The philosophical nature of art, as illustrated by Dmitri Shostakovich’s comments on the purpose of his music, from his autobiographical Testimony. Shostakovich’s words in quotation marks are followed by my gloss in brackets.
“For some reason, people think that music must tell us only about the pinnacles of the human spirit, or at least about highly romantic villains. But there are very few heroes or villains. Most people are average, neither black nor white. They’re gray. A dirty shade of gray.”
[An artist’s subject should be: how most people are. Morally, most people are a mixture of good and bad with the bad dominant.]
“And it’s in that vague middle ground that the fundamental conflicts of our age take place.”
[History is made by the average.]
“It’s a huge ant hill in which we all crawl. In the majority of cases, our destinies are bad. We are treated harshly and cruelly. And as soon as someone crawls a little higher, he’s ready to torture and humiliate others.”
[Humans are insignificant creatures like ants. Life usually ends badly. Our social relations are predatory win/lose. (See Genghis Khan and Sigmund Freud.)]
“You must write about the majority of people and for the majority. And you must write the truth — then it can be called realistic art. … . To the extent of my ability I tried to write about these people, about their completely average, commonplace dreams and hopes, and about their suspicious tendency toward murder.”
[Realism is defined as art for the majority about the majority. I put all of my artistic talent and energy in the service of portraying the grubby ordinary.]
By implication, aesthetic Romanticism’s emphasis on life as an adventure, on real heroes and villains, and its sense that good should win over bad — is simply wrong metaphysically.
Source: Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis. New York: Harper and Row, 1979, p. 94.