My initial reaction upon reading a recent obituary of Tikhon Khrennikov in The Economist (September 1) was a reaction I often find myself having when encountering obituaries – surprise that the person was still alive, or rather had been right up until just now. In this case, my surprise is not surprising, given that Khrennikov was 94 and is probably best remembered, outside of Russia at least (and quite possibly there as well), for events a half century or so ago. The two composers his name is most associated with, Shostakovich and Prokofiev, both died decades ago.
My second reaction, after reading the entire obituary, was to rethink what I knew about this complex individual.
I had previously encountered Khrennikov in narratives of the careers of those two most prominent Soviet composers, Shostakovich and Prokofiev. In such narratives, Khrennikov usually appears as Stalin’s stooge in his position as secretary of the composer’s union. As the Economist obituary points out, “he read out a draconian speech which condemned Shostakovich and Prokofiev for their formalism, accusing Prokofiev of ‘grunting’ and ‘scraping.’” Here, Khrennikov served as mouthpiece for Stalin (something he did not deny, only claiming later that this famous denunciatory speech had been written out for him to deliver), and while the official denunciation did not derail the careers of either composer, it did for a time affect their output (e.g. Shostakovich suppressed some of his own work until after the death of Stalin, and there is a good deal of debate about the extent to which his non-suppressed works of the late 1940s and early 1950s reflect acquiescence to Stalin and the campaign against “formalism” or winking irony), and one can only wonder at the chilling effect such denunciations of major figures must have had on less well known and more vulnerable artists.
Khrennikov was a stooge, and he did help to give a veneer of cultural legitimacy to Stalin’s policies and practices, as well of those of later Soviet leaders (he remained secretary of the composer’s union until the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991). But he was no Eichmann – he didn’t facilitate the worst abuses of a totalitarian regime as many in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union did. On the contrary, in a context of severe restraint on his possible actions, he did much good. He was no Eichmann both because his actions didn’t facilitate anything so serious as death camps or the gulag, and because he didn’t just follow orders. As the Economist obituary states:
“He was part of a ruthless system; but he did not deliver up Jewish composers to Stalin’s goons, and did not write negative references when the party demanded them. (Instead, he would say that the composer had been warned of the dangers of modernism, as if the lesson was already safely learned.) None of the composers he had charge of was killed; very few were arrested.”
The last fact is particularly striking, especially given Stalin’s personal interest in the arts, especially music, and the personal attention he turned to purging music of “formalism.” Contrast the fate of composers with that of the many Soviet writers who were purged or died under mysterious circumstances.
The standard narrative of Khrennikov is easy to deal with – he’s the bad lackey to be reviled, and it’s easy to feel righteous in condemning his actions. When a fuller set of details of his life is considered, he becomes more difficult. For me, this fuller narrative raises uneasy questions about whether I would act the same in his shoes. He did much that was not admirable, but he went about doing the not-so-admirable in an admirable way, providing cultural legitimacy for Stalinism and facilitating the attack on some artistic expression to be sure, but also effectively keeping his office from facilitating purges of composers and even more privately fostering at least some degree of freedom of expression for composers in association with an artists’ compound he ran.
Showing posts with label totalitarianism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label totalitarianism. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Friday, May 25, 2007
On Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia
I’d like to call attention to a recent book worth contemplating, Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts. My own attention was drawn to the book by two well-written reviews of it, one by Tara Gallagher in The Nation (May 14, 2007, pp. 46 – 52, very positive), the other by Richard Locke in Bookforum (April / May, 2007, pp. 26 – 27, 53, decidedly mixed).
The book is largely James’ discussion of several decades of reading, with the book taking the form of a series of essays about 107 cultural figures over a span of 876 pages. Given the title, the book clearly is attempting to remedy amnesia with regard to great literary and artistic production. The book could also be taken to task for focusing almost exclusively on white, mostly European, mostly 20th century males, as Locke does to a certain extent in Bookforum. In this context, I’m mainly interested in addressing a few of James’ general arguments.
I’d first like to point out James’ interesting comments on humanism, culture, and 20th century totalitarianism, comments that both book reviewers also noted prominently. Here I quote from Gallagher’s review in The Nation, as her discussion provided a useful frame for the quotations of James:
“But James’s vision of the life of the mind only begins with the individual. His introduction explains how he used to struggle with the seeming paradox that culture doesn’t necessarily lead to humanism – witness Leni Riefenstahl or Louis-Ferdinand Céline, both of whom made common cause with totalitarian regimes. Then it dawned on him: ‘Humanism wasn’t in the separate activities’ that comprise culture, ‘humanism was the connection between them,’ ‘all the aspects of life illuminating one another, in a honeycomb of understanding.’ Humanism is the embrace of human creativity in all its variety. From this principle follows a complete aesthetics, politics and sociology of humanistic endeavor, though James would reject such lifeless and systematizing terms for the philosophy he elaborates, unsystematically and in full-blooded contact with the particulars of dozens of actual lives, across the length of the book.”
He rejects totalizing ideologies as premature synthesizing (a point emphasized by Locke’s review). Insofar as totalizing theory and totalitarianism take a basic idea or principle and use it to explain everything, any synthesis they embody is premature, but I’d even question whether this is synthesis. (As I discussed in my earlier post, “Synthesis and Eclecticism in Theory,” there is good reason to be wary of grand theorizing which claims to have the key to explaining everything.)
James seems in practice to reject synthesis altogether. Despite his key and interesting argument that humanism lies in the connection between all aspects of human life and creativity, in the bulk of the book discussing his readings of particular figures, there’s little of this, at least from one to another. There’s also no clear reason for the selection of the particular 107 individuals to be discussed, except that he gleaned something insightful from having read them. That’s actually not a bad selection criterion, and there’s something highly laudable in any sort of criticism (whether of literature, visual art, theater, or even culture in the anthropological sense) that emphasizes the qualities and features observable in the phenomenon and that attempts to contemplate and explore it on its own terms rather than through an imposed explanatory framework. (I have in mind there the usual suspects – psychoanalysis, Marxism, structuralism and post-structuralism, etc. I actually have no problem with the critical and flexible use of such theoretical frameworks when the phenomenon being discussed is amenable to such theorizing on its own terms. I’m highly suspicious, though, of attempts to use such theories as skeleton keys to explain everything, e.g. explaining all or most literature as symptoms of psychoanalytic functions, explaining everything about human society in terms of class struggle, etc.) My main caveat about James’ book, then, is not his skepticism of theory, much less of totalization, but that in making scant few connections at all, he falls short of his own humanism. (But anyone should feel happy to fall short on such a grand scale as James does here.)
The book is largely James’ discussion of several decades of reading, with the book taking the form of a series of essays about 107 cultural figures over a span of 876 pages. Given the title, the book clearly is attempting to remedy amnesia with regard to great literary and artistic production. The book could also be taken to task for focusing almost exclusively on white, mostly European, mostly 20th century males, as Locke does to a certain extent in Bookforum. In this context, I’m mainly interested in addressing a few of James’ general arguments.
I’d first like to point out James’ interesting comments on humanism, culture, and 20th century totalitarianism, comments that both book reviewers also noted prominently. Here I quote from Gallagher’s review in The Nation, as her discussion provided a useful frame for the quotations of James:
“But James’s vision of the life of the mind only begins with the individual. His introduction explains how he used to struggle with the seeming paradox that culture doesn’t necessarily lead to humanism – witness Leni Riefenstahl or Louis-Ferdinand Céline, both of whom made common cause with totalitarian regimes. Then it dawned on him: ‘Humanism wasn’t in the separate activities’ that comprise culture, ‘humanism was the connection between them,’ ‘all the aspects of life illuminating one another, in a honeycomb of understanding.’ Humanism is the embrace of human creativity in all its variety. From this principle follows a complete aesthetics, politics and sociology of humanistic endeavor, though James would reject such lifeless and systematizing terms for the philosophy he elaborates, unsystematically and in full-blooded contact with the particulars of dozens of actual lives, across the length of the book.”
He rejects totalizing ideologies as premature synthesizing (a point emphasized by Locke’s review). Insofar as totalizing theory and totalitarianism take a basic idea or principle and use it to explain everything, any synthesis they embody is premature, but I’d even question whether this is synthesis. (As I discussed in my earlier post, “Synthesis and Eclecticism in Theory,” there is good reason to be wary of grand theorizing which claims to have the key to explaining everything.)
James seems in practice to reject synthesis altogether. Despite his key and interesting argument that humanism lies in the connection between all aspects of human life and creativity, in the bulk of the book discussing his readings of particular figures, there’s little of this, at least from one to another. There’s also no clear reason for the selection of the particular 107 individuals to be discussed, except that he gleaned something insightful from having read them. That’s actually not a bad selection criterion, and there’s something highly laudable in any sort of criticism (whether of literature, visual art, theater, or even culture in the anthropological sense) that emphasizes the qualities and features observable in the phenomenon and that attempts to contemplate and explore it on its own terms rather than through an imposed explanatory framework. (I have in mind there the usual suspects – psychoanalysis, Marxism, structuralism and post-structuralism, etc. I actually have no problem with the critical and flexible use of such theoretical frameworks when the phenomenon being discussed is amenable to such theorizing on its own terms. I’m highly suspicious, though, of attempts to use such theories as skeleton keys to explain everything, e.g. explaining all or most literature as symptoms of psychoanalytic functions, explaining everything about human society in terms of class struggle, etc.) My main caveat about James’ book, then, is not his skepticism of theory, much less of totalization, but that in making scant few connections at all, he falls short of his own humanism. (But anyone should feel happy to fall short on such a grand scale as James does here.)
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