Frolova-Walker, Marina and Walker, Jonathan. Music and Soviet Power, 1917–1932 (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 537 Frolova-Walker, Marina and Walker, Jonathan. Music and Soviet Power, 1917–1932. The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2012. xxvii + 404 pp. Music examples. Chronology. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. £60.00. In comparison to literature, cinema and the visual arts, the history of Russian music between the Bolshevik Revolution and the formal declaration of Socialist Realism as official Soviet artistic policy appears to have been less extensively studied. Partly this reflects the seeming paucity of major works on which scholars might focus; what are, for instance, the musical equivalents of Blok’s Dvenadtsat´ or Babel´’s Konarmiia, the films of Eizenshtein or Pudovkin, or the images of Popova or Rodchenko? It is a striking feature of the ‘Chronology of Political and Musical Events’ included in Music and Soviet Power, 1917–1932 that it gives as much prominence to Soviet premieres of Western European works such as Schreker’s Der ferne Klang (1925), Strauss’s Salome (1926), Křenek’s Der Sprung über den Schatten (1927) and Berg’s Wozzeck (1927), as it does to those of native works such as Miaskovskii’s Sixth Symphony (1924) and Shostakovich’s Second Symphony (1927). Why is it that despite the creative vitality of the Soviet 1920s in so many fields, it is compositions written under Socialist Realism — Shostakovich’s middle-period symphonies, Prokof´ev’s later symphonies, film scores, operas and piano sonatas — that still dominate performance and criticism (something that can barely be said of Socialist Realist novels and plays)? A recurrent explanation offered even at the time was that music was backward in its socialist and revolutionary development when compared to the other arts. However, a more telling and abstract explanation lies in music’s resistance to the very categories of realism, representation and ideology that were so central to discussion of the other arts; as Lunacharskii noted in 1926 in a statement included in the present volume, ‘music, unlike literature, is ineffable’ (p. 176). Thestruggletopindowntheineffableessenceofmusic’splaceinSovietsociety is amply reflected in the wide range of documents translated here by Marina Frolova-Walker and Jonathan Walker and which chart the familiar evolution of policy and practice from the initial chaos of the immediate post-Revolutionary period, through the uneasy but stimulating coexistence of and rivalry between various factions during the years of the New Economic Policy, to the seeming triumph of the proletarian wing around 1930 and eventually the establishment of single artistic unions in 1932. Building on fundamental work by scholars such as Amy Nelson (Music for the Revolution: Musicians and Power in Early SovietRussia,UniversityPark,PA,2004),NeilEdmunds(TheSovietProletarian Music Movement, Bern and Oxford, 2000) and Sheila Fitzpatrick (not least her The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917–1921, Cambridge, 1970), Frolova-Walker and Walker challenge widespread and durable myths (such as the reductive SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 538 binary opposition between modernists and proletarians that still plagues much writing on the period) and illustrate the fundamental role of personal rivalries, group identities and individual agency in a period often seen almost exclusively through the prism of official top-down ideology. Their bottom-up approach — which should be read in dialogue with accounts of Soviet artistic life that focus more directly on the role played by the institutions of party and state (as in work by Leonid Maksimenkov and Ekaterina Vlasova, or — in the literary field — Evgeny Dobrenko) juxtaposes official published sources with a wide range of archival documents, memoirs and correspondence, all of which amply demonstrate their claim that the period is best seen in terms of a struggle for limited economic resources. Throughout, translations are lively and vivid; readers will judge for themselves whether Lunacharskii can fairly be called a ‘lame duck’ (p. 222), whether the English phrase ‘like a vampire confronted by a crucifix’ best renders the original ‘kak chert ot ladana’ (p. 144), or whether Shostakovich would ever have referred to his ‘inner dude’ (p. 296). Students of Soviet cultural life have been well served by a number of important documentary sources that have been published in recent years; Music and Soviet Power, 1917–1932 is a further example of this invaluable genre and deserves to be...