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Russia produced great artists ...
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Complete review at the following URL:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/07/03/ST2008070303240.html
RUSSIA CULTURE
The Revolution in Art
Russia produced great artists -- and even greater arguments.
Reviewed by Stefan Sullivan
Sunday, July 6, 2008; Page BW10
THE MAGICAL CHORUS
A History of Russian Culture From Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn
This Story
RUSSIA CULTURE: The Revolution in Art
Chapter One: Read an Excerpt from 'The Magical Chorus'
By Solomon Volkov
Translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis
Knopf. 333 pp. $30
In 1994, when naked cellists and what-not graced the stages of Moscow night clubs, the last thing Russians wanted was adult supervision, least of all the hectoring pieties of a bearded old crank by the name of Solzhenitsyn. With much fanfare, the famous dissident writer and author of the monumental Gulag Archipelago returned to his homeland only to find his televised sermons falling on deaf ears. Few Russians wanted to hear about abuses in Chechnya, government corruption or repentance and salvation. What they really wanted was better telenovellas and more Ace of Base.
[ ... ]
"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."
[ ... ]
Given the cultural dynamics of Vladimir Putin's Russia -- a mix of healthy eccentricity and depressing political apathy -- it's perhaps fitting that The Magical Chorus gives short shrift to the post-perestroika years. Art for edification's sake has been driven from the marketplace. All that remains is an unflattering autocratic strain. The culturati who would, could or should challenge it are cowed and corralled. To drive his narrative into the 21st century, Volkov need only have mentioned that intellectuals are now remarkably free in Russia as long as they can afford a Moscow apartment and steer clear of politics. ·
Stefan Sullivan is the author of two novels on Siberia and "Marx for a Post-Communist Era: On Poverty, Corruption and Banality."
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