Solomon Volkov - The magical chorus : a history of Russian culture from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Culture and politics have always been indivisible, and to maintain the contrary is also making a political statement. A stark and tragic example of that connection is Russian culture in the twentieth century: perhaps for the first time in history did such a brutal experiment of politics being forced into the cultural life of such a huge country take place over such a long period, continuing through world wars, convulsive revolutions, and the most ruthless terror.

That is the subject of this book, the first of its kind in any language: while studies in particular areas of cultural-political interrelationships in Russia in the last century are proliferating, there has not been a unified presentation.

The relationship between rulers and culture is a theme that has interested me since my Soviet childhood. My first collection did not consist of the usual toy soldiers or stamps; following Joseph Stalins death in March 1953, I clipped newspaper photographs of the late dictator with cultural figures like the writer Maxim Gorky or actors from the Moscow Art Theater. This is how far back the psychological roots of this work go. Later, as a journalist, member of the Union of Soviet Composers and senior editor of its Sovetskaya Muzyka magazine, and interviewer of many leading cultural figures, I continually had to deal with the political aspects of Soviet culture, which at the time seemed vastly urgent to us all. As a witness, I have tried to convey that sense of urgency here.

By education and personal inclination I have always had an intense interest in music, ballet, theater, and the art marketall integral parts of Russian culturewhich sometimes seems to be terra incognita for other historians, who tend to rely on their teams of researchers and so often end up making egregious errors.1

As the reader will see, I focus on such masters as Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (and his students Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev), Mikhail Vrubel, Mikhail Fokine, Fedor Chaliapin, Pavel Filonov, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Alfred Schnittke, and such cultural milestones as the Moscow Art Theater, the liturgical music of the turn of the century, Diaghilevs Russian Seasons, and the Amazons of the Russian avant-garde (as well as the second avant-garde, still not studied thoroughly), placing all these nonliterary institutions and movements in a political and social context. Together, these exceptionally strong and beautiful voices unite in a Magical Chorus, to use the poet Anna Akhmatovas evocative metaphorical description.

However, there is no denying the fact that Russiano matter what the Western view may behas always been a logocentric country, and therefore writers hold center stage in The Magical Chorus. Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn each tried to realize the idea later crystallized in Solzhenitsyns maxim that in Russia a great writer is like a second government.2 They wanted to influence the regime, while the authorities attempted to manipulate them. None of these giants managed to implement his program fully, but in the process, all three created their enormous personal, heavily politicized legends. It is impossible to overestimate the role played by these writers in Russias public life.

Political turbulence in the twentieth century increased the worldwide resonance of the Russian Magical Chorus, but at too high a cost: death, ruined lives, and creative devastation. For seventy years, the Iron Curtain separated the Russian mainland from the migr diaspora. They began merging comparatively recently, and that complex and tortuous process is observed in my book. Another painful ideological split in Russian culturebetween urbanites and villagerscut across the entire century and is still hurting today. It sometimes seems that this conflict is growing more acute in contemporary Russia.

I am fortunate in having good relationships with major figures in both camps. Paradoxically, I would like to think that my move to the United States, where I continue to write and lecture about the old and the new Russian cultures and have been a longtime commentator on the subject, first at the Voice of America and then for Radio Liberty, gives me the opportunity to be more objective. I recall the words of Joseph Brodsky, who once told me he considered his cultural situation in New York as an observers position high on a hilltop, with a view of both slopes.3

A long-distance view is definitely needed as the globalization of culture increases. There are those in Russia who fiercely attack globalization, some who criticize only its excesses, and still others who warily welcome it; but in fact, Russia has been part of this process since the country opened up to Western Europe in the late seventeenth century. It is just that events have accelerated immeasurably.

Lenin and especially Stalin understood the usefulness of culture as a political tool not only inside the country but in the international arena, too, and they wielded the weapon well. The Bolsheviks were innovators in cultural propaganda, making the constant complaints of the Communist leaders about the Wests ideological aggression sound disingenuous: they themselves had created this confrontational arena.4

The Nobel Prize in Literature became one such highly publicized political event; it was given to five great Russians: Ivan Bunin (1933), Boris Pasternak (1958), Mikhail Sholokhov (1965), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1970), and Joseph Brodsky (1987). Year after year, the Soviet authorities expressed outrage that the Nobel Prize was politicized. Responding to such attacks, Solzhenitsyn noted reasonably, Even though the Swedish Academy was always being accused of politics, it was our barking voices that made any other assessment impossible.5 Thus, each prize came enveloped in a cloud of controversy, and I give special attention to the behind-the-scenes intrigues leading up to the awards.

Nowadays, every significant local cultural gesture sooner or later takes on a global resonance, usually a political one; when it does not, the reason is also political. There is probably no way back to truly autonomous cultural reservations. Russian culture, even domestically, is more and more judged as part of a global marketplace, a situation the Russian intelligentsia finds unusual and painful after seventy years of isolation.

For me, the best Russian examples of sophisticated cultural analysis were always the writings of Alexandre Benois and Prince Dmitri Svyatopolk-Mirsky (D. S. Mirsky) in their migr period, when their style, authoritative for connoisseurs and accessible for neophytes, was marked by a rare balance of gentle anger and ironic love.6 It still resonates today.

Throughout the years I spent working on this book, my guiding star was the memory of my precious conversations with some of its protagonists: Natan Altman, Anna Akhmatova, George Balanchine, Joseph Brodsky, Sergei Dovlatov, Kirill Kondrashin, Yuri Lyubimov, Anatoli Rybakov, Georgi Sviridov, Viktor Shklovsky, Alfred Schnittke, and Dmitri Shostakovich.

I am also deeply grateful to the following, who generously responded to my queries about those dramatic times: Nikolai Akimov, Vassily Aksyonov, Grigori Alexandrov, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Nina Bruni-Balmont, Rudolf Barshai, Tatiana Bek, Isaiah Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Andrei Bitov, Dmitri Bobyshev, Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky, Nikita Bogoslovsky, Elena Bonner, Alexander Borovsky, Lili Brik, Yevgeny Brusilovsky, Sergei Chigrakov, Marietta Chudakova, Boris Eifman, Alexander Galich, Leonid Girshovich, Evdokiya Glebov, Alexander Godunov, Yakov Gordin, Vladimir Horowitz, Boris Grebenshchikov, Irina Graham, Sofia Gubaidulina, Lev Gumilev, Alexandra Danilova, Edison Denisov, Oleg Efremov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Natalia Ivanova, Roman Jakobson, Mariss Jansons, Gia Kancheli, Vassily Katanyan, Nikolai Khardzhiev, Aram Khachaturian, Igor Kholin, Andrei Khrzhanovsky, Lincoln Kirstein, Edward Kline, Elem Klimov, Leonid Kogan, Alexander Kosolapov, Yuri Kochnev, Gidon Kremer, Natalia Krymova, Savva Kulish, Sergei Kurekhin, Jay Leyda, Eduard Limonov, Fedor Lopukhov, Lev Losev, Alexei Lyubimov, Vladimir Maximov, Berthe Malko, Yuri Mamleyev, Sulamif Messerer, Czeslaw Milosz, Nathan Milstein, Igor Moiseyev, Yevgeny Mravinsky, Anatoly Nayman, Ernst Neizvestny, Viktor Nekrasov, Natalya Nesterova, Irina Nijinska, Rudolf Nureyev, Mikhail Odnoralov, David Oistrakh, Bulat Okudzhava, Alla Osipenko, Nadezhda Pavlovich, Vladimir Paperny, Sergei Paradjanov, Viktor Pivovarov, Maya Plisetskaya, Boris Pokrovsky, Lina Prokofiev, Irina Prokhorova, Lev Raaben, Edvard Radzinsky, Rita Rait-Kovaleva, Yevgeny Rein, Sviatoslav Richter, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Robert Rozhdestvensky, Maria Rozanova, Mstislav Rostropovich, Harrison Salisbury, Andrei Sedykh, Marietta Shaginyan, Rodion Shchedrin, Angelina Shchekin-Krotova, Iosif Sher, Yuri Shevchuk, Konstantin Simonov, Andrei Sinyavsky, Boris Slutsky, Vassily Solovyov-Sedoi, Vladimir Soloukhin, Arnold Sokhor, Vladimir Spivakov, Anna Sten, Isaac Stern, Vera Stravinsky, Yevgeny Svetlanov, Flora Syrkina, Alexander Tcherepnin, Yuri Temirkanov, Nikolai Tikhonov, Alexander Tyshler, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Vladimir Vasiliev, Oleg Vassiliev, Georgy Vladimov, Andrei Voznesensky, Pavel Vulfius, Vladimir Vysotsky, Maria Yudina, Leonid Yakobson, Vladimir Yankilevsky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Sergei Yutkevich, Vyacheslav Zavalishin, and Alexander Zinoviev.