Scott Horton’s brief on the Harper’s blog about Isaiah Berlin’s rec­ol­lec­tions of Dmitri Shostakovich offers rich sym­bol­ogy of an hon­orary degree and evening fete at Oxford for the great Russ­ian com­poser. Shostakovich’s clash with Stalin over decades has become pop­u­lar knowl­edge of the composer’s biography:

Shostakovich had of course danced a dif­fi­cult waltz with Joseph Stalin, a man whom he detested and feared. The most dra­matic encounter came on a Jan­u­ary evening in 1936, the best account of which has sur­vived in hand­writ­ten notes by Mikhail Bul­gakov. Stalin and his entourage went to the opera to hear Shostakovich’s Lady Mac­beth of Mtensk. Unfor­tu­nately, the Man of Steel had been seated too close to the brass sec­tion, a fact which seems to have soured him on the work. Or per­haps it was the plot itself, which could hardly have flat­tered one of the great mass mur­der­ers of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury. Shostakovich was denounced in an unsigned edi­to­r­ial in Pravda and spent the bal­ance of the winter fear­ing for his life. He could easily have been exiled, sent to a camp to near cer­tain death. But as it hap­pened, he suf­fered mere dis­fa­vor for a few years and a second denun­ci­a­tion in 1948, only to reemerge tri­umphantly with Stalin’s demise.