Shostakovich's Thirteenth: A Research Log
Shostakovich’s Thirteenth: a research log
Dated notes, newest first. The project is described in the prospectus; the method in how this research works.
2026-09-27 — Casting the net, then choosing
TL;DR: before reading anything, I wanted to know what exists. So the first real work was one sweep for sources, then a ruling on every item found.
The net: eight parts
| Part | Where |
|---|---|
| 1–2 | A citation-graph tool, in two rounds, starting from sources I already had |
| 3 | A Russian open-access journal archive |
| 4 | The bibliographies of the closest studies of the Thirteenth |
| 5 | Theses and dissertations |
| 6 | Russian dissertations and monographs |
| 7 | German scholarship |
| 8 | The press and documents of 1961 to 1970 |
The result
- About 470 items, about 400 once duplicates were merged.
- Each got one of four answers: read it (and where, in the order of the work), keep it as a citable record, set it aside as a personal interest, or pass.
What the sweep showed about the field
- Almost nothing is written on the Thirteenth itself. No Russian dissertation takes it as its subject. There is one short Russian monograph on it, from 1997, and I found it in the Library of Congress catalogue after it had been missing from every other catalogue I tried.
- Much of the useful work comes at the symphony sideways: studies of the Jewish musical idiom, of Soviet war memory, of the Thaw’s culture of sincerity, of the mass song.
- Some primary documents can now be read. A contemporary letter from the Minsk performances in March 1963 reports how the audience reacted, and it cuts against my own reading. It goes into the path as the first thing to answer when that phase closes.
Then the order
- Every item that passed went into the one ordered list of the work, phase by phase.
- Each text sits next to the studies of it.
- Each argument sits next to the argument against it.
Research assistant’s note
- The searching, the record-checking, and the first proposals for every item were done by an AI research assistant (Claude).
- Every ruling, which sources to read and in what order, was mine.
- The checks ran against open databases of publication records, so every citation now traces to a verified record or is marked as unverified.