A Shostakovich Casebook by Malcolm Hamrick Brown

Author:Malcolm Hamrick Brown [Brown, Malcolm Hamrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: music, History & Criticism, Individual Composer & Musician, Literary Collections, General
ISBN: 9780253056252
Google: 2nfnDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2020-06-30T00:26:27.736551+00:00

i smelykh vdokhnovennykh del

of bold inspiring deeds

i sladostnovo pesnopeniia!

and of sweet song!

15

A Perspective on Soviet Musical Culture during the Lifetime of Shostakovich (1998)

LEVON HAKOBIAN

Current inhabitants of what constitutes the former Soviet Union are familiar with the fact that during the entire seventy-odd years of communist rule, the prosperous West remained generally unaware of and indifferent to what we experienced spiritually.

It seems that a shared perception among people in the West has elaborated a distinctly dark image of life under the Hammer and Sickle, listing its major constituents in one breath: the GULAG, the KGB, a militaristic euphoria, hard drinking, a bureaucracy in splendor and working people in misery, empty shops and endless lines, the dismal faces of passers-by in the streets, and bombastic propaganda about the regime’s successes. According to this stock classification, only two categories of humankind in Soviet society were worthy of attention: the cowardly, cruel, corrupt communist elite, on the one side, and, on the other, the courageous handful of dissidents. As for the rest of the population, they were automatically considered an amorphous and sterile mass of silent conformists. The typology of artistic creativity was supposed to correspond generally to the same fundamental dualism: the stillborn art of Socialist Realism, favored by the communist government and intended to serve the ideological necessities of the regime, had its exact antithesis in a dissident art whose principal aim was to defy the regime and to unmask its abominations. It has been tacitly presumed that the average person of the Soviet age, having been deprived of a legally available, digestible spiritual and intellectual food, was thus compelled to consume, on the sly, the achievements of native dissidents or Western intellects, or else to float passively in the emptiness deliberately created around him by the Kremlin’s captains of ideological warfare.

Such a scheme, to be completely accurate, obviously would depend on a purely theoretical Orwellian outlook. It overlooks the existence of a highly specific and rich spiritual atmosphere elaborated by several generations of “conformists”—that is, properly speaking, by the common efforts of the majority of the country’s intellectuals and creative people—a spiritual atmosphere that represents one of the most powerful realities of the Soviet epoch and, sub specie aeternitatis, may be regarded as an achievement of utmost importance (however unintentional!) by the communist regime. In the domain of arts and letters, the atmosphere in question revealed itself through a mighty current of independent creation free from “politics” directly expressed (of whatever coloration, dissident or Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist)—a current that proved itself capable of surviving all the changes in the Party’s general line and that showed the first signs of abating only in the mid-1980s, with the beginning of unexpected freedom and total “early capitalistic” commercialization.

The artistic trend under consideration—or, to put it more precisely, this trend of independent creation with rather indistinct boundaries which turned out to be powerful enough to penetrate all kinds of arts and letters—existed in a complex interrelationship with the officially approved worldview. Moreover, it had few points of contact with social satire or direct protest against the ruling dogmas.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.