ABSTRACT
Marina Sabinina's reading of Dmitri Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony is clearly influenced by the sociological interpretation of Gustav Mahler's symphonism begun by Sollertinsky, and by Bekker before him. The Fourth Symphony is an especially knotty example of Shostakovich's earliest adoption of this mask-like ambivalence. The importance of thematic transformation in the first movement of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony cannot be discussed in the context of 'developing variation' alone; it needs a more inclusive approach that takes into account deeper analytical structures as well as historical context. All descriptions of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony as theatrical, filmic or Mahlerian share a common motivation: a desire to account for the collisions ruptures and shock effects in his music in terms of other art forms or - as in the case of Mahler - another composer's music. Boris Tomashevsky's pragmatic approach might have marked the beginning of a new era in Soviet literary criticism.
