ABSTRACT
The presence of Dmitriy Shostakovich on the Soviet cultural scene was truly overwhelming, as was his influence on his contemporaries and on younger generations. To paraphrase the poet Apollon Grigor’yev’s famous saying about Pushkin – ‘[he] is our everything’ – Shostakovich was the ‘everything’ for the culture of almost the whole Soviet era. Born in Saint Petersburg to a middle-class family with Polish roots, Shostakovich proceeded to study music at the age of nine and entered the Petrograd Conservatoire at the age of 13. In 1923, he graduated from the piano class of Leonid Nikolayev and in 1925 from the composition class of Rimsky-Korsakov’s pupil and son-in-law Maksimilian Steinberg. The First Symphony contains relatively few moments of the psychological tenseness so characteristic of the mature Shostakovich. However, the piece seems to exceed what could be normally expected in the regard from an author in his teens.
