> When guys like me visit Russia, we see the chaos and not the beauty.
> Perhaps this is because we in the west come from a long tradition of seeing
> truth, beauty, rationality and order as being part of an inseparable
> package. Russians, being part European but part Mongol, Turk and many other
> things, have moved through a history of varied traditions in which varying
> dosages of truth and beauty were mixed with varying dosages of irrationality
> and chaos. By the most brutal of means, Peter the Great sought to make them
> European rationalists, and to see truth and beauty as Europeans ought. He
> succeeded in part, and it is probably to him that we owe much of what is
> European in Russian music, literature and art.
>
So we in the west have rationality and order??? Ed, you must live
on some higher plain than other mortals.
I don't think ethnic origins have much to do with - well anything.
In the USSR there was a lack of bourgois period emancipation
to do more with historical events and geography than anything else.
Truth and beuty are Europian? I'm not into all the
pc rubbish but this is going a bit far...
> There was a time of openness and experimenta
tion in the arts before the
> Revolution,
actually, after the revolution, post 1917, until
the eary 20s.
> but it faded out rather quickly after that. Stalin, who was
> more oriental than European in culture and personality, pulled Russia back
> into its history of fearfulness and suspicion of the west (and the south and
> the east, and just about everything else).
What a load of xyz***!!! Those nasty orientals???!!! Blame them!
If there wasn't a Stalin, there would have been somebody else.
All the countries that fell into the pattern of underdeveloped,
illiterate (powerless) working class not being able to take
and share power, and an absence of
viable capitalist class, developed a power vacuum that was duly
filled by a totalitarian burocratic elite, not far removed
from their inherited hierarchy.
Similar powervacuum develops when a strong capitalist class
weakens but manages to defeat the workers, this time
the totalitarian regimes are fascist - a frightening probability
still for the west.
The arts reflect the society in which they flourish.
The west produced in times of more limited democracy
similarily limited art. So what?
Eva
The arts remained superficially
> European, but the rules under which they were pursued or performed and the
> purposes they served were those of oriental despotism. Many painters,
> musicians and poets left Russia. If they stayed, they were suppressed,
> killed, exiled to the gulag or emasculated and made to toe the official
> line. You should read Vitaly Shentalinsky's "Arrested Voices" to get a
> flavour of the times.
>
> You are right, Ray, that Russia produced great dancers and athletes during
> the Communist period. But was this because of a genuine interest in dance
> or sport, or was it because great dancers and athletes enhanced the image of
> the state? Perhaps it doesn't matter. Great is great, whatever the
> purpose. But it does matter in that you were allowed to be great in only
> one way. To be great in ways that were not officially sanctioned was of
> little value, and was in fact very dangerous.
>
> The Communist system produced a very large number of "one way" greats -
> artists, scientists, writers and philosophers. Russia continues to produce
> such people. It still hasn't learned to do otherwise. The problem is that
> these people are talented and often enormously skilled, but the system in
> which they could function no longer exists. "One way" thinkers were valued
> in that system; they are not valued in the system which has emerged. As an
> American consultant I met in Moscow put it: "They lack flexibility and
> creativity". Walk around Moscow in summer and see the wonderfully rendered
> watercolours the sidewalk painters have produced. All are beautifully done,
> but all look as though they are of the same thing, and even a little as
> though they were done by the same person.
>
> Anyhow, that is my two cents worth for the evening. And again, welcome back
> to the list.
>
> Ed Weick
>
>
>
>
>
>
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