From Feed to Famine: M.T. Anderson’s Symphony for the City of the Dead as a “Dystopian Novel That Happens to be True”

In his critically acclaimed work of non-fiction, Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad (2015), American children’s author M.T. Anderson uses the conventions of YA dystopian fiction in order to demonstrate how both the Stalinist Terror and the Nazi Siege of Leningrad profoundly affected the life and work of the renowned Soviet composer, Dmitri Shostakovich. By offering his young audience what he has called a “dystopian novel that happens to be true”, Anderson not only challenges readers to consider the relationship between history and dystopia, but also prompts them to think critically about utopian ideals and their potentially dystopic consequences as well as about the vexed relationship between the individual and the collective. Ultimately, Symphony for the City of the Dead places into new relief the central concerns of Anderson’s earlier, and much celebrated, YA dystopian novel, Feed (2002), insofar as it calls millennial readers – named the “historical generation” by historian and activist Timothy Snyder – to be mindful of the culturally- and historically-contingent character of contemporary political crises.