Arts and politics collide in Russia in "The Magical Chorus"

"The Magical Chorus: A History of Russian Culture from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn"

By Solomon Volkov, translated by Antonina Bouis

Knopf, 333 pp., $30

In "The Magical Chorus," Solomon Volkov presents an encyclopedic overview of the past 100 years of Russian artistic life, filled with stories about the works, personal dramas and political struggles of the country's best-known writers, composers and performers. At its best it is an entertaining, gossipy book. At its worst it is a rambling series of disjointed vignettes and undigested details that highlight the book's lack of rigor and larger conceptualization.

The animating idea behind Volkov's book, such as there is, is the notion that culture and politics are "indivisible" and that this fact has never before been so starkly evident as in Russia in the 20th century, when "perhaps for the first time in history did such a brutal experiment of politics being forced into the cultural life of such a huge country take place over such a long period."

As far as it goes, this pronouncement is beyond argument, and "The Magical Chorus" recounts the many famous clashes between Russia's rulers and her artists. We read about the battles between Leo Tolstoy and Tsar Nicholas II, between Dmitry Shostakovich and Stalin, between Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Brezhnev.

These accounts reinforce the traditional view of the relationship between power and culture in Russia as essentially antagonistic. Yet although the frequently tortuous repression of artistic expression was real and profound, the history of this relationship was more complex than Volkov depicts here.

A musicologist and noted (as well as controversial) author, Volkov was born and raised in the former Soviet Union, immigrating to the United States in the 1970s. His personal story shapes "The Magical Chorus" in important ways. Volkov has known many of the people he writes about (a fact he never fails to mention), and the finest parts of the book draw on his own experiences of life in the USSR. His intimate knowledge of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras lends his discussion a subtle and nuanced richness.

Consequently, these parts have the unintended effect of making the weaknesses of the book's first half that much clearer. When writing about periods he did not experience, Volkov resorts to stale clichés and ill-informed assertions. What's more, despite Volkov's stated goal of placing his study of culture within the proper social and political context, the parade of writers, poets, artists and movements hangs awkwardly in the air, cut off from the world that gave birth to them and which is vital to their comprehension.

A product of the age of cynicism and dissidents, Volkov fails to recognize the enormous power the utopian Communist ideology of the early 20th century exercised over so many Russian intellectuals. Not only did they merely go along with the radical designs of the Bolsheviks, as he suggests, rather they shared the revolutionaries' belief in mankind's ability to leap headlong into a radiant future, thus helping to make the horrors of the Soviet experience possible.

It is a blindness of this sort to the complicated, shifting interplay between culture and politics, together with a pinched definition of the former centered on the creations of the great masters, that leads Volkov to conceive of culture's role in society in simplistic terms. He reduces this messy interaction to a tidy, unconvincing morality play between the forces of darkness and light. This chorus sings off-key.

Douglas Smith is a resident scholar at the University of Washington and the author of "The Pearl: A True Tale of Forbidden Love in Catherine the Great's Russia" (Yale University Press).