The article focuses on the penultimate novel of Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time, and attempts to interpret it within the larger context of the author’s work. The author of the article argues that this novel is by no means a deviation from Barnes’s course, set out in the previous novels, but rather a continuation of topics he examined. The genre of a historical novel allows him to play out the drama of individual versus death on a larger scale, represented by history. For this purpose, Barnes misreads the life story of Dmitri Shostakovich, whom he portrays as an individual fighting the repressive system by “internal emigration” and obsession with his own work.