Rimsky Korsakov
The names themselves, heavy with their cargoes of k's, y's and v's, are at once familiar. When strung together, they suggest the colour and richness of the culture their owners helped to create: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky, Nijinsky and Pavlova and Diaghilev. And the towering works these great artists have produced - War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, The Cherry Orchard, The Nutcracker, The Firebird - possess a resonance, a strange power that sets them apart from the cultural achievements of other nations.
Like all great works of art, they have a universality that transcends time and place, but there is nonetheless something distinctly Russian about them (although many of their creators were not ethnic Russians Ukrainian's or Georgians, among others). The creations evoke a spirit, or a tone, of the looming presence of the enormous land and its people. The physical and spiritual landscape that Leo Tolstoy evoked in War and Peace, written in the 1860s, has echoes in Boris Pasternak's 1957 novel Doctor Zhivago; it reverberates in the symphonies of Pyotr Tchaikovsky and the ballet music of Igor Stravinsky.
The presence of a distinctive national quality in the work of the best of these artists has certainly contributed both to the vitality of the country's culture and its tremendous popularity around the world - and at home. Russian citizens are the world's leading cultural consumers. More books are published, more film tickets sold, more theatres and opera houses and dance companies maintained in the former Soviet Union than in any other nation. The debut of a new ballet or a public reading by a popular poet generated that unruly excitement that Western Europeans and Americans associate with championship sports competitions or rock concerts. The publication of a new book by a major author created long queues outside bookshops - which are swiftly followed by a black market in boarded copies when the edition runs out.
But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this culture is its achievement of such greatness and popularity in an environment hostile to individual creativity. During most of the last century and half - the comparatively brief span in which virtually all of the great works were produced - all forms of art have been subject to the dictatorial control of oppressive governments. In the 19th century, the autocratic Romanov tsars tried to stifle any criticism of their regimes. Since the late 1920s, the Soviet rulers have not only refused to allow criticism but have also demanded that painters, writers and even musicians create works praising the state and its ideology. Stalin declared that artistic freedom was a bourgeois delusion; the purpose of art was to exalt the regime. Since Stalin's death in 1953, his successors in the Kremlin have occasionally tolerated creative independence, but these brief thaws have invariably been followed by new, harsh freezes. All artists in the Soviet Union had to live and work under Big Brother's unblinking gaze.
Censorship under the tsars was not as fierce or efficient as it has been under the Soviet government. The tsarist watchdogs, according to last century's Russian-born (but self-exiled) novelist Vladimir Nabokov, were mostly "muddled old reactionaries that clustered around the shivering throne". They often had trouble spotting subversion if it was cloaked under even a thin disguise - and the artists quickly became adept in Aesopian language, that is, in disguising what they wished to say as fables and tall tales.
Russia's 19th century artists also escaped some modern strictures: they might be forbidden to criticize the tsarist regimes, but they were not forced to praise them. Many of Russia's pioneering writers, composers and painters were "quite certain that they lived in a country of oppression and slavery", noted Nabokov, but they had "the immense advantage over their grandsons in modern Russia of not being compelled to say that there was no oppression and no slavery".
The artists of tsarist times had sufficient freedom to convey an astonishing amount of truth, and they did so first in literature, which exploded into new life in the early of the 19th century...
Along with writing on Russian historical places and nature Nina Spring is the owner and editor of websites which review and lists the best Home Coffee Makers and Home Cappuccino Machines.
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