The Magical Chorus: A History of Russian Culture in the Twentieth Century from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn

by Solomon Volkov, Antonina Bouis (Translator)

published	March 4th 2008 by Knopf
binding	Hardcover
isbn	1400042720 (isbn13: 9781400042722)
ebook
pages	336
description	From the reign of Tsar Nicholas II to the brutal cult of Stalin to the ebullient, uncertain days of perestroika, nowhere has the inextricable relat...more [close] From the reign of Tsar Nicholas II to the brutal cult of Stalin to the ebullient, uncertain days of perestroika, nowhere has the inextricable relationship between politics and culture been more starkly illustrated than in twentieth-century Russia. In the first book to fully examine the intricate and often deadly interconnection between Russian rulers and Russian artists, cultural historian Solomon Volkov (who experienced firsthand many of the events he describes) brings to life the human stories behind some of the greatest masterpieces of our time. Here is Tolstoy, who used his godlike place among the Russian people to rail against the autocracy, even as he eschewed violence; Gorky, the first native writer to openly welcome the revolution and who would go on to become Stalin’s closest cultural advisor; Solzhenitsyn, who famously brought the horrors of the Soviet regime to light. Here. too, are Nabokov, Pasternak, Mayakovsky, Akhmatova. In each case, Volkov analyzes the alternate determination and despair, hope and terror borne by writers in a country where, in Solzhenitsyn’s maxim, “a great writer is like a second government.” This is also the story of the nation’s leading lights in painting, music, dance, theater, and cinema—Kandinsky and Malevich, Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky, Diaghilev and Nijinsky, Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, and Eisenstein and Tarkovsky—and the ways in which their triumphs influenced, and were influenced by, the leadership of the time. With an insider’s insight, Volkov describes what it was like to work under constant threat of arrest, exile, or execution. He reminds us of the many artists who were compelled to live as émigrés, and explores not only their complicated relationships with their adopted countries but Russia’s love-hate relationship with Western culture as a whole—a relationship that has grown increasingly charged in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Epic in scope and intimate in detail, The Magical Chorus is the definitive account of a remarkable era in Russia’s complex cultural life. [close]
date added	06-24-07 edit book

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07/12/08

bookshelves: culture, currently-reading, history

Another of the great black holes in my knowledge is being filled in here. As a sweeping eulogy to one of the gilded eras of Western culture -- Russia from the late 19th- to the mid-20th century -- The Magical Chorus rewards readers with a gold mine of insider anecdotes and a story of sorts. Despite the subtitle, that story really begins not with the death of Tolstoy but with the Bolshevik seduction of early 20th-century modernist icons: Mayakovsky, Blok and Gorky in literature, Malevich ...more Another of the great black holes in my knowledge is being filled in here. As a sweeping eulogy to one of the gilded eras of Western culture -- Russia from the late 19th- to the mid-20th century -- The Magical Chorus rewards readers with a gold mine of insider anecdotes and a story of sorts. Despite the subtitle, that story really begins not with the death of Tolstoy but with the Bolshevik seduction of early 20th-century modernist icons: Mayakovsky, Blok and Gorky in literature, Malevich and Rodchenko in art. These radical outsiders responded to the decorous realism of the czarist era with a "burn baby burn" mentality, a militant aesthetic of renewal that, at least early on, conveniently served the Bolshevik agenda. "Blow up, destroy, and wipe the old artistic forms from the face of the earth," thundered the art critic Nikolai Punin. "How could the new artist, the proletarian artist, the new man not dream of this?"

For a brief period, the avant-garde became the state-sanctioned establishment. Traditionalists were marginalized. Urban writers like Maxim Gorky were allowed to rail against "the zoological individualism of the peasantry." The Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich (whose iconic "Black Square" is a painting of...a black square) assumed official curatorial duties, something akin to handing Andy Warhol the keys to the National Gallery.

We know how badly this ended: Lenin and then Stalin, already pedestrian in their artistic tastes, orchestrated a subtle yet brutal repression of cultural heroes. The legendary painters Wassily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall went into exile. Others suffered slow death in prison or labor camps. Vladimir Mayakovsky, the charismatic poet of the Revolution, shot himself in 1930, writing in his cryptic suicide note that "love's boat has crashed against the everyday" -- a fitting epitaph for a revolution gone awry.

For the most part, Volkov deftly traces this tragic arc from euphoria to disillusionment. Unfortunately, the already dense narrative is marred by gratuitous name-dropping, arcane literary gossip and almost comically clunky entanglements:

"Brodsky, on the contrary and perhaps to spite Akhmatova, always considered Nadezhda Mandelstam's prose (which in its stylistic sharpness is comparable with other masterpieces of twentieth-century Russian nonfiction -- Benois's memoirs, Andrei Bely's autobiographical trilogy, and Vladimir Nabokov's Other Shores, in its English version called Speak, Memory) on par with the works of Andrei Platonov, whom he admired greatly. "

Aside from such syntactical gems and whopper cliches (an arts patron shoots himself: "It all ended literally with a bang") Additional information. LC says there is a translator involved so maybe she should be blamed, I have added her name above, Volkov can also be maddeningly noncommittal as a guide through these historical thickets, rarely hazarding an opinion of his own. Nevertheless, he sheds light on one of the more vexing questions of 20th-century culture: How could such beautiful minds support such an ugly regime? Volkov doesn't minimize their repugnant sugarcoating of collectivization and the Great Terror, but he does go some way toward explaining how leading Soviet artists, particularly in the darkest days of Nazi barbarism, could rally around a patriotic mythos. As he rightly points out, in the difficult war years "the concert hall substituted for the church," and Dmitri Shostakovich was its chief liturgist, regularly bringing Soviet audiences to tears.

This will be a three or four star rating depending on how annoyed I get at Volkov's clunky language and how he sees the future of the arts in Putin's Russia today....less

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The Magical Chorus: A History of Russian Culture in the Twentieth Century from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn

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