Other literary motifs highlight the tragic events recounted in the book. At night, waiting for NKVD officers on the landing outside his flat, Shostakovich measures himself, apparently destined to die at 30, against Pushkin, killed in a duel at 37.

The most ominous presence, however, is manifest only in the book’s title, borrowed from an essay collection by Osip Mandelstam, who had been arrested for his poetry two years before Shostakovich’s ordeal began, and died in a prison camp in 1938. Shostakovich survived the purges, the war (“he had never felt safer”) and the thaw. He died in 1975, shortly before turning 69.

Barnes’s knowledge and love of Russian literature are also evident in quotations that pepper the text. Some recurring proverbs are apt: “cats sharpening their claws on his soul”; “when you chop wood the chips fly”. And the temptation to quote Chekhov must have been too strong for his admirer: “When they serve coffee, don’t try to find beer in it.”

Sometimes this penchant for authenticity backfires. Take, for instance, a reference to Boris Pasternak’s translation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 66. Barnes imagines how at a reading “the audience would wait keenly through the first eight lines, eager for the ninth: ‘And art made tongue-tied by authority’.” If the Russian listeners did wait, it wasn’t for these very words as none of their equivalents appear in Pasternak’s version: he famously took liberties when translating poetry, so in this stanza there are “thought” with its “mouth shut” (by no one in particular), “reason” and “stupidity”, “kindness” and “evil”, but no “art” or “authority”. The line is intended as a lead-in to an important theme — “Art no more belongs to the People and the Party than it once belonged to the aristocracy and the patron” — but the Russian translation falls flat here. Minor though such inconsistencies are, in a work where subtle details are captured with pitch-perfect skill, they jar upon the ear.

Describing Shostakovich’s obsessiveness — his habits included wearing amulets of garlic when travelling on wartime trains, frequently washing his hands and synchronising clocks — Barnes shows us a man who was happy only at his desk or at a piano keyboard, powerless to restore any semblance of order elsewhere in the world.

Equally eloquent are the book’s reflections on religion, whose demands are compared to those of the state — or of your own consciousness. The picture is one of an artist doomed to struggle, be it against totalitarianism, aesthetic disagreement or everyday circumstances.

To emphasise that little in Shostakovich’s life was black and white, Barnes quotes another Russian proverb, “he lies like an eyewitness”. It applies to most recollections compiled here, including two accounts of a “historic meeting” between Shostakovich and Akhmatova: in one, they sit in silence, in the other, talk for 20 minutes; in both, Akhmatova later remembers: “It was wonderful”. Shostakovich, who dedicated his Eighth Quartet to himself before agreeing that it be dedicated “to the victims of fascism and war”, was used to multiple interpretations: “Sometimes, he thought that there was a different version of everything.”