The Magical Chorus

Solzhenitsyn, who was not a big fan of “our pluralists,” had to admit: “Their influence in the West is incomparable to the influence of all previous emigrations from Russia.”²²

So somewhere in Soviet Party think tanks, people began to realize that it would be good to have their own, controlled cultural “loyal opposition.” Interestingly, the first person to propose this idea was none other than Stalin, back in 1947 in a conversation with a select group of writers, when he said that the weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta should be bolder and sharper than the official line on some issues: “It is quite possible that we will sometimes criticize Literaturnaya Gazeta for this, but it should not fear this.”²³ (Simonov, who wrote down Stalin’s words, remembered the chuckle with which he said them.) As a result Literaturnaya Gazeta for many decades functioned as Stalin had suggested: as a controlled place for the intelligentsia to blow off steam.

Apparently the similar role of “throwing stones in the permitted direction” was to be allotted to Novy Mir, but its editor, Tvardovsky, grew too independent, slipping out of the Party’s control, and was eventually ousted from his position. In the meantime two notable groups appeared in literature, partially sharing the line of Novy Mir and in some ways diverging from it—the “villagers” and the “urbanists.”

Among the most outstanding “villagers” who focused attention on the fates of villages destroyed by collectivization and war were Fedor Abramov, Vassily Shukshin, Boris Mozhaev, Viktor Astafyev, Vassily Belov, and Valentin Rasputin. Some of them were close to Tvardovsky, also a peasant poet, but the “villagers” were more conservative and anti-Western.

In the 1960s and 1970s this group, which stressed patriarchal values and idealized the contemporary Russian peasantry, was quite popular, being a powerful alternative to “industrial” literature with its cardboard characters and primitive plots. The villagers’ prose was sincere, alive, and its heroes, usually simple but noble peasants, expressed themselves in juicy language. Their characters were presented as true representatives of the Russian people, unlike the innumerable “positive” Party functionaries that populated the dreary works of state-commissioned literature.

Alas, this talented prose, which played such a vital role in reviving the landscape of Soviet culture, barely reached the Western reader. Yevtushenko once tried to interest an American publisher in Rasputin’s works. The publisher was excited at first, but faded when he realized it wasn’t “that Rasputin.”²⁴

Solzhenitsyn explained the lack of success in the West of the village writers who were dear to him in spirit and style by the fact that their themes and language were incomprehensible to Westerners; that may be so. But his own story “Matryona’s House,” paradigmatic for village prose, nevertheless was integrated into the world cultural discourse, which does not in fact reject stylistic exotica outright.

Some works of writers in the rival “urban” group, particularly the prose of Yuri Trifonov and Vladimir Makanin, did find an opening in the Western book market, especially in Europe. Dying before the advent of perestroika at the age of fifty-five in 1981, the formidable Trifonov described the drab lives of the urban intelligentsia that would be most enthusiastic about the changes that came in the Gorbachev years—the moderately liberal middle class that balanced precariously between conformity and hidden opposition.

A writer in the Chekhov mode, Trifonov amazingly managed to get a Stalin Prize in 1951, even though his father had been executed in 1937 as an enemy of the people. Some of the other urban writers—Okudzhava, Aksyonov— were also children of Soviet luminaries who were repressed in the 1930s. Anatoli Rybakov, who won the Stalin Prize the year before Trifonov, had even spent time in Siberian exile before the war.

These black marks in their resumes did not keep the urbanists from taking a visible spot in censored Soviet literature, even if they got their feathers clipped every time they tried to go beyond the proscribed limits of plot and stylistic canon. Nevertheless, every important work by an urban writer elicited great interest among readers and lively discussion in the Soviet press. In that sense they competed successfully with the village writers.

Both camps carefully distanced themselves from emigre literature. The villagers acted out of conviction, because they had always considered the writers who eventually moved to the West to be alien and false. Trifonov, on the other hand, had been friends with many of the future emigres, and he was forced in statements that appeared in print to cluck, “These writers are of course in a very bad way, because a Russian writer must live in Russia.”²⁵ At the same time, in private conversations, he spoke harshly of the Soviet regime: “I think that the corpse will rot for a long time, although perhaps we will live to see the end of it.”²⁶

Music had its own “urbanists” and “villagers.” The leader of the latter was the composer Georgy Sviridov, an important, complex figure: his Oratorio Pathetique using Mayakovsky’s revolutionary poems received the Lenin Prize in 1960; but a discerning listener could find in the music nostalgic feelings for prerevolutionary Russia. Sviridov also had a Stalin Prize, but at the same time, he almost single-handedly revived the Russian choral tradition, introducing palpably archaic and religious subtexts (mostly using poetry by Esenin, who was Mayakovsky’s antagonist). In this Sviridov was helped by the prominent choir conductors Alexander Yurlov and Vladimir Minin.

Since Shostakovich, broken by clashes with the authorities and gravely ill, was writing mostly contemplative, darkly elegiac music of a requiem nature, like his Fifteenth Quartet or his final work, the Sonata for Viola and Piano with its enigmatic quotation from Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata, the most visible representative for urban music was Rodion Shchedrin, nicknamed “Cosmonaut” by his colleagues for his nimbleness. His ballets The Little Humpbacked Horse, Carmen Suite, Anna Karenina (based on Tolstoy), and The Seagull (based on Chekhov), essentially vehicles for his wife, the brilliant prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, were staged at the Bolshoi with great success.

Shchedrin was suspicious of Sviridov’s nationalistic position. Sviridov, on the other hand, referred to Shchedrin as the “Rasputin of Soviet music,”²⁷ insisting that the urbanists’ music “was sick with soullessness: it doesn’t matter if it is simple or complex, primitive or sophisticated, our [Edison] Denisov, Shchedrin, and [Alexandra] Pakhmutova are equally lacking spirituality.”²⁸ (The insult was in equating the avant- garde works of Denisov and Shchedrin with Pakhmutova’s popular, quasi-official songs.)

Sviridov considered Soviet musical life a dead-end alley where “clever careerism and grandiose money- grubbing”²⁹ reigned. According to Sviridov, a clique from the Composers’ Union board had “divided up” the country’s main musical stages among them as their private fiefdoms: the Bolshoi Theater was Shchedrin’s “personal property,” Tikhon Khrennikov had the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater all to himself, and Leningrader Andrei Petrov basically ran the Maryinsky Theater.³⁰

But Sviridov praised the conductors Kirill Kondrashin and Yevgeny Svetlanov, champions of Russian classics both in the Bolshoi Theater and on the philharmonic stage. (Svetlanov recorded a major anthology of Russian symphonic music, which included all twenty-seven symphonies by his favorite, Nikolai Myaskovsky.) Sviridov was less enthusiastic about the work of the great St. Petersburg conductor Mravinsky, reproaching him for “excessive” interest in Western music: Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler, and Hindemith. Mravinsky was also probably the best interpreter at the time of emigre Stravinsky’s late works.

The Soviets since Stalin’s day had considered their performing arts as the most successful areas of the “cultural front.” Of course, there were problems there, too, especially with emigres. Chaliapin, the most popular Russian classical artist of the twentieth century, died in 1938 in Parisian exile, an implacable foe of the Communist regime.