I didn’t recognise the book on my shelf. I barely noticed it, scanning the titles quickly for a different one I had mislaid. But somehow the thin tattered spine of its dusty, crumbling dust jacket caught my eye as it rested in the dark, shadowed end of the book case.
It was one of my Dad’s from his student days. I kept a few of them when we had cleared my parents’ house. Mum and Dad met in the Young Communist League a couple of years after the war. Their revolutionary ardour had faded in the 1950s, but I had always felt a fondness for those young firebrands I never knew.
I didn’t remember this one, though. Musical Uproar in Moscow, by Alexander Werth, published by the Turnstile Press in 1949. Dad bought it the same year, on 7th June, a few days after his 23rd birthday. It is about Stalin’s ideological assault on contemporary Russian composers, Shostakovich and Prokofiev among them. But what made my heart skip, flicking through its pages, wasn’t Werth’s prose or the thoughts of Soviet apparatchiks like Andrei Zhdanov; it was my Dad’s small, precise handwriting in the margins.
Mathew Lyons 