letters Dmitry Dmitriyevich Shostakovich wrote to me. This choice by the composer's close friend Isaak Glikman brought the tormented feelings of the musical genius into public view. Now those feelings resound in the first substantial collection of Shostakovich's letters to appear in English.From the early 1930s until his death in 1975 Shostakovich wrote regularly to Glikman, a Leningrad theater critic and historian. The 288 letters included in this volume began in 1941, at the time of Operation Barbarossa and the...

(Limelight). This is the powerful memoirs which an ailing Dmitri Shostakovich dictated to a young Russian musicologist, Solomon Volkov. When it was first published in 1979, it became an international bestseller. This 25th anniversary edition includes a new foreword by Vladimir Ashkenazy, as well as black-and-white photos. - Testimony changed the perception of Shostakovich's life and work dramatically, and influenced innumerable performances of his music.- New Grove Dictionary