An eye-opening look at the intersection of art and political power.
A revealing portrait of the great composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–75), who managed to keep skin and soul intact during the worst years of the Soviet terror.
Art rarely flourishes under oppression; Joseph Stalin knew this, even if some cultural historians seem not to. One surprise in Volkov’s (St. Petersburg, 1995) richly detailed study is just how much political license artists such as Shostakovich, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Boris Pasternak enjoyed, as did other members of the intelligentsia. (Others, of course, were not so fortunate, for Stalin thrived on keeping his subjects off balance.) A case in point: in 1936, when Shostakovich came under attack in the pages of Pravda for “formalism,” many intellectuals publicly rose to his defense. “We are accustomed to thinking of the second half of the 1930s in the Soviet Union as a time of total fear, complete unanimity, and absolute subordination to the dictates of Party and state,” writes Volkov; yet the dissidents “denied the right of the Party and Stalin to dictate cultural opinions to them.” Volkov offers a masterful account of the fine art of accommodation: Stalin loosening the reins now and again as long as the artists kept producing, artists such as Shostakovich—especially Shostakovich—playing the yurodivy, or “holy fool,” to speak “dangerous but necessary truths to the face of the tsar.” (Yet not always to his face; Shostakovich also traded in subtleties, such as insinuating Jewish motifs into his music in order to protest official anti-Semitism.) Stalin was mercurial, of course—an actor who flubbed his lines in the leader’s presence went on to win the Stalin Prize, but the relevant cultural officials were purged—and the pace of oppression actually quickened after WWII, when Soviet intellectuals dared to hope more or less openly that the West, having dispatched one despot, would take Stalin on.
An eye-opening look at the intersection of art and political power.Pub Date: March 29, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-41082-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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