His memoirs,
The greatest Russian pianist, Rachmaninoff, also emigrated. Another titan of Russian piano, Vladimir Horowitz, lived in New York, a fact that Soviets found annoying, as well. But new Soviet piano lions, the best of whom had been students of Genrikh Neihaus—Richter and Gilels—took the West by storm when regular cultural contacts were established after Stalin’s death. The Soviet violinists Oistrakh and Kogan and the cellist Rostropovich were just as much a sensation in New York (where they were applauded by such Russian emigres as Yascha Heifetz, Nathan Milstein, and Gregor Piatigorsky).
Outwardly the musicians appeared to be loyal Soviet citizens, and Gilels, Oistrakh, and Kogan even joined the Party. Privately, however, they expressed their dissatisfaction with the government’s too strict cultural policy, but Rostropovich was the only one to air his complaints publicly. After he defended Solzhenitsyn (and even let him live in his dacha), Rostropovich was forced out of the country with his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, in 1974, and stripped of his Soviet citizenship by a special decree in 1978.
Ten years before that, the winner of the 1962 Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, Vladimir Ashkenazy, moved to the West. So did the creator of the first Soviet chamber orchestra, Rudolf Barshai. In 1979 a new popular chamber group, Moscow Virtuosi, was founded by the young violinist Vladimir Spivakov, and a few years later the Moscow Soloists (headed by violist Yuri Bashmet) appeared. A new generation of talented musicians, the conductors Yuri Temirkanov, Mariss Jansons, Valery Gergiev, and the pianist Mikhail Pletnev, had more creative freedom.
Ballet, which along with music was traditionally considered the most successful export of Soviet culture, still caused the Party functionaries to keep looking over their shoulders at the emigres. Even before the revolution a number of the greatest stars of the Russian ballet settled abroad: Anna Pavlova, Nijinsky, Karsavina, and the pioneer of plotless ballet, the choreographer Fokine. Diaghilev’s ballet had Russian roots, but it was a solidly based Western business by the time it achieved world fame. It started the meteoric Western careers of two new choreographic geniuses—Leonide Massine and Georgy Balanchivadze, whose name the impresario simplified to George Balanchine.
Soviet ballet, which like the opera was under the personal patronage of Stalin (continuing the Russian imperial tradition in this sphere), managed to come up with a new generation of great performers, too: the dazzling ballerinas trained in Leningrad by Agrippina Vaganova—Marina Semenova, Galina Ulanova, and Natalya Dudinskaya—and the extraordinary Moscow dancers Plisetskaya, Vladimir Vasilyev, and his wife, Ekaterina Maximova. The innovations of such masters of choreography as the avant-garde Kasyan Goleizovsky and Fedor Lopukhov and the more traditionally inclined Vassily Vainonen, Rostislav Zakharov, and Mikhail Lavrovsky (
Just when the international reputation of Soviet ballet was at its peak, it was badly shaken by a series of sensational defections: Rudolf Nureyev, Natalya Makarova, and Mikhail Baryshnikov stayed in the West. The dramatic fates of these celebrated dancers, who became the darlings of the Western media, served as yet more proof that in the cultural cold war, even an abstract art like classical ballet would inevitably be used as a political weapon.
In that sense, it was a symbolic gesture in 1979 when the American authorities stopped the departure from JFK Airport of a Soviet plane returning to Moscow carrying the wife of Alexander Godunov, premier dancer of the Bolshoi Ballet, who had just asked for political asylum in the United States. President Jimmy Carter and General Secretary Brezhnev were personally involved in this incident, which naturally got world coverage. Joseph Brodsky, in those tense days acting as interpreter for the fugitive dancer, described the drama of Godunov and his wife, separated by political circumstances, as the “Romeo and Juliet of the twentieth century.”31
A major headache for the Soviet authorities was caused by unofficial art that functioned outside the state cultural paradigm. It appeared at the juncture of visual art and poetry toward the end of the 1940s. In that bleak time, when socialist realism seemed omnipresent, strange “standoffish people with a tough individual streak,”32 as they were later characterized by one of them, the abstract artist Vladimir Nemukhin, moved into action on the margins of orthodox culture.
After the war against Hitler, some members of the Moscow artistic elite got the impression, as one observer put it, that the Iron Curtain was “badly rusted.” “We managed to get a gulp of air after the victory, especially we school kids…even in Moscow beer halls you could hear the poetry of Esenin, Gumilev, Mandelstam from people who had known the poets personally, or at least, seen them.”33 All those poets were banned at the time.
Timidly, cultural traditions and connections destroyed by the Great Terror were re-established by the emerging cultural underground. In art this was primarily the domain of the small groups of young students of surviving old masters, like Vladimir Favorsky, Robert Falk, and Pavel Filonov. In Moscow the center of attraction was Malevich’s former pupil Yevgeny Kropivnitsky, although he did not insist on his teacher’s stark Suprematism as the mandatory dogma for his own students.
Kropivnitsky and his wife and daughter, also artists, moved to the barracks settlement of Lianozovo outside Moscow, where in the 1940s Oskar Rabin, who had become Kropivnitsky’s son-in-law, joined his group; this was the first unofficial art movement in the postwar Soviet Union, and it became known as the Lianozovo Circle.
The survival of the Lianozovo Circle is one of the mysteries of Soviet cultural life in that period. Its members were marginal artists who somehow managed not to dissolve in the mainstream flow of official art. Moreover, in a strict system that denied outsiders the right to cultural activity, they fenced off a small private area for themselves where the authorities did not venture. Visitors from Moscow began frequenting the Lianozovians: there were celebrities like Ehrenburg and Konstantin Paustovsky, the liberal prose writer and idol of the Soviet intelligentsia, but also young artists and poets and curious guests. Later, foreign diplomats and tourists came, too, although officially they were not allowed to travel outside Moscow city limits: another mystery.
The Lianozovo circle included abstract, expressionist, and neoprimitivist artists. Not everyone was pleased by their work—the conceptual artist Viktor Pivovarov later admitted: “I thought the paintings of the Kropivnitskys pathetically dilettante homegrown provincialism.”34 But people were attracted and surprised by the independent lifestyle of that bizarre artistic colony right under the allegedly all-seeing eyes of the secret police.
The artists were joined by underground poets—Igor Kholin, Genrikh Sapgir, Vsevolod Nekrasov—also colorful characters who wrote brutal, experimental verse that could never be submitted to Soviet publications. Kholin, wiry and with an equine face, was a captain in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but was demoted for an ugly fight and sentenced to exile near Lianozovo, where he met the Kropivnitsky family. He started writing short, grim poems that were reminiscent of the banned work of the Soviet Dadaists of the 1920s and 1930s—Daniil Kharms, Alexander Vvedensky, and Nikolai Oleinikov, who were destroyed by Stalin.
Kholin’s nascent underground fame grew and soon the former street kid with nothing but a brief time in military school for an education, a drunkard and a womanizer, became one of the leaders of a new movement in Russian poetry, known as “barracks writing.” Like many people, Kholin lived in shanty-like barracks, where each tiny room (without plumbing and with a public outhouse) sheltered a large family.
