REVIEWS
Zakim, Michael & Stone, Douglas & Pinsker, Sanford & Lekachman, Robert & Coser, Lewis & Hausknecht, Murray
AMBITION: THE SECRET PASSION, by Joseph Epstein. New York: E. P. Dutton. 312 pp. $13.95. At one point in The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow's larky protagonist gets hooked up with an...
...The man writes well and, usually at his kookiest, rises to eloquence...
...AS AN UNQUALIFIED ADMIRER of free enterprise, Gilder rejects with proper vigor progressive taxes, environmental and other regulation, and similar impediments to competition, red in tooth and claw...
...Like any other enthusiast, Gilder is undeterred by niggling criticisms of this variety...
...Always, he seems trapped by despair...
...15.00...
...When he says that "Lenin's key associates in St...
...Not surprisingly, he finds himself satisfied, though not complacent, with the way it has held up, and I think there are good grounds for his satisfaction...
...Given half a chance, polygamous men will enjoy sexual diversity without accepting family responsibility...
...This oral art was an organic link to past centuries, integral to native culture...
...This is an array of opinions, stories, anecdotes, descriptions, speculations— bits of memories and feelings that bring Shostakovich's personality and life into focus...
...There are exceptions, including the opera Lady Macbeth...
...That Shostakovich survived Stalin can be attributed to a willingness to sacrifice his integrity...
...Free to roam in the jungles of commerce, entrepreneurs in the 19th century made capitalism great...
...SOVIET DISSIDENTS: THEIR STRUGGLE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS, by Joshua Rubenstein...
...Nonetheless, he and many others "continue to believe that the qualified application of the established model remains useful...
...He points out that the Zionist emigration movement would not be such an astonishing success without the aid of many important non-Jews such as Valery Chalidze and Andrei Sakharov...
...It is a book that David Stockman can read between a day of cutting social programs for those who have less of a hand in forming their destinies than Epstein likes to imagine and a night of undisturbed sleep...
...His most evocative music—for instance, the slow, dirgelike movements in the Sixth, Eighth, and Thirteenth (Babi Yar) symphonies —reflected not only the traditional inner tensions of an artist but Shostakovich's own silent, bitter struggle with the state...
...381 Rubenstein makes it clear that dissent is a natural reaction to conditions in the Soviet Union and not, as Soviet officials claim, the result of Western propaganda or merely the work of mental misfits out to cause embarrassment to the regime...
...Antisuccess has been perhaps the strongest strain in American literature of the past half century...
...Unlike Sakharov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn is wary of Western-style democracy, consumer "materialism," and detente with the Soviet Union...
...Happily his prose style reflects Harvard rather than the effusions of the Moral Majority...
...Billington's vivid description of the Palais Royal, the oasis of free thought, which is transformed by its owner, the reform-minded Philip of Orleans, into a vast complex of cafes, exhibition halls, entertainment centers, and bordellos is alone worth the price of admission...
...304 pp...
...In the Ukraine, for as long as anyone could remember, this Old World tradition was carried on by blind minstrels who traveled through the countryside...
...The revolutionary Convention, with only one dissenting voice, voted to outlaw all women's associations...
...Perhaps this memoir tells us why...
...Gilder is fun to read...
...That he survived as a whole, and very private, person, so acutely separate from his public self, is not so certain...
...Historians cannot resist the temptation to compare periods of Russian history and neither does Mr...
...They may yet do so again if the blundering interference of government ceases...
...He then leaves this whole theme when he depicts the national and social revolutionary trends of the mid-19th century and after...
...But nowhere does Billington say anything to the contrary...
...It took an interrogator four days to find a copy, which then had to be purchased...
...LET'S TURN TO some of the promises included in the book's ambitious subtitle—A Wide-Ranging Look at Changing Attitudes About Achievement in America...
...He speaks with bitterness but also with irony—self-protection, really...
...He views detente as the basic vehicle to move the Soviet Union away from its isolation and to speed internal democratization...
...Hollander opts for a characterization of "imperfect pluralism" and "imperfect totalitarianism...
...Roy Medvedev, however, represents another current in contemporary Soviet dissident thinking...
...Still, fair is fair...
...No matter...
...He had to distance himself from the terror, in order to survive...
...This is an oral history, most of it written down in 1972 during conversations between Dmitri Shostakovich and Solomon Volkov, a young Jewish Soviet musicologist...
...There are still other places where Billington's deep-seated suspicions about much, though not all, revolutionary thought seem to lead him to uncautious formulations...
...His family had a narodnik background and had supported the Bolsheviks during the Civil War...
...And I told Stalin the pure truth: "I'm nauseated...
...Moreover, Epstein has made it clear on other occasions that he has little patience with those who lobby for fictions that portray liberated women, suffering Jews, contented homosexuals, or militant blacks...
...Anyone implicated in this development, anyone associated even by their acquiescence to the authorities' bloody intimidations was seen by Shostakovich as guilty of collaboration...
...Here revolutionary journalists rubbed shoulders with mystical sectarians, humanitarian ideologues, occult would-be saviors of humanity, as well as a variegated underworld of confidence men...
...The author examines the complex relationship between democratic and Zionist activities...
...As dissidents consistently reiterate that the laws be taken seriously, this certainly confounds and torments the authorities...
...476 pp...
...He talks about the Illuminati, the Philadelphian fantasies, the passions for the idea of the Pythagoreans and other occult ideas and organizations only in the first part of the work, which deals with the late 18th and early 19th centuries...
...This has led commentators such as Peter Singer (New York Review of Books, 11/6/80) to argue that Marx and Engels, Proudhon and Lassalle owed nothing to occult sectarians and were true sons of the Enlightenment...
...Achievement," as Epstein defines the term, clearly counts for more than history's judgment...
...The first part of the book, devoted to the French Revolution and its preparatory phases, abounds in fascinating descriptions of the new world of popular journalism, of revolutionary songs and opera, of popular festivities, and of outbursts of suddenly liberated psychic energies...
...For him detente is equated with Western "complaisance" and "concession...
...He not only equates achievement with becoming rich and successful, but he singles out robber barons for special praise...
...Mayakovsky appeared at the theater dressed in yellow, with a flower painted on his cheek...
...At least one could compose again and one's works were performed...
...As Pyotr Yakir explains the basic aim of the umbrella dissident movement: [ We] tried to make public every illegal act committed in our country so that all the world may know...
...In a similar way, when Billington says earlier that Lassalle's mass oratory and fascination with Bismarck "prefigured in a way the later German fascination with the radio voice and aggressive masculinity of National Socialism," one is led to ask whether aggressive mass oratory was limited to Germany in the 19th century and after...
...In 1980, however, the Soviet Union is a nuclear superpower with weaponry to intimidate Europe and the world—and so there are striking points of difference between the Russia of Nicholas and the Russia of Brezhnev...
...I can't do anything anyway...
...Or take Billington's characterization of Lenin's theory of imperialism...
...He supplements here the many first-hand anguished accounts by numerous dissidents now available in English...
...The "exultant" last movement was for him—and, he insists, for the audience on the night of the premiere—a threnody for the rape of Russian life...
...Petersburg student subculture," one must ask why a student subculture could not sustain deep convictions, and second whether men like Yury Martov lacked such convictions...
...Pictures of the institutional realities of Soviet life have to be pieced together as best one can...
...He had the prescience to give Volkov sufficient proof of authenticity and, more important, to arm his friend with the most potent weapon: historical truth...
...All its songs, its music and poetry...
...First, he ranges across the entire institutional structure so that, for example, there are comparisons of the political system, stratification and styles of life, sex roles and family life, and a survey of what American textbooks call "social problems" in both societies...
...In the dawn of anthropological time, the potlach won glory and power for the chiefs whose banquets were most lavish...
...And as we decide and choose, so are our lives formed...
...The revolutionary faith," he writes, "was shaped not so much by the critical rationalism of the French Enlightenment (as is generally believed) as by the occultism and protoromanticism of Germany...
...Billington's claim that religious thought is a dominant theme in revolutionary ideology cannot be sustained on the basis of his own data...
...In Epstein's case, however, the pseudoEmersonian language serves as a thin disguise for the exploitation and greed that lie underneath...
...The latter allows for the awareness that "totalitarianism" is a concept that took its meanings and connotations from the Stalin era and that its unqualified application today can be misleading...
...It has often been said that Shostakovich never realized the genius his First Symphony promised...
...The two had ambitious plans for future collaboration...
...It has something to please everyone...
...Rubenstein...
...indeed, even those who share his views of the New Left may find their expression striking a somewhat sour note when read in the'80s...
...His dissociation from everything political, his works written at the behest of the authorities and used for propagandistic purposes, and his emergence in the West and at home as a Soviet hero all seem to put him in league with those he condemns...
...More important, it sidesteps the question of what we get when our individual "ambitions" are toted up...
...For him, backbiting begins at home: Certainly no major American literary figure has failed to get in his word on the subject of success, and most have not spoken kindly of it...
...Few knew what was going on and they kept their mouths shut: Sometimes I chastize myself for keeping quiet rather than talking, and not only talking but even publishing articles on these trumped-up musical festivals...
...Visible Man, his revelation of that year, insisted that welfare was destroying the morale of black men...
...From what...
...Medvedev believes that only the Soviet government can initiate democratic internal reforms, but that Western technological equipment will inevitably assist in the liberalization of the Soviet regime...
...Not since the late 19th century has so much moral pabulum been heaped up on behalf of SelfReliance...
...the real question posed by ambition is whether or not each of us has a true hand in shaping his own destiny...
...The necessity of constructing a picture of a society from bits and pieces, from hints and indirect clues that, at the extreme, can transform a 380 serious scholar into a Kremlinologist makes the central problem of any comparative study even more critical in this instance: How, in the jargon of the trade, are the societies to be "conceptualized...
...Affluence is a sham, a greedy affair bringing no happiness (see Galbraith et al...
...In Hungary after completing secondary school he worked mainly in manual jobs after serving a stint in the military...
...These notices signaled a purge in contemporary Russian music of the intellectual and antimelodious tendencies popular in the serial and dissonant music of the West...
...This book, especially its first part, will be indispensable for all those who wish to probe the revolutionary experience and revolutionary personalities at some depth...
...Only reform welfare, and black men will go to work, bring back sustenance to their mates, and rejoin the proud company of nuclear family men...
...Consensual divorce, informal sexual arrangements, working women, and publicly subsidized idleness assault the roots of the bourgeois ethic...
...It is the product of a yurodivy...
...306 pp...
...And to be against success is to put ambition in grave doubt...
...When the Helsinki Watch Groups were initiated in 1975 the dissident leaders acted openly and members signed their reports in order to emphasize the legality and the nonconspiratorial nature of their work...
...Of course, their guests incurred obligations to reciprocate in kind, but no chief could be certain of return...
...Meanwhile, he seethed with frustration at such repeated humiliations...
...His Fifth Symphony was written in 1937 while Shostakovich was in extreme disfavor...
...Could one, particularly a celebrity, survive without collaborating...
...Boston: Beacon Press...
...He soon became associated with the most eminent figures of his day...
...He maintains that it is best to assume that "totalitarianism should be viewed as in intention of the Soviet leaders," and he cites with approval another expert who contends that these leaders have "a peculiar ideological drive for remaking human nature...
...Shostakovich's justifications are still not easy to understand...
...SHOSTAKOVICH CAME OF AGE soon after the October Revolution, a period of relative liberalism in Soviet art...
...SOVIET AND AMERICAN SOCIETY: A COMPARISON, by Paul Hollander...
...It was she who made him stay close to the rulers," Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Bukharin...
...At this juncture, Gilder makes his own original addition to the standard case for capitalism...
...A Pravda editorial the previous year, purportedly written by Stalin himself, had denounced Shostakovich's successful opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District as antisocialist and "formalistic" (noisy "muddle instead of music...
...Robey's project is only one of the many lunatic schemes Augie bounces across and, needless to say, it is never completed...
...Where, one wonders, would Willie Mays, or Dr...
...Two examples: He claims that Engels asserted in one of his last writings that the German Social Democrats were "destined to become the new state religion of the very empire that had persecuted them...
...To be sure, puritanical Jacobins shunned such disreputable quarters, but the revolutionary pamphleteers, writers, and editors, who did so much to fuel the revolutionary passions that the Jacobins first tried to channel and later to suppress, largely emanated from the Palais Royal...
...Hollander was twenty-four years old when he left Hungary in 1956 to study at the London School of Economics...
...Its pages constitute a veritable anthology of the truths of the Reagan era and, for good measure, a novel doctrine of its author's invention...
...This term includes admirers and opponents of Western-style democracy, religious believers and atheists, Leninists and social democrats, Zionists, Russian nationalists, and spokesmen for the rights of the nonRussian nations...
...It's as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, "Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing," and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, "Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing...
...Who is to blame, Epstein asks again and again, for the fish-eye that some Americans give to success, for the contempt they feel toward the unabashedly ambitious...
...For Gilder, this utilitarian justification will not do...
...It was the poet's relationship to Stalin and the To Our Contributors • When sending manuscripts, please make sure that you do not send your only copy • And please also be sure to enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...Hollander had something more ambitious in mind...
...I answered that I couldn't...
...That he had enough hope left to want to produce this testament is a victory of the human spirit in an otherwise victoryless story...
...Thus was it ever...
...James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Robert Herrick, Frank Norris, Henry James— through the nineteenth century, from Cooper's distrust of the self-made man to James's deliciously sneering reference to his countrymen's "grope of wealth"—viewed success in America in terms ranging from equivocation to condemnation...
...Hollander is distinctly opposed to any notion that the longterm drift of both societies is toward convergence...
...Unlike his friends who perished, he compromised successfully time and time again...
...It is at once an extended, neoconservative prayer to the twin gods of Ambition and Success, and a relentless attack on those who have given raspberries to the work ethic...
...Epstein ignores, and probably distrusts, any impulses that generate from a source other than the pocketbook...
...Shostakovich's musical mentor Nikolai Zhilayev soon followed...
...But now it's more of a comedy...
...He is a Marxist dissident inside the Soviet Union who criticizes the remnants of Stalinist Russia from a leftist perspective...
...He saw Mayakovsky drawn to the heady position of a companion to the powerful, and serving them as a mouthpiece for the specious directives aimed at the intelligentsia that marked the advent of socialist realism in the arts...
...As his subtitle indicates, Hollander contrasts two societies commonly conceived of as being antithetical social structures, although at the time he was writing, the idea that there was a "convergence" of the two was a popular notion...
...It does all tend to transform one's judgment of ITT altruistically conniving at the overthrow of the Allende regime, Nestle marketing infant formula to be mixed with polluted water in the poor societies of the Third World, Hooker Chemicals thoughtfully strewing poisonous chemicals around the landscape, food conglomerates solicitously training tiny TV viewers in the merits of junk foods, and of so many, many other bustling altruists...
...Rubenstein presents the extremely wide range of opinion among various Russians who are conveniently lumped together under the current descriptive term "dissidents...
...Ambition is unseemly and everywhere suspect (see What Makes Sammy Run, The Great Gatsby, and, for nonreaders, the movies Citizen Kane and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz...
...The issue is not how we choose to live—as if this were an isolated event devoid of social consequences—but, rather, what kind of world we want to live in...
...Messianic and eschatological elements can surely be found in the history of revolutionary ideas...
...In reaction to the heightening nightmare, he retreated into the role of a yurodivy—a Russian life of outer apathy but inner turmoil and alienation, exemplified for Shostakovich by the 19th-century nationalist composer Moussorgsky...
...This could put an end to the hope for continued internal change in the Soviet Union and for the eventuality of real peace in the world...
...Epstein, an English professor, knows...
...But if we want to know why students are so shamefaced about the notion of "making money," Epstein has an answer: The reason is that it [ambition, success, making money, the Whole Works] has been systematically downgraded fora number of decades now, and these students, often the best among them, have learned their lessons well...
...But what can I do...
...Males are programmed to hunt, dominate, and fight...
...history, not biography, is decisive...
...That is, everyone except Joseph Epstein...
...Although Rubenstein is confident that the dissident movement is now a permanent fixture inside the Soviet Union, there are warnings that this may not be so...
...artists who would deeply influence him and would, after their destruction in the purges, leave Shostakovich as one of the few living links to that obliterated cultural epoch...
...When one reads the text, however, of Engels's introduction to a new edition of Marx's The Class Struggles in France, it turns out that all he did was to compare the early stages of Christianity and its slow infiltration into the nooks and corners of Roman society with the slow peaceful penetration into German society by Social Democratic members and ideas...
...The last named cannot help admitting that "Wealth and Poverty is Promethean in its intellectual power and insight...
...Moreover, his sketchy treatment of Lenin hardly departs from standard works...
...It seemed to us that his works, which invoked the passion and melancholia of the proverbial Russian soul, also betrayed a sense of personal tragedy...
...Solzhenitsyn, like the Slavophiles, believes in a unique, almost Dostoevskian spiritual development of Russia under a fatherly benevolent Czar who will lead the messianic salvation of the world...
...The same holds true for chapters devoted to Marx, Bakunin, Proudhon, and German Social Democracy...
...Too much of the contemporary canon has become, in Epstein's analogue, an "Equal-Opportunity Employer," one arranged along liberal biases...
...Since Visible Man, Gilder has done a quantity of heavy reading of selected anthropologists, sociobiologists, conservative economists, and psychologists who recognize the importance of inherited intelligence...
...The conspiratorial societies that fed both movements, from the Italian carbonari and Mazzini's Young Italy and Young Europe to the various clandestine movements against Napoleon, the restored Bourbon regime, and the reign of Louis Philippe are dealt with in considerable detail, but there seems little here that has not been adequately depicted elsewhere...
...Any community that separates sexual pleasure from the obligation to pay for its biological consequences will surely endure the very social patholo373 gies of the United States in the 1980s...
...In the end, forming our own destiny is what ambition is about...
...At $16.95, I don't say that Wealth and Poverty is cheap, but over the next four years it may well justify purchase at a Barnes & Noble discount as a reference work for explication of wild events in Washington and the provinces...
...And the attention paid to the book and its perpetrator attests to the times in which we live...
...We choose...
...But even here, when it comes, for example, to the story of Russian populism, Billington doesn't provide much that cannot be found in Venturi's great history of that subject...
...Now we try to publicize every arrest, every dismissal...
...That subject is far more complicated than anything Epstein provides in his pinchfaced book...
...His Testimony is his response to the guilt and survival of that nightmare...
...And Soviet rulers are quicker to penetrate, and more determined to prevent, any contact between political dissidents and workers...
...Shostakovich now entered the artistic circles of Leningrad...
...Epstein begins his investigation by insisting that "Ambition is the fuel of achievement...
...An American sociologist can describe not only the "official" values of, say, American schools or the formal structure of the congressional committee system but also collect information on the actual values that determine the functioning of school systems and directly observe the functioning of the committee system...
...The later parts, which bring the story up to the Russian Revolution, are considerably less original...
...Which is to say, Ambition spends most of its time in rear-guard actions, doing battles with enemies who have long since departed the field...
...It also lends his work a dimension that can only come from a first-hand knowledge of a Soviet-type society...
...HOW DIFFERENT WAS SHOSTAKOvICH...
...16.95...
...Although this book is not in the same class as Billington's earlier work, it still has considerable merit, along with major flaws...
...An attempt at "comparison" is not in itself unusual...
...In one feast of pop social science, Gilder has served up the favorite nostrums of neoconservatives, Moral Majoritarians, male chauvinist pigs, supply siders, monetarists, and nostalgic admirers of family life on the frontier...
...The book was published here in 1979 amid much excitement, and promptly denounced by the Soviets as a forgery...
...Into the bargain, they erode the work ethic because "Two half-hearted participants in the labor force can do better than one who is competing aggressively for the relatively few jobs in the upper echelons...
...He turns "ambition" into a synonym for selfishness...
...Billington's previous book, his masterful cultural history of Russia, The Icon and the Axe, was acclaimed as a major departure in the interpretation of Russian culture...
...Academics take such delight in the naysaying they pass off as required reading that their students have little choice but to mouth back the language of cynicism or dummy up: "Excitement at the prospect of a career devoted to making money, even if it is felt, cannot be openly expressed...
...By the mid 1970s both groups realized the importance and benefit of working together against a relentless common antagonist...
...In this connection Shostakovich raises, indirectly —quite apart from the question of real guilt and innocence—a fascinating and less discussed aspect of Stalinism: the psychology of the survivors, the guilt and anger that plagued those who outlived the terror...
...Sometimes his voice is sad and faraway, speaking with detachment of the turmoil of earlier years, almost nostalgic for a comfort he never really had...
...they are influenced by an unusual personal history...
...What Epstein hankers for is hardly new, but he is one of the first to demand it from "our" side of the lectern: Perhaps the one novel that no serious writer in America would care to write today is one about a man who sets out to succeed in life and does so through work, decisive action, and discretion, without stepping on anyone's neck, without causing his family suffering, without himself becoming stupid or inhumane...
...But even a cursory look at American culture suggests otherwise...
...Augie will, presumably, be his research assistant and, presumably, Robey will write a "survey or history of human happiness from the standpoint of the rich": He wanted to call it The Needle's Eye [Augie tells us] because there never had been a spiritual life for the rich if they didn't give up everything...
...People who believe that our control over our own destinies is slight, if not nonexistent, will not think very well of ambition: it may even seem rather comical to them...
...Millions of people were destroyed and nobody knew anything about it...
...WEALTH AND POVERTY, by George Gilder...
...PS: Since this review was written, Shostakovich's son, Maxim, the eminent Soviet conductor, and his son, a pianist, have defected to the West...
...We know now that he wasn't...
...Even as youngsters playing his music, we were aware that Shostakovich had led a life dominated by the vicissitudes of Soviet politics, that his art was frequently manipulated for the party's antiartistic purposes...
...This has led to the public exposure of the house that Lenin built and Stalin refortified for what it is—a society that regularly practices systematic intimidation and arbitrary rule...
...Business, to begin with, is hypocritical and sterile (see Babbitt...
...He takes a more qualified stand and perhaps gives a more realistic appraisal than Sakharov of the influence detente can exert on internal Soviet affairs...
...the guardians of high culture have always responded with "Let them eat Blake...
...This part provides a fascinating journey into the hitherto largely neglected underworld of journalists, actors, marginal intellectuals, and failed professionals who furnished much of the leadership of the French revolutionary movement...
...Hundreds of the blind folk singers gathered, answering Stalin's call "to build a better future...
...Investors risk their money with no certainty that they will regain it, much less earn a profit...
...They attempt to erase from collective memory disreputable ancestors...
...Shostakovich has produced a historical document, salvaging memories that no longer officially exist in the U.S.S.R...
...These events are a reminder that there is always the strong chance of the Soviet Union shifting in a different direction, inward perhaps, or of a return to outright Stalinist methods...
...Middle-class life is essentially boring (see modern literature...
...The last chapter, however, on the role of women in revolutionary movements, is a splendidly evocative study of a largely neglected subject...
...From Adam Smith to Irving Kristol, apologists for capitalism have emphasized self-interest as motive force for innovation and growth...
...Why are you nauseated...
...Recently, Amnesty International reported it had yet to hear of a single case in which a Soviet court had acquitted anyone charged with a political or religious offense...
...Shostakovich recalls, "It was a living museum, the country's living history...
...The author also provides splendid vignettes of largely forgotten revolutionary actors...
...Gilder takes a glum view of male nature...
...Shostakovich was not to let the commissars rob him of his final testament...
...His music lacks variety and originality...
...The rejoicing is forced, created under threat...
...uppermiddleclass life, worse (see, these students say, their own families...
...This book, the most comprehensive look so far at dissidence in the Soviet Union, is a well-written summary account of the Moscow human rights movement, from the era of the post-Stalinist reforms through Andrei Sakharov's internal exile in 1980 to the industrial city of Gorki...
...D. recipient, and university professor...
...Prokofiev and Stravinsky returned periodically from the West...
...That year probably marked Shostakovich's emotional coming of age...
...Hollander does not deny the significance of the changes since the death of Stalin...
...Gilder returns the favor in the text of his manifesto...
...This dilemma is omnipresent in Shostakovich's words...
...The special pleading of the philistine has always been for "positive" novels, filled with happy people...
...And although the two now were collaborators—Shostakovich was writing the musical score for The Bedbug—matters didn't improve between them...
...Then an answer was found: obscure but well-trained composers, exiled 379 found: obscure but well-trained composers, exiled or seeking anonymity in the outer provinces, were put back to work with the task of recreating the "national music" of Tashkent, Ashkhabad, AlmaAta, and so forth...
...Prokofiev's opera] Semyon Koiko was put into production at the Stanislaysky Opera Theater by Meyerhold...
...For example, 374 the Bavarian secret order of the Illuminati, created by one Adam Weishaupt in 1776 and suppressed by the Bavarian police nine years later, is shown to have influenced the ideas not only of moderate leaders at the earlier stages of the Revolution, such as Mirabeau, but of revolutionary journalists in the later radical phases, such as Nicholas Bonneville...
...Yet they never achieved even a modicum of equality with men who fought for these revolutions under the banner of equality— for men only...
...Gilder is, to begin with, a male supremacist without reservation...
...FOLK Music had presented a problem to the Kremlin in the'30s...
...Rather regretfully, that chivalrous Victorian Alfred Marshall advised his readers that it was safer to rely upon the strongest of human motives than the highest—avarice not altruism...
...Their death and martyrdom brought them a saintly status that Shostakovich respected but was too frightened to ever tempt...
...Of course, male exploitation of women and associated patterns of violence, drunkenness, and crime also occur in such enlightened places as South Africa whose leaders are innocent of lavish welfare spending upon blacks...
...In 1850 all Europe feared Russia's military power, but the Crimean War proved this to be a fallacy...
...As might be expected, these views are not based on purely theoretical considerations...
...Stalin was taken aback and then started mulling over this unexpected bulletin...
...I suppose that few readers, unless they are feminist scholars, have been aware that a sudden surge of feminine revolutionary activity and organization in the early years of the French Revolution was brutally suppressed during the national mobilization in 1793...
...The analyst of Soviet society, on the other hand, knows relatively little about the day-to-day operation of Soviet institutions and the attitudes and practices of ordinary citizens...
...Just as the discrepancy between what one sees and what one's body feels causes nausea, so Shostakovich's heart said one thing, the exigencies of survival another: Then Stalin called...
...This was one of the terrible signs of the age, a man disappeared but everyone pretended nothing had happened...
...He sees the best that American writers have thought and said as a tacit conspiracy against our national interest: It was not so much that these novelists preached failure but that they impugned success, and thus debunked ambition...
...Work and Wealth is glowingly praised by Nathan Glazer (alas, for the Nat I once knew...
...Ambition is a clarion call to ahistoricity, "the Imperial Self," and the virtues of keeping one's eye on the main chance...
...THE CRITICAL DIFFERENCES between the United States and the Soviet Union lead to differences in the way each can be described...
...Now, with the publication of his posthumous memoir, Testimony, his life and music emerge with a pathos greater and more complex than we could have imagined...
...As always Shostakovich was incredulous and repelled in the face of such individualistic expression...
...The first part of the book abounds in novel insights, and brings to light previously neglected facets of the revolutionary experience...
...The name Meyerhold immediately disappeared from conversations...
...677 pp...
...Meyerhold insisted upon and inspired a seriousness about art that helped the young composer overcome lingering self-doubts...
...In the end, though, Shostakovich couldn't get along with Meyerhold's domineering wife, the actress Zinaida Nikolayevna Raikh, whom he blames for their tragic fate...
...But then again an urgency comes rushing back, and he is anxious to continue...
...Shostakovich considered Mayakovsky unscrupulous, an undauntable egoist with a love of self-advertisement, and a hypocrite who celebrated the revolution in his writings while retaining so many bourgeois habits...
...On the other hand, he is quite prepared to champion boosters of the American Dream, even if what he describes is closer to fairy tale than to serious fiction...
...The Hungarian experience, which included living through the abortive revolution, accounts for the stress on totalitarianism...
...I could provide further examples of such flaws in Billington's work...
...289 pp...
...Yet while these various dissidents will acknowledge that they do not have a common futuristic vision or a common ideology, they all struggle to assert their rights and all are the opponents of fear...
...Jonas Salk, or Walter Reuther, or Ernest Hemingway, or Beverly Sills fit into Epstein's schema...
...One wonders how long it has been since Epstein poked his nose into student life...
...Though there has been some controversy in America, too, the book is certainly genuine...
...I shall try to show that their criticism is mostly based on a misunderstanding of the author's intentions...
...Since 1970 he publicly called for Soviet respect of the law, for representative government and freedom for individual self-expression...
...They made a sensation out of that too...
...Sakharov's internal exile to Gorki, which Rubenstein labels an "administrative kidnapping," was consummated without even the pretense of a trial or the process of criminal procedures...
...Nor were musicians immune to this spirit...
...In the twentieth century, the terms have been closer to those of unrelieved contempt...
...Like the nine-headed beast in the Book of Revelation, the ravening beasts of finance capitalism were for Lenin a sign that the end of history was near...
...It has as much in common with the Book of Revelation as Keynes's General Theory has with the parable of the loaves and fishes...
...Yet it is only to be expected that men and women embarked on an uncharted course that is to result in a new social and political order are attracted by intellectual currents that, in their fundamental dissent from prevailing orthodoxies, seem to provide guideposts and markers...
...FIRE IN THE MINDS OF MEN: ORIGINS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY FAITH, by James H. Billington...
...7.95...
...For that matter, the same disheartening phenomena can be observed in our own South where welfare benefits remain properly meager...
...Just as Carl Becker showed a good while ago in The Heavenly City of the EighteenthCentury Philosophers that rational Enlightenment thought was still much indebted to religious ideas and imagery from the Age of Faith, so it stands to reason that revolutionaries, even violently antireligious revolutionaries, still owed a good deal, mostly unwittingly, to previous religious traditions...
...Originally published by one university press in 1973, Paul Hollander's work is now reissued in paperback by another...
...Rubenstein's detailed analysis of the Zionist movement and its links with the democratic dissidents is the most complete yet recorded...
...376 TESTIMONY: THE MEMOIRS OF DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH, by Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov...
...One truth about American literature is that its canon is always being reshuffled—to emphasize our optimism (or pessimism), our obsession with whiteness (or blackness), our preoccupation with the Self (or society...
...Capitalism," exclaims its celebrant, "begins with giving...
...My comrades' music wasn't played, and neither was mine...
...His friend the Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels the same...
...Jack Kemp, and David Stockman...
...But when they met at the Meyerhold theater in 1929 during rehearsals for Mayakovsky's play The Bedbug, there was bad blood...
...Yet women again played active roles in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, and especially in the Commune of 1871...
...He was writing the book at a time when American campuses were in disorder and when fundamental assumptions about higher education, to say nothing of other social institutions, were being questioned...
...The meaning or significance of any bit of data will depend upon the assumptions made about the nature of the societies...
...New York: Basic Books...
...What judgment could Shostakovich then pass on his fellow survivors that wouldn't include himself...
...And so many others...
...The last few chapters, devoted to Russian developments and dealing with an area in which the author has long shown his mastery, provide a much richer texture than the chapters 375 that precede them...
...In those accounts, explicit comparisons are made primarily to point up the functioning of the Soviet system...
...New York: Harper & Row...
...Nothing starts ab ovo, and new trends always borrow from past ideas...
...He was always careful not to provoke the authorities, and when he fell into disfavor he did all he could to regain official approval...
...I see no objection to tracing certain elements of revolutionary thought to secularized religious themes or to submerged religious traditions or styles of thought...
...These students, so carefully attentive to what their teachers say, exist largely between the covers of Epstein's book...
...there were no books to burn, no texts to censor...
...We'll send you a physician, he'll see why you are nauseated...
...It cost me a great deal, that trip, I had to answer stupid questions and keep from saying too much...
...We decide...
...372 This, I would submit, is plain foolishness...
...The external environment of Brezhnev's Russia is also very different from that of the Russia of Nicholas...
...They were all shot...
...The Russian populist and Social Revolutionary movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries attracted many gifted revolutionary women...
...Shostakovich had to project a harmless, impotent image to the world while retaining a keen sense of observation, even a mystical clairvoyance, with some cryptic means for expressing his ideas...
...The director was arrested but the work went on as though nothing had happened...
...For such people forces, not individual will, are what count...
...We decide what is important and what is trivial in life...
...He moved easily in this world, conscious of his tremendous musical promise...
...At one point in The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow's larky protagonist gets hooked up with an eccentric millionaire named Robey...
...25.00...
...One need not have great admiration for Lenin's book to recognize that it is carefully researched and reasoned even though largely based on prior work by others...
...The reader looking for a good introduction to the Soviet human rights movement will glean a number of their primary causes—artistic freedom, due process in Soviet courtrooms, the activity of Lithuanian Catholics, Ukrainian nationalists, and Crimean Tatars, the right of Jews to emigrate, and the struggle against (and struggle to publicize) the psychiatric incarceration of political prisoners...
...Shostakovich was not a great composer— certainly not on a par with Stravinsky or the serialists...
...American literature, like its favorite protagonists, contains multitudes...
...But since many of the issues raised by the New Left then are still politically salient today, Hollander's work remains a useful analysis for the politically engaged as well as for those seeking an informed and sophisticated analysis of the two societies...
...Although it provided a rationale for self-preservation, it also signaled the composer's recognition of a world that denied rationality and thus forced his flight from it...
...Allied with dissident publicity is the demand for strict legality...
...I could, of course, point out that the hard evidence supplied by business and accounting departments does not support Epstein's assertion, but that would make for a very different book than the one Ambition actually is...
...When they venture into the world of work, they contradict nature's intent, threaten the stability of marriage, and damage the emotional health of their progeny...
...Under Stalin there was always an iron curtain and no one knew what was going on here...
...With the complicity of such genuinely gifted but flawed individuals as Mayakovsky, art in the Soviet Union now was to be confined to the realm of propaganda, entirely subordinate to the political sensibilities of one man...
...Hollander does rather well on this score, but inevitably in many areas the description of American society has a richer texture...
...Joseph Epstein's Ambition is, in many respects, the book that Robey could not write...
...Shostakovich saw Meyerhold disappear overnight, and remembered how they came and murdered his wife in her home, Shostakovich's supporter Marshall Tukhachevsky, the military hero— feared and envied by Stalin—was arrested and shot for being an alleged Nazi spy...
...Young males, the story went, prefer grabbing the welfare checks from the women they prey upon to getting out and hustling at an honest job...
...The time seemed full of promise, and there was a rush of excitement and activity in the Russian art world...
...The Scotch verdict "not proven" seems the only appropriate one...
...That kind of foolishness in the new political climate could have done him only harm...
...Nonetheless] we do choose how we shall live: courageously or in cowardice, honorably or dishonorably, with purpose or in drift...
...Chicago: University of Chicago Press (Phoenix Edition...
...it seems to have dominated his later life...
...Developments in the visual arts alone in Moscow in 1920 give us some idea of this energy...
...Their relationship soon became close, with Meyerhold providing Shostakovich with a home, a stimulating association with 377 his preeminent theater, and friendship...
...But the specifics of the American experience are also evident and pertinent...
...At best, I fear, he was left without a reference point, confused by the manic fluctuations of Soviet reality and by the tensions of his own schizophrenic condition...
...It was as independent of the official line as the despised avant garde in the West but harder, much harder, to control...
...It is also a book that preaches to the newly converted on the New Right and takes delight in kicking wounded liberals now that they're down...
...His claim is a trifle startling, nothing less than identification of capitalists as practical altruists...
...Appropriately, such expression was contained in the imagery of his music...
...And so on...
...On such topics as these, Gilder, though a Harvard graduate and a member in good standing of the Century Association, does come on amazingly like the Reverend Jerry Farwell...
...Can I change anything...
...In this milieu Shostakovich began his career, off to an auspicious start with the warm critical reception of his First Symphony, a conservatory senior thesis, written at the age of nineteen...
...While held in jail, for instance, Vladimir Bukovsky asked for a copy of the Soviet Constitution...
...Folk music was deeply rooted in cultural traditions and couldn't be banned as could a composer or even a formal style...
...One day in 1928 the famed actor and director had phoned him to offer a musical position with his renowned Leningrad theater...
...We'll take care of that problem, Comrade Shostakovich...
...He sees ambition and material success (read: wealth) as interchangeable terms, as if no worthier kinds of ambition exist...
...Although the book is not organized on an "equal time" principle there is a dual focus, and it can also profitably be read as an analysis of American society in the latter half of the century...
...Today within the Soviet Union intellectual and spiritual life is even more restricted than it was under the Czarist autocracy...
...Women should stay home and nurture their husbands and children...
...There is nothing here that suggests the idea of a new Marxist state religion...
...He is more concerned with freedom of the soul than freedom from one's callous government...
...But I prefer to close on a more positive note...
...It is also a book that makes it clear a staunch philistinism can co-exist with elbow patches, an academic job, and editorship of the American Scholar...
...Gilder informs us that any successful society encourages these genetic predispositions...
...There are Soviet experts who contend that any such characterization assumes that the society is more unchanging than is actually the case and overlooks the emergence of a more pragmatic, less ideologically rigid orientation among the present leadership...
...Not long afterward, it was decided that national sentiments could be useful, like the national celebrations of Stalin's Georgian origins...
...For Shostakovich himself, the work stands as a tragedy...
...Since arriving here in 1959 he has been "a graduate student, Ph...
...The already reticent young man was pushed further inward by the fear and isolation of the times...
...But typically the focus is on one institutional area, or there is an assumption of some special interest and expertise on the part of the reader...
...Before the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics the Soviets accelerated a crackdown on dissidents in order to clear the city of what the Kremlin considered "hooligans" and "parasites...
...When it was first published, the book was politically "relevant...
...Slowly, this extemporaneous monologue on the issues and personalities of his day becomes an intimate self-portrait, a uniquely personal glimpse of Soviet history...
...The chapters Billington devotes to the SaintSimonians and to other pre-Marxist socialist movements are adequate but again not terribly new...
...What are these lessons...
...The three most prominent, sophisticated, and eloquent exponents of the main currents of detente are Andrei Sakharov, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, and Roy Medvedev...
...And a dangerous foolishness to boot...
...Joshua Rubenstein makes excellent use of most of the primary and secondary accounts of this topic...
...The views of all these diverse factions are carefully scrutinized by Rubenstein...
...as an eleven-year-old Shostakovich had watched Lenin's arrival at the Finland Station...
...Novels seldom do a good job at special pleading...
...The Palais Royal, from which, incidentally, the call for the storming of the Bastille emanated, was not only the nursery of revolutionary thought, the preferred marketplace for unconventional ideas, the favorite haunt of radical thinkers, but also a gathering ground for sly pornographers and seekers of unconventional sexual experiences...
...Shostakovich was now no longer branded an "antipeople" composer...
...it also left him an uncertain legatee of Meyerhold's independent style...
...Each section of the manuscript was initialed by the authors and smuggled to the West—soon followed, a year after Shostakovich's death in 1975, by Volkov himself...
...However, the premiere of the Fifth was an official triumph, received as a celebration of Soviet greatness and conforming to Soviet aesthetic tenets...
...Yet it is a novel unlikely to get writ371 ten so long as that other, more familiar novel— which has the ambitious man or woman confront society and either go under or win out only at the cost of his or her decency—provides, as it evidently does, so much comfort...
...New York: Basic Books...
...No doubt, he had the makings of a successful "socialist artist...
...So finally I agreed, I made the trip to America [to the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace in New York, 1949...
...378 He blamed Meyerhold for playing politics, Eisenstein for buckling under the political currents, Prokofiev for seeking fame and appeasing the authorities, and Mayakovsky for praising Stalin—who decided who would live and who would die...
...But even a qualified use of "totalitarianism" to define the basic nature of the society is questioned today...
...We decide that what makes us significant is either what we do or what we refuse to do...
...As an adolescent, he had much admired Mayakovsky's writings, never missing a reading in Leningrad...
...His present work, which aims to trace the origins of modern revolutionary faith and seeks to write the story "not of revolutions but of revolutionaries," has so far received a highly critical reception, mainly on the part of Marxist commentators...
...On the other hand, much of the value of the book derives from the fact that the social institutions and processes that are the scholarly concern of Soviet and American Society were also the focus of intense political action in the society...
...In the first part, the most original, Billington shows in instructive detail that mystic doctrines, sectarian secret societies, occult traditions, and Masonic cliques exerted a considerable influence on the men who were to become main actors in the drama of the French Revolution...
...More than any other current dissident, Andrei Sakharov has represented the philosophy of Western liberal democratization...
...It is not likely to tell most of us how to live at the ragged end of our century, much less how to live well...
...This new, "left" art, sparked by the communist interest in mass politics and the industrial machine, affected all the arts...
...Hollander does not hide his distaste for the student radicals and the New Left in general...
...Rather...
...Stalin called an all-Ukrainian Congress of Lirniki and Banduristy...
...And all I thought about was: how much longer do I have to live...
...In the wake of the 1964 Goldwater debacle, Gilder, then in his Ripon Society phase, wrote with Bruce Chapman The Party that Lost its Head, advancing an argument that Republicans for the sake of selfpreservation should accept the welfare state and administer it with more efficiency but just as much compassion as chuckle-headed Democrats...
...The filmmaker Eisenstein, the dramatist Meyerhold, and the poet Mayakovsky embraced this new genre of ` constructivism," proclaiming "the streets our museum, the walls our canvasses...
...He had even tried to set some of the poems to music...
...12.95...
...What could I say...
...But with the eradication of folk music there was no material left for the huge song and dance festivals staged throughout the country...
...By 1978, Gilder had seen a different light...
...Ambition is a study that substitutes a convenient fantasy for the facts of the matter and glibness for hard thought...
...He was, rather, another symbol of the revolution gone awry...
...It was his last work in the theater...
...Epstein hectors his readers as if The Greening of America and The Whole Earth Catalog were still sacred texts, and the'60s remained alive and well...
...The last pages of the book provide a moving portrait of Rosa Luxemburg, and this alone would seem to testify that Billington by no means intended to write an antirevolutionary tract, as some of his critics seem to believe...
...These requirements for survival so color his recollections that Testimony becomes an intimate study of Stalin's psychological legacy...
...But because it is written for the nonspecialist in Soviet affairs, the general reader will profit most from the broad (but not superficial) view of Soviet society...
...Moreover, the sin is compounded when John D. Rockefeller turns up as one of the heart-warming case studies in "ambition...
...And in his nagging way, the leader and teacher asked me why I didn't want to go to America...
...Most important for the aspiring young composer was his association with Meyerhold...
...I know George Gilder as a likable chap, prey to surges of emotion that last long enough to translate themselves into entire books...
...What about your health...
...Visions of the Second Coming played their part in the imagery of the future blissful solution to all the problems of contemporary society...
...Petersburg were almost all middle-class intellectuals drawn to revolutionary activity not so much out of deep conviction as out of the inertial habit of the St...
...Naum Gabo, Antoine Pevsner, Alexander Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin, and others developed their styles and ideas—and constructivism was on the rise...
...But Billington pursues this theme with a relentlessness and persistence that seems to me not only misplaced but misleading...
...The publishing business being what it is a revised text is impossible, but this new edition does carry a new Introduction in which the author makes a "reassessment" of his original work...
...The rich and successful do not exhaust the possibilities of what being "ambitious" can mean...
...Only doctrinaire fools would deny such influences...
...Needless to say, such connections earned Meyerhold the enmity of Stalin...
...any work on Soviet institutions or social processes implicitly, if not explicitly, contrasts them with Western societies...
...Marxist commentators have reacted to Billington's portrayal of early revolutionaries as men and women often deeply influenced by occult movements, mystagogues, eccentrics and madmen, much as families tend to react in defense of the purity of the family tree...
...but no complaints were heard...
...And so, Shostakovich's yurodivy existence begins to make sense to us...
...YET THERE IS SOMETHING PUZZLING about Billington's approach, and that is his persistent attempt to explain revolutionary developments in religious terms...
...Bukovsky, how382 ever, for this legalistic defiance, received a much longer sentence than he might have received otherwise...
...He yearns to demonstrate that capitalism is not only more efficient than socialism but also morally and ethically superior...
...Epstein freely admits that "people will always argue about the ends to which ambition is put," but he goes on to insist that this is neither the real point nor the real question...
...Here Billington traces the bifurcation of the original twin idea of Egalite and Fraternize into national revolutionary movements seeking to bring about fraternal brotherhood in newly liberated nations and social revolutionary movements concerned with reaching an egalitarian socialist or communist society...
...Isn't this altruism...
...When he died, Shostakovich was eulogized by the international press as a hero of Soviet art...
...The metaphor is, at best, unfortunate given OPEC, petrol-dollars, and the windfall profits heaped up by Exxon et al...
...Filippo Buonarotti, the author of the History of the Babeuf Conspiracy, which became a sort of Bible for the various conspiratorial societies that emerged in postrevolutionary France, in Italy, and elsewhere in the first part of the 19th century, seems to have been a link between the older mystical and the later radical tradition...
...SHOSTAKOVICH'S RELATIONSHIP with the great poet Mayakovsky was marred by antipathy...
...That was all...
...Of course, the works they wrote appeared on the programs with local names and not their own...
...Other sketches include Henry Ford, the du Ponts, the Guggenheims and the Kennedys...
...Earlier this was a tragedy, that's true...
...As Shostakovich says, "you know how things turned out...
...There is, to be sure, an unfortunate sentence on the first page of Billington's book that provides a handle for his critics...
...Shostakovich speaks of the influence of Hindemith, Krenek, Milhaud, and of Berg, who was to come to Leningrad and conduct his opera Wozzeck...
...They would ask in America...
...Writers are not the only ones who disappoint Epstein...
...Shostakovich immediately accepted...
...The title of chapters and subchapters refer to "Faith," to "Prophecy," "The Early Church," to "Credo," and "Ecclesia...
...They brought down the house but erected nothing in its place...
...party leadership in the '30s that especially upset Shostakovich...
...This was soon followed by an attack on his ballet Bright Stream...
...In the same way "imperfect pluralism" is a reminder that American society falls far short of any ideal of pluralism...
Vol. 28 • July 1981 • No. 3
