Russian Giants

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...