In the opening lines of Requiem, Anna Akhmatova famously recounts how she was quietly asked by a fellow sufferer in the prison line in Leningrad to describe the Russian people's pain in her poetry. For many, the goal of art in the Soviet system was to bear witness to the brutality of the Soviet Union. The moral obligation of bearing witness made Dmitrii Shostakovich's music an emblem of art's power to resist tyranny by expressing the suffering inflicted on human lives, or so the hagiographic interpreters of Shostakovich's work like to claim. As its title indicates, Marissa Silverman's Gregory Haimovsky: A Pianist's Odyssey to Freedom is another account of such heroic resistance. Silverman's hero is the Russian pianist Gregory Haimovsky (b. 1926), a devoted interpreter and proponent of Claude Debussy's and Olivier Messiaen's music in the Soviet Union. Messiaen, a deeply Catholic composer whose complex method of composition inspired the post-World-War-II avant garde, was a difficult sell in the aesthetically constraining atmosphere of Socialist Realism, in which both spiritualism and abstract compositional techniques were shunned. Silverman claims that Messiaen served as “a unique kind of musical Messiah” (196–97) not only for Haimovsky but also for his fellow Russians who, thanks to Haimovsky, could “perceive and feel musical expressions of ‘truth’ that transcended—if only for a few moments—Soviet brutalities and aesthetic dogma” (10). Messiaen's images, Silverman insists, “were the weapons Haimovsky used in his continuous resistance to Communist ideals” (151). Silverman's inflated heroic narrative of resistance, rehearsed ad nauseam in Shostakovich studies of the popular sort, is unfortunate and turns her otherwise informative book into a hagiography in which Haimovsky's promotion of Messiaen appears as “‘activism’ in the face of totalitarianism” (147), a claim that reveals Silverman's idealistic American perspective on the irrational workings of the Soviet Union.

In five chapters and two appendices, Silverman describes Haimovsky's childhood, piano education, and career turns, mixing biography with the mandatory Soviet Grand Guignol, which, according to Haimovsky's family lore, claimed the three-year-old Haimovsky's father. Silverman shows that the ill turns of Haimovsky's professional life had more to do with prevalent antisemitism than with Haimovsky's anti-communist stance. Unwilling to follow his well-wishers’ advice to change his Jewish surname or join the Party, Haimovsky was “exiled” to Kalinin after his graduation from the Moscow Conservatory in 1950, then, after completing his doctoral degree at the Leningrad Conservatory with a dissertation on Debussy's piano music in 1956, to the Glinka Conservatory in Gor΄kii. It was in Gor΄kii that Haimovsky, looking for programming of contemporary music for the local radio and TV station, discovered the music of Messiaen.

Haimovsky's attraction to Messiaen reveals an alternative aesthetic paradigm in the history of Soviet music. Although Silverman's account of this alternative is too simplistically binary, it provides her book with a central point that goes beyond Haimovsky's personal memories and a somewhat redundant retelling of the horrors of the Soviet Union. The book's most interesting part is Appendix 2, the translation of excerpts from Haimovsky's study on Messiaen, which, although commissioned by Soviet Music in 1964, was never published in the Soviet Union due partially to Haimovsky's decision to move to Israel in 1972 (the book appeared in Russian as Oliv΄e Messian v moei zhizni only in 2009 at Liberty Publishing House).

Silverman is right that in Messiaen's music Haimovsky found an escape from Soviet reality. For him Messiaen represented the antithesis to Shostakovich who, by expressing pain and suffering, forced his listeners to dwell on their tragic lives. Haimovsky was tired of what he heard as “the chest-exploding harsh voices of the so-called truth” in Russian music (120); of the inconsolable grief often associated with Shostakovich's works. Moreover, he felt insulted by Shostakovich's Symphony no. 13, “Babi Yar,” because it “touched, even with the finest of intentions, an untouchable subject . . . the tragedy of the Holocaust” (83). Messiaen's aims were different. Even in the Quartet for the End of Time, written in a German prisoner of war camp, Messiaen was unwilling “to recreate musically the horrors of his bloody era” (196). In his music, Haimovsky quoted Messiaen, there was “no place for an emotional commentary on reality.” The joy and beauty conveyed remained “closer to abstractness than of actual emotional experiences” (192). Haimovsky's exploration of Messiaen's music might not be revelatory for Messiaen scholars. But it is a key for understanding the spiritual undercurrents in Soviet music, which came to light in the work of Sofia Gubaidulina, Arvo Pärt, and Alfred Schnittke, composers born about a decade after Haimovsky.