Abstract
An aesthetic reaction against the carnage of World War I was a common phenomenon in much of postwar Europe. In Russia it was not so much the war itself that came to capture the imagination of postwar artists, but the revolutionary toppling of the autocratic government in February 1917 and, most significantly, the unexpected seizure of power, in October that year, by Lenin and his Bolshevik Party in the name of the working class.1 Beyond the broad notion that ‘art belongs to the people’2 and the conviction that artistic culture could and should play an important role in the building of the first socialist state, the revolutionaries had no firm understanding of what that might entail. That ‘Soviet’ art would somehow be as new and unprecedented as the socialist workers’ paradise was a matter of faith. Whether the workers should be creators of the new art or its consumers, whether art should build on the traditions of the bourgeois past or jettison them to begin from scratch, and what forms that art should take, were questions that animated debate for a long time. In many respects, the first twenty years or so of the revolution can be seen as a period of restless struggle to find answers, to define art anew. The resolution to the search would eventually come in the form of a mandate from above.
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Notes
The words of Lenin recalled from the reminiscences of Klara Zetkin; cited in Lenin o kul’ture i iskusstve, ed. N. I. Kriutikova (Moscow, 1956), 519–20.
B. V. Asaf’yev, ‘Krizis lichnogo tvorchestva’ and ‘Kompozitory, pospeshite!’; quoted in Akademik B. V. Asaf’yev: izbrannïye trudï [Selected Works], v (Moscow, 1957), 20–24.
V. Lenin, New Economic Policy (New York, 1937);
quoted in B. Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia (Bloomington, 2/1983 [enlarged edition, covering 1917–81]), 42.
R. Lee, ‘Dimitri Szostakovitch: Young Russian Composer Tells of Linking Politics With Creative Work’, New York Times (20 Dec 1931), section 8, p.8.
O. Downes, ‘Prokofieff Speaks’, New York Times (2 Feb 1930), section 8, p.8.
D. Shostakovich, ‘Moi tvorcheskiy otvet’, Vechernyaya Moskva (25 Jan 1938), 3; the author and source of the quoted review have never been identified.
D. Shostakovich, ‘V preddverii velikoi pobedy’, Komsomol skai pravda (13 Feb 1945);
quoted in S. Khentova, Shostakovich: zhizn’i tvorchestvo, ii (Leningrad, 1986), 207.
Bibliographical Note History and Political Culture
The advent of ‘glasnost’ in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union sparked the release of important documents and information about the interwar period. Among recent studies incorporating some of the new perspectives are R. Pipes, The Russian Revolution 1894–1919 (New York, 1990);
R. C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: the Revolution from Above, 1928–1941 (New York, 1990)
and R. Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations (New York, 1991).
All are provided with up-to-date bibliographies. M. Heller and A. M. Nekrich provide a readable survey of the Soviet period in Utopia in Power: the History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present (New York, 1986)
and M. Lewin offers stimulating insights in the collection The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York, 1985).
Articles on a wide range of topics — including creative arts, education and the media — can be found in Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution ed. A. Gleason, P. Kenez and R. Stites (Bloomington, 1985).
Somewhat more subjective — though nonetheless valuable — reflections are represented by R. Medvedev, Let History Judge: the Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (rev. New York, 1989)
and A. Sinyavsky, Soviet Civilization: a Cultural History, trans. J. Turnbull and N. Formozov (New York, 1990).
Literature, the theatre and visual arts
A comprehensive survey of the literary developments, official and dissident, can be found in E. J. Brown, Russian Literature Since the Revolution (rev. Cambridge, MA, 1982).
M. Hayward’s collection of essays on literary topics and individual authors, Writers in Russia: 1917–1978 (San Diego, 1983), is noteworthy for its intelligence and erudition.
An account of the political subjugation of writers by the literary bureaucracy can be found in J. and C. Garrard, Inside the Soviet Writers’ Union (New York, 1990).
K. Rudnitsky’s Russian & Soviet Theatre: Tradition & the Avant-Garde, trans. R. Permar (London, 1988) is an impressive survey, lavishly illustrated.
The classic study of the artistic development of Soviet film is by J. Leyda, Kino: a History of the Russian and Soviet Film (Princeton, 3/1983).
In Soviet Choreographers in the 1920s, trans. L. Visson, edited by S. Banes (Durham, 1990), E. Souritz presents a fine study of a less-researched creative sphere.
D. Elliott, in New Worlds: Russian Art and Society 1900–1937 (New York, 1986),
places developments in the visual arts into cultural and political perspective; his work is complemented by the exhibition catalogue Soviet Art 1920s–1930s, ed. V. Leniashin (New York, 1988), a lavish visual panorama of the period.
Pioneers of Soviet Architecture: the Search for New Solutions in the 1920s and 1930s (New York, 1987) by S. O. Khan-Magomedov is the indispensable study of the subject.
Music
The rehabilitation of historical memory and resulting reassessments of our understanding of the Soviet period have been slow to penetrate musical scholarship. Although written substantially more than 20 years ago, B. Schwarz’s Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, 1917–1981 (rev. Bloomington, 1983) remains the standard English-language source on the history of Soviet music.
Soviet Composers and the Development of Soviet Music (New York, 1970) by S. Dale Krebs, though in many respects outdated, is still useful for its survey of the styles of more obscure Soviet composers.
D. Gojowy offers a provocative glimpse into some of the lesser-known experimentalists in Neue sowjetische Musik der 20er Jahre (Laaber, 1980).
A more tangible introduction to music of the suppressed Soviet avant-garde has begun to surface on disc, including The Music of Alexander Mosolov (Olympia OCD 176), Anton Batagov, Rails, Russian avant-garde piano music of the early 20th century (MCA Classics AED 10354), Natalia Gerassimova, Russian Songs of the 1920s (Saison Russe/CDM LDC 288025) and Music of the Soviet Composers of the 20s (Melodiya SUCD 10–00077).
S. Frederick Starr provides a fascinating introduction to another little-known subject in Red & Hot: the Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union 1917–1980 (New York, 1983).
H. Robinson’s Sergei Prokofiev: a Biography (New York, 1987) is the most current English-language study of that composer.
Shostakovich, the most prominent Soviet composer, has been served poorly by the recent literature. Testimony: the Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, ed. S. Volkov, trans. A. W. Bouis (New York, 1979), is sensational in its revelations, but its authenticity has never been established.
I. MacDonald’s The New Shostakovich (London, 1990) is fatally flawed by its singleminded determination to prove the composer a lifelong political dissident, motivated in his music almost exclusively by subversive political concerns.
Less pretentious and musically more competent approaches can be found in N. Kay, Shostakovich (London, 1971)
and K. Meyer, Dmitri Schostakowitsch (Leipzig, 1980).
J. Jelagin’s Taming of the Arts, trans. N. Wreden (New York, 1951), remains among the most enlightening memoirs of musical and theatrical life in the USSR in the 1930s.
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Fay, L.E. (1993). The USSR, 1918–45. In: Morgan, R.P. (eds) Modern Times. Man & Music. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11291-3_7
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