“Let's kill the children and live happily ever after. "The Noise of Time" Julian Barnes Julian Barnes Shostakovich

“Not just a novel about music, but a musical novel. The story is told in three parts, flowing together like a triad” (The Times).

For the first time in Russian - the latest work by the famous Julian Barnes, winner of the Booker Prize, one of the brightest and most original prose writers of modern Britain, author of such international bestsellers as “England, England”, “Flaubert’s Parrot”, “Love and so on”, “Premonition” the end" and many others. This time, “by far the most elegant stylist and the most unpredictable master of all imaginable literary forms” turns to the life of Dmitri Shostakovich, and in the anniversary year: in September 2016, the whole world will celebrate the 110th anniversary of the birth of the great Russian composer. However, writing a fictionalized biography worries Barnes the least, and he aims much higher: having as an artist a license for any fantasy, in love with Russian literature and an excellent command of the context, he builds his structure on the shaky soil of Soviet history, full of silences and half-truths...

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“What I read about Shostakovich convinces me: he no longer wanted to deal with such an inconvenient thing as life, not to mention such terrible things as politics and power.”

“Not just a novel about music, but a musical novel. The story is told in three parts, flowing together like a triad” (The Times).

Abstract: "For the first time in Russian - the latest work by the famous Julian Barnes, Booker Prize winner, one of the brightest and most original prose writers of modern Britain, author of such international bestsellers as “England, England”, “Flaubert’s Parrot”, “Love and so on" , "Premonition of the End" and many others. This time, "definitely the most elegant stylist and the most unpredictable master of all conceivable literary forms" turns to the life of Dmitry Shostakovich, and in the anniversary year: in September 2016 the whole world will celebrate 110 years since the birth of the great Russian composer. However, writing a fictionalized biography worries Barnes the least of all, and he aims much higher: having as an artist a license for any fantasies, in love with Russian literature and an excellent command of the context, he builds his structure."

It is difficult to fit such a large-scale figure as the great Russian composer Dmitry Dmitrievich Shostakovich into the volume of a small novel. Therefore, music itself as a source of greatness remains outside the plot, mentioned only by dates and numbered notes. The narrative focuses on the key moments of the biography related to the confrontation between the creator and the authorities: the painful wait for arrest after damning criticism in the pages of the party press, humiliating participation in the propaganda visit of Soviet cultural figures to the USA, forced membership in the Communist Party and leadership of the hateful Union of Composers...

Those were the days of moral ups and downs, betrayals and forced compromises, but it is hardly worth blaming the brilliant protagonist for sacrificing dignity in favor of the well-being, by the way, of himself and his loved ones. Not everyone can be a hero, and the question of what is more important, creativity or honor, remains open to this day. Surviving in cloudy times, bending before the noble ignoramuses, Shostakovich miraculously managed to avoid unforgivable abominations. The noise of time is a metaphor for the unrighteous, empty vanity that is commonly called “life.” Only art, only high music can overcome it. In his declining years, Shostakovich was favored by the authorities and criticism, received every conceivable award, but humanity was also fully rewarded by his music.

Arguments against. The book by the famous English novelist Julian Barnes does not claim to be part of the “Lives of Remarkable People” series. Due to its compactness, it looks more like a synopsis of a great failed novel. Attempts to reflect the thoughts of the brilliant musician in the days of his trials look shallow and even naive, and the personal assessments of individual contemporaries and colleagues of Shostakovich are also questionable. You shouldn’t trust the delights of critics who called Barnes’s novel “one of the best”: his track record makes this work look superficial and unnecessary.

Arguments for. One of the greatest writers of our time, a Booker Prize winner, turns to the life of our compatriot - this is interesting in itself. Julian Barnes promises a combination of brevity, complexity, talent and tragedy: "What I have read about Shostakovich convinces me that towards the end of his life he could not wait to die, and this expectation was reflected in his music. He no longer wanted to deal "with such an inconvenient thing as life, not to mention such terrible things as politics and power. And music allowed us to escape from social circumstances." Although the novel was written in English, Barnes tried to convey the peculiarities of Russian speech, copying our idioms and characteristic phrases. One of the foreign critics even compared “The Noise of Time” with Lermontov’s prose.

Dedicated to Pat

Who to listen to

Who's to blame?

And who should drink bitter?

THE NOISE OF TIME

All rights reserved

Translation from English by Elena Petrova

A great novel in the literal sense of the word, a true masterpiece from the author of the Man Booker Prize-winning Sense of an End. It would seem that I haven’t read so many pages – but it’s as if I’ve lived my whole life.

The Guardian

A new book by Julian Barnes, dedicated to Shostakovich and his life during the eras of terror and thaw, is booming in the UK. But Barnes's ambitions are, of course, higher than writing a fictionalized biography of the great composer in his anniversary year. Barnes is only playing at being an informed biographer, and the shaky ground of Soviet history, largely consisting of unverified information and outright lies, is perfect for this: there are many truths, choose any, another person, by definition, is an incomprehensible mystery.

Moreover, the case of Shostakovich is special: Barnes largely relies on the scandalous “Testimony” of Solomon Volkov, to whom the composer either dictated his memoirs, or dictated them in part, or did not dictate them at all. Either way, the author has an artist's license to imagine whatever he wants, and the opportunity to get inside the head of his invented Shostakovich allows Barnes to write what he wants: a majestic meditation on the rules of survival in a totalitarian society, how art is made, and, of course, about conformism.

Barnes, who is in love with Russian literature, has studied the language, and has even visited the USSR, displays an impressive command of context. At the level of names, facts, toponyms - this is the necessary minimum - but not only: in understanding the structure of life, the system of relations, some linguistic features. Barnes constantly trumps phrases like “a fisherman sees a fisherman from afar”, “he will straighten the hunchback’s grave” or “to live life is not to cross a field” (“Zhivago”, of course, he read carefully). And when the hero begins to adapt Yevtushenko’s poem about Galileo to his reasoning, it suddenly seems not the painstaking preparation of a British intellectual, but some completely authentic good-heartedness of a Soviet intellectual.

Stanislav Zelvensky (Afisha Daily / Brain)

Not just a novel about music, but a musical novel. The story is told in three parts, merging like a triad.

The Times

Gustave Flaubert died at the age of 59. At this age, the famous writer Julian Barnes, whose deity was and remains Flaubert, wrote a novel about how Arthur Conan Doyle investigates a real crime.

Barnes turned 70 and published a novel about Shostakovich. The novel has Mandelstam's title - “The Noise of Time”.

Barnes, who tirelessly praises not only Flaubert, but also Russian literature, hints in the title at three cultural and historical levels at once. The first is Mandelstam himself, who died in the camp a year after 1937, when Shostakovich was teetering on the brink of death. The second is Shostakovich’s music, which the Soviet ghouls called “confusion,” that is, noise. Finally, the noise of the terrible 20th century, from which Shostakovich extracted music - and from which, of course, he tried to escape.

Kirill Kobrin (bbcrussian.com / London Books)

A novel of deceptively modest length... Barnes again started from scratch.

The Daily Telegraph

Barnes began his book with an attempt at some kind of non-standard structure - he gave on the first pages a digest of the themes of Shostakovich's life, which then emerge in a detailed presentation. This is an attempt to construct a book about the composer musically, leitmotifically. One of these motives is the memory of the dacha of Shostakovich’s parents, in which there were spacious rooms, but small windows: there was, as it were, a mixture of two measures, meters and centimeters. This is how this theme unfolds in the composer’s later life: an enormous talent squeezed into the shackles of petty and hostile tutelage.

And yet Barnes sees his hero as a winner. A running aphorism runs through the book: history is the whisper of music that drowns out the noise of time.

Boris Paramonov (Radio Liberty)

Definitely one of Barnes's best novels.

Sunday Times

This corresponds not only to my aesthetic perception, but also to my interests - the spirit of the book is better expressed through style, through the use of certain turns of phrase, slightly strange turns of phrase, which can sometimes resemble a translated text. This is what I think gives the reader a sense of time and place. I don’t want to write something like “he walked down such and such a street, turned left and saw the famous old candy store opposite or something like that.” I don't create the atmosphere of a time and place that way. I am sure that it is much better to do this through prose. Any reader is able to understand what is being said, the meaning is completely clear, but the wording is slightly different from the usual, and you think: “Yes, I’m in Russia now.” At least I really hope you feel it.

Julian Barnes

In his generation of writers, Barnes is by far the most graceful stylist and the most unpredictable master of every imaginable literary form.

The Scotsman

It was at the height of the war, at a stop, flat and dusty, like the endless plain around. The lazy train left Moscow two days ago, heading east; There were still two or three days of travel left, depending on the availability of coal and the transfer of troops. At dawn, a little man was already moving along the train: one might say, half-dead, on a low cart with wooden wheels. To control this device, it was necessary to deploy the leading edge where required; and in order not to slip, the disabled person inserted a rope into the harness of his trousers, which was passed under the frame of the cart. His hands were wrapped in blackened rags, and his skin was stiff as he begged on the streets and train stations.

His father went through imperialism. With the blessing of the village priest, he went to fight for the Tsar and the Fatherland. And when he returned, he found neither the priest nor the tsar, and his fatherland was unrecognizable.

The wife cried out when she saw what the war had done to her husband. The war was different, but the enemies were the same, except that the names had changed, and on both sides. As for the rest, in war it’s like in war: young guys were sent first under enemy fire, and then to farrier-surgeons. His legs were chopped off in a military field hospital, among the windfall. All sacrifices, as in the last war, were justified by a great goal. But it doesn’t make it any easier for him. Let others scratch their tongues, but he has his own concern: to stretch out the day until the evening. He turned into a survival specialist. Below a certain point, the same fate awaits all men: to become survival specialists.

A handful of passengers descended onto the platform for a breath of dusty air; the rest loomed outside the carriage windows. Near the train, the beggar usually started a rollicking carriage song. Perhaps someone will throw in a penny or two in gratitude for the entertainment, and those who don’t feel like it will also be given some money, if only they can move on as quickly as possible. Others managed to throw coins on the edge in order to mock him when, pushing off with his fists from the concrete platform, he set off in pursuit. Then other passengers usually served more carefully - some out of pity, some out of shame. He saw only sleeves, fingers and change, but did not listen. He himself was one of those who drink bitter things.

Two fellow travelers traveling in a soft carriage stood at the window and wondered where they were now and how long they would stay here: a couple of minutes, a couple of hours or a day. There were no broadcast announcements, and it was more expensive to be interested. Even if you are a passenger even three times, if you start asking questions about the movement of trains, you will be taken for a pest. Both were over thirty - at that age some lessons are already firmly ingrained. A lean, nervous, bespectacled guy, one of those who listen, hung himself with garlic cloves on strings. History has not preserved the name of his companion; This one was one of those that makes you laugh.

A cart with a half-dead beggar was approaching their carriage, rattling. He bawled dashing couplets about village obscenities. Stopping under the window, he asked with gestures for food. In response, the bespectacled man raised a bottle of vodka in front of him. Out of politeness I decided to clarify. Is it unheard of for a beggar to refuse a drink? Not even a minute had passed before those two came down to his platform.

That is, there was an opportunity to think for three. The bespectacled boy still held the bottle, and his companion brought out three glasses. They poured it, but somehow not equally; the passengers bent down and said, as expected, “we’ll be healthy.” Clink glasses; the nervous skinny man tilted his head to the side, causing the rising sun to flash for a moment in the lenses of his glasses, and whispered something; the other laughed. They drank to the bottom. The beggar immediately held out his glass, demanding to repeat it. The drinking companions poured the rest for him, then took the glasses and went up to their carriage. Blissful from the warmth that spread over his crippled body, the disabled person drove towards the next group of passengers. By the time the two fellow travelers settled into the compartment, the one who heard had almost forgotten what he himself had said. And the one who remembered just started to lose his mind.

Part one
On the landing

ABOUT He knew one thing for sure: now the worst times have come.

For three hours he languished at the elevator. I was already smoking my fifth cigarette, but my thoughts were wandering.

Faces, names, memories. The peat briquette weighs heavily on the palm of your hand. Swedish waterfowl beat their wings overhead. Sunflowers, whole fields. Clove cologne scent. The warm, sweet smell of Nita leaving the tennis court. Forehead wet with sweat dripping from the toe of his hair. Faces, names.

And also the names and faces of those who are no longer there.

Nothing stopped him from bringing a chair from his apartment. But one way or another, my nerves wouldn’t let me sit still. And the picture would be quite provocative: a man sat on a chair waiting for the elevator.

The thunder struck unexpectedly, but there was a logic to it. It's always like this in life. Take, for example, attraction to a woman. It comes unexpectedly, although quite logically.

He tried to concentrate all his thoughts on Nita, but they, noisy and annoying, like blowflies, did not budge. They dived, of course, on Tanya. Then, buzzing, they rushed off to that girl, Rosalia. Did he blush, remembering her, or was he secretly proud of his crazy prank?

The Marshal's patronage - it also turned out to be unexpected and at the same time quite logical. And what about the fate of the marshal himself?

Jurgensen’s good-natured, bearded face – and then the memory of his mother’s harsh, unforgiving fingers on his wrist. And the father, the sweetest, charming, modest father, who stands at the piano and sings “The chrysanthemums in the garden have long since faded.”

There is a cacophony of sounds in my head. Father's voice; the waltzes and polkas that accompanied the courtship of Nita; four F-sharp wails of the factory siren; the barking of stray dogs drowning out the timid bassoonist; revelry of drums and brass under the armored government box.

These noises were interrupted by one very real one: a sudden mechanical roar and grinding of the elevator. The leg jerked, knocking over the suitcase standing next to it. The memory suddenly disappeared, and fear filled its place. But the elevator stopped with a click somewhere below, and mental faculties were restored. Lifting the suitcase, he felt the contents gently shift inside. Why did my thoughts immediately rush to the story of Prokofiev’s pajamas?

No, not like blowflies. More like the mosquitoes that swarmed in Anapa. They covered the whole body and drank blood.

Standing on the landing, he thought he had control over his thoughts. But later, in the solitude of the night, it seemed to him that his thoughts themselves had taken all power over him. And there is no protection from fate, as the poet says. And there is no protection from thoughts either.

He remembered being in pain the night before his appendicitis surgery. Vomiting began twenty-two times; all the swear words known to him fell upon the sister of mercy, and in the end he began to ask a friend to bring a policeman who could put an end to all the torment in one fell swoop. Let him shoot me from the doorway, he prayed. But his friend refused to let him go.

Now neither a friend nor a policeman is needed. There are already plenty of well-wishers.

To be precise, he spoke with his thoughts, it all started on the morning of January twenty-eighth, thirty-six at the railway station in Arkhangelsk. No, the thoughts responded, nothing begins in this manner, on a specific day, in a specific place. It all started in different places, at different times, often even before you were born, in foreign lands and in foreign minds.

And once it begins, everything goes on as usual - both in other lands and in other minds.

His own mind was now occupied by smoking: “Belomor”, “Kazbek”, “Herzegovina Flor”. Someone is tearing out cigarettes to fill a pipe, leaving a scattering of cardboard tubes and scraps of paper on the desk.

Is it possible at the current stage, albeit belatedly, to change everything, correct it, return it to its place? He knew the answer - as the doctor said when asked to put his nose on: “Of course, you can put it on; but I assure you that this is worse for you.”

Then Zakrevsky came to mind, and the Big House itself, and who would replace Zakrevsky in it. A holy place is never empty. This is how this world works, that Zakrevskys are a dime a dozen in it. When paradise is built, and it will take almost exactly two hundred billion years, the need for such Zakrevskys will disappear.

It happens that what is happening is beyond understanding.

This cannot be, because this can never happen, as the mayor said when he saw the giraffe. But no: and maybe it does happen.

Fate. This majestic word simply means something that you are powerless against. When life announces: “Therefore...”, you nod in agreement, believing that fate is speaking to you. And therefore: it was assigned to him to be called Dmitry Dmitrievich. And there's nothing you can do about it. Naturally, he did not remember his christening, but he never doubted the veracity of the family tradition. The family gathered in my father's office around a portable font. The priest arrived and asked the parents what name they had chosen for the baby. Yaroslav, they answered. Yaroslav? Father winced. He said that the name was too tricky. He added that a child with that name would be teased and pecked at at school; no, no, it’s impossible to call him Yaroslav. Father and mother were puzzled by such an open rebuff, but they didn’t want to offend anyone. What name do you suggest? - they asked. Yes, simpler, answered the priest. For example, Dmitry. The father pointed out that his own name was already Dmitry and that “Yaroslav Dmitrievich” was much more pleasant to the ear than “Dmitry Dmitrievich.” But the priest - no way. And therefore Dmitry Dmitrievich entered the world.

And what's in a name? He was born in St. Petersburg, grew up in Petrograd, and grew up in Leningrad. Or in St. Leninburg, as he himself used to say. Is the name really that important?

He was thirty-one years old. A few meters away from him, his wife Nita is sleeping in an apartment, next to her is Galina, their one-year-old daughter. Galya. Lately his life seems to have become more stable. He somehow did not characterize this side of things directly. He is no stranger to strong emotions, but for some reason he cannot express them. Even at football, unlike other fans, he almost never shouts or makes a fuss; he is content to quietly celebrate the skill—or mediocrity—of a particular player. Some see in this the typical stiffness of a buttoned-up Leningrader, but he himself knows that behind this (or under it) shyness and anxiety lurk. True, with women he tries to cast aside shyness and rushes from absurd enthusiasm to desperate uncertainty. It’s as if the metronome switches at random.

And yet, his life eventually acquired some orderliness, and with it, the right rhythm. True, now uncertainty has returned again. Uncertainty is a euphemism, or worse.

A suitcase with the most necessary things standing at my feet reminded me of my failed departure from home. At what age was this? About seven or eight years old, probably. Did he take the suitcase that time? No, it’s unlikely - my mother wouldn’t allow it. It was in the summer in Irinovka, where my father served in a leadership position. And Jurgensen hired himself as a laborer at their country estate. He crafted, repaired, and dealt with any task in such a way that even a child loved to watch. He never taught, but only showed how a piece of wood could be used to make a saber or a whistle. And one day I brought him a fresh peat briquette and let him smell it.

He reached out to Jurgensen with all his soul. He said, taking offense at someone at home (and this happened often): “Okay, I’ll leave you for Jurgensen.” One morning, before he even got out of bed, he had already expressed this threat, or perhaps a promise, out loud. His mother didn't make him repeat it twice. Get dressed, she ordered, I’ll take you. He did not give up (no, he failed to pack his things); Sofya Vasilyevna grabbed his wrist tightly and led him across the meadow in the direction of Jurgensen’s hut. At first, walking blithely next to his mother, he swaggered around. But soon he was trailing foot by foot; the wrist, and then the palm, began to free itself from the mother’s grip. At that time it seemed to him that this He breaks out, but now it became clear: the mother herself gradually let him go, finger by finger, until she freed him completely. She freed him not so that he would go to Jurgensen, but so that he would burst into tears and rush back to the house.

Hands: some slip out, others reach out greedily. As a child, he was afraid of the dead: suddenly they would rise from their graves and drag him into the cold, black darkness, where his eyes and mouth would become clogged with earth. This fear gradually receded, because the hands of the living turned out to be even more terrible. Petrograd prostitutes did not take into account his youth and inexperience. The harder the times, the more stubborn the hands. So they strive to grab you by the spot, take away your food, deprive you of friends, relatives, means of subsistence, and even life itself. Almost as much as he feared prostitutes, he was afraid of janitors. And those – whatever you call them – who serve in the authorities.

But there is also fear of the opposite nature: the fear of letting go of the hand that protects you.

Marshal Tukhachevsky defended him. More than one year. Until the day when - before his eyes - sweat streamed from the marshal's toe down his forehead. A snow-white handkerchief fanned and blotted these streams, and it became clear: the protection was over.

He did not remember more versatile people than the marshal. Tukhachevsky, a nationally famous military theorist, was called the Red Napoleon in the newspapers. In addition, the marshal loved music and made violins with his own hands, had a receptive, inquisitive mind, and willingly discussed literature. Over the course of ten years of their acquaintance, the marshal in his jacket appeared every now and then on the streets of Moscow and Leningrad after dark: without forgetting either duty or the joys of life, he successfully combined politics and a pleasant pastime, talked and argued, drank and ate, without hid his weakness for ballerinas. He said that the French had once revealed to him a secret: how to drink champagne without getting drunk.

He failed to adopt this secular gloss. Self-confidence was lacking; and, apparently, there was no special desire. He did not understand delicate delicacies and quickly became tipsy. During his student years, when everything was being re-evaluated and reworked, and the party had not yet taken full state power, he, like most students, pretended to be a philosopher, without any reason to do so. The question of gender relations was inevitably subject to revision: as soon as outdated views were discarded once and for all, someone at every opportunity referred to the theory of a “glass of water.” Intimate intimacy, the young wise men said, is like a glass of water: to quench your thirst, it is enough to drink water, and to quench your desire, it is enough to perform sexual intercourse. In general, such a system did not raise any objections to him, although it necessarily presupposed a reciprocal desire on the part of the girls. Some had the desire, others did not. But this analogy worked only within certain limits. The glass of water did not reach my heart.

And besides everything else, Tanya had not yet appeared in his life.

When, as a child, he once again announced his intention to go live with Jurgensen, his parents, apparently, saw in this a rebellion against the rigid boundaries of the family, and perhaps even childhood itself.

Now, on mature reflection, he sees something else. Their dacha in Irinovka was distinguished by something strange - something deeply wrong. Like any child, he did not suspect any of this until it was explained to him. Only from the mocking conversations of adults did he understand that all the proportions in this house were violated. The rooms are huge, but the windows are small. For a room of, say, fifty square meters, there could be only one window, and even a tiny one. Adults believed that the builders had made a mistake - they had confused meters with centimeters. The result was a house that terrified the child. It’s as if this dacha was deliberately invented for the most terrible dreams. Perhaps that’s why he was drawn to get out of there.

They always took me away at night. And therefore, so as not to be dragged out of the apartment in only pajamas and forced to get dressed under the contemptuously indifferent gaze of a law enforcement officer, he decided that he would go to bed dressed, on top of the blanket, having previously placed his packed suitcase by the bed. There was no sleep; tossing and turning in bed, he imagined the worst thing imaginable. His anxiety was transmitted to Nita, who also suffered from insomnia. Both lay and pretended; each pretended that the other's fear had neither sound nor smell. And during the day he was haunted by another nightmare: suddenly the NKVD would take Galya and place her - in the best case scenario - in an orphanage for the children of enemies of the people. Where she will be given a new name and a new biography, where she will be raised as an exemplary Soviet person, a little sunflower who will turn after the great sun named Stalin. Rather than suffer from inevitable insomnia, it is better to wait for the elevator on the landing. Nita demanded that they spend all nights, each of which could be their last, together. However, this was the rare case when he insisted on his own in a dispute.

Julian Barnes

The noise of time

Dedicated to Pat

Who to listen to

Who's to blame?

And who should drink bitter?

THE NOISE OF TIME

All rights reserved

Translation from English by Elena Petrova

A great novel in the literal sense of the word, a true masterpiece from the author of the Man Booker Prize-winning Sense of an End. It would seem that I haven’t read so many pages – but it’s as if I’ve lived my whole life.

The Guardian

A new book by Julian Barnes, dedicated to Shostakovich and his life during the eras of terror and thaw, is booming in the UK. But Barnes's ambitions are, of course, higher than writing a fictionalized biography of the great composer in his anniversary year. Barnes is only playing at being an informed biographer, and the shaky ground of Soviet history, largely consisting of unverified information and outright lies, is perfect for this: there are many truths, choose any, another person, by definition, is an incomprehensible mystery.

Moreover, the case of Shostakovich is special: Barnes largely relies on the scandalous “Testimony” of Solomon Volkov, to whom the composer either dictated his memoirs, or dictated them in part, or did not dictate them at all. Either way, the author has an artist's license to imagine whatever he wants, and the opportunity to get inside the head of his invented Shostakovich allows Barnes to write what he wants: a majestic meditation on the rules of survival in a totalitarian society, how art is made, and, of course, about conformism.

Barnes, who is in love with Russian literature, has studied the language, and has even visited the USSR, displays an impressive command of context. At the level of names, facts, toponyms - this is the necessary minimum - but not only: in understanding the structure of life, the system of relations, some linguistic features. Barnes constantly trumps phrases like “a fisherman sees a fisherman from afar”, “he will straighten the hunchback’s grave” or “to live life is not to cross a field” (“Zhivago”, of course, he read carefully). And when the hero begins to adapt Yevtushenko’s poem about Galileo to his reasoning, it suddenly seems not the painstaking preparation of a British intellectual, but some completely authentic good-heartedness of a Soviet intellectual.

Stanislav Zelvensky (Afisha Daily / Brain)

Not just a novel about music, but a musical novel. The story is told in three parts, merging like a triad.

The Times

Gustave Flaubert died at the age of 59. At this age, the famous writer Julian Barnes, whose deity was and remains Flaubert, wrote a novel about how Arthur Conan Doyle investigates a real crime. Barnes turned 70 and published a novel about Shostakovich. The novel has Mandelstam's title - “The Noise of Time”.

Barnes, who tirelessly praises not only Flaubert, but also Russian literature, hints in the title at three cultural and historical levels at once. The first is Mandelstam himself, who died in the camp a year after 1937, when Shostakovich was teetering on the brink of death. The second is Shostakovich’s music, which the Soviet ghouls called “confusion,” that is, noise. Finally, the noise of the terrible 20th century, from which Shostakovich extracted music - and from which, of course, he tried to escape.

Kirill Kobrin (bbcrussian.com / London Books)

A novel of deceptively modest length... Barnes again started from scratch.

The Daily Telegraph

Barnes began his book with an attempt at some kind of non-standard structure - he gave on the first pages a digest of the themes of Shostakovich's life, which then emerge in a detailed presentation. This is an attempt to construct a book about the composer musically, leitmotifically. One of these motives is the memory of the dacha of Shostakovich’s parents, in which there were spacious rooms, but small windows: there was, as it were, a mixture of two measures, meters and centimeters. This is how this theme unfolds in the composer’s later life: an enormous talent squeezed into the shackles of petty and hostile tutelage.

And yet Barnes sees his hero as a winner. A running aphorism runs through the book: history is the whisper of music that drowns out the noise of time.

Boris Paramonov (Radio Liberty)

Definitely one of Barnes's best novels.

Sunday Times

This corresponds not only to my aesthetic perception, but also to my interests - the spirit of the book is better expressed through style, through the use of certain turns of phrase, slightly strange turns of phrase, which can sometimes resemble a translated text. This is what I think gives the reader a sense of time and place. I don’t want to write something like “he walked down such and such a street, turned left and saw the famous old candy store opposite or something like that.” I don't create the atmosphere of a time and place that way. I am sure that it is much better to do this through prose. Any reader is able to understand what is being said, the meaning is completely clear, but the wording is slightly different from the usual, and you think: “Yes, I’m in Russia now.” At least I really hope you feel it.