 |
| "Man in a Suprematist Landscape" by Kazmir Malevich |
Revolutions are produced by men of action, one-sided
fanatics, geniuses of self-limitation. In a few hours or days they overturn the
old order. The upheavals last for weeks, for years at the most, and then for
decades, for centuries, people bow down to the spirit of limitation that led to
the upheavals as to something sacred.
—Doctor
Zhivago
Boris Pasternak
We resembled the great Inquisitors in
that we persecuted the seeds of evil not only in man’s deeds, but in their
thoughts. We admitted no private sphere, not even inside a man’s skull.
—Darkness
at Noon
Arthur Koestler
“Music is the great uniter. An incredible force.
Something that people who differ on everything and anything else can have in
common.”
―Just Listen
Sarah Dessen
Anyone interested in reading a compelling novel on the preparation for
and the conducting of
Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony might first wish
to read my
review
of Sara Quigley's
The Conductor.
In a review, I wrote: "Julian Barnes's The Noise of Time is a masterful example of a new
hybrid form, the fictional biography in which there are no imagined characters;
the novelist confines himself to the historical record, but enters into the
consciousness of his subject. Barnes’s subject is the Soviet composer Dmitri
Shostakovich and his ghastly “conversations with power.” Barnes limits himself
to three major episodes in the composer’s life: the period during the Great
Terror of the 1930s when the composer confronted the possibility that he would
be sent to the Gulag or shot after Stalin wrote a blistering editorial
condemning his opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District; after the war ,when he
was blackmailed into attending a propaganda tour in New York to deliver a
series of speeches denouncing his own work; and, provided in the third section,
a 1960 snapshot of an elderly Shostakovich, sitting in the back of a
chauffeur-driven car, during the reign of “Nikita the Corncob” in which he is
forced to join the Party that has humiliated him throughout his professional
life. There is little action as the composer waits; memories surface that in
turn give way to rueful reflections. Yet the novel is one of the most
insightful about the difficult role of the artist in a police state."
 |
| Osip Mandelstam |
Unlike
composers the art of poetry does not easily lend itself to coded messages that
can protect the artist. Osip Mandelstam courageously recited to a small group
of trusted friends in his own home, one of whom betrayed him, leading to his
subsequent arrest in May 1934 for his savagely satirical lampoon that
characterizes Stalin as a “murderer and peasant-slayer” with “cockroach
whiskers” and “fingers as fat as worms” who surrounds himself with “fawning
half-men for him to play with.” Mandelstam, who possessed granite-like
integrity in his frail body received a temporary reprieve through the
intervention of Bukharin, and was sent with his wife into internal exile.
Hoping to save himself, he expressed a willingness to atone for his lese
majesty and write poems in praise of Stalin. But as the terror deepened and
enveloped millions by May 1938, he was rearrested after the dreaded knock at
the door, and dispatched to the camps where he died of malnutrition and a heart
attack in transit.
Although Mandelstam’s voice was stilled, his friend and
fellow poet, the gifted and enormously resilient Anna Akhmatova, felt the need
to continue the tradition of earlier poets and assume a moral responsibility to
be the voice of memory by bearing witness to these ghastly times. Between 1935
and 1940, although she dared not speak it aloud because she was under
conspicuous surveillance by the NKVD, who clearly intended to intimidate her,
Akhmatova ended her silence by sculpting in words a memorial to the victims of
the Stalinist terror, "Requiem" (not published in Russia during her lifetime)
that expressed with searing emotional clarity what others could only feel. It
was written on scraps of paper, a fragment read silently by a friend who
committed it to memory and burned the paper. Grounded in personal experience,
she stood in a prison queue with a food parcel for her son, after he (who was
arrested repeatedly), and her lover were arrested within a couple of weeks of
each other primarily as hostages to ensure her compliance. Standing in that
line with women also desperate for news of their loved ones, Requiem is a testament to their
suffering and by extension the anguish of a whole people.
I
review Amor Towles' astonishing novel,
A Gentleman from Moscow.
 |
| Pasternak and Olga Ivinskaya |
"And here was Pasternak giving a representative for the Milanese publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli the manuscript of
Dr Zhivago –
a love story he knew the Soviet authorities would never allow to be
published because it didn't "conform to official cultural guidelines".
For one thing,
Dr Zhivago had nothing positive to say about the new Russia. As the editors of the literary journal
Novy Mir told
him, they couldn't possibly print extracts from it because of its
"non-acceptance of the socialist revolution". For another, the novel
was, like all love stories, – indeed, like all but the most manically
modernist fiction – premised on the idea of the individual human
consciousness. Post-tsarist
Russia,
on the other hand, was centralised and collectivist and anti anything
that spoke to what it saw as the bourgeois fantasy of the self and its
essences."
—From a review in the
Guardian by Christopher Bray of
The Zhivago Affair by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée. To read the complete review, click on the following link:
 |
| Within the Whirlwind |
Within
the Whirlwind is a relatively conventional biopic,
but one done with immaculate intelligence,
plenty of creativity and the kind of good taste that seems to know
innately what and what not to stick up there on the screen. Written by Nancy
Larson, from Eugenia Ginzburg's own memoir, the film tosses us, almost from the first,
into the paranoid purges of Russian dictator Joseph Stalin and his apparatchiks.
We quickly learn that Eugenia's husband is going to be of little help. Whether he is frightened for his own skin or
that of their children, Eugenia is soon on her own. Few of the Russian intelligentsia of the time
escaped these purges. Imprisonment was
preferable to death, and Ginzburg manages to survive the Siberian gulag.
For a film that deals mainly with a time of
captivity in a place of wretched deprivation, the film manages to show us a
fair amount of small, kind—sometimes quite surprising—moments. From a bowl of raspberries handed by a
peasant girl into the boxcar in which the prisoners are being shipped to a
dinner in the home of Russian camp commandant and the many acts of kindness
between the women prisoners—one of whom steps in front of a guard's rifle to
protect her friend—these tiny fragments build slowly, helping the women to
survive. Ginzburg is also nourished by the love of a German doctor and the solace
of poetry.
