The Icon and the Axe

The revolutionary events of 1917-18 in which Lenin played such a crucial role have a kind of musical quality about them. Mercier's characterization of the French Revolution, "Tout est optique,"9 might be changed for the Russian Revolution into "Tout est musique." In France there was a certain "demonic picturesqueness" in the semi-theatrical public execution of the King (on which Mercier was commenting) and in the aristocratic, neo-classical 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

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VI. THE UNCERTAIN COLOSSUS

1. Crescendo

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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