The Magical Chorus

The martyr image was helped by the relatively early deaths of Tarkovsky (at fifty-four) and Brodsky (at fifty- five, of a heart attack), and Schnittke’s series of strokes, the last and fourth on July 4, 1998 (the composer died on August 3, at the age of sixty-three). The strokes gradually turned Schnittke into an invalid. He was half-paralyzed after mid-1994, unable to speak, his right leg and arm immobilized. But he continued writing music, with his left hand. The media reported this, and it made Schnittke seem even more heroic.

For comparison: neither Mandelstam nor Tsvetaeva were legendary personalities in their lifetime for any sizable audience; nor did they become cultural icons right after their tragic deaths, which were not publicized. Esenin’s mythological status was assured by the unprecedented and persistent popularity of his love lyrics and secured by his suicide, which was widely discussed in the Soviet press. Mayakovsky was celebrated by the state on Stalin’s orders.

The newness of the instantaneous deification of Tarkovsky, Brodsky, and Schnittke in contemporary Russia right after their deaths was that they were promoted (at least in part for political reasons) in the West. All three had been supported by a wide-ranging network of prestigious commissions, prizes, grants, and international festivals that were thoroughly covered by the Western media.

The irony lies in the fact that the influence of this trio on the current cultural process in the West is rather limited. Tarkovsky, Brodsky, and Schnittke have what is usually referred to as cult status, and they have their great fans, particularly Schnittke, whose music is played and recorded all over the world (the conductors Gennady Rozhdestvensky and Kurt Masur, the violinist Gidon Kremer, and the Kronos Quartet). But their works are perceived as concluding chapters rather than the start of something new. For today’s fast-changing, global, and multi-cultural situation, the artistic legacy of Tarkovsky, Brodsky, and Schnittke seems too static, hierarchic, and eurocentric.

Chapter Fourteen

The rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in April 1985 is often described as the start of a totally new era in the country’s life. It is true that after the final years of Brezhnev, who had fallen into senility and died in 1982, and the brief sojourns in the Kremlin of Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko (both died after long illnesses), the appearance on the political scene of the dynamic Gorbachev seemed to herald significant changes.

But that sense of historic shift increased in hindsight, when the true meaning of Gorbachev’s leadership became apparent. Back in 1985, no one could have predicted what the seemingly routine change of general secretaries of the Communist Party, even for a younger and more energetic one, could portend.

“The country cannot go on this way.” The famous words Gorbachev allegedly uttered to his wife, Raisa, on the eve of his election, sound apocryphal.¹ Gorbachev had not shown himself to be a bold reformer at that point. Even after he took over, he was a traditional Party big shot, as can be seen from some of his cultural interventions.

In 1983, while one of the secretaries of the Central Committee, he brought to the attention of the Secretariat the “ideologically harmful” play by a young author, Ludmila Razumovskaya’s Dear Elena Sergeyevna, depicting “problem” schoolchildren. The play had already been shown in several theaters to thousands of viewers and had received mostly good reviews. But someone had denounced it to the Party leadership, and Gorbachev performed a ritual whipping of the suddenly popular young playwright.

Indignantly reading the lines of one of the characters from the play (“Come on, pop, what ideals are you talking about, there aren’t any now, come on, can you name just one?”), Gorbachev fumed: “Just this speech should have alerted any Soviet person, much less a cultural worker or a censor. We must state that there has been a lack of supervision and an absence of political vigilance…. How long are we Communists going to be ashamed of defending our Party positions and our Communist morality?”² One could argue that at that time it was mimicry, with Gorbachev just pretending. But in late June 1989, four years after he became the country’s leader (perestroika was at its height), Gorbachev summoned the Politburo to discuss the urgent problem of the publication in the USSR of the exile Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. The transcript shows: Gorbachev agreed to the publication only under pressure of his more liberal colleagues Alexander Yakovlev and Edvard Shevardnadze.

At that meeting, Gorbachev sided with the arch-conservative Yegor Ligachev in denouncing Solzhenitsyn: “I don’t think he will ever be our unconditional friend and perestroika supporter.” When he saw that the majority was on Solzhenitsyn’s side, he gave up, saying to Ligachev: “Well, are we the only ones left? I guess I’ll have to read the book.”³

Gorbachev is often called the father of perestroika. However, it did not spring from his forehead like Athena from the head of Zeus. The roots of the changes, including cultural ones, can be found in the Brezhnev era, which had been dubbed the time of stagnation.

Specifically, it was in the last ten years of Brezhnev’s administration that emigration to the West was permitted, thus creating for the first time in many years an alternative paradigm of Russian culture. This occurred in great part because the new third wave of emigration was largely embraced by the Western media.

Contact and interaction between Western journalists and the previous emigres had not developed. Solzhenitsyn mentioned it in his 1981 interview on NBC television: “In the 1930s, at the most terrible time of the Stalin terror, when Stalin destroyed many millions of people, at that time your main newspapers were proclaiming the Soviet Union as the country of world justice.”⁴

Solzhenitsyn then insisted that if in those years the West had focused its propaganda on the Soviet Union, the global situation might have changed. The Soviet citizen, the writer said, exists in an information vacuum and is continually brainwashed by his own government: “That is why radio broadcasts from abroad are so important—he can get information about himself and what is happening to us.”⁵

By the time of this interview, the West had been broadcasting to the Soviet Union for more than thirty years. Solzhenitsyn recalled that when he was released from prison camp in 1953, he used his first wages to buy a radio receiver and then “listened continually”(his words) to all Western broadcasts in Russian, trying to catch snatches of information that broke through the Soviets’ powerful jamming: “I learned so well, that even if I missed half a sentence, I could construe it from the few words I got.”⁶ Dissidents inside the country were the first Soviet citizens to break the barrier of silence and mutual distrust with the West. They were followed by a significant number of cultural figures who left the country, giving a new impulse to Western broadcasting in Russia. Viktor Nekrasov, Aksyonov, Voinovich, and other popular writers and artists appeared regularly on Voice of America, Radio Liberty, the BBC, and Deutsche Welle. They spoke to their huge audience of fans, starting a confidential dialogue that helped dismantle cultural obstacles. This genre of frank and intimate conversation was new to Soviet listeners.

The broadcasts created new stars, like the writer Sergei Dovlatov, who moved to New York from Leningrad in 1979. In the Soviet Union, almost none of his prose got into print, while in the United States his works were published one after another, first in Russian and then in the most prestigious American publishing houses. Even The New Yorker, which of the Russian emigres had previously printed only Nabokov and Brodsky, published ten of Dovlatov’s ironic short stories, which described the tragicomic adventures of Soviet “little people.” At The New Yorker, Dovlatov was justly considered a writer in the Chekhovian tradition, but they must have also sensed his connection with American prose: while in the Soviet Union, he had been influenced by Hemingway.