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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
There are few documented examples of the fake or forged autobiography, although the genre probably has a long, secret history. Its most famous practitioner was Clifford Irving, who, in 1971, tried to publish the tell-all memoirs of Howard Hughes without telling Hughes. Irving's manuscript began with a brazen announcement that "more lies have been printed and told about me than about any living man" and that it was time for the "elusive, often painful truth." Irving made the mistake of releasing his manuscript while Hughes was still alive. Nothing kills an autobiography like a flat-out denial by the author.
In 1979, the Russian-emigre musicologist Solomon Volkov published "Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov." It was a grippingly embittered monologue by the greatest of Soviet composers, denouncing Communism and chronicling a life lived in fear. In retrospect, something about the first page should have set off alarms. Like Irving's Hughes, Volkov's Shostakovich seems to protest too much. "Others will write about us," he says. "And naturally they'll lie through their teeth." This book would "speak the truth about the past"; "reminisce . . . only in the name of truth"; "try to tell only the truth."
The book arrived with impressive credentials. According to Volkov, each chapter had been read and signed by Shostakovich, who had died in 1975. Irving never met Hughes, but Volkov was acquainted with Shostakovich, and was known to have interviewed him. A year after publication, though, "Testimony" hit a snag. The American scholar Laurel Fay pointed out that seven of the eight chapters began with word-for-word quotations from older Shostakovich essays. Given that these pages bore Shostakovich's signature, it looked as if Volkov might have obtained the...
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