Julian Barnes could have written a biography of Shostakovich. He chose a novel instead. That decision is itself an argument about what it takes to understand another person.

There is a well-documented historical record of Dmitri Shostakovich's life under Stalin: the denunciations, the periods of official disgrace, the public capitulations, the music that was suppressed and the music that was reluctantly composed to order. A scrupulous biographer could assemble all of this and produce a coherent account of what happened. Julian Barnes chose to write a novel.

Fiction claims access to interiority. It can move inside a consciousness and render not just what a person did but what it felt like to do it — the texture of the fear, the quality of the self-justification, the precise shade of shame that attaches to survival. Biography, however empathetic, must remain at the threshold of inference. The novel walks through the door.

It is structured around three moments in which Shostakovich waits — on a landing outside his apartment in 1936, expecting arrest; in an airport in 1949, preparing to represent Soviet culture in America against his will; at his dacha in the 1960s, an old man reviewing the accumulated weight of a life lived under surveillance and constraint. Barnes moves through these scenes with great precision and considerable restraint, avoiding both heroism and simple condemnation. He renders something that’s harder to fictionalise and more uncomfortable to read: the chronic, low-grade terror of a man who has survived, who has made his accommodations with power, and who can no longer be entirely certain whether this makes him a pragmatist or something else.

The Bourdieu passage that frames this collection makes the point sharply: you cannot place yourself in another person's position, because you are not in the same position. By definition. What you can do — what Barnes does, with unusual intellectual honesty — is attempt to imagine across the gap while remaining aware that it is a gap. The novel never pretends that Barnes knows what Shostakovich felt. It constructs a plausible, carefully researched, deeply considered version of what he might have felt, and it holds that version with appropriate tentativeness. The fictional form, paradoxically, is more honest about this limitation than biography often is.

What stays with the reader is less any single scene than a cumulative sense of what it costs to be a person of integrity in a system designed to make integrity impossible — and of how integrity itself becomes complicated when survival requires its repeated negotiation. Barnes doesn't resolve this. He sits with it, which is the most empathetic thing a writer can do with material this resistant to easy judgment.

The BBC Newsnight interview with Barnes, recorded around the book's publication, is worth seeking out. He speaks with characteristic precision about why he chose Shostakovich, why fiction rather than biography, and what he understands himself to be claiming — and not claiming — when he enters another person's consciousness through the novel form.