Playing With Fire by Elizabeth Wilson

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, £25

Elizabeth Wilson’s biography of the pianist Maria Yudina, includes a link with a Stalin story, albeit tangential and ultimately unproved. The story goes that listening to the radio one evening, Stalin heard Yudina playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 23 and asked Radio Moscow for a recording. The broadcast had been live, so the musicians were recalled to record the piece, and an outraged Yudina slipped a note into the sleeve denouncing Stalin. Wilson convinces the reader that the story is untrue, and the rigorous research she deploys to show this is evident throughout her book. Wilson follows Yudina carefully from her birth in what is now Belarus to her death in Moscow in 1970. The threads of her life interweave to illustrate not only an astonishing career, but also aspects of Russian life and culture before and during the Soviet era. Yudina was a religious woman, born into a Jewish family, converting to Orthodox Christianity when she was 20 and becoming active against aspects of State control of the Church during the 1920s and 30s. “I know only one way to God: through Art,” Yudina said. During the Second World War she was at the height of her fame, playing for troops, submarine crews, in hospitals and for the besieged citizens of Leningrad, where she arrived at the military airport with a huge kitbag filled with provisions for those in need, and declared, “the Muses… are not silent in Leningrad”. She was close to Shostakovich, and Boris Pasternak gave his first reading of Dr Zhivago in her Moscow flat. Clearly, this book is filled with dramatic experiences and detail, but Wilson’s craft as a storyteller ensures that it is a captivating read. She also provides us with four pages of acronyms, revealing some obscure Soviet organisations.