​In May 1937, a man with a suitcase is standing in front of a lift in one of the residential blocks in Leningrad, ready to leave his family to protect them. This is how the latest book by a British novelist Julian Barnes The Noise of Time begins. The main character is Shostakovich and the novel The Noise of Time is a tribute from an English novelist and journalist Julian Branes to this musical genius, a conformist and a toy in the hands of the powerful ones. He also provides a vivid account of the Soviet practices during the roughest years of Stalin’s cult of personality and the Khrushchev thaw.

The Noise of Time is one of the books we are really happy to have, mainly because we got to publish it right on time – we will introduce it during the Convergence festival in the Slovak Radio’s big concert studio on Sunday, September 25th, exactly 110 years after Dmitri Shostakovich was born. The introduction of the book will consist of the performance of his cello, violin and rarely played viola sonata, also the iconic eight string quartet. Robert Roth will read passages from The Noise of Time.

A Soviet composer Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich (1906 – 1975) was world-famous and reputable, but also prohibited and disclaimed. Stalin’s protégé, a composer successfully representing totalitarianism abroad was ruined and alienated by the power he glorified. Shostakovich is the main character of the book which is not exactly a biography; it is more of a novel that shortly after publishing brought up contradictory reactions between musicians and admirers of Shostakovich. The Slovak version of The Noise of Time was edited by a musicologist Andrej Šuba.