poet, Andre Chenier, stoically writing his greatest poetry in prison while awaiting execution. In Russia, however, there was no 'Latin perfection of form'10 to the Revolution. The Tsar was brutally shot with his entire family in a provincial basement and their bodies mutilated in a forest, while poets from the old order, like Blok and Bely, wrote half-mystical, half-musical hymns to the Revolution in the capital, seeing in it, to cite Blok, 'the spirit of music.'
Symbolic of these chaotic revolutionary years was the extraordinary institution of the Persimfans, an orchestra freed from the authoritarian presence of a conductor.11 In the emigration, there sprung up the so-called 'Eurasian movement,' which saw in the Bolshevik Revolution 'the subconscious revolt of the Russian masses against the domination of an Euro-peanized and renegade upper class.' Leading Eurasians hailed the new Soviet order for recognizing that the individual man fulfilled himself only as part of the 'higher symphonic personality' of the group; and that 'group personalities' could alone build a new 'symphonic society.'12 A kind of icon was provided for artists of this period by the pre-revolutionary painting of the 'supremacist' Casimir Malevich, 'The Cow and the Violin,' which symbolized the vague hope that the agitated creativity of the violin might somehow replace the bovine contentment of bourgeois Russia.13 Even a future fighter for the old order like Nicholas Gumilev wrote a pre- Revolutionary poem bidding the artists of his age 'look into the eyes of the monster and seize the magic violin.'14
Stringed instruments provide, indeed, the background music for this period of violent change: the gypsy violins of Rasputin's sectarian orgies in imperial palaces, the massed guitars of fashionable aristocratic nightclubs, the unparalleled profusion of virtuoso violinists in Odessa, and the balalaikas which accompanied the popular melodies sung around campfires by both sides throughout the Civil War. The consolidation of Bolshevik power between the coup of November, 1917, and the peace of 1921 provides a kind of feverish crescendo to the music of runaway violins. The
478
VI. THE UNCERTAIN COLOSSUS
1. Crescendo
479
sound of 'harps and violins' (the title of one of Blok's collections of poems) began to fade soon thereafter, so that the later, Stalinist, revolution brought silence to the cultural scene from exhaustion as well as repression. The silence was broken only by prescribed ritual, communal chants and the grotesque merriment of collective farmers dancing at pre-arranged state festivals. The role of music in the Stalin era is typified by Alexis Tolstoy's paean to Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony as the 'Symphony of Socialism.'
It begins with the Largo of the masses working underground, an accelerando corresponds to the subway system; the Allegro in its turn symbolizes gigantic factory machinery and its victory over nature. The Adagio represents the synthesis of Soviet culture, science, and art. The Scherzo reflects the athletic life of the happy inhabitants of the Union. As for the Finale, it is the image of the gratitude and enthusiasm of the masses.15
The pendulum of history had swung back from the freedom and experimentalism of the electric age to the authoritarianism of the candle-lit past. Indeed, 'the silence of Soviet culture'10 was all the more terrifying for its simulacra of sound.
The remarkable brief interlude of freedom that preceded a quarter century of Stalinist totalitarianism was dominated by three general attitudes: Prometheanism, sensualism, apocalypticism. These were preoccupations rather than fixed ideologies: recurring leitmotivs amidst the cacophony of the age, helping to distinguish it from the period immediately before or after. Each of these_ three concerns had been central to the thought of Solov'ev; each was developed to excess in the years following his death in 1900; each became suspect as Russia plunged back into a new 'iron age' under Stalin.
Prometheanism
Particularly pervasive was Prometheanism: the belief that man- when fully aware of his true powers-is capable of totally transforming the world in which he lives. The figure of Prometheus, the Greek Titan chained to a mountain by Zeus for giving fire and the arts to mankind, had long held a certain fascination for radical romantics. Marx- had idealized this legendary figure; and Goethe, Byron, and Shelley had elaborated the legend in their writings. Now the Russians, as they plunged more deeply into the mythological world of antiquity, also turned admiring eyes to Prometheus.
Merezhkovsky translated Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound; others read Prometheus und Epimetheus of the Swiss Nietzschean, Carl Spitteler, or La scommessa di Prometeo of Leopardi. Ivanov wrote a Prometheus of his own in 1918, and objects as far afield as a leading publishing house and a key musical composition of Scriabin bore the name Prometheus. Revolutionary admirers of Beethoven in Russia as elsewhere saw themselves as 'creatures of Prometheus' and hailed the Prometheus theme in the last movement of their hero's Eroica Symphony, in which Beethoven was thought to defy Christian doctrine about man by shouting 'in a voice of thunder: 'No, thou art not dust, but indeed the Master of the Earth.' '17
Russians of this period sought like Prometheus to bring fire and the arts to humanity. Thus, their interest in questions of form and technique did not, for the most part, create indifference to social questions, but rather excitement over the possibility of solving them with the alchemy of art. Moreover, increased interest in contemporary European culture did not imply indifference to Russian tradition. On the contrary, the amassing in Russia of unparalleled collections of contemporary French art and the popularization of a wide variety of contemporary Western art on the shimmering pages of The World of Art (Mir iskusstva) coincided with the rediscovery, restoration, and reproduction of icons and the development of a new, more spiritualized form of religious art by figures like Michael Nestorov.
The diversity of Russian culture in the late imperial period is exemplified by the three most widely discussed events in Russian culture during the last year before the outbreak of World War I: the first performance of Stravinsky's ultra-modern, neo-pagan 'Rite of Spring,' the opening of the first large exhibit of fully restored ancient icons and the 'futurist tour' of a group of avant-garde poets and painters. The first event took place in Paris, the second in Moscow, and the third in seventeen provincial cities. But there was little sense of conflict. As in the golden age of Pushkin, Russians of the silver age sought answers that would be equally applicable for all mankind. The preceding age of Alexander II and III and the succeeding age of Stalin were far more parochial. Populists and Pan-Slavs under the Alexanders were interested mainly in the peculiar possibilities of Russia: just as Stalinists concentrated on 'socialism in one country.' Populists, Pan-Slavs, and Stalinists all looked to the West primarily to learn from its natural scientists and social theorists. But Russian thinkers in this period looked at the full spectrum of Western artistic and spiritual experience.
With the enthusiasm of fresh converts, Russian artists saw in the newly discovered world of art something to be enjoyed for its own sake and exalted for the sake of all mankind. The term 'Russian Renaissance,'
480
VI. THE UNCERTAIN COLOSSUS
1. Crescendo
