Shostakovich's Thirteenth: A Research Log

Shostakovich’s Thirteenth: a research log

Dated notes, newest first. The project is described in the prospectus; the method in how this research works.

2026-10-13 — Two newspaper pages, and new ways of keeping track

TL;DR: two Soviet newspaper pages arrived from a library in Illinois. Handling them changed how the project records what it finds.

What arrived

• The Slavic Reference Service at the University of Illinois found and scanned two pages that UW–Madison doesn’t hold. The service is free.
• Комсомольская правда, 4 October 1961: a report from a conference of young poets, with a paragraph on «Бабий Яр».
• Ленинское знамя, 19 December 1962, the day after the premiere: a news-agency feature with a short piece by the conductor, Kirill Kondrashin.

A first assessment, before interpretation

• Each new document now gets a short block when it arrives: who wrote it, where, for whom, in what genre, and how the copy reached me.
• Then what it says, in my words. Interpretation comes later.

Threads

• Some words and phrases recur from one document to another.
• I now tag each recurrence and read them together in date order, as a thread. These two pages started the first ones.

Words with ideological weight

• Some Russian words carried Marxist or Soviet weight for readers of the time.
• The translations now flag them, so I can ask later how they were heard. The English keeps the plain meaning; the flag is for the analysis.

Renamed

• The list of questions I can’t yet answer was called a “doubt register”. It’s now just “open questions”.

2026-09-30 — The first translation session: «Babi Yar», lines 1–24

TL;DR: the first session spent translating the poem the symphony sets. I planned on five lines and finished twenty-four. Going slowly turned up more than I expected from a first line.

Read the poem

• The 1961 text, as first printed in Литературная газета, is reproduced in full in Ю. Бит-Юнан & М. Нагорная, «Спор о памяти», Философические письма 8/2 (2025), open access.
• Published English translations include George Reavey’s, in Yevtushenko’s Early Poems, and Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi’s, in the Penguin Selected Poems (1962).
• My own translation stays private. The poem is still under copyright.

How a session runs

Finals are final for now. A later revision replaces one, with the old wording kept beside it.

The first line

• The poem opens by saying there are no monuments over the ravine. The Russian line ends on its word for “there are none,” нет.
• Russian puts the new, stressed information last, so the absence is the last thing heard. My translation keeps it at the end.
• I also kept the sentence without a doer. Nobody in the line fails to build anything; the monuments are simply absent.
• Elsewhere in the poem, when people act, the negation has an agent. The first line’s absence has none. That contrast is worth following through the whole poem.

The turn at lines 4–7

• In four lines the speaker moves from being as old as the Jewish people to being, as it seems to him, a Jew.
• This is the jump from likeness to identity. I expect that escalation to matter for the argument.

Threads banked along the way

• The symphony has its own symbolic language: the key of B-flat minor, the tubular bells, the bass soloist and the male chorus.
• Who sings each line, chorus or soloist, will be part of the analysis. The record now notes it for every line.
• Some words in the poem carried official weight in 1961, such as мещанство, “philistinism.” How they sounded to an audience then needs its own research.
• The poem’s grammar of the self, its reflexive verbs, deserves a closer look.

What changed in the method

• Afterwards I looked back at what made the Russian hard. The answer was words whose meanings fan out.
• The literal version now flags those words. It gives their range and says which meanings the context brings forward, without choosing for me.

Research assistant’s note

• The assistant (Claude) supplied the literal versions, the grammar glosses, the scansion and the sound notes, and kept the record.
• It also offered readings, which stay its own until I adopt one:
  • The poem climbs a ladder of certainty. It moves from “it seems to me” (мне кажется) to “I feel” (я чувствую), and finally to a plain “I am” (Я —) with no verb of perception at all.
  • «Над», “over,” is the preposition of grave markers: what stands “over a grave” (над могилой). The first line opens in the grammar of a memorial and then withholds the memorial.
• Every translation choice above is mine.

Postscript, 3 October: the site checks itself

• This site restates parts of the private working notes. When a note changed and its public page didn’t, the page fell out of date.
• A small script now compares each public page with the notes it draws on, after every update, and fails loudly when one falls behind.
• Its first run, over the previous few days, flagged both changes that had been missed. Both pages are now up to date.

2026-09-27 — Casting the net, then choosing

TL;DR: before reading anything, I wanted to know what exists. So the first real work was one sweep for sources, then a ruling on every item found.

The net: eight parts

The result

• About 470 items, about 400 once duplicates were merged.
• Each got one of four answers: read it (and where, in the order of the work), keep it as a citable record, set it aside as a personal interest, or pass.

What the sweep showed about the field

• Almost nothing is written on the Thirteenth itself. No Russian dissertation takes it as its subject. There is one short Russian monograph on it, from 1997, and I found it in the Library of Congress catalogue after it had been missing from every other catalogue I tried.
• Much of the useful work comes at the symphony sideways: studies of the Jewish musical idiom, of Soviet war memory, of the Thaw’s culture of sincerity, of the mass song.
• Some primary documents can now be read. A contemporary letter from the Minsk performances in March 1963 reports how the audience reacted, and it cuts against my own reading. It goes into the path as the first thing to answer when that phase closes.

Then the order

• Every item that passed went into the one ordered list of the work, phase by phase.
• Each text sits next to the studies of it.
• Each argument sits next to the argument against it.

Research assistant’s note

• The searching, the record-checking, and the first proposals for every item were done by an AI research assistant (Claude).
• Every ruling, which sources to read and in what order, was mine.
• The checks ran against open databases of publication records, so every citation now traces to a verified record or is marked as unverified.