Life and Fetters Chéreau-Janá?cek-Dostoevsky
Cohen, Mitchell
ARTICLES Life and Fetters Chéreau-Janâcek-Dostoevsky MITCHELL COHEN Do some artists—authors, painters, composers—have an uncanny capacity to jell a political moment and anticipate the next in...
...There is not much that our men of learning can teach the common people...
...Themes entwine in waste...
...He sings of "resurrection," just before guards bark at everyone else: back to work...
...He planned musical works on Russian themes, and was chair of Brno's "Russian Circle" when it was outlawed in 1915...
...Consider a comment he made just before the New York premiere...
...In 1926 Stalin consolidated power...
...The Russian dimension may dissipate in Chéreau's House, but the opera's existential intelligence reverberates forcefully in it...
...Janâcek turns these into distinct episodes, both linked to Goryanchikov's place in the opera...
...Janâcek's first treatment of it came as Russians *Jarmila Prochâzkovâ, Prezident a skladatel ("President and Composer"), OpusMusicum, xxi, 1990, pp...
...Dostoevsky's Goryanchikov is not the sole incarcerated noble in the novel...
...At the end of the opera, Goryanchikov finishes his term...
...He finished it in 1917 after a decade of troubled efforts with several librettists...
...Despite his criticisms of intellectual illusions, Dostoevsky sustained his own, and these generated a nationalist mysticism-the belief that Russia would transcend its woes when the kernel burst through the husk into holy, national authenticity...
...Harbinger...
...His opera Kâïya Kabanovâ premiered in 1921...
...The Makropulos Case roams across centuries of Central European history and has an inheritance dispute at its center...
...Dostoevsky tells of the eagle in two powerfully focused pages...
...Yet these truly foul-doers, who "raved in their sleep," also comprise for him human misery writ large...
...For them, peasantry is peasantry, gentry is gentry...
...Dostoevsky's Russian concerns vanish from Chéreau's universalizing of prison experience...
...The costumes and Peduzzi's sets for House were grimly wise...
...A student described Janâcek's speech patterns as "staccato.like a cross between a machine gun and a typewriter," but with a Lachian accent that revealed his roots...
...Chéreau's Phèdre, which I saw in Paris in 2003, was a taut homage to Racine's poetic powers...
...Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov is the sole (obvious) political prisoner...
...The allusions are powerful, yet, conceivably, loaded politically...
...it flies away as the political prisoner is liberated...
...A passage in the novel becomes especially telling in this regard, not least because Janâcek transformed it in an arresting way...
...While he, like all the "fictionalized" fellow inmates, wants liberty, Dostoevsky's quest will take him to Mother Russia's bosom, while the Poles, one presumes, sought freedom from an often overbearing neighbor...
...These scenarios allow Janâcek, an artist concerned linguistically and musically to be close to earth and lives lived on it in his own day, to send-up narcissistic intellectuals together with a self-absorbed bourgeoisie...
...Our job is to make it possible to think about all the prisons in the world at any time...
...Did Janâcek know that a two-headed eagle was a tsarist emblem...
...But this excision together with his (Pan-Slav flavored) merger of the Pole Z-ski and the Russian Goryanchikov lends force to Brod's assertion that his friend's worldview combined in its own way humanism and nationalism—or at least it lends force to what might be perceived as the productive value of conflicts created by apparently contrary principles...
...instead, his defiance becomes that of Goryanchikov...
...He meant Lenin, a Jew only in anti-Semitic rumor, and Trotsky, a Jew who insisted on his internationalism...
...Dostoevsky's prejudice thus vanishes in Janâcek's hands, because the Russian and the Pole become one, and political oppression, not class, identifies them...
...But throughout much of the act, we hear a felon tell how the woman he loved married someone else—whom he murdered...
...This is, I suspect, a jab at director Peter Sellars, who can easily be imagined placing Dostoevsky's convicts in Guantânamo or Abu Ghraib—in case nobody knows of American misbehavior in them...
...Chéreau's production suggested multifarious anguish by many means...
...We didn't give in, and we proved to the Wagnerians that the situation in Janâcek 's opera is completely different and therefore requires music of a different character...
...Broucek and Taras Bulba can be interpreted to do just that, the first for specifically Czech concerns, the latter for Czech and Russian...
...There are others, Poles interned presumably for their quest for independence...
...His Pan-Slavism was natural given his own language, but culture and politics were then hard to separate...
...They are viewed at the Metropolitan Opera on small screens perched on the back of the seat in front of you...
...After his arrest, Dostoevsky faced the tsar's force majeure in the form of a grueling, public mock execution before being sent to Siberia...
...House of the Dead premiered in Brno in 1930...
...Back and forth, back and forth...
...II, (Faber and Faber, 2007), pp...
...Recalling this description as I watched Janâcek's opera, I thought of a bleak parable in which Schopenhauer sought to illustrate the human condition...
...Too many "thinkers" failed to grasp just this point—that was a lesson he took from katorga, although joining the groupuscule in St...
...Anger at this social cruelty motivated Dostoevsky's politics more than anything...
...In House they were also, at times, projected as supertitles onto the claustrophobic walls and pillars behind the prisoners, as if announcing to our eyes that what prisoners say can only batter about on the concrete surrounding their lives.* Then, the spiritual brutality of forced labor crashes down...
...As it happens, Janâcek composed what he called a "modern historical opera" between September 1923 and December 1925...
...Janâcek's penned-in prisoners sing, "Freedom, dear freedom/ See, it doesn't look back...The eagle is Tsar...
...He admired greatly this liberal democratic humanist who became Czechoslovakia's first president in October 1918...
...In other words, they are unlike Goryanchikov-the-murderer while they are like Dostoevsky-the-political-prisoner...
...He wanted audiences to be "disgusted" by Broucek, and linked him in a letter in March 1920 to Oblomov, the "spineless" title character of Ivan Goncharov's nineteenth-century novel...
...A composer's favored topics for programmatic music or operas can tell much about his mindset...
...This would, however, be one way to characterize what happened to foes of Stalin who, unable to resist, were, if lucky, dispatched to Siberia's houses of the dead, now serving a new regime...
...Perhaps Dostoevsky wanted to skirt censors, but the change seems also a way to identify himself with the other felons, despite his social standing...
...it is all the prisoners...
...We don't need to put the prisoners into orange uniforms to talk about Guantânamo...," said Chéreau...
...He also removed from the final version of his House the Jewish convict Isay, a target of Dostoevsky's derision...
...Social turmoil filled Czechoslovakia's early years...
...And it is difficult to imagine that this Russophile Czech composer (and avid newspaper reader) did not draw mightily into his history-conscious spirit the happenings further east—and project them into opera...
...They would later clash with the Bolsheviks, even capturing Omsk...
...She is his "gypsy" or "dear black girl, said to be a Jewess...
...Mitchell Cohen will be CUNY Writing Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center for 2010-11...
...Instead of a plot, each of three acts features an episode in which another felon steps forth to disclose his story...
...His non-operatic stage work is riveting...
...Masaryk was in Russia for part of that year, working to assemble troops interned there for a Czech Legion to aid the Entente...
...Chéreau points rightly to the unifying role of ostinato in House, yet it is also one urgent means by which Janâcek animates the reality of imprisoned lives...
...He is not in the opera...
...On arrival, he is stripped of his coat, his head shaven, his legs fettered...
...His maturation, however, produced a unique style, not imitations...
...He may now have been a citizen of independent Czechoslovakia, but he remained preoccupied by Russia's fate...
...Enthusiasm for tsars or their association with freedom can hardly elicit sympathy nowadays (outside some noxious political quarters in Russia...
...He appears, faces the commandant, and is taken away to reemerge only at the act's end, a noble waylaid by a new reality...
...Tucker notes that Russian peasants victimized by Stalin's agenda came to use "VKP," the Russian initials of All-Union Communist party, to signify Vtoroe krepostnoe pravo—"The Second Serfdom...
...Janâcek's libretto instructs that Goryanchikov, on return from his beating, is to limp across stage while prisoners watch...
...Consider the reaction to the 1904 premiere in Brno of Janâcek's Jenufa, an opera focused on village life and perhaps his best known work...
...Still, Janâcek supported Kamila's efforts to assist real Gypsies, who were constant victims of vicious enmity...
...Works used in this essay include Joseph Frank's five-volume literary biography of Dostoevsky, John Tyrrell's invaluable two-volume Janâcek: Years of a Life (Faber and Faber, 2006, 2007), and Vilem and Margaret Tausky's Janâcek: Leaves from his Life (Taplinger, 1982...
...We meet the eagle again at the end...
...By autumn his "black opera" was mostly complete...
...Inmates wore dull garb of our own day, clothed as Everyman in detention...
...And his humanism was better grounded than Dostoevsky's...
...Isn't a political foe of, say, serfdom—someone who would protest widespread exploitation and social suffering—distinct from a murderer, whether serf or noble...
...He visited Russia more than once—his perceptions of the tsar's autocratic world tend to the misty-eyed—and he thought to study music there...
...Another calls it "Tsar of the forests...
...themes recur while contrapuntal accompaniment or melody or harmonies change...
...I don't know, but following Czechoslovakian independence in November, a patriotic—rather too patriotic—male chorus by Janâcek premiered...
...Dostoevsky's Goryanchikov, who is often identified with the author and is the novel's principal narrator, is a wife-murderer, not a political prisoner...
...the Narod only in their own discursive terms...
...He dedicated his postwar revision to Czech soldiers...
...In the meantime, we see the others...
...In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Czech nationalists became vociferous as large nations in Habsburg domains gained considerably better circumstances than small ones...
...Former co-editor of Dissent, he is professor of political science at Baruch College and the Graduate School of CUNY...
...I have an empty head, i.e...
...they hope for some variation that might allow penned-in energies to find some outlet...
...But in the fall of 1924, on the eve of its Prague premiere (and nine months after Lenin's death), he echoed words in the novella's finale to explain that his music saluted Russian vitality.* Poles, Russians, and Czechs seem to have merged for him in its composition, recomposition, and explanation, perhaps as Z-ski, Goryanchikov, and Dostoevsky would later...
...But in February 1927, he published an open letter to Brod expressing intense affinity to Dostoevsky...
...In Act 2, Goryanchikov teaches a young inmate to read, sustaining a kind of noble humanitarianism...
...The essence—or what he imagined to be the nature—of this collective protagonist lay within the Omsk inmates, perceivable only beneath their degenerate existence...
...The answers are important, even if—especially because—the image of the eagle's release by freedom-hungry prisoners is powerful, devastatingly so...
...It was inspired by Gogol's Taras Bulba, a ferocious novella celebrating Ukrainian Cossacks (of Russian origin) at war with Poles in the seventeenth century...
...In late 1927 came the end of the liberalizing New Economic Policy...
...He has worked in several media and, apart from people who pay attention to opera, is perhaps best known for his award winning 1994 film La Reine Margot (starring Isabelle Adjani and set during the religious and political strife of sixteenth-century France...
...mending into 1928...
...Yet critics—Georg Lukâcs or Irving Howe, for example—who shared none of Dostoevsky's manic nationalist dreams—grasped the extraordinary ways in which remarkable human content and wretched politics breathed in the same person's work...
...Broucek...
...Undoubtedly...
...And Masaryk could express utter shame when nationalist rhetoric was deployed to silence critics: "Big words can make people drunk...
...Imposing, sliding gray walls made up the penal complex, and shades of illumination combined with them and the costumes to make time and place unsure...
...270, 748...
...But not that new...
...The injured bird appears in the stockade after Goryanchikov goes to his lashing...
...Now he ascribed an insufferable egotism to them, whereas his own obsessive quest was for bonding, for instinctive holism...
...Imagine a herd of porcupines on a freezing winter's day...
...Not without cause...
...for I was also a Russian...
...Music is, after all, sound in time, and this opera is about men serving time...
...The police worried that its cultural preoccupations masked sympathies detrimental to Vienna...
...Great controversy accompanied Chéreau's 1976 staging—this too was a collaboration with Boulez and Peduzzi—of Richard Wagner's Ring as an anarchist parable for its bicentenary production in Bayreuth, Germany...
...For Dostoevsky, by contrast, Goryanchikov the noble identifies with his nation rather than with class compatriots of another people, and even when those are political prisoners as was the novelist...
...This is forced communal existence...
...Dostoevsky's "tsar" takes wing looking only forward...
...Like many Central and East European composers, Janâcek took great interest in peasant folk culture...
...Janâcek's case is less problematic since traces of nostalgia for prerevolutionary Russia came with support for a democratic republic...
...There is, after all, specificity, not just an abstraction of sound, when our varied human voices sing...
...It too was trapped, one wing injured, a leg "out of joint...
...Another Russian thread is visible (or audible) in a "symphonic rhapsody"—he called it his "musical testament"—that he composed in 1915 and then reworked in 1918...
...In any event, when this party later opposed Masaryk's reelection, Janâcek resigned (in May 1927) in what a newspaper called "an unequivocal, eloquent, gesture...
...His aesthetic attention focused on rendering Czech into musical forms, and he kept notebooks recording what he heard around him (both in speech and in nature...
...Communal existence is, of course, to be found in other places...
...the porcupines move from Act 1 to Act 2 cleaning up...
...The eagle should die in freedom, one inmate says...
...Excursions In some ways, Janâcek was a musical counterpart of Tomâs G. Masaryk...
...Like many Czechs, Janâcek looked to Russia to offset the Germanic world...
...The thought occurred to me," he reflected, "that if one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely.all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning...
...Yet here things need to be made more complex, since there is also another sensibility working out in Janâcek, one that raises some issues for Chéreau's universalizing...
...Ostinato means obstinate, and the convicts are just that...
...When he shapes an opera, Chéreau engages it with inventive acumen rather than making himself its private proprietor...
...Dostoevsky's pre-arrest writings portrayed abject people, but, as Joseph Frank points out, "those who were truly vicious had always come from the upper class or had worked to serve them...
...The wedding scene at the end of Jenufa was pitted against the "Wedding March" in Lohengrin...
...But when Broucek time-travels to fifteenth-century Prague, he proves himself a blowhard as heroic compatriots resist German troops of the Holy Roman Empire...
...Yet both Goryanchikovs harbor Russian hostility toward Poles...
...He had discerned "greatness of soul even in a bandit precisely because I was able to understand him...
...It is not relentless and there is some empathy, yet Dostoevsky depicts the Poles as exclusivist, intolerant, and—a source of special phlegm—unable to find a "trace of humanity" in Russian peasant convicts...
...Born in a small village in 1854, Janâcek spent much of his life in Brno, a Moravian town in the Austro-Hungarian Empire...
...Scholars debate his reasons for doing so...
...It is a Pole, "Z-ski," who is flogged in Dosto-evsky's book for insisting he is a political prisoner...
...He continued *See Otakar Sourek, "Preface," to Leos: Janâcek, Taras Bulba: Rhapsodie für Orchester (1915-18) (Vienna: Universal Edition, 2008), p. viii, and John Tyrrell, Janâcek: Years of a Life, Vol...
...Janâcek does not seem to have had House in mind as of late December 1926...
...And there, contrary to idealizations of the Narod (the People) by rebellious intellectuals like himself, he found that peasant-convicts rejected solidarity with their "superiors...
...In a letter, Dostoevsky remarked on the excruciating closeness as they lived in filthy barracks through summer's heat—followed a half-year later by cruel Siberian cold...
...Was he aware that in summer 1918, not long after the tsar's execution, the Czech Legion seized the "Lenin," a Bolshevik armored train, and renamed it "Eagle...
...This indeterminacy served to universalize agonies conceived originally in firm time and place, mid-nineteenth century Russia...
...At the novella's end, the Ukrainian Cossack chieftain is burned at the stake, crying out that a "Tsar will spring forth" whom "no power in this world" could resist...
...That's terrible...
...He asserted in House: The cockerel-habit of always wanting to be first in every situation, and at all costs, and whether one is worthy of it or not—that is unknown among the common people...
...In coming decades, he emerged as a religious and nationalist zealot for the regime of the "Tsar Liberator...
...When the creature heals, the men usher it into a cold sky "as if they too had been set free...
...Janâcek dedicated to Masaryk a biting opera, The Excursions of Mr...
...I don't propose a simplistic, causal correspondence between Janâcek's operatic endeavor and momentous events unfolding in the U.S.S.R...
...Porcupines Dostoevsky tells us that he "came to understand that in addition to deprivation of freedom, in addition to forced labor, there is in a convict's life one more torment, one that is almost more powerful than all the others...
...The opera's protagonist is a Prague landlord who is boozy with beer and his own materialistic interests...
...I don't know if Chéreau recognized this as he conceived his House, but his production implies it...
...Broucek is befuddled by the cultural avantgarde when he goes to the moon, where, at the "Temple of All Arts," he hears a "Child Prodigy" sing an outlandish "Lunar Anthem...
...None of Janâcek's music or words (most of the latter are Dostoevsky's) is to romantic purposes, all while there is a profound humanism in them...
...Chéreau and his collaborators have more sophisticated ways...
...Take, for instance, the subtitles...
...If inmates circled around, it looked "fiercely" at them...
...Janâcek may have had good artistic reasons for doing this— he pares down Dostoevsky's panoply of char-acters—and he had deemed Isay in the novel to be a "good fellow...
...Separations Repressive Nicholas I died five years before House of the Dead was published in 1860...
...Janâcek joined an increasingly right-wing party, the National Democrats, in 1922...
...I'm not preparing anything," he wrote...
...The first voices we hear are those of convicts in tenor chorus: "They're bringing a nobleman here today...
...In summer 1928—just before Janâcek died in August—came the Shakhty show trial (engineers charged with "wrecking"), a harbinger of purges to come...
...One of his students recounted, "We Janâcekians were naturally immediately enthused...while the Wagnerians were boasting of the grandiloquence of Wagner's music...
...it had presupposed alliance between the "proletariat" (such that existed in an overwhelmingly rural land) and peasants...
...Still, the schematic parallels are conspicuous...
...Janâcek matured in a world of strife between Czech and German speakers...
...One tendency of nationalistic thinking is to associate distant, sometimes imaginary history (also myths) with contemporary predicaments...
...When the commandant asks if he is a brigand, and he answers "political offender," he is dragged off for lashing...
...ARTICLES Life and Fetters Chéreau-Janâcek-Dostoevsky MITCHELL COHEN Do some artists—authors, painters, composers—have an uncanny capacity to jell a political moment and anticipate the next in their own media...
...Dostoevsky's "Russian Pan-Humanism" foresaw Russia leading Slavs in a messianic "true" universalism—which often seems very particular...
...Broucek is really the composer's nation when it was not his own ideal of it...
...It is based on a popular nineteenth-century Russian play about authoritarian family life in a provincial town...
...One has only to remove the outer superficial husk and look at the kernel within attentively, closely and without prejudice, and one will see in the common people things one had no inkling of...
...In October came the Five Year Plan, which aimed at rapid industrialization, forced collectivization, and the uprooting of— effectively war on—the peasantry...
...It was well deserved, even if its political ramifications were explored somewhat inattentively...
...In Boulez's stead, Esa-Pekka Salonen led a searing rendition of the score in New York...
...This production of a finely honed, brutal work by one of the twentieth century's great composers received almost unanimous praise...
...He was, like Janâcek, hostile to the Bolsheviks, yet asserted that socialist and (his) nationalist ideas shared ethical foundations in democratic opposition to exploitation, whether material, political, or cultural...
...Chéreau speaks of the music as sometimes "rude" and sometimes "violent...
...Particular, Universal Janâcek wrote House with the Russian original and a translation in front of him...
...Extremists in Austria's parliament protested "non-German" works just as Jenufa was in rehearsal for its Vienna premiere...
...By then he was at work on House of the Dead...
...Yet he frames the opera while Janâcek makes the real protagonist collective...
...They huddle for each other's warmth, only to jump apart when, unavoidably, they prick each other with their quills...
...One Janâcek strength in this work is ostinato, a repetitive musical structure...
...it is they who should take a few lessons from the common people...
...The heroine throws herself into the Volga, and it doesn't take much free association to imagine that Janâcek worried that Russia was doing the like by Bolshevik means...
...The staging premiered in Vienna in 2007, with performances also in Amsterdam and Aix-en-Provence...
...More discomforting is a complaint about the Bolsheviks in December 1917: "Two Jews are ruling 160 million Slavs...
...In 1861, his heir, Tsar Alexander II, decreed an end to serfdom...
...My thanks to John Tyrrell, who pointed me to this article and translated the relevant passage...
...The latter is on DVD...
...In Chéreau's production, however, the set's walls metamorphose into a down-sloping trough...
...We never learn Goryanchikov's actual "crime...
...Oblomov reveals defects in the Russian makeup, and Janâcek fretted that too many Oblomovs among the Czechs might lead to something like the "terrible revolution" in Russia...
...fought Habsburg troops—Slavs against Germans...
...Broucek is a landlord...
...He also removes his dominant voice...
...Not long after his release, he referred to the convicts as "the Russian people, my brothers in misfortune...
...All the debates about the Narod that animated Dostoevsky's age culminated not in his ever holier, authoritarian nationalism but in a Stalinist sibling—what Stalin biographer Robert C. Tucker called "National Bolshevism...
...Dostoevsky's "true" humanism had limits...
...Obstinancy The opera's musical beauties are intentionally jagged...
...In Dostoevsky's book convicts pile bricks, dawn to night...
...This seems a way to say it must have a greater domain, for steppes have no forests...
...In November, Stalin proclaimed himself the new Peter the Great...
...Janâcek's opera was fashioned between 1926 and 1928 from passages in Dostoevsky's semi-autobiographical novel about his four years as a political prisoner at "katorga" (hard labor) in Omsk, Siberia...
...It's an old, admittedly romantic question, and it crossed my mind as I watched Patrice Chéreau's treatment of Leos Janâcek's opera From the House of the Dead at New York's Metropolitan Opera last winter...
...The porcupines are constrained merely (!) by a merciless nature, not by man-made stockades...
...It takes "an even trajectory, beating its great wings...
...Prejudice didn't prevent him from falling in love with Kamila Stosslovâ, a Jewish woman many years his junior (and married, as he was...
...but to the prison come such men as not everyone would care to cohabit with, and I am certain that all the convicts experienced this torment, even though for the most part they were not conscious of it...
...Janâcek returns Goryanchikov to what Dostoevsky was—a political prisoner...
...Still, their fate would be familiar to Dosto-evsky's inmates...
...We watch prisoners on a feast day act out plays-within-the-opera (their theme: unfaithfulness...
...Asking who is a rightful heir—to an estate or, say, to a civilization—is an obvious question for nationalists, no less than "Who is a proper proprietor...
...This liberalism could slip, as it often does among advocates of small nations facing enmity from larger ones...
...Eagles Late in his novel-memoir, Dostoevsky recounts how a small eagle, a kind found in the steppes, joined the convicts for a period...
...Janâcek effectively inverts Dostoevsky by merging "Z-ski" and Goryanchikov...
...Yet this director's universalizing is open to some difficult questions (that might also be posed from somewhat different angles to Dostoevsky or Janâcek): isn't a political prisoner usually very different from other convicts, even if they all suffer comparably painful punishment...
...and the latter had, in other ways, also shifted somewhat from Dostoevsky...
...It was too Czech, they complained, even in German translation by Max Brod, Janâcek's vigorous proponent...
...Litter pours forth...
...Yet we see quickly that there is little honor among the querulous, often violent convicts...
...Many Czechs hoped for Entente victory in World War I. German nationalists did little to assuage them, and this also translated into operatic politics...
...Consider the Soviet Union in the same, proximate, time frame...
...Its title: "The Czech Legion...
...these rhythms were to be found in his operas...
...This moves his House steps away from both Dostoevsky and Janâcek...
...Janâcek certainly did not have this in mind when he called the last movement of his Taras Bulba rhapsody "Taras's Prophecy...
...The pressing matter for Janâcek was Czech-German conflict, yet some of his private correspondence and diaries contain other racial references, including what John Tyrrell, his foremost biographer, calls "whiffs" of (fairly commonplace) anti-Semitism...
...He was a Czech nationalist and a Pan-Slavic Russophile...
...He decided this was so much nattering, and he joined a clandestine groupuscule within its ranks that wanted action, in this case, by means of a printing press...
...I would even say...
...These were also urgent questions for an anti-nationalist ideology in power, Bolshevism, and the country it then ruled...
...Masaryk, like Janâcek, was drawn to Russia but was less innocent about the tsarist world, branding it a theocratic tyranny...
...Dostoevsky was caught unawares when faced by peasant-convicts with "a moral degeneracy he had attributed previously only to their betters...
...But the writer had already begun what he called "regeneration" in Omsk...
...He added "[W]e have that God who doesn't know religious differences, the God of love...
...Its success was due to an uncommon, cooperative imagination: Chéreau's direction, conducting by Pierre Boulez, and Richard Peduzzi's brilliantly stern sets...
...Petersburg indicates that he had already begun to look askance at intellectuals who spoke of * If this was also done in Aix, it is not evident from the DVD...
...Petersburg in April 1849 for participating in an intellectual circle that mostly talked about Fourierist and other "Western" ideas...
...Chéreau may have the finest directorial imagination in Europe...
...Unlike humans, it will never accommodate to prison...
...He was also a liberal in the European sense, and contributed regularly to a like-minded newspaper...
...Dostoevsky was taken into custody in St...
Vol. 57 • July 2010 • No. 3
