Symphonies for the red devil (Scotsman):
Yet as Stalin’s power became absolute, no aspect of life could escape his personal influence. Music was taken under state control in 1932, and "socialist realism" became its dogma. Tolstoy had used realism to highlight the plight of the oppressed; but in Stalin’s Russia there were no longer supposed to be any social problems. Art instead had to celebrate the triumphs of socialism. In music, anything that failed to toe the line was denounced as "formalism", and The Nose became a perfect target.
Formalism meant anything progressive or intellectually challenging. Volkov quotes a letter by the novelist Alexander Fadeyev - Stalin’s chief literary bureaucrat - more or less defining it as "capable of satisfying only people in glasses, with skinny legs and thin blood".
This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy
on Sunday, April 11, 2004 at 2:23 AM.
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